How the Dead Live (Factory 3) (27 page)

‘I think it’s very possible I will be,’ I said, ‘but that won’t save you.’

One of his eyelids started to twitch and I said: ‘Now, would you like to make a statement about this?’

‘Not a chance,’ he said.

‘You might as well,’ I said, ‘you’re nicked, you know. I’ve got you, and I never let up.’

‘What devotion to duty,’ he sneered. ‘I daresay that’s why you’re only a sergeant.’

‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘you interesting little man – but the terrible thing about me is, I don’t care.’

‘I’m amazed you’re still wearing a skin with no holes in it,’ he said. ‘Quite amazed.’

‘There are holes in it all right,’ I said, ‘and now yours is going to be punctured as well; I’m going to use your phone.’ I reached over and picked it up, dialling the voice at its home number. When he came on the line I said: ‘It’s me. Right away I need a warrant for the following – Ernest and Anne Kedward, William Mardy, Walter Baddeley, John Prince and Richard Sanders.’

‘It’s all wound up, is it?’

I said: ‘Yes, but the experience was much more difficult than the facts.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said the voice, ‘and I
urgently need to have another talk with you about that man’s jaw you broke, Inspector Fox.’

‘When I get back to London will do,’ I said. ‘Don’t let’s fuck this lot up now. Send the arresting officers down from London, you see why we can’t use Thornhill, will you do it?’ I rang off the moment the voice said yes, before it could start arguing.

Kedward had bent over in his chair. ‘I don’t feel well,’ he said.

‘I don’t wonder.’

‘You’ve no mercy,’ he said.

‘Oh I have,’ I said, ‘only not for you.’

‘I’d give anything to get off the hook.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘you’re going to go the distance.’

I walked away from the place and the desk sergeant, Turner, eternally scratching in his hair, looked vaguely up at me as I went by.

I drove back to the hotel. ‘Society?’ an anxious, bearded wizard was inquiring of a TV panel as I passed through the lounge. ‘I wonder what we mean precisely by that term?’ I could have told him, the silly old cunt. I got up to my room, and as I reached it the phone was ringing; it was Cryer. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours.’

‘I can’t be everywhere at once,’ I said, ‘now calm down, Tom, what is it?’ He sounded in a dreadful state and I could tell that whatever it was, it was nothing good.

‘Get up here to Mardy’s at once,’ he said.

‘I’ll be there in the time it takes me to get there.’

‘Ah, but there is no time,’ he said.

(Mardy had said to me: ‘I am the new evangelist. I have challenged life and death now, I have seen heaven and hell. I have lost and won, I suffer for all men that have suffered, I feel for the whole world. I cry all night with my head on my crossed arms; I can see no exit for me, no end to my sighs and tears. Yes, I lie with my brain cradled on my arms and face the great hidden cause. I am a
fraction of what was once a great country, and its failure reflects my own downfall.

‘But I will see the mockers off. All, all I will carry away in front of me on the black water and regain my love and strength, my wife and youth. Our troubled river runs underground for a while only to come up again and glitter as a fountain and be of great service to the thirst of men. My pride will be reborn, reborn and reborn; we will always be born again.

‘The challenge is to be oneself. What you see now is a creature in adversity, dying through the loss of my wife in a hideous and obscure battle. But soon I shall be at ease and know the great words peace and rest.

‘But now I am just an insect. It is too slight to decorate with a medal, nor can you bury it with any honours piled on a coffin. No, it dies under a random boot in the middle of pursuing its path.

‘I drown in the sorrow and bitterness of Marianne’s death; we are all of us forced out of our shape by necessity and by events beyond our control.

‘To pray for your dead is in a certain way to be dead oneself.’

And he added: ‘Do what you like with me.’)

Mardy had said: ‘I have this terrible recurring dream of monsters gnawing at my arms.’

Between our questions and answers he had crooned part of an old song, thinking of Marianne:

‘I operated on her for the last time with that song going round in my head,’ he told me: ‘Impossible agonies, indescribable pain. The weather that day was so glorious – my thinking hideous, my future, none. Oh God, rescue me from this nightmare which I have had too long – my judges will have made no worse errors than I, what have we done to deserve it?

‘Oh Marianne, Marianne – appalling loneliness, a void. Only the invisible bears me up; we speak together in the shocking darkness, each carrying the other somehow, unseen.’

It was dark and raining when I went up to Mardy’s for the last time. I drove up to the house, edging past the smashed masonry on the gravel, and parked between Mardy’s rusted, broken van and Cryer’s car. I took my torch and pushed my way in through the open front door. Cryer was standing in the hall under the organ and came towards me saying: ‘Thank God you’ve come.’

‘What’s the matter?’ I said. ‘Now come on, take it easy.’

‘I can’t,’ he said. He led me to the steps that went down to the cellars and pointed down them, saying: ‘He’s down there with her;
I heard him but I couldn’t get in.’

‘He must have had another set of keys,’ I said. ‘What did you hear, Tom?’

‘I heard him raving, praying and singing.’

‘We’ll go in,’ I said, ‘I’ve got the keys he gave me.’

