Dead Man Upright Page 3

  The last time we met, when I was up for sentence, you spoke to me of humanity. Humanity, frankly, is a message that can go out of style. After all, even Christ reckoned there would always be people like me about and he should have known – he was knocked off with a couple of us. The fact that I kill is in fact my whole point – that there is no point. Everyone says my case is a nasty business, and you spoke up and said I was a total disaster. But I don’t believe I am the disaster – I think I’m just a reminder that people are living in one.

  Several of the prisoners here have told me they’re going to kill me, so they probably will. But since other people’s deaths never bothered me I don’t suppose mine will either, though I suppose the first night will seem fairly strange.

  In any case, even if I do live I shan’t see you again for years. We’ll both be really old by the time I get out – perhaps you’ll be dead even. Never mind. If I write to anyone it might as well be to you, since I both knew you and never knew you – I’m not sure which, because I have never really known anyone anyhow, so it’s hard to tell the difference. Do you remember by the way, the time a man came into the house after he had knocked someone over? I’ve always remembered that – how he trembled while he looked at the body under the car, and his telling you he knew what the void was, and then being sick on the floor.

  I’ve never felt like that. I’ve looked at the world around me and decided it didn’t matter what crime I committed in it – the whole place is the scene of a crime anyway. You always told me to look at the world as it is, and I have.

  I shan’t do all this porridge. If the others don’t top me I’ll do it myself. I don’t see the end as a threat. I think the real threat is that there threatens to be no end. By the way, a postscript – do look the word ‘nihilist’ up in the OED before you use it again.

  I could see the mother now, as I walked, saying ‘I don’t know how he came to be in it.’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘In hell.’ She meant herself and her son. She looked at me: ‘What would you know about that?’

  But what was the point in telling her what I knew?

  ‘To be in hell,’ she continued, ‘is to be not quite dead. Just not buried.’ She stared at a flat spot in her cold, dull sitting-room with the heating off, smoothing her black and white tweed skirt with its dogtooth pattern, plain and infinitely alone, too old to cry, too young not to suffer.

  ‘He’s a killer,’ she said, ‘My Andrew. What would his father say if he knew?’

  By chance I had met the father through a case – a man local to me, of definite opinions, who had designed public buildings. As for myself, I felt like Caliban, my love deformed, and no longer young.

  ‘If only it hadn’t been for the promises,’ she said.

  ‘Promises?’

  ‘If it hadn’t been for God. God was a wicked deceit. If it hadn’t been for the promises we would have got through hell without even realising we were there.’

  ‘Perhaps the promises are well-founded,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ she said. She added flatly: ‘There’s nothing there at all. Andrew’s right, hell is resolution in agony, we’ve all been conned.’

  She was middle-class and I was certain that ‘conned’ was a word she had never used before; yet when she said it then she spoke it as though she had been using it all her life. ‘No time,’ she whispered, ‘no time. Life’s like packaged goods, over-wrapped and flimsy – it’s hardly believable, by the time you’ve got understanding it’s time to die.’ One side of her mouth puckered up the way mouths only do whose owners never knew what it meant to cry.

  I walked on up Haverstock Hill with a voice saying: ‘My name is Susan Ogdon, I’m forty with no kids; weep for me, I’m a divorced housewife by trade and occupation. Well, one spring morning it was raining, life looked bleak and I couldn’t see how things could turn out right, so I took a rope I’d bought and went to a bridge down the road and stood up there with the birds singing and put a bag over my head. I made a double knot in the rope to make sure everything went off right, but I can’t have jumped hard enough because I only started to strangle, and that was when I found I wanted to live after all. But I hadn’t given myself a chance – I was feet off the ground with no way to free myself, and that was when I understood what the sweetness of breathing meant, when I couldn’t. But just then two men from the water came by. They had been sent to cut me off and they cut me down instead – one of them got a knife out of the van and cut the rope while the other lowered me and got the bag off my head – he saw the bag was from the supermarket and said “What an advertisement” as I fell into his arms. I wish he hadn’t been married. He smelled wonderful, all oil and metal – first time I’d been in a man’s arms for years.’

