I Was Dora Suarez Read online

  I said: ‘I’ll do it my own way, Charlie. You needn’t wait – I don’t want to keep you from your Yugoslav princess.’

  ‘It was a mistake getting you back, after all,’ Bowman said. He clutched his stomach and grinned with pain.

  ‘You ought to see a doctor about that,’ I said. I added: ‘It wasn’t a mistake – I want whoever killed Carstairs and Suarez badly. I solve my cases, but I do it a lot faster when there aren’t a lot of unnecessary people about. If you don’t believe me, ask Inspector Fox.’

  Bowman left in a fury, slamming the car door which he had opened to spit out of. He was always the same, a glutton for other people’s punishment – only it never worked with me and he knew it, not that that stopped him, his obsessions being a good deal stronger than he was.

  I phoned Stevenson at the Factory. I liked Stevenson. He had come over to A14 from Camberwell not long before I was fired, and we got on straightaway. He was a pale, blond man in his thirties who looked as if he were hard into sport – he wasn’t, though. What he was hard into was nailing a free pint, psychopath or villain – he was also, like me, into cutting grasses’ price to the bone, which may have been his Scottish blood coming out. He gave the cigarette firm that churned out Westminster filters no peace by smoking practically their whole production through each revolution of the sun. Whether night or day, he blew this vile smoke into the faces of people who had tripped up in the wire somewhere; he blew it at them over at the Factory in Room 202, and was generally noted at all levels as an intelligent, non-violent man, and yet best not fucked about. In fact, Stevenson was a man rather like me, which meant we could have a word without having to get the dictionary out.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘how’s the morale? You on Empire Gate?’

  ‘Yes, that’s why I rang you,’ I said. ‘The Voice said to. And is that right you’re into the Roatta death over at Clapham?’

  He said: ‘Dead on.’

  ‘How was it?’

  ‘Depends if you like the living room done out in grey and red – I saw in the Recorder it’s up-and-coming fashionable, the new macabre style. But what interests me is the short space of time it took between your job and mine.’

  ‘It would have to have been really brutal for it to be the same feller,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t trouble your soul over that,’ Stevenson said, ‘it is.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I reckon Empire Gate to Clapham Common North Side to be not even two miles’ worth, and don’t villains love wheels? Yes, it could sound cosy, who knows? The time it takes for a few sets of lights to change, crossing the bridge at one in the morning. Roatta, how was he done, you say? Nasty? I’ve not read it.’

  ‘Top of his head blown off,’ Stevenson said, ‘just the bottom jaw left, the rest of it part of the wallpaper, no extra price. Done with a Quickhammer, nine-millimetre, bullet was a dumdum, if you call that nasty.’

  ‘Well, I don’t call it polite,’ I said.

  ‘These maniacs just cannot seem to learn manners,’ Stevenson said.

  ‘On the other hand I can’t say my heart’s bleeding over the fact Roatta’s gone,’ I said. ‘We all know about Felix, on the local council, virgil, father and friend to all, also high up the ladder in West End clubs and prostitution, only try and nail him. Still, the killer’s the wet twat to get into, so yes, let’s have a chat about it like straightaway, because if our luck was running for once, it could turn out to be the same individual, you never know – anyway we’ve got to start somewhere.’

  ‘Who was this Suarez girl of yours anyway?’ Stevenson said. ‘Anything known?’

  ‘That’s the problem,’ I said. ‘I’m having her checked north, south, east and west, but as far as I can tell so far, she was clean for us, not a day’s form.’

  ‘That blows our theory to bits, then,’ said Stevenson, ‘because if she had anything even remotely to do with Roatta, she can’t have been clean, therefore we’re looking for two killers, not one, and that’s a pity.’

