I Was Dora Suarez (13 page)

‘All right,’ I said, ‘yet you realise that from my point of view I’ve got to find the killer.’

‘I know,’ he said.

‘So that the longer your report takes, the further away he’ll get. Could you ring Westminster?’

‘Look, it’s arranged,’ said Lansdown. ‘I have a permanent line open here – if I’m out, Wiecienski’s in and vice versa, and the second they’ve got anything, they’ll be on. The head of the team they sent over was Johnson. He was in charge of the Suarez examination and there aren’t six men in this country who know more about AIDS than he does.’

‘Did he say anything?’ I said. ‘Anything at all? Because what’s beginning to interest me more and more is how she caught this.’

‘After an hour he said he couldn’t understand how her lower intestine had got into the state it is. He told me: “It’s the vehicle by which the virus was introduced into her that I can’t make out – it wasn’t the male organ.” After he had looked into her lower stomach anally and then got film of it he said to me: “The colon is abnormally dilated and appears to have been scraped raw and eaten in places. But I shall have to analyse the film, of course.” Then he turned to me suddenly and said: “To put it vulgarly, what was left of her colon wouldn’t make a paper handkerchief worth sneezing into.’ ”

‘In your opinion, was she correct in what she wrote, in the book of hers that I found, that she was dying anyway?’ I said.

‘Oh yes,’ said Lansdown. ‘Look at her – here, here and here.’ He
took up a pair of forceps and curled her upper lip back from the gum. ‘You see this gingevitis, the teeth exposed to the roots? Hairy leukoplakia on the side of the tongue here? And here? That’s a proliferation of the Epstein-Barr virus. Oral thrush, aphthous growths right at the rear of the cavity, epiglottis generally infected – these are secondary infections, but they often spread downwards into the lungs, usually presenting as some relatively untreatable, because rare, form of pneumonia, pneumocystis carinii, toxoplasma, or pneumococcal lobar.’ He added: ‘While you can stabilise some of these infections temporarily, there is no guarantee that they won’t recur or manifest themselves differently in other parts of the body – advanced AIDS, in our present state of knowledge, is irreversible and the prognosis in the case of Suarez, negative.’

‘How long would she have had to live?’ I said.

‘Anywhere between three months and three years,’ said Lansdown, ‘but Johnson’s opinion was from six to twelve months.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘anyway she had made up her mind to kill herself.’

‘I can understand that,’ said Lansdown.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘only then in rushes your man and saves her the trouble by taking an axe to her the night she’d decided to do it.’

The phone rang and Lansdown went over to it. He listened and said: ‘There’s a police officer upstairs in the main hall, wants to know if he can come down.’

‘He give a name?’

‘It’s a Detective Sergeant Stevenson.’

I took the phone and said: ‘I don’t know why you’re here.’

He said: ‘I think I might.’

‘Come down anyway,’ I said. ‘Someone’ll show you the way.’

‘I know the way.’

‘Avoid a man called Veale,’ I said.

While I was waiting for Stevenson I walked away from the others to a tall window and looked out over London. Words of Dora’s poured through me:

I thought, ‘Yes, but who the hell was he? Where was this piece of waste ground? What couldn’t he do yet?’ I was certain she was talking about her killer – but Dora never named places, never once named people.

There had then been a page after that on which, marking it with a star, she had added in her swift, angular writing:

—and as I read I felt I could see, now that I knew that she was dying of AIDS, how, cornered, she had both found her mind and lost it in the terror of her approaching end.

‘Hush now, Dora,’ I said, going back to her body and stroking her cheek, ‘hush, rest now.’

There was a knock on the door and Wiecienski opened it. A voice said: ‘Sergeant Stevenson.’

I led him across to where the others stood by the body.

He looked down at her and said: ‘Suarez?’

I said: ‘Yes.’ I said: ‘You’re a mate of mine and I just wanted you to look at her, as you’re here.’

He stood looking down at her; he didn’t say anything.

I bent down and pulled out a small, icy box from under the
trolley wheels that had accompanied the body. Without opening it, but placing my hand on it, I said to Stevenson: ‘In this box there is a part of Suarez’s left breast and most of her right arm. But I have forgotten that she is not complete; to me she is complete, and I am going to catch this man. The world isn’t big enough for him to escape me.’