  These memories crowded or sidled into my head together – beautiful, hideous and sad.

  Stevenson had a rotten one a few weeks ago, too. He was sent to a house in an alleyway in Kilburn that looked like a side-street to hell because an old man had jumped from the top floor, only he’d had the bad luck to decapitate himself on the fence going down, leaving most of him on the concrete with his bottom stuck up and his bald head a couple of yards away smiling at it. Bowman had sent him there saying it was just a routine matter of making sure he’d gone of his own accord and not been pushed; that way they could close the file.

  Later he went upstairs to have a last look round with a local uniformed man; this officer wandered round the deceased’s room for a while, looking at the open window the old man had dropped from, just generally looking round. Finally he picked up some of the dead man’s underwear, looked into it, sniffed and said: ‘Here, look at these, fresh skiddies – fine line in tyre treads, he must have been scared shitless.’

  ‘If you can’t master your fear of death,’ Stevenson shouted at him, enraged, ‘at least don’t laugh at it.’

  Talking to me and Cruddie later he said: ‘There are people who oughtn’t to be coppers, or probably any other fucking thing. I don’t know. They’re just not fit for it.’ He added: ‘I don’t get any younger. I just went away from that place in Kilburn when I was finished. I didn’t say anything. I just thought, getting away from that constable who could look into a pair of dead man’s pants and laugh, well he’s no better than a moron and so much for human progress.’ He picked up the file he wanted and turned to us at the door: ‘World’s gone down the drain, that’s all.’

  Listening to him I thought, he means people who stop to help someone. As for Stevenson’s old man lying cut in two in north-west London, he had jumped in the grim knowledge that for him there was no more hanging on, and he had just helped himself out of the place. The one act of detection now was to realise that London was a war zone. I wanted to tell Stevenson that, but before I got the chance he said: ‘See you for a pint later,’ and went out. We drank one together later at The Trident. They had ‘Just Like A Butterfly Does’ on the tape, and the music reminded me of happier times.

  Dying. Walking on uphill, I thought dying really was tactless. Death the way A14 saw it didn’t just transcend the bounds of taste; it abolished the very nature of taste, striking the definition of nothingness into the hearts of people who spent their lives trying to avoid it. But we didn’t see death the way such people did; we didn’t see it in a civilised, prepared way. We saw it without the church, without the priest, without the funeral parlour; no hymns, just the dead body, stiffening, sometimes in one, sometimes in more than one piece; we saw death suddenly, when we had a hangover, called out to the raw dank place where death was when we weren’t in the mood, like a cabbie picking up a client obliterated by the dark on an empty road. I’m always using memory in my work, as a writer does; I’m after something in the human soul that I can’t quite grasp – I read a lot of books in my spare time.

  As for Cruddie, he had been transferred to us from Dundee and had to act as a buffer between A14 and Bowman over at Seri
ous Crimes as well as do his other work. Cruddie’s last has been the suicide of the wife, just divorced, of the founder of the Gravy Train restaurant group in the West End. Police broke into her flat in Kensington Square because there were complaints about the smell and found her lying on her back with her nether regions dried to the floor by her excreta – she had overdosed on methadone, had a bowel movement while dying and been there five days. Cruddie stopped the car on his way back to Poland Street to buy a glossy magazine for his wife, and there was the dead woman’s picture inside with a caption saying how noted she was for her infectious sense of fun and high-spirited talent as a fund-raiser.

  And then there was the one Frank Ballard had to clear up once. A man had been queueing in a bank. When his turn came he told the clerk: ‘I’d like ten thousand quid.’ The clerk answered: ‘Wouldn’t we all?’ The villain shot her dead – she was either too slow in her thinking or a shade too fast with her wit.

  The result was the same either way – as Ballard said, never pass an armed robber off as a joke, it doesn’t work.

