How the Dead Live (Factory 3) (18 page)

‘None of us do,’ said Cryer. ‘So, back to work, tell me how far you’ve gone on this Mardy woman.’

‘I can’t and I won’t.’

‘At least give me some reason why I’m not welcome,’ Cryer said.

‘All I can say is I’m worried what the papers would do with it,’ I said. ‘I don’t want a tragedy dismissed as a death on page three in the rags.’

‘The
Recorder’s
not a rag. There’d be no cheapjack stuff. If it’s a tragedy we’ll treat it as a tragedy.’

‘That’s not really the point, Tom,’ I said. ‘What do newspaper sales managers know or care about tragedy?’

‘You could say the same about the police.’

‘I know,’ I said, ‘and I do, and that keeps me down in the ranks where I belong.’

‘You’re really strange,’ said Cryer.

‘Why strange?’ I said. ‘It seems obvious to me, the difference between what’s straight and bent. At least it does now, though I had to work for it to understand.’ I said to him: ‘All right, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you’ll be patient for a day or so, long before any other paper gets here I’ll give you a story on this case and this town that’ll make everyone sit up – but it’s going to be done my way because I know it’s the only real way; try and understand what neither of us yet knows.’

In the night I went out on an impulse and was walking swiftly towards the edge of town when a man ran at me out of a sidestreet and seized my arm.

‘Who are you?’ I said. ‘Let me go.’

‘My name’s Brad,’ he said, ‘I’m Dick Sanders’ brother.’

‘Come out under this street light where I can see you.’

He edged out from the wall – a sallow individual in his late twenties whose hands dangled without apparent purpose on his
wrists. He wore a black plastic jacket and torn jeans that told of much rough work done for not much money.

‘You the copper from the smoke? You on the Mardy case? I want to talk about them.’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘but not out here in the street.’

‘We’ll take a walk, then,’ he said, ‘not far, down past the sewage farm where there’s an unfinished estate, that’s where I squat.’

I followed him into the dark through ruined places and puddles left by the tracks of earth-shifting machines. Projects that had been started by bureaucrats in the wrong area had been abandoned for as little reason; we plodded through rutted clay that splashed with the activities of rats and night creatures.

At last we got to a block of concrete that had been left roofless.

‘Basement we want,’ he muttered, ‘I’ll get a light, we got a stove and wood. Wait there, give me the torch, I’ll not be a minute.’ In that time he was back again with his arms full of oak billets sawn small; I watched as he placed them patiently in and then saw the fire spark between his hands and the paper catch. ‘Can’t get dry newspapers in February,’ he muttered, blowing on the flame, ‘not really dry.’ Men like him had been part of our protection once. They were the descendants of men who had sat still, stroking their horses’ necks as they waited for the cannon to open up across ravines very far from Thornhill but whose spirit, still the same, was now unneeded and abandoned. Next he got a camping gaslight going so that I could see the cement room as it was, damp, the windows left blank and unglazed by the builders when the money for the project ran out. Rags had been nailed up across them to cut the draught, and in a corner lay two old torn mattresses with sleeping bags slung on them.

‘It’s just a squat,’ he said, standing up from the fire once he had got it going, ‘but the point is we can’t be seen. You want a drink?’

I said yes and he said, it’s just home-made but none the worse for that, and reached into a cupboard, emerging with a gallon bottle. ‘By the neck,’ he said, handing it to me, ‘we’ve no glasses.’

‘I don’t care,’ I said, and drank. I added: ‘Does Dick live here with you?’

‘When he can. But we’re in bother.’

‘I know.’

‘He talked to me after you saw him,’ said Brad, ‘and that’s why I wanted to find you. You know how it is, he’s doubtless told you, we’ve none of us fuck all to lose. If we got sent up for twenty years we’d be no worse off than we are at Lakes Mill.’ He put his hands to the blaze and sang:

That was a song the British line regiments sang as they received French artillery in the Peninsula and at Waterloo. We stood against the Tyrant with Polish lancers and German dragoons believing we were saving Europe, and now here the rest of us were in a ruined unfinished building with nothing proved.