  ‘Don’t be too sure,’ I said. ‘I went through Empire Gate really close-coupled and found a notebook she’d written which I’m working through, only I haven’t had time to finish it yet – but Suarez wasn’t clean. She doesn’t come out sunny-side through her own writings, anyway not to me.’ I added: ‘There’s something weird in this from my end altogether. These two women were axed to death, but I don’t swallow at all, after reading her notebook, that it was just the casual nut, the passing axeman who loves to drop in. I think Suarez was a whore. I think she was in love with someone on a one-way basis. What I know by reading her was that she had had enough. What I saw in the flat with Bowman was that she was dressed to kill or die. Her notebook never gives dates, just days of the week, but I feel pretty sure that the Saturday where she writes that she’s going to top herself was the same night she was done. She was also, going by the notebook, physically a very sick girl, and the whole thing stinks to me.’

  ‘It would help us if it stank of Roatta as well,’ Stevenson said.

  ‘Well, Carstairs/Suarez does have that kind of stench,’ I said, ‘if we can just find something like a link.’ I added: ‘Well, I’ll be round as soon as the traffic permits, I’m starting now,’ I said. ‘Do you know where they’ve put me?’

  ‘You’re back in 205.’

  ‘Bet my plastic tulips have gone.’

  ‘Yes, some cunt left the window open and a vulture did a hot cross out of the zoo, flew over and shat on them, so some pure little WPC held them at arm’s length and took them down to the garbage.’

  ‘Oh well, they were getting faded looking anyway,’ I said. ‘Too bad – I’ll buy some more with my first pay cheque if I ever live to draw the fucking thing. By the way, you seen Charlie Bowman around the buildings anywhere?’

  ‘Well, fancy that now,’ Stevenson said, ‘hold on, here he comes bowling in right now asking for you, and judging by the look on his face, which is all red and funny looking, you’d better do the same. I’ll wait for you.’

  ‘I’m on my way,’ I said.

  ‘Well, it’s good you’re back,’ said Stevenson, ‘it means there’ll be a few brains around the place for once.’

  ‘Some people won’t be happy about that,’ I said.

  ‘Fuck them.’

  On my own at last, thank God, I went back into the flat and walked round its half darkness very quietly. The folk from the lab had left everything as they had found it. The back window, by which everyone was agreed the killer had entered and left, still stood half-open, the dust on the base of the frame still smeared by his hastily departing glove.

  I walked round and round the flat; I was beyond the two corpses now because I was already with them.

  I knew what it meant when Serious Crimes said they had been through a place. They were thorough, all right; the trouble always was, though, that they were thorough but not absolute; that was because they often didn’t take enough time to think out what they were looking for. Thus, they would ignore what I would seize on, thinking it unimportant; conversely, they would preciously gather up in their special bags items that turned out to be of no interest at all.

  What I wanted from Betty and Dora immediately was traces they had left – writing, letters, a scrawled note, even – anything that spoke of them.

  Locking myself into it against all interruption, I began existing in that golgotha. I searched among the boxes, trunks and suitcases. There were over a hundred of them in the kitchen alone. But except for a few of her clothes at the end of her bed and a bra and slip hung out to dry in the bathroom on a line, there seemed to be nothing of Dora’s.

  What was it Wilfred Owen had written on the Sambre front in 1917?

  Oh what made fatuous sunbeams toil

  To break earth’s sleep at all?

  It struck me that rooms like these, situations like these, were the front line of the eighties – but this flat seemed to me to be worse than what I usually got, because the very people that the dead armies had fought to
protect had been murdered in their turn, and this time there had been no one to protect them.

  Such light as there was in the flat faded as I searched it and waited for the ambulance to come until I had to turn the lights on; the afternoon assumed a short, steep winter slant, dulling the high windows a grimy yellow and blackening the plane trees outside, while in the basement flat someone played the same Chopin prelude over and over and over.

  I had the most marvellous dream the night before I went down to Brighton; in it I met the sweetest woman I am sure I have ever seen. I was lying in bed in a strange room in a hot, foreign country; but the southern light was dimmed, altered by half-closed shutters, and the high room was cool. I was just wakening in the dream with a feeling of regret at some absence, but tenderly and without sadness, when suddenly she came in and knelt beside me on the bed.