Stevenson said: ‘It depends, but I think we might – you know I’m on this Roatta thing.’

I said: ‘Yes, let’s talk about it when we leave here.’

He said: ‘I came over here because I wanted to be sure of catching you.’

I said: ‘Yes, all right.’

‘Let’s get off back to the Factory when you’re ready,’ said Stevenson, ‘and have a talk – see if we can’t connect up a few things. Might be nothing in it, but you see how the times click, and villains have wheels. I see no reason yet why he mightn’t have carried straight on after Carstairs and Suarez and done Roatta, do you?’

‘I’m glad to hear you say it,’ I said, ‘because it’s what I think of as a possible, too, if we could find a link that tied Suarez and Roatta together. The old lady’s not a problem – for me she was killed because she butted in at the wrong moment and saw too much. Anyway it’s a starting point.’ I added: ‘Also I’ve got the press on it. Cryer.’

‘Yes, why not stir the sauce,’ said Stevenson, ‘certainly. Villains and maniacs buy a newspaper same as the next man.’ He added: ‘Not that that makes them human.’

Wiecienski shuddered in the cold room. Without looking at anyone, he said: ‘Get him.’

I suddenly wanted to be back to the Factory. I looked at the time; it was ten to one in the morning, but I wasn’t tired. I said to Lansdown: ‘We’ve got to leave. Thanks very much. We’ve learned a lot.’ I thought, ‘So she had terminal AIDS.’ It was all I could think about. So that was at least one of the things she could never tell Betty Carstairs – but talking to Lansdown, I
tried to sound as if I were just talking about the weather.

Lansdown was saying: ‘I’ll keep you fully in touch.’

‘Yes, thank you,’ I said. ‘One thing – if you could try and let me know when the funeral is.’

‘Carstairs will probably be buried next Saturday,’ Lansdown said. ‘With public funerals it’s usually on a Saturday afternoon – but Suarez is going to take longer, depending on the Westminster, our report, the coroner, yourselves.’ He said to Wiecienski: ‘You can take her back now, Andrew.’

Wiecienski said: ‘I’ll take care of her,’ and he drew the towel over her.

Time put a dead little question into a silence that fell as he did so, marred only by the squeak of the rubber wheels; and then the full horror of Suarez’s death must have struck all of us in that high room smoking with ice simultaneously, because we all turned and looked at each other, speechless, and Wiecienski looked back at us over his shoulder once with red eyes as he took her back.

Stevenson had been dropped off at the morgue by a passing squad car, so to get back to the Factory we took my Ford, and to take my mind off Carstairs/Suarez for a few minutes, I started talking to him about my recall to A14 – I was glad to have a straight man to talk to. I said: ‘It was surprising; the Voice rang me, and I was told what I’d never been told at the time of the internal enquiry over the Mardy case – that the decision of the disciplinary board was that I be suspended from the police force, you know, the door shut but not locked, so that you stand around with your head under your arm until they suddenly come on the line and say you can have your head back on your shoulders again now if you want, we’ve a job for you and you’re reinstated, only don’t fuck us about this time. Yes, well, then I see Jollo, and when I’ve got him tuned in, it turns out they’ve no one over at A14 to put on Carstairs/Suarez, you being busy over Roatta. I said, you can’t just fire and rehire people like that and they said why not, you like police work don’t you and I said yes. Then they reminded me
that I was a very dedicated officer, which I had been in danger of forgetting, and Jollo and the Voice started up again with their dreary old music – why is it we all hate you so much at times, Sergeant, why are you always a loner, always so fucking difficult. The only way I can solve my cases is by being myself, I said – I don’t think they got it, though. Jollo said, your tongue’s too sharp, why don’t you try keeping it in your pocket? It would cut the pocket, I said, I’d rather nail a villain with it. And it’s true I’m a loner, I added, though I’ve one or two mates – but that’s because I don’t want a whole load of zealous cunts looking for promotion tumbling all over me when I’m on a matter. You know me, Stevenson, I always warn them first, like politely – nothing at all today, thanks, fuck off, always leave me alone when I’m working – because that way I can hear a murderer, feel him, hunt him my own way; that’s what I’m made to do. You’re really too old to stay a sergeant, you know, Jollo said, you’re forty-five. I said, if you kick me upstairs, I go straight out at the front door again – that’s final and I want a divorce, as they say on page three of the linens, so why don’t you just let me get on with it? Because if everyone behaved the way you do, Jollo said, what kind of a police force would we have? Why not reverse the question, I said, and try answering that one? After all, I said to them, look at my private life. That’s quickly and easily done – it’s me. What I had going for me on the family front before, well, that blew itself to bits, as you well know, and it’s not because you’re a loner that you’re a bad detective; besides, the hours of work don’t bother me at all, and that’s all I think you need to understand, Mr Jollo. I told him well, look, anyway, you know me – if you put me onto these two women’s deaths they’ll become the whole human race for me till I catch the individual, and I will. I’m always the same; I’m always on the side of the victim; I never change. But if you give me a case, Mr Jollo, it’s my case and nobody else’s. It’s my nature; it’s like putting a mongoose to a snake. All right, all right, Jollo said, just get on with Carstairs/Suarez, and I said,
that’s what I’m patiently waiting to do when you’ve finished talking. So then afterwards the Voice, which had been told of this conversation with Jollo, rang me and said I had this really lyrical side to my nature and I said there’s nothing very lyrical about an A14 death.