‘Be slow,’ he said, ‘or by Christ I think I shall go mad.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you just stay out here?’

‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to come with you; if you can do it I can do it.’

‘You heard him moving about?’

‘Yes, seems like just a few minutes ago, I’m not sure. Shuffling about, and sounds like the opening and closing of a lid.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know what it’s the lid to. Look, I tell you, you just stay out here, this is police work.’

But he shook his head.

‘Whatever we find in there,’ I said, ‘it’s going to be frightful.’ ‘I know.’

So I used the keys I had to open the door. It budged an inch or two, but there was an obstruction behind it of some sort; all I could see with the torch was that it was dark in there of course, the current being cut off. It was also warm and very smelly, like rotten beef. ‘Give me a hand and push,’ I said to Cryer, ‘so we can squeeze in.’ So we did that, shoving the door back against this obstacle until we could get past. Immediately we did Cryer, who was just in front of me, slipped and fell on his face on the floor. I shone the torch and managed to get him up, then saw he was bright red all down his front. When Cryer saw what there was to be seen in there he shouted, oh my God.

‘Turn away,’ I said, ‘don’t look.’ Marianne Mardy sprawled half in, half out of the deep-freeze, her bald head swung over the edge, the melted ice dripping off her face, and Mardy was huddled in the corner where he had fallen in killing himself; my light picked out the glitter of the surgeon’s knife he had done it with and which lay beside him. I knelt down in his blood to examine him and by degrees understood that he had begun by
opening his left wrist and that when that hadn’t worked fast enough he had cut his throat.

It takes love to bugger up a life and smash it to pieces, yes, it takes love in its strange forms to do it, good and evil being so hopelessly mixed up in us. At least I didn’t need to look at the figure of the woman lolling out of the icebox, not any more thank God, that was the pathologist’s work now, not mine.

Behind me Cryer was whispering: ‘Look, there’s something written here on the wall.’

I went over to it. Written in Mardy’s blood that straggled downwards across the plaster I read: MARIANNE O DARLING MARI

So, suddenly, it was all over, and I understood yet again how everything is far more complex and serious than we suppose as though I had ever doubted it.

‘All right,’ I said to Cryer when we had got back up to the hall, ‘I’ll phone and get the mob over.’

‘Poor man,’ said Cryer, ‘poor people.’

I said: ‘Remember those words. Now will you be all right for ten minutes? Then I’ll come straight back and wait with you till everybody comes, because I think we need each other’s company for a time.’

‘I must call Angela,’ he said. His face was perfectly white. ‘The paper too.’

‘Of course you must,’ I said. ‘You go and do it as soon as I get back.’

‘Use the phone in my car,’ he said, ‘and thank you for your understanding.’

‘There should be more of it,’ I said, ‘and it’s for me to do the thanking, I’m glad you were here. I may well be finished in the police over this, I’ll have to face a board over Fox, but now you see the difference between what some people call channels and what I call justice.’

‘I truly do,’ he said, ‘and I don’t believe you’ll be finished.’

‘No,’ I said, going to the door. ‘Give me a straight run at the truth and I don’t believe I’ll ever be finished.’

‘I think Mardy was all right,’ said Cryer.

‘Yes, so do I,’ I said, ‘it was those braided dolts that killed him.’

As I drove back to London to be suspended the following day I thought in the traffic about everything Mardy had said. He said to me at one point: ‘Marianne was the most brilliant and wonderful person I have ever known.

‘I suffer and hurt all over. Life means nothing to me now; my heroine will never change, thinking, as she always did, of others. I tell you, just taste the heart and you will find you are thinking about the dead, about people who went off in front and drank death first.

‘Speaking for myself, I wonder if in your work you can really imagine what prison’s like; over Dorothy’s death, I endured the shame of it every day as I endured the heat and the cold there, the rotten food, the bullying of the warders, the disguised contempt of visitors. For a surgeon, a doctor, for a brilliant man, the pain’s terrible, terrible. Marianne soothed the pain away for me, and I’m afraid I can’t go on talking just now.

‘Yet the bitterness of old age and death makes me wonder rather late what we’ve all been doing in our lives except go down in our own blood and other people’s.

‘Yes, it’s true, love, passion, brilliance and disaster is all I’ve ever really known.

‘Above all, truth is not politics or money, nor indeed anything except itself but love.

‘You know, I was so quiet in my mind, happy even, until existence touched me, until I was needed at the moment where others reached for me and begged me for my help.

‘Yes, if I were to live now, from now on I would always live for others; everything I would do would be for others, what I would do for myself I would do for them.’

I remember how I went to look outdoors a little while after he had said that; the sky was troubled and overcast, and yet sweet.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’m quite certain that envy and greed, blackmail and murder will never defeat us. No, no,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘not us. Not us.’ He turned to me and said: ‘You understand how passion changes us back again into what we once were, must have been.’

I told him I understood, even though I wondered if I did.

Perhaps the only true crime is to know too much without really knowing what understanding means, so that as you live for the other, you also die for him.

‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘watch our reflections as they fade and change, because it may be for the last time.’

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