I Was Dora Suarez Read online

  Love which, even with the plunging sensation of my heart and mind, I could never accept was false, because I did not want to live without her body, as I should have had to if I had judged her by her mind.

  Now, having passed through what I was hard taught, I have for a long time made use of it in my work to judge and place the actions and motives of others and see how the catcher, to be a true arrow against assassins, must at some time in his own life have personally had to do with one.

  I got a can of beer out of the fridge, stripped it open and sat down at the kitchen table with its chrome legs and bitter blue Formica surface. I took a swallow of the beer, trying to conceive what it meant to be murdered. I tried to imagine Carstairs’s and Suarez’s terror at the killer’s sudden irruption into the flat on Saturday night – until in the end, for an instant, I became Suarez physically as the killer came for her, and felt as paralysed as she did as the axe bit into her arm at the swinging finish of its parabola.

  The phone rang again. I picked it up and said: ‘Yes.’

  The Voice said, as if I had never been away: ‘There you are. You’re back on the police.’

  ‘A14?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I said: ‘It isn’t to do with the axe murder of those two women over in Kensington at all, Carstairs and Suarez, is it?’

  The Voice said: ‘It is. What have you heard about it?’

  I said: ‘I read about it in the paper tonight coming back from Brighton.’ I added: ‘I’m a private citizen; I don’t have to be dead easy about going back to Poland Street just like that.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ said the Voice, ‘so get round here now.’

  ‘It’s not on,’ I said. ‘There’s the Fox matter, the disciplinary board, all the breakage you get when you try and string me round with a load of cunts.’

  ‘It’s all arranged,’ the Voice said. ‘The Fox affair is forgotten because I’m shorthanded.’

  ‘You make me feel really wanted,’ I said.

  ‘Nobody particularly wants you,’ the Voice said. ‘I need you; there’s a difference. So get over to the Factory, get your arse in gear. By the way, there’s a mate of yours, Sergeant Stevenson over on A14, who’s dealing with another death over at Clapham that happened within hardly an hour of Carstairs/Suarez and he wants to talk to you. You come in now, ask for my deputy, Detective Chief Superintendent Jollo, sign some paper which’ll give you a warrant card, then get onto Chief Inspector Bowman, Serious Crimes, he was first on the scene; he’ll take you over to Kensington. Also see Stevenson as soon as you can. Now come on, move – I’ve no one obstinate enough but you to put on this, so hurry – I’m having my wig twisted over this one from upstairs.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ I said.

  ‘You put your questions to the dead,’ the Voice said. ‘No point your putting them to me.’

  It rang off.

  I got to Poland Street and found Bowman. He wore a brand-new black leather jacket which made me understand what sixty-year-old hippies were going to end up looking like, and his face was sort of a funny colour.

  ‘What’s the matter with you,’ I said, ‘have you got flu or something?’

  ‘Don’t start,’ he said, ‘now just don’t, Sergeant, that’s all, and let’s get going, the car’s waiting.’

  I felt sorry for him, and the trouble between us always was that it showed.

  Even though Empire Gate was a mile long, running south at right angles to the Thames with Kensington Palace and the Soviet embassy behind it, it was easy enough to pick out the stucco porch we wanted because there was a uniformed officer standing under the portico at the foot of the steps going up to the block. It was eleven on Sunday morning when we arrived, and the February sun, the colour of a fake guinea, shone down palely on the quiet, dirty pavement, on the big Mercedes of third secretaries parked in front of dubious embassies. Bowman said to the copper on the door with his usual charm: ‘Bowman, Serious Crimes, open up, son.’ He added, pointing to me: ‘And tell your folk that this officer is taking over the case so that they’ll know, all right?’

  ‘All right,’ said the officer, looking at me, ‘I make him.’ He led us indoors and along a worn carpet that ran along the ground floor to a dark door under the staircase.

  ‘Everybody been and gone?’ I said to Bowman, meaning the technical people.