‘I’ve got my contacts and I’ve got my territory, that’s the London metropolitan area; I know it the way a blind man knows each wall he taps on when he goes down his front steps into the street to turn right to reach the shops. I’ve got my grasses, all like snide whores, all with the mentality of garbage pickers – ready to sieve through any shit in the hope there’s a coin in it somewhere. I’ve got my drunks, my half-pardoned villains waiting to come up for trial and anxious to trade if it’ll mean a year off their sentence or even reduced to community service in exceptional cases. I’ve the press, I see a feller or two over a drink across at the Clipper or the Yorkshire Grey and I’m set to go; I’m permanently set to go. All I need to get to work is the minimum that any police officer needs – a warrant card, which is authority to go in, and access to police computers and information on file.’

I parked in the Factory lot and said: ‘I’ve been blagging on.’

Stevenson said: ‘My eardrums aren’t bruised.’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘then in that case let’s drive the lift up to the second floor.’

‘I’m very hard into Roatta’s past,’ Stevenson said as we went up in the lift, which was empty, ‘very hard.’

‘It cheers me up to hear you say that,’ I said, ‘because once you start digging into that load of shit, there’s most certainly plenty of it.’

‘I tell you, it’s the close timing of Roatta’s death with yours that fascinates me,’ Stevenson said.

I said: ‘It interests me a great deal, too.’

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘have you heard of a club called the Parallel Club?’

I said: ‘Yes, that’s up near Carnaby Street. Used to be called the Night Off, then there was heavy bother and it burned.’

‘Roatta had it done,’ said Stevenson. ‘The old management weren’t paying him off enough, so it was smashed up with the first warning, and then second time round, up it went.’

‘Rough.’

‘Don’t go crying your eyes out,’ Stevenson said.

I said: ‘It’s that place the yuppies go to for extra sex, and so what else about it?’

‘Roatta’s about it,’ said Stevenson. ‘He was co-owner with Giancarlo Robacci.’

The lift stopped on our floor and we got out. ‘Well, I’ve been away,’ I said, ‘I didn’t know that.’ I added: ‘But we all know about Robacci.’

‘Now there’s a man I’d like to clobber,’ said Stevenson, ‘but the trouble is that he’s Bolivian these days. Failing that, I’ve twice tried to get him deported, but I don’t know why – I just couldn’t pull the trick.’

‘Well, fancy that,’ I said.

We went into his office. I turned a chair round and sat with my arms crossed along its back. I said: ‘There are a lot of Italians popping up in this hand, aren’t there? Had you noticed? Some of them alive, some of them less so.’

‘Well, we’re the West End here, aren’t we?’ he said. He was restless, tapping his nails on the desk.