I Was Dora Suarez Read online

  All right, laddie had let his passions stray just a little bit too far; still he was certainly pretty terrific as an operator.

  ‘Your funny little thing really is tiny, isn’t it?’ May said to him, looking at it with interest the first and last night in her life she saw him naked. She bent down, doubled up in her fat clumsiness and tried to give it a kiss. He shrank away from her with the whiplash speed of a viper and she said: ‘It’s all right, don’t get your knickers in a knot, I was only just looking at it, love, it looks sort of bruised or something, doesn’t it hurt?’ She added: ‘I thought you would be huge, like Daddy’s, the way you came on in the pub.’ She was a working-class good-works vicar’s daughter, only oversexed. ‘I’ve seen all kinds, but yours is just sort of nothing, isn’t it,’ she said, ‘all sort of black and hurt looking, does it work? I can hardly even find it, see, I’m looking for it.’

  She intended these remarks kindly – affectionately, as if he could ever have understood what that word meant. These words – her last – were only casually thrown off, like many a death warrant, and like every other death warrant, they worked. He remembered how the bulb her side of the bed at the cheap hotel – twenty-eight quid for two, cash, no questions – was too bright; also, with detached affection, the way the back of her head had looked as her nose dived suddenly into the Schweppes ashtray on the night table as he cut her and she died. At the same time he dealt with that thick red crease across her stomach where her panties went which had always made him feel so ill; he also seriously rearranged the broadening line through the back parting of her hair which meant that May would have gone bald if she had lived long enough, which she really had no valid reason for doing. Even so, like a faded photograph of someone’s family that he had half known, the memory of her made him feel nostalgic from time to time – it was a shame, who on earth would have bothered to kill her, she must have been just a pickup in a pub. Well, anyway, she should have been glad to be spared all future indignity – only why should it be he who, as he thought of her, remembered wiping his knife off, putting it back in the black sports bag and leaving by a rusty fire escape?

  Still, what could it matter? All these things were just some of those things, images from some second-rate film dug up from somewhere years ago that left you frankly cold – no starring roles.

  Well, now the killer felt impelled to leave – not on safety grounds, but because he wanted to preserve the precious afterglow of his rich dinner and take its savoury memory back out into the cold with him – and yet that was the very minute when his vast banquet suddenly turned sour in him. It was just as he made up his mind to go that the great rich meal he had indulged in, its ponderous, heavy, bloody sauces, suddenly rose and boiled in his gut, bringing his stomach heaving up into his mouth. He managed to get to the jacks and spew up most of what he had just supped on and then, when he got back, he found that there was nothing left to gloat over but the revolting litter of an abandoned feast; all at once it was clearing-up time. The scent of the girl’s blood had lost its bouquet, its spicy, fresh fragrance, and all of her which, through fullness, he had not been able to enjoy of her, lay congealing on the floor, her blood now smelling sharp and acid, like stale wine. Her sprawling limbs admitted only one image. They were what they could only be – joints of chilling, upset meat – and her bloodstained grin, the fixed, yet slack absence of her dark eyes were the worst of all sentences, the one that condemned a killer by looking past him. Yes, something had gone wrong this time. Now the place chilled him; it had acquired an intensity of its own. Since he was in no way equipped to face the appalling result of his butchery, raging, he blamed the room. While he was out of it, being sick, it must have found a subtle opportunity to plot against him, and that was why now the motionless air in there, the feeble electric light, had become thickened, slyly menacing him. That was also why the various smells in there, recalling cold food, gas and green peas all together, the sweetish stench of the old woman’s underwear, combined to bring the frightful scenario back into his throat again so that he instantly found more vomit on his tongue. He glanced into the mirror at which he had so lately smiled in triumph. He shouted: ‘I look pretty good!’ and flexed his muscles, but any third person would have registered nothing more there but a bent and hollow shadow, a seamed, yellow face and eyes that would have made even a trained nurse turn away in horror.

