I Was Dora Suarez (26 page)

‘Well?’ he said, ‘now what?’

‘The plan’s easy,’ I said, ‘it’s the execution that’s moody, I’m going in there.’ We stood in deep shadow and spoke very quietly.

‘Right, let’s go, then.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re going back to the Factory, and you’re going now.’

He shook his head. ‘No chance,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

I said: ‘Spavento is down to me. Suarez and Carstairs is my case.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘It can’t be done.’

‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Look, you’ve got family responsibilities. I haven’t. You’ve got some kind of career in front of you; I haven’t. A14 only fetched me back up off the beach because they’d got no other moron to put on this. I’ve always been expendable as far as the brass is concerned, and I tell you, that’s the only reason they’re using me – they’ll junk me again once I’ve done their work for them.’

‘You’re making no sense at all,’ he said. ‘The two of us can cut this madman out upstairs there, all right, but just you on your own, that could go either way.’

‘You still haven’t understood,’ I said. ‘This’ll only go one way. There’ll only be one to come out. There’s going to be no paperwork on this.’

He said: ‘I believe you love Suarez.’

I said: ‘That was what I was trying to tell you in your office earlier; only when I found her at long last, she was dead.’

Stevenson said: ‘For God’s sake.’

I said: ‘You are a friend of mine, but even so you can’t know what I know or feel, you are not me, and I am going to avenge her now, as I swore I would when I kissed her head, and you have heard nothing, seen nothing – so now go – this is between me and the responsible man. I tell you again, there’ll only be one to come out, so now go.’

‘You’re armed at least,’ he said.

I said: ‘I’m out of practise but I am, and for the reason I’ve given you, if it is a reason. Now take the car and leave, the keys are in it.’

‘You’ve got no defence in court at all,’ he said, ‘if you kill him.’

I said: ‘If I’m dead, I shan’t need one. If I live, then the only man who can put me away for twenty years is you.’ I said: ‘That depends on you, and I depend on you – knowing what you know, you must do as you think best, but you won’t stop me now. My mind is made up and that’s the end of it, so now will you just leave me be?’

‘I can’t let you risk your life like this.’

‘It’s my risk.’

‘I repeat, you’re taking the law into your own hands.’

‘It’s better in my hands than in no hands.’

‘It isn’t for us to make the law,’ Stevenson said, ‘we’re here to uphold it.’

‘Suarez was your sister,’ I said, ‘your daughter, your wife.’

‘You’re not meant to think like that,’ he said. ‘You’re a copper.’

‘If I didn’t think like that, I wouldn’t be a copper,’ I said. ‘If I didn’t think like that, there’d be no point in being a copper or anything else.’

‘Drop it.’

‘No.’

‘All we’ve got to do is get into the car and call the mob up – wait till the mob comes round to get him out, that’s what they’re paid for.’

‘No,’ I said. I pushed him over to the Ford.

‘Will you stop being such a cunt,’ said Stevenson. ‘Everyone in the Factory knows they want to take you back and promote you; don’t fuck it up over this maniac now.’

‘I don’t want to be promoted,’ I said, ‘I’ve never wanted to be promoted.’

‘What do you want then, for Christ’s sweet sake?’

‘I don’t know if what I want exists,’ I said, ‘but that doesn’t alter the fact I want it, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. And don’t raise your voice,’ I added, ‘I want him quiet till I get up to him.’

He saw that the game was set out; he understood now and got into the Ford. As he started it he said: ‘I’m not going home, I’ll be in 202. Ring me the second you’re finished.’

As I watched Stevenson leave and prepared to go up against Spavento I wondered if even those really close to each other and comfortable in their lives now understood any more what that means, the ruin and end of a life in a disgusting way, or if perhaps they have forgotten what that mortal sickness which we call despair really means.

For so many people, and good people, too, are now, thank God, at last well based in their lives after the miserable horrors of the war that they are perhaps no longer capable of imagining themselves as a face against a wall with no further to go. But I had joined the police in order to protect the weak in the same spirit as any volunteer for the same cause in any domain – only with me it was not the hospital, but the street.

If you want to deal with evil, you must live with it and know it. In my work you have no chance at all of beating what you don’t know, whose language you can’t speak; the margin is very tight, and the risk of being corrupted accordingly very near.

I loved Dora, not only because I found her beautiful for me, but also because I felt so ashamed that we should have allowed her to fall so far; and so I was sure that in human law, by going up to Spavento now, I was at least acting as the shield that she should have had; I even felt that I was perhaps taking a step towards that time when others like her would be protected from the death that she and Betty Carstairs had suffered. For the span of my own lifetime I would always arrive too late, but I felt I must try to look forward to a day when that would all be altered, so that we would no longer only be able to obtain justice for people after they were dead. I know that if it were for me ever to command anything, I would have a centre where people frightened for their lives could come and be seriously listened to, their fears sifted, analysed and acted upon, and not just be told to fuck off and stop wasting police time.

