He Died with His Eyes Open Page 2

  While I was looking down at the dead man, the two coppers came back. The eager one that Bowman had put down looked at me. He was much too clever to say anything this time, and even when he did speak he wasn't exactly polite or impolite— he just managed to leave the politeness out. The other PC, who hadn't annoyed me yet, slipped up when I asked him to call the ambulance again on the walkie-talkie, and he called me 'son'.

  'Is that what you call your station sergeant?'

  'No.' He was a brutal-looking blond of about twenty, who moved about with a controlled restlessness, cherishing his fists.

  I could tell he despised anyone who was different from him, older than him, cleverer, weaker, or in disagreement with his views of the society he helped to administer.

  'I'm about twice your age,' I said. 'Would you like me to call you son, son?'

  'No.'

  He wasn't suitable to be a police officer. He was much too partial to a battle with 'enemies' of whom he took far too sharp a view. He wasn't the kind of man you could depend on to ensure a democracy. He wasn't a quick thinker, either. The Met was too full of people like him, and it was no good the bosses upstairs saying they had to take what they could get. With three million unemployed, they could get whatever police force they wanted, like they did with the army. But a policeman's job, properly carried out, is much harder than a soldier's—or should be. You don't just obey orders. You have a code, but you are often on your own (I always was) and then you have to invent your orders.

  'You haven't been with us long,' I said.

  'A year.'

  'Just take being a policeman easy,' I said. 'No need to rush at it like a bull at a gate.'

  'Okay,' he said. He said it softly and unpleasantly, with a reserved chill in his eyes. I wondered what would happen to anybody he was questioning if he ever made CID, if they gave him a bit of cheek.

  'That's all right,' I said. I noted the number on his shoulder-strap. I always noticed those things.

  There was an uneasy silence, so I said: 'To pass the time till the ambulance comes, have either of you any comment to make on this case? Anything at all that comes to mind?'

  'That isn't our business, Sergeant,' said the brighter police-man, with the air of having learned a lesson.

  'Come on. I'm asking you both.'

  'Hard to say,' said the blond.

  'Was he on drugs, for instance?' I said. 'You've got what evidence there is in front of you, same as I have.'

  'I wouldn't know,' said the blond, absently. 'After all, I'm just a copper on the beat. With only a year's service in.'

  'You'll never make CID with that attitude,' I said.

  'Who says I want to?'

  I turned to the other one. 'Why does a middle-aged drunk end up on a piece of waste ground looking as if he'd been hit by a shell?'

  'He had enemies.'

  'Most people wouldn't give a fuck about a poor slob like this,' I said. 'They might give him a push or smack him just one. Why a terrible beating like that?'

  'Yes, and it was planned. They topped him in one place and dumped him here.'

  'Right,' I said. 'But what motive could they have had? They took a risk.'

  'Yes, okay,' said the brighter police-constable. 'Yes, I'd buy that.' He spoke with a South London accent that guttered in his throat like a flame in a cracked chimney. The other one sulked in the rain on the edge of the torchlight. 'Well, if they went so far as to kill him, maybe he knew too much about something.'

  'Maybe he was a grass—a snitch.'

  'Maybe,' I said. 'And he might have done bird, but somehow I don't think so. Anyway, that's easily checked.'

  'Or a spy?'

  'No,' I said. 'Foreign powers don't operate like that. Nor do terrorist groups. They blow people to bits, shoot them, or even run them over. But they don't beat them to death and then move them. They haven't time.'

  'Money, then.'

  'It doesn't look as if he had any.'

  'Well, it must be one of those three, Sarge. I can't think of anything else.'

  'No,' I said, 'nor can I. At least not yet. Not till I've been through his gear, talked to his friends, if any.' I added: 'You've been a help, anyway. What's your name?'

  'Marvell.'