  3

  I saw the pub a hundred yards away; it was an old building. The upstairs billiard-room had those windows the Victorians thought were the ones people had in the middle ages; the downstairs windows had beer ads set in the panes. The fog was making my right arm ache where I had once been shot, so I put my other shoulder to the door and got into the bar that way.

  Firth was a big man, but apart from that he didn’t strike you as one of life’s success stories; he looked as if he had needed a doctor, never mind a tailor, all his life and had never been near either. He was wearing a grey overcoat with cheroot burns in the target area, and sat with his belly splayed out at an empty corner table with an empty glass on it. The table had beer circles all over it and he was killing a Hamlet in an ashtray; he didn’t stir when I came in but gazed at me with eyes like a broken shotgun. He was my age and I had been the best man at his wedding, but now he was that hopeless piece of human waste, a busted copper.

  He said carefully: ‘I could murder a pint.’

  Three years back there had been a night Firth couldn’t handle. He had come across a young villain helping himself to a hatchback in Green Lanes and went to nick him, only what he hadn’t reckoned on was the bloke coming up to him with a tyre bar and hitting him hard, dislocating his shoulder. Firth ran for it, being on his own, but the wrongo caught up with him just the same and beat the shit out of him, breaking some more bones. After he got out of hospital Firth went back to work convinced he had a yellow streak and from then on, from always having liked a drink, he took to the bottle in such a major way that he had to go.

  The last time we met I had told him that although I knew people who drank to hide the fact they were cowards I didn’t think he was one. Firth had answered: ‘No, of course not. I know. I just drink because I like the taste of the stuff.’

  ‘That’s a view no copper can afford,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ said Firth, ‘that’s why I’m not one. However, you’ve got to have something to take your mind off things, even if they come back worse with the hangover.’

  ‘You ought to think yourself lucky you’re out of the Met anyway,’ I said. ‘No more stabbings, rapes, woundings, affrays, riots, aggravated assaults, first in with the corpse, nothing.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry I’m out; I’ve fucked everything up. And then there was Diane – she couldn’t take the unsocial hours.’

  ‘That’s screwed a lot of coppers’ marriages.’

  ‘Diane,’ said Firth. He looked into his beer, whistling. ‘Remember how you sat up with me the night she left? Me locking myself in the karzy with the bottle of ring-a-ding till you had to come and break the door down? I don’t suppose we’ll either of us forget that night.’

  I certainly wouldn’t. I got two pints of beer from a man in a dirty shirt and sat down with him again. ‘This your local?’

  ‘A pisspot’s local’s the pub where he happens to be.’

  All right, I thought, so it’s self-pity day. Firth had trouble getting his lips to make words at times, like a man after a stroke. He picked his pint up and drank half of it. He wiped his mouth and said: ‘Anything goes, as long as you don’t ask me if I’ve stopped drinking – you look as if you were going to. People do, ever since Diane jacked me in.’

  ‘I’ve never hated a drink enough to be that critical,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve lost my anger about her now anyway.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘What’s good about it?’ he said. ‘If you can’t get angry about anything any more it means you’re over the top and what’s more I am – I’m finished, and what the Christ’s so fucking wonderful about that?’

  I looked at Firth again, thinking of a man I used to see around my flat in Acacia Circus on Saturday mornings who had disappeared a long while back – a fat man in jeans and a double-breasted blue jacket flapping open in the wind who was always shaking with laughter and pointing at people he didn’t know. I thought Firth would go that way too if he didn’t look out.

  Meanwhile the rest of the stuff about Diane was coming out.

  ‘She used to tell me I was great at first,’ he said, ‘you remember, women’s rights, came on strong about how she’d always been a lone fighter etcetera till she met me, and now there I was on the scene at last, a man with an independent mind who washed the car and did the dishes but wasn’t there when he wasn’t wanted either – in fact, a man she reckoned she could settle down with.’