  ‘Yes,’ said the uniformed man. He got the flat key out of his pocket and handed it to me.

  Bowman said to him: ‘Now go back to the door and stay there till you’re told to do something different.’

  The officer answered: ‘I’ve had an offer of good work in this big bakery over at Camden Town.’

  Bowman said: ‘Take it then, sonny. You’re dead right, why stand out here in the cold freezing your bollocks off?’

  When he had gone, Bowman said to me: ‘Are you going in first?’

  ‘You’re the major general,’ I said, ‘the way you just came on.’

  ‘Yes, only it’s my second time in here,’ said Bowman. He swallowed.

  I said: ‘It’s that bad, is it?’

  He said ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘then stay out in the hallway with the uniformed baker there.’

  Bowman said ‘No, but I’d appreciate it if you went in first.’

  I had never seen Bowman like this before; but anyway I took the Banham key I had been given, set it in the lock, opened the door and went in. The first thing I took in were the lower limbs of Betty Carstairs because there they were directly under my feet, lying outside the bent clock which sprawled against the filthy wall inside the front door like a drunk that had been beaten up. The top of the clock had collapsed on her head and chest and one of its lead weights, pieces of a chamber pot, wood, glass and blood lay spread round her; I noticed fleetingly that the dial of the clock bore some kind of miniature boating scene with Windsor Castle in the background.

  I took in the shambles of the dark, cramped Victorian hall next. There was a pervading smell of urine everywhere. A pointed old woollen hat lay under a table where the phone stood with its cable ripped out. There was blood on the hat; it must have fallen off Carstairs’s head when she hit the clock. Immediately beyond her body a narrow corridor wandered at an angle to a kitchen door kept open by a rug swollen with damp – all this back part of the flat, the hall and the kitchen, was bitterly cold.

  I went into the kitchen; it was still lit by one feeble dirty bulb high up in the ceiling. It was a tall room, but it was crammed with rubbish that reached right up to the remains of its moulded plaster cornice. Trunks, old TV sets dating back to the days when God was still yelling for his bottle, supported stacks of battered suitcases and boxes overflowing with the kind of junk you tried to avoid at the Harrow Road end of Portobello Road; heaps of cracked dishes rose unsteadily from hard armchairs upholstered in British Rail. The floor was littered with rusting fish forks in mock-ivory handles, lengths of material, a pile of men’s homburg hats going back to the thirties, serge skirts, rayon stockings, pink underwear which was making a comeback after seventy years – all this was bursting out of suitcases with broken latches marked P&O – Not Wanted on Voyage or out of council rubbish sacks, so that the only free space was an enclave under a window blinded by dark red paper. The sweet, rotten odour that infested this place came from a trailing, unmade bed with two mattresses supported by books; I uncovered the bed and found the mattresses to be soaked with urine and encrusted with human dirt.

  At right angles to the bed stood an old General Electric fridge with its motor humming ceaselessly; it would go on humming until it fused because the case of the fridge had long ago rusted out. Opposite the fridge stood a greasy old New World cooker in speckled grey enamel stamped Mark I Series 1940, its oven jammed with enormous dishes such as large families used fifty, sixty years ago. A dented aluminium kettle stood on one jet of the cooker next to a slab of bacon that had been forgotten about and rotted, and there was a gas leak somewhere, probably from the fifty-year-old
heater that fed the hot-water tap to the sink.

  Directly I felt able, I turned back to the hall and knelt down beside Betty Carstairs. I absorbed every detail of her position, judged the force with which she had been thrown into the clock and took note of every inch of her clothing. What I observed first was a short, naked expanse of withered thigh, the skin and bone showing between a half-length lisle stocking; then a thick old tweed skirt up round her waist – only now, whatever she might once have held precious in herself was as meaningless as a dead soldier after a battle; whatever she might once have believed herself to be was exploded by the violence that had been done to her.

