I Was Dora Suarez Read online

  Praise for Derek Raymond’s

  Factory Series

  “No one claiming interest in literature truly written from the edge of human experience, no one wondering at the limits of the crime novel and of literature itself, can overlook these extraordinary books.”

  —JAMES SALLIS

  “A pioneer of British noir … No one has come near to matching his style or overwhelming sense of madness … he does not strive for accuracy, but achieves an emotional truth all his own.”

  —THE TIMES (LONDON)

  “The beautiful, ruthless simplicity of the Factory novels is that Raymond rewrites the basic ethos of the classic detective novel.”

  —CHARLES TAYLOR, THE NATION

  “A sulphurous mixture of ferocious violence and high-flown philosophy.”

  —PROSPECT

  “A mixture of thin-lipped Chandleresque backchat and of idioms more icily subversive.”

  —OBSERVER

  “Hellishly bleak and moving.”

  —NEW STATESMAN

  “He writes beautifully, and his sincerity cannot be faulted.”

  —EVENING STANDARD

  “Raw-edged, strong and disturbing stuff.”

  —THE SCOTSMAN

  DEREK RAYMOND was the pseudonym of British writer Robert “Robin” Cook, who was born in London in 1931. The son of a textile magnate, he dropped out of Eton and rejected a life of privilege for a life of adventure. He traveled the world, living in Paris at the Beat Hotel and on New York’s seedy Lower East Side, smuggled artworks into Amsterdam, and spent time in a Spanish prison for publicly making fun of Franco. Finally, he landed back in London, working in the lower echelons of the Kray Brothers’ crime syndicate laundering money, organizing illegal gambling, and setting up insurance scams. He eventually took to writing—first as a pornographer, but then as an increasingly serious novelist, writing about the desperate characters and experiences he’d known in London’s underground. His work culminated in the Factory novels, landmarks that have led many to consider him the founding father of British noir. He died in London in 1994.

  I Was Dora Suarez

  First published in 1990 in Great Britain by Scribner

  © 1990 Estate of Robin William Arthur Cook

  This edition published by arrangement with Serpent’s Tail

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  eISBN: 978-1-61219-016-7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011932392

  v3.1

  FOR

  Gisèle, Chopin, Claude and

  Marie-Pierre Franqueville:

  I could never have got through this

  without the four of you.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  1

  Interrupted by her because she had come to see what was happening next door while he was still finishing up with the girl, the killer came up to the old woman without a word, got hold of her as if she were a load of last week’s rubbish and hurled her through the front of her grandfather clock, which stood just inside the door of the flat, using strength that even he didn’t know he had. He saw that that had worked OK: she died as she hit it. After the splintering crash that her body made breaking the clock – the shocking, sudden damage, the liquid slap of her head hitting the inside of the clock case – she sighed once, death’s sister to a sob; and the sound, as she died with her head hidden inside the clock, outranked every other sound in the place.

  However, the killer heard nothing. He stood, unaware, for a good minute; absorbed, absent and distorted with ecstasy and by the excitement of the two murders that he had just committed. He had a long, blank time to make up for; months, pitiless chains of days and nights of hideous, iron struggle, of ruthless training and punishment; there had been nights when he had moaned and screamed out of his broken window into the night of College Hill, wondering if he ever would get into action again, his hands jammed round the black frames.

  As for his second victim this evening, Betty Carstairs was eighty-six, and that was how she died that night. She had never truly asked herself if the long and arduous history of her life had been worthwhile, or whether indeed it had had any meaning at all; but she had at least supposed that she owned some right to her own body, to give or withhold it while it was still worth looking at, and to continue to live on in it even after it was not. She had endured two wars, accepting in both the losses of people close to her that wars entail; she had been less afraid of the bombing than of considering why it was that so many of those who made up her personal world should perish in an apparently random way, and why it was that she should have expected patience from herself, and found it, each time her husband, long dead now, had invaded her physically – for she was Scottish, and had never been an awakened person: all she had ever really enjoyed doing was walking. And then, lately, when she had fallen seriously ill with her heart and knew that she was spent, she marvelled and wondered, when she was not in pain, why she need feel so afraid and alone.

  Well, now she had been killed in her own clock, so that was that, and that was the squalid and miserable end of Betty Carstairs. She was to pass later, after the autopsy, through the diesel flames of a London cemetery in a recuperable coffin, a graven angel passing through a moment of fire, at a price arranged on the cheap by her great-nephew Valerian who knew a few people, and who, having been through the flat with a mate of his directly we had finished, took such pickings from it as he could down to Chelsea in two of her suitcases and got pissed on the proceeds.

  Now there was one of your promising lads who thought he knew everything, except that much later I indirectly got him nicked by readjusting his head for the hat on another case which was looking for someone to wear it; it carried two years in the shade. I didn’t appreciate Valerian somehow; I’m fucked if I know why.

  Anyway, that was the end of Betty in our world.