  It was true he felt frustrated and cheated. All he had wanted to do was what he always did when he could – take the girl’s head off in one, bag it up and get straight back with it to College Hill. There he would have put it on the floor on a dinner plate facing him, just as he had done with the others, so that she could watch him while he punished himself. He would have kept her there as he went into training for as long as possible, but it was always the same in the end, of course – sooner or later it all started to go bad until in the end the lot had to be smashed up and junked, leaving an absence; it was like being thieved of an ornament, a memory, until there was a next time.

  Because there was no question of taking this head back – look at it! It was like the day Father papered the parlour – what a fuck-up!

  Suddenly he began to hear noises outside; someone was knocking on the front door. He didn’t care; there was something else he had on his mind anyway which would soon make him feel better. Still, he rapidly picked up his old sports bag, slung its handles round his neck, raised the bottom sash of the kitchen window and dropped out onto the drainpipe that he had come up by. He was already a quarter of the way down when he paused to listen to a timid rapping on the front door of the flat and an elderly female voice saying: ‘Betty? Mrs Carstairs? Mrs Carstairs! Betty! Dora! Are you all right? Can you answer me, please? Please!’

  The killer smiled as he shinned on down the wall, his mutilated cock, roughly bandaged to halt the bleeding, forced to grate against the iron pipe; he whimpered at the pain, already planning out the ruthless exercises to come.

  (We immediately discovered that the old lady who had tapped at the Carstairs door was an elderly neighbour, a Mrs Drewe and that, as turned out to be invariably the case with her, she had nothing useful to tell: ‘Like Cupid, I’m very shy and rather blind, you know,’ she explained to me, ‘though of course, like any modern woman I may look very mondaine.’ I had a feeling she wasn’t entirely sure what that word meant, so I settled my face into a keen look and hoped she might say something interesting if I gazed at her long enough. She didn’t, though. She set her cracked, red old lips in a considered manner and said: ‘I just fire my little arrows, Sergeant, never truly knowing where they might land – but I must bare my soul to the police and admit that in my time I have had several exciting little adventures. Now when I was in Buenos Aires in 1953 …’

  However, as she finally admitted, she had never really had a single useful thing to say since she had left Tunbridge Wells in 1938 except common gossip, which was why her husband had dumped her in a Shepherds Market bar one pink-champagney night in 1949. She added that she was frightfully rich but very lonely, and that although she had rather lost the habit for young men like me, we might perhaps just steal upstairs to her flat and have a very small gin and It, one each, no more.

  But I was several light-years away from her and I cut her short, assuring her that if she had been three minutes earlier at the door of the Carstairs flat instead of three later, the killer would have opened it to her, in which case she would be dead; it was her instinctive sense of mistiming that had undoubtedly saved her life.

  I also told her while I was at it that she had no chance of achieving her one ambition, which was quite obviously to live to be two hundred years old, unless she cured herself of her terrible habit of listening at people’s doors and peeping through keyholes, since there were people like me paid to do silly things like that anyway.

  The only tangible result that that rather strict little lecture had was to make her ring in to the Factory and complain about my manners, which got a dusty answer from the desk serge
ant; he copped a deaf one to her just as he did the day he got a voluble tourist in a lightweight two-piece and wig in front of him who spent a whole hour patiently explaining in Swedish that his brown poodle, which answered to the name Hooki, had last been seen straining its greens against a pillar of Albert Bridge.)

  Meantime the killer, in his exalted state of excitement, gave off a dreadful smelly fart as he reached the bottom of the drainpipe, which, the traces of it bright yellow in colour, were afterwards found by us in a pair of his old underpants at College Hill, together with other stains. He crossed the little wreck of garden, littered with empty cement bags and other rubbish less easy to name and found a slice of shadow beyond the reach of the streetlights; there he pulled his sports sack away from around his neck and adjusted his lower clothing, which had taken a good beating, together with what was inside it, during his descent.