  Just then the ambulance appeared. It arrived with a groan of expiring sirens, though it hadn't been in any hurry. When it stopped, no one exactly erupted from it. After a decent pause two men in blue uniforms got down from the vehicle in a calm, quiet, British manner. The man who wasn't the driver got the back steps of the ambulance folded down and produced a stretcher which he couldn't manage to make work right away. The man who was the driver walked slowly over to us and remarked: 'Well, here we are.' We were obviously meant to feel that this was in the nature of a revealed truth. He glanced at Staniland's body and said with a knowledgeable look: 'This him?'

  'Well, if it isn't,' I said, 'it was.'

  'Fraid as he was dead,' said the driver, 'he rather come at the bottom of the list, there being a case of industrial action on.'

  'You're right,' I said, 'he was in no bigger a hurry than you are.'

  'You'll excuse my asking,' said the driver, 'but would you be trying to take the piss?'

  'Well, if I was,' I said, 'there'd be fuck all you could do about it. Now get him on board, or I'll report you for wasting police time.'

  There was a very long pause indeed. 'As a police officer, you're supposed to be impartial as to union action,' the driver said.

  'And I am being,' I said. 'I'm just telling you to get on with it. What's not impartial about that?'

  'You,' said the driver bitterly. His mate said, without looking up from the official notebook he was scribbling in: 'Okay, George, let's get out of the rain and weigh him off.' He looked at his watch, noted the time down in his book and shut it. He said to the two police-constables, 'We'll just be in time for this new TV series they're running. It's all about some old king being murdered way back by a lot of geezers in baggy shorts and funny hats with pearls on. They all prowl about rabbiting a lot and waving swords at each other, see, then there's a bloke in a fur cloak has em all up in court and gives them a long rabbit, then he has em all topped. It's good.'

  'I don't think it's good,' said the blond copper. 'I think it's a load of crap.'

  'You're biased against hist'ry, you are,' said the driver's mate, 'if you won't mind my saying so, Officer.' As he spoke, he was shoving the stretcher with the corpse packed onto it under a blanket into the white interior of the ambulance. When he had finished he slammed the doors on it, walked round to the front and climbed in. The driver, with a choked look, got in too and started up. The ambulance pulled away at a sedate speed. 'Night, all,' the driver's mate called back.

  Nobody answered.

  Inside the ambulance the ruined face of Charles Locksley Alwin Staniland screamed silently up at its white roof which a British Leyland operator had sprayed one day when he happened not to be on strike and needed the overtime.

  2

  I went to see the police surgeon who had examined the body on arrival and said: 'What did he die of?'

  The surgeon said wearily: 'Everything.'

  When I asked the pathologist the same thing, he said: 'You tell me what he didn't die of, I don't know.'

  'Why don't you know?' I said. 'You're the pathologist. You're supposed to know.'

  'The wounds happened so quickly on top of each other that it's hard to say which came first. Not impossible, only I'm not through yet. But you can take it that they broke the arms and the leg first, also the fingers, and that the blow that put paid to him was the one to the frontal lobe of the brain, which was delivered with something like a builder's two-pound hammer.'

  'I wonder how he got himself so well hated,' I said.

  'Don't ask me things like that,' said the pathologist, 'I'm only quite young still and don't have much insight into people's horrible motives. I hope I never do. Anyway, it's not my job,' he added. 'I only establish time and cause of death, and I'm no
t a copper, I just work for them.' We were in the morgue, and he dropped a clutch of bloody instruments into a sterilizing unit. He glanced at Staniland's blue face as his assistant slid him back into the fridge.

  'Maybe he knew too much, sort of overspecialized in something.'

  'And then talked in his sleep,' said the assistant, banging the fridge shut.

  'Find a builder,' said the pathologist with a snigger. 'Find a hammer, why don't you? I'll match it up to the hair and the blood group.'

  He made me rather angry. 'Imagine one day having a girl-friend too many, doctor,' I said, 'and being hammered to death by a jealous lover. Or not a girl-friend. A boy-friend.'