  When he came to himself again, the killer looked at the clock vaguely; it meant nothing to him. He was breathing hard, straining, fit and ready for more, and it was disappointing, it disquieted him, that there was just silence in the place now. He stroked the back of his hand across his lips; they parted stickily, with a crust of effort and desire on them. His lips gaped open with pleasure, only he didn’t know that.

  The face of the grandfather clock showed a view of the Thames with Windsor Castle behind it in the distance; the river was as it had been in 1810. It was a cottage clock. It had never been valuable; now it was a wreck. Whatever it had stood for, whatever the skill that had gone into making the clock, the Roman figures on the white enamel dial, its river scene: all that was gone now. Without its dusty glass, which the killer had smashed, each detail of a little rowing-boat, painted on a separate strip of copper and then geared to the second-hand pinion, with which it agreed, now stood out quite new and fresh. The three hands of the clock, hours, minutes and seconds, the tiny boat and the two people in it had been built to indicate time’s passage as it was experienced in that era – in a slow, invariable way. But that, too, was over now – the needle broken off its spindle, the thin steel snapped off its bearing.

  Yet time, which had always stepped in a rigidly constructed and formal manner round its face, though arrested now, had in one sense not really changed; for the p
ainted rowing-boat, the kind that on the Thames they used to call a perfect, was still there, resting far out on the tidal river. This swaying toy ferried a miniature couple from a vanished age, a boy and a girl, across the top of the clock face; each leaned eternally gazing at the other with a bare arm lying across an oar. Lovers, they looked into each other’s eyes with an adoration which a hundred and eighty years could not efface even though the flaking faces were no longer clear – either because the little brush had not entirely captured them, or because it was sunset, or else because the scale was too small – anyway, you could only in part make out the lovers’ features. But still the motionless blades lay dipped in the white-lead, scrolled waves, the boat lying across the crawling drift of the river – and if the clock could have been set going again, the boat with its dreaming cargo would have gone back to dipping and ticking with the clock as it always had done, rocking and nursing them each time the pendulum swung. Only of course that was impossible forever now; for so great had been the killer’s strength that Betty Carstairs’s head had smashed through the clock door, smashing it in two, and there was no revoking that.

  Then, after what seemed like a long pause, the strike weight suddenly slipped and fell on Betty Carstairs’s face. In response to the new change of balance, the whole clock frame strained gravely outwards, and its pointed hood slid very slowly off its runners and crashed onto her legs, so that when this new sound was over, there she had been turned on one side forever, buried in wood and glass. There was plenty of mess around, too. There were the shards of her chamber pot, for instance, that she had been carrying to the bathroom when she heard the noise in the other room and looked in, that he had kicked out of her hand the second he killed her. There was also the smell. He held his nose; for if there was one thing the killer detested, it was the smell of anybody’s piss but his own.

  There was her blood, too. Everything that he had done resolved itself into abominable little details: for instance, in her ultimate spasm, she had half spat her top denture out through her lips, which lent her the smile of a lunatic criticising bad theatre.

  Now the killer cupped his hands round his mouth; it was cold in the flat, and he blew hard on his fingers. He half noticed his lips, for which he had a passion, in a gilt mirror, and was full pleased to see that they were as thick and red as ever, ready to draw any woman. Only his hands dissatisfied him; for in spite of his gloves, which he peeled off for a moment, the palms were marked from the drainpipe he had scaled; they were dry and rust-coloured, and that was a detail that clashed. He quickly put the gloves back on: ‘It’s bloody freezing in here!’ he shrieked. ‘There’s sod-all heating on in this bleeding barracks, fuck this for a lark.’ He pointed a long, loose finger upwards and shook it at the place as though it had threatened to fight back – but already the second’s pleasure he had had of ‘handling’ the interfering old git was over: so she was weighed off wasn’t she, and who gave a fucking green banana? The mistake the little beldame had made was to stick her stupid face round the sitting-room door to see what the noise was about while he was finishing the girl up; he wouldn’t even have known she existed otherwise. But she had seen too much. It was logic. He couldn’t afford to let Granny live, and anyway he hated being interrupted when he was intent on a piece of work, so it added up to the old cow had to go.

  ‘It’s time you were off yourself,’ he said out loud. His voice bounced back at him like a scream off the wall.

  Still, talk of screaming, the girl had started by half screaming her fucking head off, silly little tart – but then she always had been one to kick the milk over, no matter what, he remembered – and good riddance to her. But, underneath, what he was really trying to ask himself was whether he could get through his present situation; he knew he had to launder it somehow now so that he could get out clean. But although he knew what ‘get out’ was, he didn’t know what ‘clean’ meant, so that he had some kind of a problem for a minute. He had no conception whatever of the term ‘guilt.’ He just obeyed his power, the impulses. He didn’t know how to frame these impulses in language at all but just automatically marched when the impulses said to do it, and it was this improbability that turned him into a wild card hidden in the social pack that of course made him so vastly dangerous. He turned soundlessly on ultra-thin soles; he had put on a thin pair of brand-new racing pumps for the job. Thinking of women in any way at all transferred him immediately to a vital, if ill-defined level in himself and filled him with the instant desire to punish himself by wanking. He stroked enquiringly at his cock, which still hurt after the last time; but recently, while he had been in training, he had been damaging it more subtly, because he didn’t want this cheeky (because apparently independent of him) and self-important other little self of his to clack on him now; rather, he was going to murder it slowly, and the way he was now appearing (but only, like an interrogating copper, appearing) to give it a bit of margin meant that the suspect would soon have plenty of mileage in it again and then it would have to go on trying to give an account of itself as it had always had to. He touched it, found it was bleeding and abandoned it temporarily, putting it back into his sports trousers. Then he walked back into the room where the girl’s body was.

  He leaned against the doorjamb of this room, his black hair making an intense splash against the dead yellow wall. From there he surveyed his principal work, taking no more than a quick look in the mirror to admire his sated eyes, which, he had to admit to himself – though he went through the solemn, absurd ritual of asking himself if it were true – looked pretty terrific. He never realised the truth about his eyes because he was accustomed to believing that their dominating gaze was unique; objectively, though, they were not in the least as he conceived them. Far from it. Far from being attractive, as he was convinced they were, they struck others as eyes that had perished violently centuries ago, and there was also some form of lacquer over them that lent them the expressionless look that you see in the eyes of the dead.

  He whispered, looking down at what he had done: ‘I could have been a lot neater than that, matey – really a lot neater.’

  There was no one there to answer him, of course, and yet again there was no question but that he was dead right.

  Mind, the place had looked bad enough anyway already, even before he had erupted into it. The high, icy old room he stood in had already been reduced by neglect and the losing struggles of its occupants to the point where it was now just a decayed, filthy relic of mouldering plaster, the wallpaper sliding towards the floor in the damp – in fact it was so wet in there that the killer’s breath emerged as fog and hung motionless in the jaundiced air until in the end it rolled slowly away from him towards the wall like bad jokes emerging out of the mouth of a cartoon character. Two grubby beds with plates and the remains of food on them stood eighteen inches apart, each under an Indian counterpane worked in red tapestry and adorned with small glass discs sewn in, and it was in the gap between these beds, on a square of greasy carpet, that he had felled Suarez. She lay with the left side of her head half split off, and her left breast, severed from the rib cage, had slithered out of the front of her low-cut dress and lay not far from her, partly in her blood, partly inside its bra.

  ‘Yeah, well now, that was a real carve-up wasn’t it?’ the killer screamed. ‘A right royal fucking shambles! You could have done better than that, my friend – an unbelievably whole lot better, couldn’t you, you fucking amateur?’

  Yes, well he could have, only he had totally done his pieces when she put a hand out to reason with him. She started to say ‘I love you anyway,’ but the mere mention of that word, compared to his intentions, sickened him, so that he had impatiently cut into the arm extended to him at its shoulder with the cutting edge of his axe; at times he still listened with the keen pleasure of a music lover to the clean steel grinding through wet red bone. But where he had gone wrong was that the wound made her hoot and howl, of course, and so made it that much more difficult for him to get her in
to the position where he wanted her for his main stroke – and besides it made blood too soon just when, like any lover, he wanted to take his time and move slowly towards his climax. But, on the other hand, who the fuck needed to listen to anything she had to say when all he wanted from her was relief for his raving passion, to get the clean scent of her blood in his nose, to get his face, his mouth, his cock down into her?

  And so, overexcited by her terror and her pitiful efforts to avoid him, he had let the short, serviceable fireman’s axe he had turn in his hand, which was sweating because of his fury and excitement, so giving the girl that fraction of time to pivot as the blade came for her – and even then when, having missed his trick, he appeared to quieten down, half smiling and saying to her (in some imitation of a Midlands accent, remembering a former occasion in Nottingham where that had worked really well): ‘Let’s be calm, let’s calm down now, shall us?’ trying to soothe her as a groom does when he approaches a nervous young mare to gentle her, humming absently and pleasantly, she still wouldn’t accept the axe when he showed it to her again, ritually presenting it to that white neck of hers – so that in the death he had to come for her pretty well any old how in one of those great curving rushes of his. Silly little bat, she kept trying to get away from him long after there was nowhere for her to go, telling him over and over that she had made her peace with the world, which infuriated him in a delicious way – and yet all he achieved by the panic he had caused in her was make her trip over one of the trailing sheets between the two beds, which created a prize cock-up, because all she did then was fall with a thud on the floor and a bit later, even when she did finally manage to get up again, she had by then got her stupid little head in totally the wrong position for him, so that instead of his being able to take her head clean off, bag up and leave, he somehow got in a fluster. And now look at the fucking place, a shambles, shit order! It wasn’t a question of the blood everywhere or the smell of her entrails in the frozen room that upset him so much as the mess he had made of her. She was sad to look down at, like a fuck that hadn’t come off; the assorted bits of her lying all over the toffee shop left him with an emptiness, they left him wanting to take the whole scene back and play it again.