There was a door, a heavy steel one, that had once, before the fire, given access to the factory building on the high platform at the delivery bay end which had been barred across and yet still presented no problem since the door had been half torn out of the cement wall and lay half sprawling on its lower hinges. I checked my pistol before I went in and then jammed it between my belly and waistband just in front of my right hip, pushing the right-hand end of my jacket into the back of my belt so that there would be nothing between the weapon and my hand. I felt very afraid. By a blink of my flashlight I saw that although the staircase ahead of me, rising beyond the lorry weigh-bridge by the side of the glassed-in dispatch manager’s office was blackened by fire, it was built of cement and intact. A cat shrieked on a minor note and flew towards the shattered jacks, and I started up the stairs, not slowly, but listening. Through the twisted window frames between the floors the city glowed blue and orange and made a sound like a gagged man trying to speak; but inside me Dora was saying to me all over again from out of her exercise book from Empire Gate:

I climbed another floor, and at an angle of the blackened stairs her lost voice rang inside me for the first time, high and clear, but imprecise, yet as if she were trying to thank me, reach out for me to help me and be helped.

I felt sure she was glad I had heard her and I whispered: ‘Dora, look after me,’ whereupon I felt her smile pass straight through me and knew that she was released forever from this earth and that I would come through all right, too, because of her.

I suddenly thought as I crawled on up the stairs, ‘I wish Dora could have known my sister Julie.’ I have always loved Julie; she lives just outside Oxford and she is the only family I have left now. For I knew that if Dora had come to her in trouble, Julie would have sat her down in the comfortable chair in the sitting room by the electric fire and made her a cup of tea or poured her a shot of whisky just as Betty Carstairs had. She would never have asked Dora any questions – Julie never did that – and in the end Dora would have confided in Julie as another woman and told her whatever she felt like saying, and Julie would have helped her in a way that Betty couldn’t because she was too old, whereas Julie was only five years older than Dora would have been. At any rate I felt sure that if the two of them could only have met in time, Dora would be alive now and then I would have taken her to me; but in the meantime Julie would have lodged her in the attic bedroom where I always slept on my rare time off from the Factory, and as for her physical condition, Julie knew a lot of specialists in Oxford because she did hospital work, clerical, in the
hospitals during her time off from her job in the town hall. Julie is a big fresh girl like an apple, a kind, intelligent girl, there aren’t many like her left in Britain now, and she is my lovely sister, too, we have always been very close – and we would have saved Dora, only it was too late now.

What else had Dora said?

We are all much too far off from each other. ‘For,’ she wrote,

She added:

She concluded:

The killer had stopped all training; he stood motionless, naked in his big bands, in the three-quarters dark because of the streetlights, his mouth slightly open, wondering if he had not heard a noise on the staircase, a soft noise which he had never heard at that hour before, if he had in fact heard it, he wasn’t yet sure. The blacks and the rest of the district smashed the factory up for fun, but they always made plenty of noise about it; that never bothered him. But this was a soft, slipping noise that he believed he heard; it might be nothing, or else it could just relate to a pair of soft, deliberate feet.

Women! His old ones! Sometimes they came back to haunt him. At times he was aware of their faint dead voices in the silence that surrounded him; he frowned at the echoes of their babbling squawks as they perished; he caught again, like bile coming back up in his throat after a bad meal, a nose dipping into a Schweppes ashtray in a cheap hotel somewhere as its owner died, was at times, in his head, pursued by the tap of girls’ shoes on a pavement, by the smell of their scent and sweat, by all the madness of his life’s work.

He belched suddenly. He had just eaten a small scrape of his shit which he had saved in a cotton bag; it was all he ever permitted himself when he was on punishment training. He was incapable of wondering what he was doing it all for, what he meant or what he was proving, apart, of course, from the straight excellence of his bones, his limbs, his curly hair, his superb physique, trained to an ounce: he would never understand that to others he looked curved, tired, his eyes blank and dead, his hair dirty, his sodden trousers an embarrassment, his endless stories about himself in the pub frankly a fucking bore, his monotone insistence on death, punishment, how he would rather fuck a dog than a woman, not really what most folk wanted to listen to when they came down
to the boozer for a pair of jars.

But the killer, listening to the stairs, did suddenly feel tired as well as, after his final stretch with the wheel, in pain. For now, casually, uninvited, this terrible bird had now come to nest and exist in him. It was now even darker, more insolently at home in himself than it had been at first, and behaved in him, in every realm of him, in a provocative and deliberate manner, turning and hopping round more and more nosily and aggressively inside him, arranging its greasy, poisonous wings with their green and scarlet sheen as it pleased with its predatory beak, suiting itself boldly to his interior; its presence created this new exhaustion in him, draining his strength, agility and beauty. Shocked, he waited in terror, facing the door, while the bird did its own thing inside him, independent. Even with the Quickhammer in his hand he had a chill, muddy certainty in himself that if anything was going to happen, this time he wasn’t going to make it. He had felt himself being invisibly watched all day, and although he insisted to himself that he was as fast, fit, trim and well as ever he had been, inside he felt that with half his natural purpose, the one between his legs, destroyed, he might be going to fail, fall and die.

Earlier I had thought: ‘How could Suarez and Spavento between them ever have known what love was?’

But she explained it for me in what she had written to him on a paper serviette that I found in her box at Empire Gate: ‘You always drew me to you in spite of everything – I know we can help each other.’