Dead Man Upright Read online

  There were two kinds of time to be. There was safe, and there was unsafe, or impossible time to be. Present time was always unsafe, future time non-existent. But Mandy and Flora were safe, past time, stimulating time. His self-esteem rocketed upwards.

  Free from any unpleasant regurgitations now, he returned to the present and found himself outside Leicester Square station, puzzled and unsure how he had got there. ‘Well, why not?’ he whispered in the crowd. He smiled at the ground. ‘Let’s go up to Soho.’

  Some Chinese festival was in progress. The Chinese rushed past him, chattering; in the middle of Gerrard Street a diddicoy approached him with a carnation wrapped in foil and offered to tell his fortune. She snatched his hand before he could stop her but only glanced at it before dropping it quickly to say: ‘You’re not in your right mind.’ She made a sign on herself and left, looking back fearfully over her shoulder; her behaviour made him angry, considering he had given her a pound. At first he was outraged that anyone should run away from him like that; then he began fretting that she might somehow have seen through him.

  He soon recovered, though, and stared upwards to watch the paper dragons wobbling and curtsying in the wind, their teeth bared as they pivoted gravely to face the fire station. He lingered outside the pub on the corner of Lisle Street; the place was busy. He stood by the door for a while, scanning people’s faces, but decided against going in. It was the wrong time of day for him, he liked the dark; besides, he found the atmosphere of that particular pub, with its rock music and smell of cheap cooking, repellent and walked on. Veering towards depression again he crossed Shaftesbury Avenue, still with the memory of Flora as she had looked after he had finished with her – dying, propped against the wall of the vault; pictures of her popped up in front of him one after the other, rich, immediate and stark.

  He wondered about the gipsy woman once more, then forgot her completely, because the theatre in his head was brightly lit again and he was back in the vault, sharpening the razor on the heel of his cowboy boot. The razor was not to despatch Flora, only to excite her. He never used the same method twice; like Elgar, he smiled to himself, he liked variations. As for the boots, it was the first time he had ever worn such things. He had bought them to surprise her – they were special boots for a special occasion, a touch of theatre that was also a reminder of their relationship.

  For, once he had weaned her from her subscription to the Bible Readers’ Fellowship and taught her to worship him, he had sometimes allowed Flora a little theatre; she liked that. After all, she had deserved some effort from him. She had given him her two houses and all her money; in fact she had given him everything she had. She had yielded to him as her new god on the timid condition – as if it were for her to make any! – that theirs was a love to be consummated in the other world where purity had vanquished evil – a secret love, an understood, just-between-the-two-of-us thing like the eye-language between teenage lovers, or anyway the nearest a middle-aged spinster could get to it.

  Another case of late passion.

  How did he find these women? he didn’t know – they just happened. They were childless, well-off and single, submissive and not young, women who couldn’t resist looking into the West End bar where he happened to be on a whim, to order a fruit juice and linger over it, perhaps wistfully hoping for a last glimpse of adventure. If they were going to fall for him at all they did so immediately. Women were spellbound by him, positively or negatively; he attracted or repelled them violently and at once, often without even needing to speak.

  Perhaps his power came from his eyes. They were deeply sunk, hardly more than sockets in the half-dark of a bar. His lantern face and hair combed back from his forehead gave him an intellectual look which had reminded at least one admirer of Arthur Rubinstein, and it had been almost too easy with Flora really. Her eyes were as straightforward as a proposition of marriage from the first moment, and he remembered yet again how he had hated entering her last night. He belched quietly, re-experiencing his fear and loathing as they joined and she whispered: We’re committed, Ronald.

  This proselytising earnestness of hers had shortened her life still further. It had recurred more and more frequently towards the end of their relationship, so much so that he ended by loathing her as much for her submission as for her strict insistence on controlling her own money almost to the last moment, no matter how much he lectured or wheedled; this was to contradict a god, and in fact she nauseated him so much that, even if it had not been for Ann, he would have got rid of her in short order. In complete contrast to his praise of her a minute before, he had actually got a terrific high as he jostled her without ceremony to her execution, shuffling and hooded from the car to the vault; her intensity, with its jarring vibrations, its troubling undertones of Christianity, inspired a sick disgust in him and released all his power in one ecstatic wave, a fury all the more ungovernable for being long hidden. He had enjoyed her better the second time, when the head was off and that sanctified look of hers gone; he had turned the head to the wall while he detached his relics and quartered the rest, then shovelled it abruptly underground among his other trophies.

  And yet, despite his victory, grim shreds of their dialogue still hung from corners of his mind: ‘I have a divine capacity to think, Flora; I could have been a painter of genius. I have always known that with my birth a great teacher had come into the world.’

  ‘I want everything from you, Ronald.’

  His lips moving quickly, he repeated sections to himself, now, of the usual exordium he intoned concerning the beauty of mutual death; he had perfected the speech, inspired by an Open University philosophy course, in jail. He had delivered it to Flora satisfactorily in the solemn, meaningless spondees of a vicar, but he had gazed at her narrowly all the same as he prepared to straddle her half-clothed body, unsure even at this last moment if he was veering towards bad theatre.