I said: ‘Did you know about this trip with dry ice up to the Mardys?’

‘We’re always pushed for money.’

I said: ‘Just tell me if you knew about it.’

‘Well of course I did,’ he said. ‘It was heavy gear, it needed several men. Dick rowed me in and gave me a whack of the money, only natural, but we’re spent out again now.’

‘You know where that dry ice came from?’

‘Yes, and so do you.’

‘And you knew what it was for? Did you never stop to think about Mrs Mardy? About where your money came from?’

He said: ‘You never stop to think about anybody else when you’re hungry and broke.’

‘Where is Mrs Mardy now, do you think?’

‘I can only guess.’

‘Do you think she’s still up at their house?’

‘Maybe. There was this electricity strike, that’s when the dry ice deal was done.’

‘With Baddeley.’

‘With the undertaker, that’s right.’

I said: ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’

‘Once I’ve been paid,’ he said, ‘I never ask questions.’

‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but you’re going to answer some, I’ll see to it.’

He took a drink and put the bottle down on the floor. ‘Before I do,’ he said, ‘we’re all of us boracic up there, we haven’t a light between us, nothing to eat. Could you give us any money at all? We’re frantic up there, it’s desperate.’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘here’s twenty quid.’ I got it out, it was my own money, and he took it. I said: ‘Now talk, and make it interesting.’

He said: ‘I don’t know what trouble I might be getting us into here if I do.’

‘Less than if you don’t.’

He said: ‘What Dick saw arriving one day at the Mardys’ was a big fridge—’

But I interrupted: ‘I hear a noise outside, we’ve got an audience.’ I went over to a window and tore the rags away. I looked outdoors and said to Brad: ‘Get down on the floor quick, take cover, do it now.’

‘We’re coming in,’ said a man’s voice out in the dark. In they stormed with knitted hats over their faces. They came in as a triangle with its point towards me, the head man holding a twelve-bore, the two behind spread out with bike chains, the one on the left of me with a knife open.

I said to the man with the gun: ‘Have you got a permit for that?’

‘Shut your gob,’ he said. ‘Who are you anyway?’

‘Someone who could cause you a great deal of bother,’ I said, ‘such as a police officer.’

‘What a job,’ he said, ‘that’s really tough, darling. Got metal on you?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘you’re running no risk, you pathetic little man, I’m
not armed, I never go armed, I don’t need to be armed for gits like you.’

‘We’re not after you anyway,’ said the gunman, ‘for which you can be fucking thankful. It’s that cunt behind you under the table there, that Brad, that’s the man we want.’

‘We all want what we can’t have,’ I said.

One of the men behind him wrapped his chain round his left arm and came up with his knife. He held it at me, its blade shining in the light from the stove.

I said to the gunman: ‘You make me weep. Am I supposed to be afraid of you?’

‘Most people are,’ he said. ‘Now stand aside.’

‘I never do that,’ I said. ‘I exist to make sure that folk like you do fourteen years apiece if you don’t drop all that on the floor, do it now.’

‘Don’t be a fool, John,’ said the gunman, ‘this is a contract on Dick and Brad – the folk backing me don’t like a grass, and what a pity you was here to spoil a neat scene. Now mind your face.’

‘I know the undertaker that called the contract,’ I said, ‘and the fact that I know means it’s gone rotten on you, you load of poofs. The man’s going up the spout, I should know, I’m in charge, and incidentally my name’s not John.’

The man behind on the left, who hadn’t spoken or moved yet, except to let his chain swing from his wrist in an idle kind of way, now said to the gunman: ‘There’s too much chat here, and knocking the law down, that can mean grey days, lots of them.’

‘At last someone’s talking sense,’ I said, ‘I didn’t think any of you were capable of it. You put me away and there isn’t a copper in Britain that wouldn’t wring your necks, and some of them have got big hands.’

‘Get that cunt behind you off the floor,’ the gunman said, ‘that’s all we want.’