  'Look here, I trust you're not insinuating—'

  'And imagine us, the law, mimicking Sherlock Holmes over your remains—me, and that assistant of yours with the wisdom of the ages in his face and the dead fag in his mouth.'

  3

  I went to sleep in my dreadful little bachelor's flat—a police flat—at Earlsfield after starting to look through Staniland's property. Bowman had sent it over in an old suitcase. I dreamed that far below me, under the walls of a ruined fortress, there was a field faded brown by drought with rocks lying in it. I was abroad somewhere—somewhere that smelled—and sitting on a terrace that I suddenly found was made of rotten canvas. My legs dangled over the edge and my feet were so far from the ground that the soles tingled. On either side of me well-dressed people chatted to each other, unconcerned. Then the whole structure yawed, swayed and fell devastatingly away; I screamed as I fell towards the field with the rocks in it. 'They have to get you in the end,' Staniland remarked calmly as we fell together, 'otherwise there'd be no end to the pointlessness.'

  I woke up sweating.

  I thought about myself. I'm not a bachelor, I'm divorced. On the face of it, that doesn't mean much in the police nowadays; if it did, they'd never be able to fill the ranks.

  It doesn't help your career, though. The people upstairs have never been divorced, whatever they may have done on the side (things that come out, to the public amazement, from time to time).

  Having accepted yet again that I would always be a sergeant, I stared upwards into the dark trying to focus on Staniland, trying to imagine him walking, upright and alive, without his injuries. I went on trying to picture him like this until I wished morning would come.

  I switched the light on at five and got out one of the tapes from Staniland's collection and put it on my cassette player.

  People stroll about in Battersea Park among the dogs' turds as if they had all time before them. I hope they really believe it—they might as well. They go round and round the park, then they turn about and go back to the flats which border it. There they sit and worry about their problems and wait for the pubs to open. In spite of their clothes, a lot of them are sitting tenants and on social security. If you tell them that you're a writer, they tell you that they are writers too, though they haven't an ounce of talent in them, only resentment and nastiness. They come on very liberal: this is false. The moment you have anything interesting going in your room—a discussion, a party, a screw—they start banging on your floor with a broom handle like a jealous mother-in-law in a hopeless, elderly way. These are your 'neighbours'. Next evening you see them in the bar of the Princess Caroline wearing secondhand snappy coats, sporting gold buttons with anchors on them and peaked caps at an angle, Leninstyle. They look ready to denounce anybody; they are obsessed with their middle-class status right down to the last assumption, down to the mongrel which they strain against their feet in their balding suede bootees just as if these snappish animals had a pedigree. When I have had a few drinks these people turn into predatory birds, hornets and wasps. If I criticize them, they tell me I have no pity. If I do not, they have none for me.

  Under its strictly tended foliage, the keepers of Battersea Park shut the gates at ten-thirty at night, reminding you that you aren't in the country now, while not three streets behind the Rastafarians roam and howl. Shut out of the pubs down there by unwritten law they rule the streets— their prey the Asians, those whites who are too defenceless to retaliate and, in general, intelligent-looking and therefore possibly rich people. The only things the jobless blacks can call their own are the paving stones. Battersea is representative of a hopeless national situation, and only a succession of typical British governments could ever have got us out into it. I loathe Battersea. I just want to go mad.

  I turned the tape over, but the other side was blank.

