I Was Dora Suarez (7 page)

Bowman came over and we stood looking down at the hard little turd.

Bowman said: ‘Why do so many of them feel they have to do that?’

‘It’s egoism and overexcitement,’ I said. ‘It’s part of a very complicated way of getting your rocks off – it’s also like someone illiterate signing some document with an X.’

He stirred the stool with the tip of his Regent Street boot. ‘What chance do you think you’ve got, catching him?’

I said: ‘I’ll get him.’

‘We think so, too,’ said Bowman, ‘but don’t think we’re going to do you any out-of-the-way favours.’

‘I’ll find my own way of getting any help I need,’ I said, ‘and as for favours, you may find that by putting me on this you won’t have done yourself any.’ I added: ‘Just fuck off now, Charlie, will you? I want to be on my own.’

‘Watch your tone, Sergeant.’

I said: ‘It’s my case. Go outside. I want to be alone with her.’

When he had gone, I got down on my knees beside Dora’s body and at once felt close to her, but also separated from her by a distance that I had no means to describe. She was very slender,
and wore the bloody remains of a new dress. It was pink and white, with dark flowers on it; its skirt just covered her knees. At first, as I looked at her legs lying folded under her, it seemed to me that her body from her thighs down to her feet was swollen, too heavy in relation to the rest of her – that her dark head, slight shoulders were too elegant for them – but then I realised that that was how, propped up against the bed, she had drained – the law of gravity had filled her like that with her blood, like a sausage with meat, and that was how death had left her.

It was a long time before I could make myself look closely into her ruined face with the terrible hacks, gashes, bruising and broken bone on its bad side. I wouldn’t do it until I was alone, and yet to be alone with her was really worse to begin with, because I was afraid that I might get so far out of touch by looking at her that I might never get back; I was as frightened to look at her as I would be to drown.

And yet I found, far from being afraid when I did look into her face, that I was in tears. The good side of it, except for one smear of blood down her cheek, was intact. The axe had struck her across, and then down the face, the bad side. Her eyes were not damaged; they were black, ironic and three-quarters open – blind almonds turned in towards a corner of the high ceiling with the sly pointlessness of the dead.

Presently I got out my flashlight and shone it over her, because the place where she had collapsed and died between the beds was so dark, and the old white light-shade overhead, thick with dust, was wrongly placed to shed enough light on her. In the glare of the torchlight her indifferent eyes glittered coldly past me. On these eyes, the dust of our great capital was already beginning to settle. She was still a very beautiful girl for a few more hours yet as long as you looked at the untouched part of her, for she was only newly dead. Only her brow, drawn in the stiff frown of terror, spoiled her expression, and her lips were unnatural; they were slightly but slackly parted to show her teeth, as though she were finally bored with some argument. Death had already been at
work drawing shades across her cheeks up to the widow’s peak of her black hair; but the saddest thing to me, because it was totally incongruous, was the outflung gesture of her unhurt arm, which seemed to be waving to everyone in the world, telling them not to be afraid but follow her – and it was only when I touched her back and felt the arch of her spine impossibly bent against the side of the bed that I saw how, in her last abominable agony, the poor darling had wanted to try and stand up again, to escape death for just one second more so that she could explain everything that she was so suddenly having to leave.

A short way from her, three feet from the beds, stood a low table which had not been overturned in the struggle; on it lay a magazine open at a travel agent’s advertisement offering cut-price charter flights to Hawaii. I felt it was the last dream of escape that Dora had had before she died, and as I read it I felt her whole presence, a vast sorrow, concentrated on the double-page spread. In the bright photograph palm trees arched outwards, their fronds racing seaward in the wind, reaching for the brilliant waves; just under the trees, a young couple stood staring out across miles of empty beach at the Pacific, which receded so far that it finally vanished into the coupon that you had to send off now to qualify for the reduction that was valid till the first of July only.

It was then, and only then, that I understood what it really meant, the feeling of people’s rightful fury and despair, and it came together with my desire to bend over Suarez and whisper, ‘It’s all right, darling, don’t worry, everything’ll be all right, I’m here now, it’ll be all right now’ – and the feeling was so strong in me that I knelt and kissed her short black hair which still smelled of the apple-scented shampoo she had washed it with just last night; only now the hair was rank, matted with blood, stiff and cold.

I went out to the squad car parked across the street and said to the driver: ‘Get through on the radio and tell them they can come for the bodies now.’

Bowman was bent over double in the back of the car. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I said.

‘Ulcer playing up.’

I said: ‘While the ambulance is on its way I’m just going back in to look through their things.’

‘That’s all been done,’ Bowman said.

‘A14?’

‘Of course not. No, the real mob. Serious Crimes.’

‘That’s not good enough,’ I said.

‘You cheeky bastard,’ said Bowman. ‘What do you mean, not good enough?’

I said: ‘I’ll do it my own way, Charlie. You needn’t wait – I don’t want to keep you from your Yugoslav princess.’