  What had happened above him was already becoming blurred in his mind. Like any man who has enjoyed a great many women in his time, he had trouble counting all his conquests and seldom tried. He stripped his soaking red gloves off and shoved them into the sports bag last, telling himself to get real racing ones next time with a proper grip; then, having stepped back, he took a run at the low wall between himself and the street and neatly vaulted it.

  The street was empty except for the fog that swept slowly round the lights; the pillars were surrounded by rubbish sacks that lay slumped against them, waiting for the garbage truck like old men who had been shot. The killer thrust his bloodstained gloves deep through a rent that gaped in one of the sacks, then crossed the street to a pink Fiat Uno that was parked there.

  Although he had only nicked it three days before in Kennington he dropped into it as easily as if he had had it for years, giving the starter an easy time with plenty of choke, because the battery was on the weak side.

  The killer drove away looking really excited now because he was by no means exhausted. He was in real training, so it was therefore going to be one of those rich nights that collide with major dying. What he was doing now was motoring over pretty fast to Felix Roatta’s palatial house on Clapham Common North Side, as he had some business outstanding there. When he arrived, one in the morning was well gone. There was some fog, and it was thickening. He stopped the Fiat in Marjorie Grove, taking a place at the parked-up kerb by bumping two cars about, then walked back to Roatta’s place in his little racing pumps with his usual quick, jerking steps. He met no one. He sprinted up the steps two at a time to the smartly varnished real oak door and rang the buzzer at the base of the answerphone. After the killer had repeated the code twice, Roatta’s voice growled into the tin speaker: ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It could be Tinkabel,’ the killer said, ‘so don’t fuck me about.’

  ‘You know what time it is?’

  ‘I didn’t know money cared,’ the killer said.

  Roatta evidently agreed, because the lock on the heavy door clicked open and the killer went in. His body was glad of the sudden warmth of the pretentious hall, his thinly-soled feet in their sporting pumps grateful for the sumptuous carpet. Roatta said from the head of the stairs: ‘Come on up,’ but he needn’t have bothered to say that at all because the killer was already there. He went up close to Roatta, who sniffed at him.

  Roatta said: ‘You smell funny.’

  The killer said: ‘I am funny.’

  ‘In here,’ Roatta said, indicating his massive drawing room. A Conservative on his local council, a leading citizen, he feared and detested his visitor, only they had shared interests, so that Roatta had to put up with him whether he liked it or not. Roatta didn’t like it. He was too soft now to like anything much except his comfort. The shared interests consisted of a West End club called the Parallel Club which had been doing very very well, but was now suddenly glowing red hot because of some stupid fucking newspaper story, so that even the law, though it had been extremely well seen to, was getting anxious. Roatta wanted to get out of the business cash in hand while it was going, and he believed that because of certain things the visitor had done there, of which he had photographic proof, he had got him into a jam, so he wanted a lot of money for the matter to be like settled. Roatta was a man who wanted a lot of money anyway, but sometimes you can’t know what it’s wrong to want till it’s too late, can you?

  ‘First time I’ve dropped by here,’ the killer said, ‘and a nice place it is, too, if you can stay alive in it.’

  He reached down between his legs. A little blood was leaking through his crotch; he wiped it away with his forefinger.

  Roatta was mesmerised; stupidly, he gazed at the blood spot.

  ‘Now you shouldn’t be so indecent,’ the killer said softly. ‘You shouldn’t go showing your eyes around where they don’t belong.’

  He took a drop more blood away from the place with his finger; only this time he held it under his nose and sniffed it. Then he looked at Roatta again – not at his outside, but at his inside. It was a look that moved on through Roatta and far away. Roatta waved at the big liquor cabinet across the room and said: ‘A drink?’

  The killer said: ‘No.’

  ‘Well, sit down then and feel at ease,’ Roatta said; secretly, though, he dreaded for his cushions because at heart he was rather an effeminate person.

