I Was Dora Suarez Read online

  If Roatta’s death proved anything one didn’t know already, which was unlikely, it reminded the investigating officer of the unwisdom of pushing business interests too hard with a multiple killer – in other words, since Roatta was strictly bent, of trying to put the arm on one. A man who is already dead kills freely, and the proof of this adage was all over Roatta’s sitting room.

  The killer stopped laughing as suddenly as he had begun. He wiped the Quickhammer free of splashes of Roatta with cotton waste, ejected the empty shell and dropped it into his black sports sack next to the axe. Then he took a plastic bag out of it which held a change of clothes; he put these on in Roatta’s bathroom. Finally, when he had packed everything up, he walked straight down and out of the house, closed the door, ripped off his gloves, put on another pair and went back to where he had left the car. He abandoned this a mile from College Hill and jogged back the rest of the way, holding himself between the legs with one hand and his bag with the other, meeting no one in the deep fog. When he got back to College Hill, he tore up the back wall of the burnt-out factory he squatted in by the fire escape and slipped through the glassless window. He wasn’t even out of breath. He went straight to his corner where his jute sack lay, stripped to his knickers and lay down on the cement, using his sports sack as a pillow. There was no light or water in the place but that didn’t matter, he wasn’t civilised. He very seldom needed water, and what he loathed above all was light. Where he could fold into himself and stay suspended like a bat during such little ease as he knew was in the dark, and there was plenty of that here. Only a far-off streetlight diffused some orange glow through the fog a hundred yards away where Lovelock Road joined College Hill, and the set of traffic lights there snapped regularly on and off. Yes, the squat would do till the council meddlers came round for a shufty, but that wouldn’t be tomorrow; it would do him for a time. He no longer consciously remembered the two women as he prepared to sleep; even the image of Roatta’s head, not an hour old, was getting blurred. Training would begin when it got light at seven; punishment tomorrow evening.

  He closed his eyes.

  He dreamed he was by the sea; there was no sky. The colour of the sea was brown, and as well as the waves rolling in frowning lines towards the beach, brains tumbled about in the slow breakers, seamed with red threads. The dream did not disturb him, but he woke on his damp and freezing floor because the punishment he had inflicted on himself going down the drainpipe at Empire Gate had made the shreds of his penis bleed again, and he had awoken because he was in pain.

  As soon as he was half-awake he slipped his knickers off. Holding them close to his face, he handled them loosely for a moment with an absent expression, then suddenly buried his nose in them, his dark eyes huge, his face monstrous with the wisdom of evil. As well as the blood and the seepage from last night’s ejaculation he had shit himself lavishly in his sleep, a sloppy, yellow liquid. Having spent a while burying his face in them, he folded the knickers up and put them carefully to one side on top of a stack of others. He would never wash them; he would never wear them again. Every secretion that had occurred in his underclothes before, during, or sometimes just after a moment of action was a souvenir to be preciously kept and safeguarded. He wasn’t a clean person in any sense of the word; he was absolutely connected to his bodily smells as though they alone proved to him, for want of other evidence, that he existed. From these excreta he would from time to time select an example years after it was dry, consulting it, scenting its associations, and then turn generally back through the pile slowly, nostalgically, as a man turns back through time – stroking, sniffing at the fetid little crusts much as any of us might look wistfully at the flowers that he pressed between the leaves of a book when we were a child. Finally he laid the knickers away and jerked his way to the window. There he shook his tangled face and said, half aloud:

  ‘There really are times when I frankly don’t know how I keep a firm grasp on my reason.’

  His lips, grey and sharp, were bent sharply downwards in the shape of a sickle. His eyes compelled the other because they bore the stare of someone entirely lost on the earth, and he was the most hideous thing that you prayed you might never see.