‘You waste either or both of us, make up your pitiful minds which. Go on, fire, then – what’ll it prove?’ I thought if he does
I’ll go somewhere, but where is where? Meantime, to know what justice is, you must still have a head, balls and kneecaps – the only way to find justice is to live without shelter, since all the messages are gloomy now.

The man with the knife said: ‘This is fucked,’ as if it were a failed orgasm, and suddenly closed his knife. The other villain who had stood swinging his chain still stood there swinging it, only now patches of sweat, even on that February night, were breaking out under his armpits.

The man holding the gun said: ‘We’ve no interest in your getting hurt unless you get in the way.’

I said: ‘It’s my job to get in the way.’

The gunman said: ‘That individual on the floor behind you has a contract on him, he’s a grass.’

‘You berk,’ I said, ‘I decide all that, I’m the law. Now break that gun and drop it; you’ll do life if you don’t, and I’ll lean on the parole board to make sure you don’t do less than ten, if I live.’

We stared at each other. ‘You won’t have Brad unless you have me first,’ I said, ‘you can be sure of that. You kill a police officer and you’re in real shtuck, you realize that, I repeat it, now decide. Shoot or wank.’

‘You’re a right runner, you are,’ said the gunman. He broke the weapon, kept it in his hand and dropped the shells. He said past me to Brad: ‘We’ll meet again, sweetheart, don’t you worry.’

‘If you do,’ I said, ‘it’ll be in court and then look out – ten years, three to a cell in Canterbury, but they say you can hear the cathedral bells if the wind’s right.’

The three of them faded, becoming part of the darkness they had emerged from. I watched them leap into a shattered Ford with no plates on it; the back-ups jumped on, bottom gear went in and the tyres yelled on the bad road. ‘Bye-bye, cuntie!’ they shouted, now that they thought they were away. I thought, you poor pricks. Where I came from, a contract was a serious affair.

I turned to Brad and said: ‘You can get up now.’ He already had. I said: ‘We can be quiet now. What was it you were going to say?
Stop shaking, you’re alive, aren’t you?’

He started to tell me about a heavy load that he and Dick had delivered three years ago, telling me about it and thanking me for just now.

When he had finished I went back to the hotel and had a bad night, what was left of it. I was thankful when dawn came, but in February the sun rises late, if at all.

My most murderous inquiries are into my own life, which is really less my own than of my friends. Most of my few friends, thank God not all, are dead or disabled – Jim Macintosh dead, Ken Hales also, Foden shot through the spine and Frank Ballard paralysed for life. I know my friends, they’re like myself – we were all intelligent, sure of our own thought; we knew what we believed and were never afraid. But I feel nearly alone now, though I stand in for my sick and dead, I believe. There are times when I feel alone in the face of our society, its hatred and madness, its despair and violence. To go on drawing my pay, to go on living in Acacia Circus, to go on acting on my own, just to go on at all, I have to be very careful. I feel the edge of the precipice with every step I take and have to be most particular how I tread; the path isn’t solid, and under it is the mist and that vile slide towards a bottomless death. I am a minor figure for whom no god waits. The state that pays me laughs at me; my own people at work find me absurd.

I dream across the altar of my past, have many enemies.

I once read about a man who was obliged to take poison for being too honest. He was given time; he was told to take his own life in his own time. His crime, as always with those who value life instead of taking it, was honesty, and his friends helped him to die, giving him the poison disguised in wine as he lay in a hot bath after supper and conversation in which all the questions that had lain between them were discussed. The dying man said calmly that since all men must die we must from the earliest moment examine everything we have known so that good can reign; he said that to find out the best in man through logic, analysis and friendship, discussion and love, was far better than obedience to any state.

There was a man whose help I would have been glad to have in any obscure investigation – he was Greek, I think, and I gather another awkward bastard like me.

My conception of knowledge is grief and despair, because that has been the general matter of my existence. The Hampstead girl that I once loved, and of whom I spoke earlier, fetched a book once in the night that she had been reading and after we had made love stated the position of tragedy: