I Was Dora Suarez (23 page)

‘He minded them and then guided them into people at the end of a string,’ Stevenson said. ‘Didn’t he, though?’ He smashed his fist down on the desk. ‘And there are three bodies to show for his behaviour. Didn’t he? Didn’t he?’

‘Spavento is physically sick, isn’t he?’ I said. ‘With AIDS, isn’t he, you elegant little cunt?’

‘Nobody talks about him,’ Robacci whispered, looking at the floor. ‘I keep telling you.’

‘I don’t know who these virtually witless people think we are,’ I said to Stevenson. ‘I keep telling them and telling them that we’re serious folk, that this is really real police work, and they still don’t want to know; my life, will they swallow it, my life, they fucking well will not.’

I said to Robacci: ‘Now this is going to come as a brand-new horrid surprise to you,’ I said, ‘but you, Scalo and Margoulis are being bred up here in the Factory to talk about Spavento in front of a court. I’ll let you into a secret; you’re both going to get very mediocre counsel, we’ll fix that from our side with the DPP, and you’re both going to go down with a monster bang; because Margoulis will be our witness and he’ll have the very best counsel; we fix all that, too. These lawyers have to make a living, the money on the brief’s the same whether they perform well or badly, see?’ I said to Stevenson: ‘But that’ll just be tidying up.’

Stevenson said: ‘I think we’d better just go off and see Spavento now and tackle him with a few questions, thus eliminating him from our enquiries, if you see what I mean.’

‘It’s being worked on by folk who are in the job of selling newsprint,’ I said, ‘so it might take two hours or not even.’

‘Well, I don’t think we need this individual cluttering this room up any more,’ said Stevenson, indicating Robacci with the edge of his thumb. ‘He makes a small room smell even smaller.’

‘Can I go back down to my cell now and get some sleep then?’ Robacci said.

‘No you can’t,’ said Stevenson. ‘What you can do is sign a statement with Rupt, Drucker and a WPC, go up in front of the beak in the morning at nine and then straight to Brixton on remand, your feet won’t touch.’ He said to me: ‘Fucked if I can see why these people should snore their heads off and us wearing our boots out.’

He rang for the duty constable. When the officer appeared, Stevenson waved at Robacci and said: ‘Take this lot away.’

‘I want my lawyer,’ Robacci said, ‘I want him now.’

‘I’m in hell and I want a fucking snowball,’ Stevenson said.

He burst out laughing. He added: ‘Fuck off, cunt.’

Dora had written: ‘Oh, it’s sure that the more beautiful you are on this earth, the fewer they are to protect you.’

When Robacci had gone and 202 was empty, I repeated those words of hers to Stevenson and I said: ‘Don’t you see, we’re too late to save Suarez, we’re too late as usual to save her, but it doesn’t work like that at all, and so don’t you see that we must have rules, even if they’re apparently obscure rules – for if not, we’d all be murdered, and then there’d be no one left at the bar at six, which is the civilised hour.’

‘I suppose we’re still men, then,’ said Stevenson. ‘Is that what you’re trying to say?’

‘If you’re my friend, yes,’ I said, ‘that’s exactly it.’

‘Apart from finding who killed her, what else can we do, though?’ he said.

‘We must try and bring her back,’ I said, ‘just as if her death had never happened.’

‘That’s mad,’ Stevenson said.

‘It’s no madder than what surrounds us,’ I said, ‘and it must be done, even if I can’t think out exactly why, it’s as if we were back saving people back in the war.’ I thought for a moment and said ‘We save Suarez and somehow we save everybody.’

Thank God I am neither particularly human nor beautiful, Stevenson neither – for it must be as terrible to be a beautiful human being as it must be to be rabbit or a partridge, threatened on every side by cunts: nobody and everybody wants you, and you become everybody’s prey.

I stood up and went over for a moment to stand by the window, still bleeding for Suarez inside; like all the wrongly dead, she was a heroine in her own right for me, poor child, and it was for her that I existed in the police or elsewhere my poor darling sweet Suarez, my darling Suarez.

I dreamed of times when my mind was not so old – of brilliant sun and then of grey rain, of going out into days in the morning as though these things were not old but brand-new and that I still belonged in them, as did everybody I had ever known, quite equally, which is to be a true citizen in any place.

I said out into the night: ‘We’ll get our dignity back; whether alive or dead, we shall all be as we used to be.’ I found I absolutely had to state those words out loud because, through the deaths of Suarez and Carstairs I found myself suddenly in a state of great doubt, despair, and in a testing time, not only because of the way the two women had left us but because of the fury I felt on account of it. I found my own life set on the scales as though it were theirs; and the worse I found I was in my mind, the more I thought and clung to my memories of gardens, springtime and vanished times in my attempt to rid myself of the evil that saturated me through being obliged as a peasant is to go into a cellar and kill a snake – although, in the world I worked and lived in, good was a feeble
dream compared to the reality of evil unless she were conjured up again by the grasp of a vanished but loving hand, a night out, the deep passion of a kiss made particular for you alone and printed to your cheek by the one being created to you for the purpose. I don’t and can’t know how the new times will come – I only know that Suarez and Carstairs must, by our forces, be put to rest; because until that is done, the new future will never come, and so none of us can ever be at rest.

It has always seemed certain to me that there is only one way to go about anything or go anywhere – it is as straight as possible. I must end with my hands right in my work and solve it; and although I have made terrible mistakes through ignorance, I see justice under that light – everything usefully done is done for others. Now Carstairs and Suarez, too, in their new state, will surely find and join hands with us in a mysterious and valuable way that the rest of us can’t yet know.

It’s a silly, frightening world but our own, I suppose.

I suppose.

(They say that faith can move mountains; so I have heard and do in part believe it, that’s Shakespeare, that is. I hope he was right; that’s me.

For Betty Carstairs was murdered because she loved Suarez as the daughter she never had, and at eighty-six she tried to save her; and Suarez was killed because she was beautiful, poor, sick and at our mercy, and we showed her none, and may our country hang its head.

I see now, clearer than I have ever done, that my work is a matter not just of my personal honour, but of our national honour, as if, in spite of everything, there were still a spark in us as there once was when we loved the dead as ardently as we did the living and believed in their continued being as I still most certainly do, and then I am really not capable just by myself of explaining just what went wrong after that.)

Did you know I sometimes cry in my sleep? Did you ever hear of a man who never cried in his sleep?

By examining other people’s lives and deaths I am half consciously showing myself how to approach my own.

Strip horror; face it naked. Don’t hide or run, and then the good will come, even if it has to go through hell to find you.

I remember, a long way back, talking to Frank Ballard about a flasher he had arrested on the banks of the Serpentine. ‘Nine flashers out of ten are harmless,’ I said. ‘The tenth is a killer.’

The tenth could be a Tony Spavento.

The Voice rang. ‘I don’t like the way you’re going about this Carstairs/Suarez case,’ it said in a tone somewhere between authority and nervousness. ‘I don’t like it at all. You’re acting as if you were the law, not just a sergeant working for it.’

‘There ought to be a law that made murder impossible,’ I said, ‘but there isn’t, so I’m filling the gap until there is.’ I added: ‘As for being just a sergeant, don’t assume I’m not ambitious merely because I turn down promotion; we’ve had this conversation before. In my own way I’m very ambitious. Most hardworking people are – also my twin ambitions are positive and useful. One, I want to be a pioneer, not a pawn – two, I want to find out everything I possibly can about myself and others, because the more I know, the better equipped I am for catching killers, What would I find out as a detective chief superintendent? Nothing.’

‘We don’t want any pioneers at A14.’

‘Well, it’s that or take me off the case,’ I said, ‘in which case I’ll continue it as a private citizen. I told you what the contract was at the word go, and you agreed to it.’

After a long pause the Voice said wearily: ‘All right.’

It rang off.

I went into Stevenson’s office. ‘Well?’ I said. ‘What happened to our three lovely detainees?’

‘They went over to Great Marlborough Street, where they were remanded in custody pending further enquiries, application for bail refused.’

‘Well, that’s one part of the vomit cleared up,’ I said. ‘Now let’s see about the big lot.’