  ‘We are for the splendour of heaven, Flora – we are the fire!’

  But even on the night of her death he had not been quite unfettered yet from a sense of his own absurdity and he had gazed at her intently; did she really believe everything he was telling her? With his head on one side he had scrutinised her like a conjuror trying to decide if the member of the audience summoned on stage to help him with a trick knew more about it than he did, though the gazelle had given no sign of resistance. However he was put out and whipped out the Sabatier knife anyway; he could feel his power growing but was terrified that it might ebb, that a chance reaction from her might accidentally lop it.

  ‘Where is death’s sting, Flora?’

  She screamed when she saw the knife and then, in a fury, after he had failed to penetrate her and botched it, ejaculating between her legs: ‘Lie still, fuck you!’ he cursed between her wails, swiftly opening her to the heart to observe its last beat, drowning her garbled shrieks and pleas which rose and went on rising until they stopped suddenly, throttled in the tide of her blood, the camera, set up so carefully, turning all the time.

  As he was walking up Macclesfield Street his mother suddenly appeared in his head. He snapped her out instantly like a light because what he had been through with her as a child had been too horrible either to remember or forget, but found with growing panic that he couldn’t switch her off. She hated all kids and had given him a hard time as far back as he could think, especially when she had a man in the place; usually it was Boy. Now there she was in front of him in a frightful series of snapshots, himself an eight-year-old again dressed in girl’s clothes with his skirt up and naked underneath, dancing at the end of the bed while his mother and Boy lay on it roaring with laughter.

  He broke out in an icy sweat but the photographs wouldn’t stop; he covered his eyes now, in Macclesfield Street, against the sight of his mother’s body lying the way Boy had left it after he had beaten her skull in and left. He would tell the police, and later the court, neutrally, as though he were someone else: ‘I
came back from school that day. I should say it was four o’clock, and I heard them fighting in our ground-floor flat and they were in the middle of the living-room that doubled as a bedroom and I came in to see him holding her by the neck; then he picked up an iron bar, and beat her head in, crushed the top of her skull right in with it, it made a rotten noise, and she shook her head which sent blood flying all over the place and then she went down in a heap, and then he just finished his beer off and walked out into the street.’

  But what he hadn’t told the police – or anybody else – was that when Boy had gone and he was there with the body by himself before the police came, his first thought had been I shall never have to dress in girlie clothes again, and he had edged forward into the room to stare at his mother’s blood-soaked body, at her bare belly with the salmon-coloured underclothes spotted with blood and her skirt rucked right up over it. After a time he had approached her; first he had picked up one arm and let it drop, then uncovered her breasts and touched them, then prodded her sex with his forefinger until in the end, growing bold and realising that he wished he had killed her himself, he had forced a piece of kindling into her vagina and twisted it viciously around inside her until his disgust came up and he vomited on the bed. Finally, in a swift movement, he had bent, spat on her and then hit her in the face until her face was gone and there was blood all over him where he had cut his hand open on her teeth.

  When the images had at last faded he leaned against a wall in Shaftesbury Avenue. He put his arms round his chest and his hands into his armpits, shivering; by the time he felt better evening had fallen. Clouds stopped over Centre Point, flustered grey hands and driven, elongated faces; they swelled, collected and separated, some with a white plaster gasp in the middle, then raced away on a rising east gale. When he felt able to he turned into the darkness off Dean Street towards a pub behind Diadem Court called The Sicilian Defence – the only kind of defence there was in a pub like that – still physically weak. He had completely forgotten about his mother now because Flora was back again. ‘As soon as I’ve been with a woman,’ he thought, ‘the moment I’ve finished with her, it’s strange, I see her in a new light – distant, wise in space and time, a true companion.’

  Control was everything; it was the long, sure road to affirmation. He pushed the pub door open and walked up to the bar to get a glass of beer.

  All at once, feeling uplifted and irresponsible, he decided that ‘Biddy’ made a fine pally nickname for Flora for old time’s sake, for a bit of auld lang syne. He whistled on his way to the bar, changing the words of a rock song:

  Last time I saw yez,

  You shore looked swell to me,

  Opening up your body old body

  To all of my miseree-ee,

  Biddy old Biddy a-ree, a-ree,

  Biddy a-ree a-ree.

  ‘Evening,’ he said to the barman, ‘pint of Guinness.’

  ‘Stop it, stop it, Ronald,’ he said to himself as he watched the glass being drawn, ‘you’re giving me mind-hop!’ He nearly burst out laughing. He shook his head and winked wisely at the ashtrays on the bar; there was just no knowing how a man worked, he told himself.

  Feeling in his pocket for a fiver he nodded and said to himself: ‘The world is well rid of women like Flora Borthwick.’