  It was most certainly a very old-fashioned room I was in, I should say at least a hundred years old, with a green iron bed standing on a six-sided, tile-patterned floor, terra-cotta, perhaps; I seemed to be in some foreign country hotel. She wasn’t beautiful or even all that young; she was well dressed and thickset. She smiled at me, reaching out to stroke my face, and said: ‘I have no name.’ But I had only to look at her when she appeared in the dream to think, ‘Ah, good, you’re finally here – now there’s two of us, together we can get something done at last’; and thinking this in the dream had a deeply pacifying effect on me. The single swift movement with which she gave herself to me in her day-clothes gave me no time to think, and I couldn’t be expected to know the whole of what she conveyed in the space of the dream; but there was nothing hurried in the first close look of our faces. I really just remember my astonishment at the slenderness of her hands, at the intense bronze shade of her face, and at her hair, which was short, knotted quickly and practically at the back of her head. Also her hair was scented in a way I couldn’t recapture afterwards; she was the face of a goddess on a thousand-year-old coin that has never been touched, found, damaged or exchanged. Smiling into my eyes, she pulled the skirt of her street suit swiftly up over her hips and we met immediately in my arms. We had no time for anything more, but I managed to say: ‘You are the most heavenly woman I have ever met,’ and she said: ‘I know, and you have been looking for me for a long time, and so I have come because you believed and knew I would come’ – and so we made love and I woke in a state of great peace, knowing that somehow I was sure to be all right.

  Later in the dream I sat in a white restaurant, the brilliant sunlight that struck through the glass roof dulled by dark shades. I was sitting alone at a table when she came in with her many children and sat down at another large table at the far end, carrying herself with that same superb assurance. I was perfectly happy, though, to sit on at my own table, smiling at her – indeed, I had never felt so happy. The minute she saw that I had noticed her she put her chair at the table in a position so as to face me squarely; and when she was sitting there, pointed straight opposite me, she suddenly opened her thighs wide so that I could see her sex, and then her innumerable children, excited and pleased, crowded round me, jostling each other, and she said with her shining eyes in mine, saying it with her eyes since we were too far off to speak ‘There! Does that please you now?’ I didn’t know – I only knew that mercy, love and justice were the same.

  Before he left Bowman had said: ‘Is there a chance the killer could have been a woman?’

  ‘Christ no,’ I said, ‘even Squeaky Fuentes never killed like that. You remember her, and she was as nutty as a shopping bag full of monkeys on heat.’

  ‘All right,’ said Bowman, ‘it was just a theory I was spinning off at random.’

  ‘Well, luckily it missed me,’ I said.

  He saved a cartridge on that one and said: ‘Anything else I can help you with?’

  ‘Probably,’ I said, ‘only not with your thinking, more the practical side.’

  ‘I’ll give you some of that in the mush on my night off,’ he squawked.

  ‘Why don’t you just go on losing money at snooker with Alfie Verlander,’ I said. ‘That way you’ll only fibrillate, and avoid the major stroke.’

  That was when he slammed the rear door of the squad car on my nose and left for the Factory in a smelly roar of exhaust.

  I thought how extraordinary it was the number of people that didn’t like the truth and went back into the flat. My wife Edie had said to me one night: ‘You’d be amazed the number of people who don’t like you,’ and I remember I answered: ‘No, I wouldn’t, but I find that the people who don’t like me don’t like themselves, that’s all.’

  ‘You don’t expect to get on in the police with that attitude, do you?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s not what the police is for, and I do wish you’d stop worrying about my career.’

  ‘We need the money,’ she said flatly, turned over with a loud thump and slept.

  I had come out of the flat for a moment’s air and to think; now I turned to go back in again, moving round a team of builders on the damp pavement who had just finished loading a skip with rubbish, seen it off the truck, and were now going down to the Queen Anne round the mews at the back of the block for a few pints of Swan, and why not? In their bright yellow helmets with the Wimpy slogan on them, joking away together, stacking their gear for the night, slapping and punching each other, they made me feel better just to be around them for a second or two like that. They were all young men and, I imagined, must be just like I was at their age – either married, going steady or anyhow hoping to get their end away after next Saturday’s match; they made me feel less lonely as I came back to you, Dora.