  2

  I was down at Brighton for the day. The front enclosed the sea, which wasn’t a bad idea; the only thing wrong was the town behind it, which I thought was a pity. I thought it would have been pleasant to have had just Sussex countryside, narrow lanes leading to a village or two, but there was no more hope of that. I stood some distance from the sea at the top of the stony beach. It wasn’t that I minded getting wet, since it was raining anyway. The sea grumbled greenly around inside the old harbour walls and the breakwaters, under the pier. It looked as fed up as I was, so that in the end I decided that the best cure would be to go and massacre a beer in a pub I had spotted not far off actually open for trade called the Fishing Smack, as our seafaring big London brewers call practically any pub within the smell of seaweed if the opposition hasn’t already got away with the title for one of theirs. I noticed there was a door at the side as I entered; what was left of the word GENTS on the heavy-glazed pane was well scarred, someone must have cracked a bottle against it, or more likely a head.

  There were few folk in there just yet since it was early, so I ordered a pint of the Kronenbourg and went over to the window with it to sit at the end of the long bar and watch the sea again in its troubled equinox movement. The rain was coming down really hard now, I saw, without the red-coated young barman polishing his pint pots about half a mile away having to remind me of it, so I watched the sea practising really, like a county-class cricketer who doesn’t have to try very hard for the match but with a batting problem at the nets, slogging plastic bottles from the cap of one glutinous wave to the next. I drank some of my beer and watched three local men of a certain age wearing macs, sou’westers and gumboots, walk slowly down the steep slope of pebbles to examine the same scene. I watched it with them from the bar and then farther out, beyond them, southwards until the water stopped being shore green and turned a freezing far-out Channel blue, rolling backwards with the outgoing tide until I supposed it must get to France or anything else solid enough to stop it.

  I didn’t especially know why I was down there; it was a Sunday, and I had merely woken up that morning, immediately got up and dressed as though I were still in a hurry to get round to A14, only to remember as I always did, once I was well awake, that I was beached. But today, on an impulse to get away from Acacia Circus, I had just got the Ford off the weeds that were gnawing its tyres away by the kerb and come down to Brighton because it was near. It was something to do – something that helped me forget, at least for an afternoon, that I was permanently prevented from doing my proper work. I had one key phrase against being bitter about this. I thought always, and was thinking now as I drank my beer: ‘Well anyway, if Frank Ballard, brave man, better mate than him I never had, and he paralysed from the waist down for life by a gunshot-wound, if he can take it and not go mad, then I can bloody take it.’ Finishing my beer, I thought: ‘After all, what’s the alternative?’ I was both a human being and a disciplined police officer, and so because I had combined what I saw as justice with my duty, I had struck a fellow officer, been judged by the police and fired. It was to do with a case called the Mardy affair. After I had repeatedly warned him not to give in to an excess of zeal and to keep completely out of my way, for his own sake and notably for the accused’s own, and he still interfered because he had been promoted inspector and didn’t like the way I invariably handled my work on my own, I hit him and broke his jaw, and so I was brought before a police disciplinary board, was heard by three senior officers from the north country where nobody knew me, was found against and fired – that’s getting on for a year back now.

  But if it were all to do over again, I would do it all over again; I know my hands are clean.

  I felt like going outside for a minute, so walked down to the bottom of Palmyra Square, whe
re long ago I had been sent down to see into the deaths of a young couple who had lived in the top flat at number eight. There had been no point in my going, really, because they were both dead, and there was nothing I could find out or add to what the Brighton police already knew, that they had been credit-card ripping and it was catching up with them – had caught up. They had a great lunch at Wheelers, where they had invited people over to their table for brandies, after which they walked hand in hand down the pebble beach where I had just been standing and then on out to sea. The sea did for them what they had asked it to do and then afterwards brought them back to the beach in its own time, wet as fish and green with weed, their faces greyish white and their arms still half trailing round each other, and I don’t know why, but when I saw them like that in Brighton morgue, I was convulsed with what I felt in myself to be a rightful fury.

  I looked out to sea again. It was the end of February, the twenty-sixth, and all at once the short afternoon had had enough; it scattered its way off towards the night chased by short, dirty clouds. I remember I got home to my wife Edie in the end at about two in the morning and she said: ‘You look dreadful, what was it?’