  There was a crumpled piece of writing paper lying near the body and I picked it up, straightened it out. I could see at once that the handwriting was not Mrs Carstairs’s, but a young woman’s. There was just one line on it: ‘Now I need a long rest.’

  I got my flashlight out because the flat was so dark and examined next, as I had to, the angle of Mrs Carstairs’s head to her shoulders and then, having gently felt her neck, confirmed that it was broken. I turned her face just a little in doing so and her denture, that had been forced halfway out of her mouth, slipped back to its normal place as though in gratitude, and the old lips, though fixed, appeared to me to smile. Otherwise her face had been obliterated by terror and disfiguration – wiped out and replaced by the sly look that the dead assume after just a few hours.

  I said to Bowman behind me: ‘Have they timed this yet?’

  ‘They say Saturday between eleven at night soonest, one o’clock Sunday morning latest, but of course we haven’t had the results of the autopsy yet.’

  I said: ‘I want that soonest.’

  He said: ‘You know what they’re like down there, you’ll have to push them.’

  I said: ‘I’ll push them, if they need pushing.’

  Bowman said: ‘You’re going to have to polish your buttons over this one, there’s a right flap on upstairs over it.’

  ‘It’s the press that bothers them up there,’ I said, ‘not the bodies.’ I added: ‘And as for my buttons, I’ll polish them to where they’re likely to blind someone.’

  ‘You’d better come and look next door now,’ he said.

  I stroked Betty Carstairs’s half-open right hand and said: ‘Yes, all right, let’s go into the other room now and see the girl.’

  He said: ‘Wait, let’s take our time.’

  ‘What difference will that make?’ I said.

  Time? How long had my encounter with the dead woman taken? What had it done to me? How long had it really taken me to lean over Betty where she lay in the clock and stroke her smashed face and hand and then pick the splinters off her concave chest?

  ‘Let’s go in,’ said Bowman, but he was very white, and I stopped him by putting my hand gently on his shoulder and the gesture felt strange, made towards someone I normally so intensely disliked.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘stay where you are.’

  There was no putting the moment off, so I walked forward into the dark yellow room where the girl lay. As I pushed the door slowly wider open I saw a few fingers of blood that lay drying on the mat. In the dark February light they looked black, as did the red smears on the scaling yellow edge of the door and the jamb, and I was so chilled by what I saw that I found myself behaving like someone in a bad dream, so that I felt I glided, propelled rather than walking normally, over to where the girl lay between the two beds. The smell of her entrails was already very noticeable, but after a time I bent and touched the pool of blood nearest her. It was already cold, with scabs forming on it due to the low winter temperature; underneath it was sticky, oily. The blood lay on the uncarpeted parts of the floor, soaking into the planks; it lay in blots on the bedding, on the furniture, shattered by poverty, on the walls, with thicker lumps and gobs stuck to surfaces here and there; as I pursued my examination I discovered that the murderer had licked and eaten small pieces of her; he had also ejaculated against the top of her right thigh. Something over by the boarded-up fireplace attracted my attention, and I walked over to find a small curl of blackish shit lying there.

  Bowman came over and we stood looking down at the hard little turd.

  Bowman said: ‘Why do so many of them feel they have to do that?’

  ‘It’s egoism and overexcitement,’ I said. ‘It’s part of a very complicated way of getting your rocks off – it’s also like someone illiterate signing some document with an X.’

  He stirred the stool with the tip of his Regent Street boot. ‘What chance do you think you’ve got, catching him?’

  I said: ‘I’ll get him.’

  ‘We think so, too,’ said Bowman, ‘but don’t think we’re going to do you any out-of-the-way favours.’

  ‘I’ll find my own way of getting any help I need,’ I said, ‘and as for favours, you may find that by putting me on this you won’t have done yourself any.’ I added: ‘Just fuck off now, Charlie, will you? I want to be on my own.’

  ‘Watch your tone, Sergeant.’

  I said: ‘It’s my case. Go outside. I want to be alone with her.’