  2

  I was going to see an old mate of mine, ex-Detective-Sergeant Firth, who had rung me to fix a meet; we had said twelve-thirty. I took the tube to Chalk Farm but I was early, so I walked the rest of the way, making for a pub called The Keys of Heaven up Haverstock Hill. Away to the north an IRA bomb exploded and a pillar of smoke rose in the motionless air; presently sirens wailed in the distance and the fire brigade got going. It was December the third and I felt terrible. Good and evil were raging in my stomach, using my liver as a roped-off area, and I was sidling along the edge of a headache; it was also the anniversary of the experience I had got gratefully out of with a DC from another division – I was at the stage where practically every day meant an anniversary of some kind. She had a degree in psychology, and each time we had sex she would say: ‘Are you sure you’re feeling confident about this?’ until by the time it was over I wondered if I felt confident about anything at all.

  I didn’t mind going to The Keys of Heaven. I don’t mind going into any pub when I’ve some spare time for that matter, just to sit and have a drink and look at people. It hasn’t anything to do with being a detective; there’s just something agreeable about watching people being themselves, and I never interfere with it.

  I don’t like anybody else interfering with it either. Indeed I see it as the ultimate point of my job to make sure that no one does, which in our violent and indifferent society isn’t easy.

  I thought maybe I was going down with a cold. I had woken two hours ago in my flat out at Earlsfield sweating, dreaming I had plunged my hand into a pool of freezing liquid and felt something in there, while behind me a man whispered I’m just going to climb over into your mind. It was a grey morning, quiet and bitterly cold with a fog turning to fine drops on my coat; the sun, turning their windows red, weighed over the houses in arms of cloud thin enough to drop it, and I wondered if I had ever really looked at a day at all.

  But I would have got up feeling depressed that morning anyhow, because the day before I had been on what Charlie Bowman described as routine business over at Church Road, Leyton. The same evening that he was made redundant the occupant of number forty, a Mr James Boyce, had shot his wife and two daughters dead with a two-two Webley pistol. Hearing the shots, the neighbours had broken the door down, and there was Mrs Boyce with the youngest girl, seven, in the kitchen where the kid had been eating her tea, a boiled egg; all we could really tell from the mother’s face was that she had shortly before been crying, though there were no signs of a domestic row. Anyway, having killed them, the widower reloaded (we found the empty shells neatly side by side on the telephone table in the passageway) went into the sitting-room and fired at the elder girl from behind while she was watching the box, the bullet entering the heart; the child looked as if she had fainted with surprise. Then, after writing a few incomprehensible words to say he loved them – the message smeared with their blood and written on the back of his repossession papers which he had used as a flat surface – James Boyce had shot himself. There was a call for his wife from someone called Emma (her girlfriend, as it turned out) on his answering machine and he had left word on it to say they would ring back as they were all just going out. It was a cheerful message, and we worked out that he must have dictated it immediately after the slaughter, as if he hadn’t yet quite realised what he had done.

  I can’t think what they called us in for. There was nothing unexplained about those deaths – unless of course the minister responsible for the economy would have liked to say a word.

  That in turn reminded me of a letter I had been shown the other day by the mother of a man I had arrested for murder and armed robbery who was starting a life sentence. He was a postgraduate student in economics, but he also had a thing about stealing antique jewellery to give to his girlfriends. Only this time he had broken into a shop and killed the owner, who had interrupted him, by shooting him in a particularly disgusting way, in the balls, so that the owner, whose heart was weak, had had a seizure and died.

  Dear Mother,

  You used to tell me as a child that the devil makes no image in a mirror; you must have been right because there isn’t any mirror in this cell. However, the atmosphere in here encourages me to ask you some questions – I feel sure that, as usual, you have all the answers.

  My questions are probably pointless. Never mind; here goes. Why do I hate women, when I only thieved to please them? Why do I hate being touched? Why do people turn white and seem to die when I go near them? I say seem to die because people are hardly more dead to me when I have finished with them than they were before – a lecturer at university once told me it
was a metaphysical point. Why is it that I haven’t any sense of humour, as you never tired of pointing out? Why did that lawyer at the trial say that the only feeling I had was in my trigger finger? I only shot the man for a practical reason, because he interrupted me while I was robbing him – and if I shot him badly it was because he called me a dirty word, it was as simple as that.

  But some of the others that I’d done before, that I admitted to at the same time to clear the books, some of those struggled, and that meant things got messy and out of hand. Most of them took it easily, but you’d get the odd one that would go on screaming after I’d told him to stop, so I’d no choice but to clobber them more or less any old how. Their screaming got on my nerves because I reckoned it would bring the law down, so I panicked and bashed them around in a way I wouldn’t have if they’d co-operated.

  I know you always criticised me for treating the truth casually – but there’s a reason for that. When other people tell the truth they are admired for it, but when I do it, as I am right now, all I get is the kind of look which I can honestly do without, and I’ll let it go at that.

  Well, I’m left with the feeling that I’ve been by myself all my life – in fact I remember as a kid you really did leave me outside the shops all afternoon. What did you do that for? And do you think the results have justified themselves? The psychiatrist here says the images I have of the world lack depth, but I don’t agree at all – I assure you that some of the pictures I have of you, for instance, are bloody sharp.