  ‘A double suicide at Brighton, boy and girl. Banks, credit cards. They asked the Factory to send someone down.’

  ‘Why get in a state?’ said Edie. ‘It happens all the time, you’ve only to open a paper.’

  ‘I know it does,’ I said, ‘and I always want to know why.’

  ‘Well, that’s what they pay you for, to find out, if you call that pay, what you draw.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve just been doing,’ I said, ‘and it isn’t that, it’s a question of two deaths down to a square of fucking plastic.’

  ‘The public has to be protected,’ she said.

  I said: ‘They were the public, you stupid woman.’

  ‘They tried to get their hands into the till and it didn’t work,’ said Edie severely. That was always one of the troubles with my wife Edie. For her and for her father the low-grade police was beneath her socially; she wasn’t the daughter of a big wheel in the fruiterer’s trade for nothing, apples by the ton up from Kent. ‘Scratch my back for me, will you?’ I remember she said then. ‘I’ve got an itch between my shoulder blades where I can’t reach it.’

  We went to bed and I said: ‘I’ve seen them.’

  ‘Seen what? Look, just settle, will you? Why won’t you settle?’

  ‘Seen their bodies,’ I said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘The sea had turned them surprisingly fucking little,’ I said.

  ‘Oh?’ she said. She added: ‘I do wish you wouldn’t swear.’

  ‘You just can’t help it in my job, Edie. Don’t you see, the words sometimes take the place of tears.’

  ‘I wish you’d just go to sleep,’ she said, ‘it’s nearly four.’

  ‘I can’t, Edie,’ I said. ‘Oh, why can’t you just be a wife to me for once, just hold me quietly for a while and don’t say anything more just now.’

  But she said: ‘I think you really ought to know it, and Dad agrees with me, you’re a dreadful load on me at times – all this perturbed thinking of yours and you nothing but a detective sergeant who’ll never go up in rank because you insist it isn’t rank that matters.’ She sat bolt upright in the bed, pointed to her stomach and screamed: ‘Well, all right, then, if that’s the way you want it, look at the load I’m carrying thanks to you, Mr Police Officer with the Lofty Ideas – I think you’re altogether too sensitive for the police sometimes, I really do, and now there’s the child due in May with all the expenses it’ll bring, and a fat lot you care! She’s due on the twentieth, the doc says, and I tell you I am near the point when I don’t want to know!’

  But presently she lay down again and her voice faded; I was glad of that. That night I realised that I had married Edie for her fatal, extraordinary body, not her opinions. I understood that no body could ever be enough if it held opinions in dead opposition to my own. I already knew that I wanted the coming child, who was, for nine short years, to be my daughter Dahlia, far more than Edie did; I loved Dahlia even before she was born, which may have been why Edie always hated her, who knows, and my love for the child meant that I would always find a means of tolerating Edie on account of Dahlia; I would find some means of growing deaf. All I had wanted that night was to hold Edie against me in my vulnerable hour after that day in Brighton. It was her primitive security that I needed; just a fraction of what Edie’s body was giving to the child she bore. That was all I needed to recover and so, through being reassured, feel enabled to get into perspective that greenish couple still in their trailing decomposed embrace, their swollen, expressionless faces nibbled by fish – what I needed from Edie then was her kisses, her comfort, just for a few minutes, and so prove to me that love can banish the frozen, lazy rottenness of eyes that have been eight days underwater.

  We all have our weak moments.

  When I got in to Acacia Circus, the phone was ringing. I got my key into the lock quickly, but by the time I got the door open the bell had stopped. But I had a feeling it would soon start again; I just had a feeling when I heard it ring, that’s all. It wasn’t just intuition either. One, people hardly ever ring me, and two, on my way home I had stopped off at the Princess of Wales over in Battersea for a Kronenbourg; and it happened that three men came in, one of them with a Sunday-edition copy of the Recorder, which he put on the bar beside him open at an inside page. The headline read REVOLTING DOUBLE MURDER – AXEMAN STRIKES. I said to the man whose paper it was: ‘Do you think I could just have a look at that?’