As I spoke I found I was remembering my grandmother from my childhood, for no reason perhaps but that, like my sister Julie, she represented innocence. It was summer, and my gran sat reading in a deckchair in our small garden under the only tree, an apple tree, wearing a straw hat tilted over her nose; she was still a very handsome woman, even at forty-eight. A hot wind raved vaguely among the leaves, turning up their pale undersides, and just the memory of her helped disentangle my spirit from all the squalid filth that was my working life. For an instant, Stevenson and Room 202 vanished and I was running towards her through the long grass that hot afternoon – oh Didi! Didi! – taking her by the hand and pulling her up out of her chair to bring her up for tea, which my mother had set out on the verandah – tea, bread and butter, jam and cake on a cloth spread over a green-painted iron table.

What I do know is that if my grandmother were in my place now, and if it were she who had to deal with the deaths of Carstairs and Suarez, she would have acted just as I am doing – she was stubborn, independent and compassionate, and that was why I had always loved her so. She never uttered a word when her two sons died in that car accident, but a cancer which, according to the doctors she had had for a long time but had said nothing about, now suddenly declared itself, perhaps because of the shock, so that she had to go into hospital very shortly after the funerals. Sensing, as she told my mother, that the operation had failed, she called for all her makeup and put it on asking sister for the loan of her pocket mirror, and she hummed a little music from
The Coronation of Poppaea
, her favourite opera, the morning she died.

Voices from so far back now that they are still young fly calling, searching in the darkened wood of my mind and I see at long last that the pain of her loss helped me make me what I am.

Sometimes I feel so oppressed by evil that I feel I could go out of my mind like my wife Edie did. It’s not just the terror that the facts of a murder inflicts on me, but the needless agony that
threatens and visits people – that’s my sadness. Life, people, the places they made for themselves, the traces they leave behind them like the wake fading behind a ship, the earth itself – life is so precious that I fear one day it might blind me, just as it blinded Suarez.

But I will equalise everything for you, Dora, just as I swore over your body in the morgue that I would.

(I saw the photograph of her again, taken in the Parallel Club while she was still alive. The shot was taken from slightly behind her and close to her right side with a flash, and the light brought her cheek out dazzling white in contrast to her black hair. Her almond eyes were three-quarters open under thick lids, only they were responsive and living, not fixed absently upwards as they had been when I saw them in death. She was heavily made up – I understood why now, of course – and on the monochrome film her lips showed as black as her eyes and hair. She held a microphone in her right hand and her lips were close to it, parted and singing. Beyond her, looking with the camera, were tables jammed with the solid, impassive faces of villains – Parker and Sharpe, the iron-bar specialists, were there with their women, also Mike Slattery and Phil the Gap, and of course the dark-haired man, in the act of turning his face instinctively from the camera, that I had shown the Italians.)

I was worn out suddenly; we were trying to do work in hours that needed weeks. I said to Stevenson: ‘We’ve known each other a while – can I just tell you something that makes this case different for me? Different from all the others?’

‘Of course. What is it? You sound really serious.’

‘I don’t care what you think when I say this,’ I said, ‘but I think I would have been in—’

The phone rang. Stevenson picked it up, saying: ‘It’ll have to wait a minute.’ When he had finished listening, he put it down and said: ‘That was Barry from Records.’

‘Well?’

‘Suarez had form, did you know?’

‘Don’t tell me,’ I said, ‘I can guess – theft and prostitution?’

‘Well done,’ he said. ‘Three months theft, thirty days for the other.’

‘As if she were the only one,’ I said, ‘and as if it mattered.’ I added ironically: ‘Desperate people will do almost anything these days, won’t they?’

‘He was only trying to help,’ said Stevenson.

‘Oh I know that,’ I said. ‘Nothing on Spavento, I suppose.’

‘Nothing.’ He added: ‘What were you just going to tell me when the phone went?’

It rang again. Stevenson picked it up, listened, and handed it to me.

‘Cryer.’

I took the phone and said: ‘Yes, Tom?’

‘We’ve found him – my photographer’s got his picture again, but this one’s different. In this one he’s at home.’

I said: ‘College Hill? The old rubber factory?’

‘That’s right.’

‘How long ago was this?’ I nudged Stevenson and put the call on the loudspeaker so that he could listen.

‘Less than an hour ago. He’s taken lots of them; he’s taking them all the time.’