  4

  Morning came. It shone through my uncurtained bedroom window, but I still listened. I came to a grim account that began:

  France. The moment I got back to Duéjouls after the others had left, the first thing I did was burn all my daughter's clothes—all her books and toys that had been left behind. As I couldn't bear to look at them I took everything up behind the house into the courtyard and made a huge fire of them. It was August, and the heat was so great that I was afraid everything would catch fire—the house, the whole village, the sky. I watched her books burn up: Ant and Bee, A Busy, Busy Day, Mister Clumsy and Mister Clever. Her drawings of houses and cats and snails soaring over her impression of the house on the wind wrinkled and flared; the flames gusted through them. The evening breeze from the causses flailed and tossed her works lightly up to heaven, as lightly as if they had never been. I felt horribly faint inside as I stoked the fire—as if I had been transformed by a fever that left only my twisted body behind, listless and hideous. I knew only that it had to be done as I burned her clothes and shoes; it was the cost of my failure as a father and a man. Everything would have to be explained and paid for—but not tonight, not now.

  Wine now: I drank the cold wine from the bottle while the fire burned, destroying our past for us, my daughter's and mine. When the fire looked like dying of exhaustion under its ash I threw some eau-de-vie on it and raked the slabs of half-burned paper and material with a hoe they call a harpe round here to give the fire more air. When everything was burned I knew I had done right as I reeled away. I knew Charlotte could never, and would never, come back. Life had never permitted her any fairy-tales, not with me as her parent: and it never would. I cried with fury and despair and loneliness as with a last gesture I threw on her old gumboots and school satchel, and burned her exercise books with their drawings of frogs and flowers, and the scraps of poems she had copied out with Madame Castan: 'Jamais, jamais, tu ne la rattraperas!'

  I have to explain what the agony of her loss means—she was my heart, my soul, my other self. But I could never possibly have told her so, and so I lost her. Once I knew I was going to lose her, I suddenly preferred to lose her at once, not wait. I rushed onto the loss, I sent everybody away, then went away myself. Ah, existence is like water, it is everywhere and yet it flows away. They say I have Polish blood on my mother's side. When I came back, as I had to, I burned everything that had belonged to her. Are the English inhuman? While I was in England my brother said I shouldn't take everything so seriously. But if you don't take love seriously, what do you take seriously? Belongings? Money? Property?

  I put the fire out in the evening. I wonder how much of this I can really stand?

  After a pause on the tape Staniland answered himself:

  Only so much, of course. I'll find out when the time comes.

  He had found out all right. I put Staniland's tape down on the floor. I wondered how much Bowman, or the two PCs, or the pathologist, or anyone else, would have understood of them.

  I wondered how much I really understood.

  5

  Bowman had given me the wrong address for Staniland. It wasn't the Battersea address on the national insurance card they had found on him, but the one on the letter from a bank saying they'd be really very glad if he'd drop in pretty well at once and see them about his overdraft. It was dated only a fortnight before his death, and the address it was sent to was in Lewisham, the clock-tower end of it. I had found the letter mixed in with his papers.<
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  I started to think about everything I knew of Staniland so far, beginning with his being smashed to pieces. He was fifty-one. He was balding. When they washed the blood off him, he had nice hands (you could see from the one he still had the shape of ) and had perhaps been attractive to women. Too attractive? But he didn't read like a love-'em-and-leave-'em specialist. The fingers on that hand—his right—were stained with nicotine. He was a drinker, too—you could tell that from his nose, and from his problems, as shown up in what he had recorded. Not an alcoholic, though; his handwriting was too precise, the letters as a rule well-formed for a man who had written quickly, and well-spaced between the lines, the lower loops never entangling themselves with the upper loops of the line below. It was an educated, reflective, intelligent hand that didn't go with the cheap suit he was found in.

  What the hell had the man been doing?

  Bowman hadn't found any money on him. He was on welfare. That didn't mean he was broke, though; plenty of people these days fiddled the rules; they had to, to survive. Besides, there was the letter from the bank—he must surely have had money in it once, even if he only owed it when he died.

  I kept shutting my eyes till it was late enough on in the morning for me to go out and get information, trying to visualize Staniland and how he had lived. A writing man. A self-confessed failure, tortured by the loss of his daughter. A man who had lived abroad, probably for a long time (I should have to listen to all his tapes to verify that, but there were so many of them that it would take time), an educated man.