  For I kissed your hair and I can’t understand why, but I am bound to you.

  Dora, I don’t know how far into the dark I shall have to go to find you, but try to help me reach you, help me to find you, don’t just slip away. Try your hardest to help me.

  I’m not afraid of your killer, Dora. Listen to me, I’ll try to explain this through the words of another man – one of my best friends, a police officer called Frank Ballard who was shot in the back down Fulham Palace Road opposite the Golden Bowl by a little cunt with a sawn-off twelve-bore who was ripping off a takeaway, which has left my mate Frank paralysed from the waist down for life. Well, Frank has organised his new life as a cripple wonderfully, and I wish you could have met him because he would have done you good. He knows how to explain difficult things; I respect Frank and I like him and always ask him for advice when I’m in a jam; we were on A14 together and worked on some tricky things. Well, just after he was shot and he was in the Charing Cross hospital with flowers and books round him which we brought in, I saw him alone one afternoon and he said: ‘It seems to me that the worst of a serious police enquiry – by which I mean enquiry into a murder – is that too often the investigating officer, and he can be the best you like, can’t stop unconsciously thinking about how he is getting on with his enquiry in relation to his superiors – he will always tend to commit the error of thinking of himself. The result of this is that it blinds the officer to the dead person, and since he is generally unaware that he is committing it, it is a very hard fault for that officer to correct. Yet he must most certainly do so; for if he did not, he would be deprived of his objective sense of justice, and so would not be a proper person to be an investigating police officer. He could not be because, if the dead do not count sufficiently with the officer, then how would that officer weigh at a bar, supposing that the dead were to be sitting there? Supposing that they could still form an opinion in our world where they, too, used to live, the dead would want to know: Where was this officer’s true interest?

  Do you know, Dora, Frank smiled then and said, ‘Excuse me for running on like this …’

  But I never forgot what he said because it was what I have always believed myself, and Frank knew it.

  I knew I would find Dora’s things in the end if I looked long enough, and I did, in the fortieth box I opened in the
kitchen. There were just a few papers in it – her National Health Insurance card and an old black-and-white photograph, with its corners bent, of her dancing with a man in a club somewhere with his back to the camera, a dark-haired man, and an exercise book. I opened the book; it was about three-quarters filled with her handwriting. I wanted to read it immediately, having looked through everything else in the flat and found nothing else significant of hers. For I was certain of one thing – that Dora was the key to both the deaths, not Betty Carstairs.

  3

  When I got into Poland Street and said who I was, the sergeant on the main desk looked up sharply and said: ‘You’re to go straight up to the fourth floor.’

  The fourth floor was where the Voice lived. I thought that for the first time in my life I might meet it, but I was right out of luck there. I took the lift up to Room 471, and there the Voice’s deputy, Chief Detective Superintendent James Jollo was waiting for me.

  I said: ‘Well, here I am.’

  He said: ‘Yes. And it’s usual to address me in a proper way, Sergeant.’

  ‘You’ll soon stop bothering about all that once you get to know me better,’ I said. ‘Is the commander away?’

  ‘What do you care?’ Jollo said. ‘He don’t move in your shitty little world.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘that’s the trouble with him – not knowing what’s going on gets him just like you, all kind of confused, and that’s when he sends for people like me and not you. Silly, isn’t it?’

  ‘I didn’t send for you to have an argument,’ Jollo said.

  ‘Good,’ I said, ‘let’s not have one, then. Let’s get on to the Carstairs/Suarez murders.’

  ‘You’ve been, have you?’

  ‘Yes, I have,’ I said, spreading them out. ‘Look, I’ve got their blood on my hands.’

  ‘You really are a horrible man,’ said Jollo. ‘You don’t give an amber light – I find you’re everything Chief Inspector Bowman says you are.’