  ‘Feel free.’

  I flattened the page out on the bar and leaned over it.

  Mrs Betty Carstairs, 86, of 19, Empire Gate, South Kensington, and a woman of about 30 whose identity the police have yet to establish, were both found murdered in appalling circumstances late last night by a neighbour in the Victorian building, Mrs Philippa Drewe. There is no doubt that the killer entered the flat through the rear sitting room window, and left the same way. The flat is on the ground floor, but it is some distance from the back of the block to the ground, and Poland Street police are satisfied that the killer made use of the drainpipe which descends to the waste patch of garden twenty-five feet below. Mrs Carstairs died through being hurled into her hall clock; her friend or lodger was literally hacked to pieces with the killer’s axe. Chief Inspector Charles Bowman of the Serious Crimes squad, who is in charge of the enquiry at present, told us in his usual energetic way: ‘You can hardly expect me to make any comment on this disgusting business yet, as I have only just arrived, and may well hand over this matter to colleagues, because I am on the missing Yugoslav princess affair over in Walthamstow.’

  It was only a few lines of newsprint but a strange feeling came over me when I read them; I quickly finished up my beer and left.

  As I drove back to Acacia Circus I thought of the nights, far back, when I had made love to Edie. She told me once, just before she did what she did to Dahlia, I mean killing her, that out of all the times we had made love, there were only three when she had ever felt anywhere near me; the other times she told me she was completely absent. Somewhere inside me I knew it myself; there were nights when my hands knew, even while they were caressing her body, that she was immersed solely in thoughts of hatred and new curtains. Because of her mental trouble which, until it was too late, I never would admit that she had, she was never sincere with me about anything, but responded to any approach I made to her with a perfunctory sweetness, which in the end I found I couldn’t swallow, no matter how hard I tried on account of my unending physical desire for her; until, towards the end, even such grim coquetry, which was all that madness had left her where others were concerned, could only begin after an evening of rum and cokes at the Maid’s Head. Or else she might just as easily start screaming if I so much as touched her, with the child sleeping next door.

  I found that these days, so many years ago now – eight – since Dahlia�
�s death and Edie’s admission to Banstead, I now only thought of Edie when I felt that something abominable was about to happen – something capital and irrevocable in my life; and now tonight, for the first time since I had been discharged from the police, as I drove, Edie, in my mind, was treading heavily towards me yet again in her unrippable dress, drivelling her disjointed evil. Since she was a murderess, Edie, who had impregnated me so deeply with herself that I shall remember her forever with no hope either of peace from her or replacement for her, made me understand murderers better than I ever otherwise could have: their lapses, the vile din of their fugues, the whole negative concerto of insecurity expressed in absent violence, their desires expressed in ways that were thought to have died; but evil never dies. In the old days, as I reached my climax with her, Edie moaned, shouted or screamed as if in delight; but I subsequently understood that she had never understood what that word meant. I was always too hard at work, also emotionally involved with her, ever to consider her objectively, but what I slowly understood was that she was patiently trying out a range of approaches to me, all copied; and that from her point of view I was a piece of flat cardboard cut out roughly as a man. Like all murderers she knew that she must not make too many obvious mistakes, so she worked intelligently and patiently, suppressing her real drives for as long as it took her to formulate those copies of love which would blind and subordinate me to her. She held the ace of hearts after all, my passion for her, and so became my master in the end, the way she played me, knowing that her hatred must never show on those nights, rationed, when she realised that I had to have her if she were to pass, unobserved, as normal; so that when I came to her, her long hair was always arrayed on the pillow and she would immediately surround me with her thick white arms, spreading her apparently hot, solid thighs and stomach, which were in complete contrast to the thin lecturing lips and spurious eyes that she has when I go to see her at Banstead now, and muttering her love for me.