  When he had gone, I got down on my knees beside Dora’s body and at once felt close to her, but also separated from her by a distance that I had no means to describe. She was very slender, and wore the bloody remains of a new dress. It was pink and white, with dark flowers on it; its skirt just covered her knees. At first, as I looked at her legs lying folded under her, it seemed to me that her body from her thighs down to her feet was swollen, too heavy in relation to the rest of her – that her dark head, slight shoulders were too elegant for them – but then I realised that that was how, propped up against the bed, she had drained – the law of gravity had filled her like that with her blood, like a sausage with meat, and that was how death had left her.

  It was a long time before I could make myself look closely into her ruined face with the terrible hacks, gashes, bruising and broken bone on its bad side. I wouldn’t do it until I was alone, and yet to be alone with her was really worse to begin with, because I was afraid that I might get so far out of touch by looking at her that I might never get back; I was as frightened to look at her as I would be to drown.

  And yet I found, far from being afraid when I did look into her face, that I was in tears. The good side of it, except for one smear of blood down her cheek, was intact. The axe had struck her across, and then down the face, the bad side. Her eyes were not damaged; they were black, ironic and three-quarters open – blind almonds turned in towards a corner of the high ceiling with the sly pointlessness of the dead.

  Presently I got out my flashlight and shone it over her, because the place where she had collapsed and died between the beds was so dark, and the old white light-shade overhead, thick with dust, was wrongly placed to shed enough light on her. In the glare of the torchlight her indifferent eyes glittered coldly past me. On these eyes, the dust of our great capital was already beginning to settle. She was still a very beautiful girl for a few more hours yet as long as you looked at the untouched part of her, for she was only newly dead. Only her brow, drawn in the stiff frown of terror, spoiled her expression, and her lips were unnatural; they were slightly but slackly parted to show her teeth, as though she were finally bored with some argument. Death had already been at work drawing shades across her cheeks up to the widow’s peak of her black hair; but the saddest thing to me, because it was totally incongruous, was the outflung gesture of her unhurt arm, which seemed to be waving to everyone in the world, telling them not to be afraid but follow her – and it was only when I touched her back and felt the arch of her spine impossibly bent against the side of the bed that I saw how, in her last abominable agony, the poor darling had wanted to try and stand up again, to escape death for just one second more so that she could explain everything that she was so suddenly having to leave.

  A short way from her, three feet from the beds, stood a low table which had not been overturned in the struggle; on it lay a magazine open at
a travel agent’s advertisement offering cut-price charter flights to Hawaii. I felt it was the last dream of escape that Dora had had before she died, and as I read it I felt her whole presence, a vast sorrow, concentrated on the double-page spread. In the bright photograph palm trees arched outwards, their fronds racing seaward in the wind, reaching for the brilliant waves; just under the trees, a young couple stood staring out across miles of empty beach at the Pacific, which receded so far that it finally vanished into the coupon that you had to send off now to qualify for the reduction that was valid till the first of July only.

  It was then, and only then, that I understood what it really meant, the feeling of people’s rightful fury and despair, and it came together with my desire to bend over Suarez and whisper, ‘It’s all right, darling, don’t worry, everything’ll be all right, I’m here now, it’ll be all right now’ – and the feeling was so strong in me that I knelt and kissed her short black hair which still smelled of the apple-scented shampoo she had washed it with just last night; only now the hair was rank, matted with blood, stiff and cold.

  I went out to the squad car parked across the street and said to the driver: ‘Get through on the radio and tell them they can come for the bodies now.’

  Bowman was bent over double in the back of the car. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I said.

  ‘Ulcer playing up.’

  I said: ‘While the ambulance is on its way I’m just going back in to look through their things.’

  ‘That’s all been done,’ Bowman said.

  ‘A14?’

  ‘Of course not. No, the real mob. Serious Crimes.’

  ‘That’s not good enough,’ I said.

  ‘You cheeky bastard,’ said Bowman. ‘What do you mean, not good enough?’