  ‘No,’ said the killer. He just stood there in front of Roatta, much too close. He stood utterly still, appearing not even to breathe, and saying nothing for such a long time that in the end Roatta, getting nervous, had to bridge the gap.

  ‘All right, then,’ Roatta said, ‘have you got it?’

  ‘Got what?’ the killer said.

  ‘My money,’ Roatta said. ‘My reddies. Have you got them ready?’

  It was the bad joke of the century, but Roatta laughed at it as if he were sitting well back to enjoy – which was a lucky thing for the joke, because it was obvious no one else in the room was going to laugh at it.

  ‘Yes, OK,’ said the killer, ‘here it is.’

  He produced a big 9mm Quickhammer automatic with the tired ease of a conjuror showing off to a few girls and shlacked one into the chamber. He told Roatta: ‘Now I want you nice and still while all this is going on, Felix, because you’re going to make a terrible lot of mess.’

  Roatta immediately screamed: ‘Wait! Wait!’ but his eyes were brighter than he was, and knew better. They had stopped moving before he did, because they could see there was nothing more profitable for them to look at, so instead they turned into a pair of dark, oily stones fixed on the last thing they would ever see – eternity in the barrel of a pistol. His ears were also straining with the intensity of a concert pianist for the first minute action inside the weapon as the killer’s finger tightened, because they knew that was the last sound they would ever hear. So in his last seconds of life, each of them arranged for him by his senses, Roatta sat waiting for the gun to explode with the rapt attention of an opera goer during a performance by his favourite star, leaning further and further forward in his chair until his existence was filed by, narrowed down to, and finally became the gun.

  At the same time great changes took place in him. As age goes in the world Roatta was fifty; but as he detected the first, barely perceptible sound in the gun’s mechanism he was suddenly a hundred and fifty, then a thousand and fifty, and then two hundred thousand and fifty until, when the killer fired, Roatta’s face was bright yellow and he was a million years old, his face hardened in iron concentration before the bullet even struck.

  The ammunition was old, like the gun, and the bullet for Roatta had a cross cut in its soft tip. The gun was silenced, but it was a big gun all the same, so that even though it only made a discreet noise like fup! when everything happened, a sound between a sneeze and a fart, the effect that the gun had on Roatta was much, much more precise and spectacular than either.

  A dizzy series of happenings occurred. The upper part of Roatta’s head entirely disappeared; it vanished in a red screen of exploding blood and bone, and when that cl
eared away, there was nothing left of his head at all except his lower jaw, from which a sly tongue with things running off it dropped sloppily over his chin like a grass trying to sell a phone number. Roatta now resembled some mad orchid – its perimeter decorated with gold fillings in the front but just National Health amalgam in the molars, which didn’t cost much and didn’t show – or else you could compare him to a wobbling great egg cup if you liked, the red bowl of his throat a squalid crown for the rest of him, which still leaned attentively forward in its real leather armchair. At the same time as his brains were beginning to run down his tasteful walls and slide across the glazing of his well-chosen pictures, a block of hard matter that had been in what was his nose while he had one whirred flatly through the air and went whack! onto an occasional table like the hand of one of those very determined women that want an immediate divorce – except that the hand was bright green. Meanwhile, other splinters of Roatta’s head, bone, a lot of liquid matter, marrow, stuff that a team of twenty top surgeons would have a hard time putting a name to, rang, splashed, slid and pattered round the room; they rained onto the vulgar, expensive furniture, into the cushions that Roatta had been so worried about, onto the carpet, where they presented as showers of crimson sick – Christ, the bits rained down just about everywhere.

  But the killer laughed, because he found it totally hilarious the way the sitting body still had its once white trousers carefully pulled up to preserve the sharp crease. It wasn’t the kind of laughter any normal person would want to hear. While it lasted, the expression on the killer’s face never varied, and it was a face where laughter didn’t frankly work.