  ‘In fact in the end your own independent mind told you to do as you were told,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right! I went out of my bleeding way!’

  ‘Never sacrifice yourself for a woman,’ I said. ‘They don’t appreciate it, they explode. I should know.’

  ‘Well, she exploded all right.’

  ‘I can still hear the bang,’ I said, ‘I was there, remember.’

  ‘That was the night I decided to beat the tom-toms.’

  ‘You poor, half-wide mug, you were way off base,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t have been beating any tom-toms, you were supposed to be working your cogs off for a bigger car and saving up for net curtains.’

  ‘What about her drinking?’

  ‘You didn’t drive her to drink,’ I said, ‘she flew there solo.’ I added: ‘You’ll replace her one day.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Firth, ‘the day Charlie Bowman makes Chief Superintendent.’ He peered into the bottom of his glass and hummed a few bars of ‘Needles And Pins’ into it. ‘She’s got someone else anyhow, a wanker. Let’s have another pint.’ When I came back with them he said: ‘I ran across them in the street the other day.’

  ‘I hope you were understanding.’

  ‘I was understanding about why people commit murder,’ he said, ‘if that’s what you mean. He’s a good deal smaller than me and it was close.’ He sighed. ‘But then I remembered I’d already got problems, so like a twat I let him go.’ He swallowed some more beer. ‘Do you remember when she picked up the first dish that night?’ he said. ‘Started right off with the heavy artillery? Huge great fucking thing – the one we used to serve the roast on when we had folk round.’

  ‘That’s right, it had a swan in the middle.’

  ‘That’s the one, you remember it pretty well.’

  ‘I should do,’ I said, ‘it was my wedding present. I found it in Balham market.’

  ‘Yeah, well, where was you then when that one lumbered up the room?’

  ‘Under the table, of course,’ I said. ‘Where did you think I fucking was? Did you think I wanted to get killed?’

  ‘Well, there was someone else in the bedroom, too, while Di was bowling maiden overs with the soup.’

  ‘That was the man she went off with, the one with the purple Spitfire. Don’t look at me.’

  ‘You remember a lot of deta
il,’ he said. ‘Too much.’

  ‘Look, it wasn’t me in the bedroom,’ I said. ‘If you recall, I was halfway to the jacks to clean up because I’d caught some spin-off when the spuds came over, and that was when Diane accused me of backing you and that’s when I bought the salad bowl as well, beetroot right down my front. I had to throw the shirt away in the death because biological stains are a doddle compared to beetroot, ask any washing powder, and I couldn’t have turned up at the Factory wearing that – the villains wouldn’t have taken me seriously.’

  ‘Well, I won the chicken and the bread sauce, remember?’ said Firth. ‘That’s when I shouted at her: “Who do you think you are you stupid bitch, War on Want or something?”’

  ‘That’s right! And then you drop-kicked the cultural corner – St Francis went for a penalty in the chimney and the third world sculpture finished up in the sprouts tureen. Germaine Greer did the real damage, though,’ I added with satisfaction. ‘The Female Eunuch went slap through the hi-fi. You’ll never listen to Elton John’s greatest hits on that again. Mind, I didn’t believe it in the first place when Diane said you’d gone politically correct.’

  He said without any warning: ‘I’m glad you came as a matter of fact, I want to talk police business.’

  ‘Police business?’ I said. ‘Christ, I thought it was marriage counsellor’s day.’

  ‘Will you just listen?’ he said. ‘That’s all I ask.’

  I waited.

  ‘I’ve got a place near here, pad with a bed, chair, table, cookette, gas fire if you can afford to feed the meter, sixty a week. It’s horrible. Still, what did I expect? A castle in Kent?’

  ‘Don’t work your self-pity off on me,’ I said, ‘just ramble on, or else if we’re here for a drink let’s have a drink.’

  A snowflake wandered by outside, kissed the window above Firth’s head and melted. He didn’t move to go and buy a round so I said, thinking he was flat: ‘I can work you a ton.’