‘It was a mistake getting you back, after all,’ Bowman said. He clutched his stomach and grinned with pain.

‘You ought to see a doctor about that,’ I said. I added: ‘It wasn’t a mistake – I want whoever killed Carstairs and Suarez badly. I solve my cases, but I do it a lot faster when there aren’t a lot of unnecessary people about. If you don’t believe me, ask Inspector Fox.’

Bowman left in a fury, slamming the car door which he had opened to spit out of. He was always the same, a glutton for other people’s punishment – only it never worked with me and he knew it, not that that stopped him, his obsessions being a good deal stronger than he was.

I phoned Stevenson at the Factory. I liked Stevenson. He had come over to A14 from Camberwell not long before I was fired, and we got on straightaway. He was a pale, blond man in his thirties who looked as if he were hard into sport – he wasn’t, though. What he was hard into was nailing a free pint, psychopath or villain – he was also, like me, into cutting grasses’ price to the bone, which may have been his Scottish blood coming out. He gave the cigarette firm that churned out Westminster filters no peace by smoking practically their whole production through each revolution of the sun. Whether night or day, he blew this vile smoke into the faces of people who had tripped up in the wire somewhere; he blew it at them over at the Factory in Room 202,
and was generally noted at all levels as an intelligent, non-violent man, and yet best not fucked about. In fact, Stevenson was a man rather like me, which meant we could have a word without having to get the dictionary out.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘how’s the morale? You on Empire Gate?’

‘Yes, that’s why I rang you,’ I said. ‘The Voice said to. And is that right you’re into the Roatta death over at Clapham?’

He said: ‘Dead on.’

‘How was it?’

‘Depends if you like the living room done out in grey and red – I saw in the
Recorder
it’s up-and-coming fashionable, the new macabre style. But what interests me is the short space of time it took between your job and mine.’

‘It would have to have been really brutal for it to be the same feller,’ I said.

‘Don’t trouble your soul over that,’ Stevenson said, ‘it is.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I reckon Empire Gate to Clapham Common North Side to be not even two miles’ worth, and don’t villains love wheels? Yes, it could sound cosy, who knows? The time it takes for a few sets of lights to change, crossing the bridge at one in the morning. Roatta, how was he done, you say? Nasty? I’ve not read it.’

‘Top of his head blown off,’ Stevenson said, ‘just the bottom jaw left, the rest of it part of the wallpaper, no extra price. Done with a Quickhammer, nine-millimetre, bullet was a dumdum, if you call that nasty.’

‘Well, I don’t call it polite,’ I said.

‘These maniacs just cannot seem to learn manners,’ Stevenson said.

‘On the other hand I can’t say my heart’s bleeding over the fact Roatta’s gone,’ I said. ‘We all know about Felix, on the local council, virgil, father and friend to all, also high up the ladder in West End clubs and prostitution, only try and nail him. Still, the killer’s the wet twat to get into, so yes, let’s have a chat about it like straightaway, because if our luck was running for once, it could
turn out to be the same individual, you never know – anyway we’ve got to start somewhere.’

‘Who was this Suarez girl of yours anyway?’ Stevenson said. ‘Anything known?’

‘That’s the problem,’ I said. ‘I’m having her checked north, south, east and west, but as far as I can tell so far, she was clean for us, not a day’s form.’

‘That blows our theory to bits, then,’ said Stevenson, ‘because if she had anything even remotely to do with Roatta, she can’t have been clean, therefore we’re looking for two killers, not one, and that’s a pity.’

‘Don’t be too sure,’ I said. ‘I went through Empire Gate really close-coupled and found a notebook she’d written which I’m working through, only I haven’t had time to finish it yet – but Suarez wasn’t clean. She doesn’t come out sunny-side through her own writings, anyway not to me.’ I added: ‘There’s something weird in this from my end altogether. These two women were axed to death, but I don’t swallow at all, after reading her notebook, that it was just the casual nut, the passing axeman who loves to drop in. I think Suarez was a whore. I think she was in love with someone on a one-way basis. What I know by reading her was that she had had enough. What I saw in the flat with Bowman was that she was dressed to kill or die. Her notebook never gives dates, just days of the week, but I feel pretty sure that the Saturday where she writes that she’s going to top herself was the same night she was done. She was also, going by the notebook, physically a very sick girl, and the whole thing stinks to me.’

‘It would help us if it stank of Roatta as well,’ Stevenson said.

‘Well, Carstairs/Suarez does have that kind of stench,’ I said, ‘if we can just find something like a link.’ I added: ‘Well, I’ll be round as soon as the traffic permits, I’m starting now,’ I said. ‘Do you know where they’ve put me?’

‘You’re back in 205.’

‘Bet my plastic tulips have gone.’

‘Yes, some cunt left the window open and a vulture did a hot cross
out of the zoo, flew over and shat on them, so some pure little WPC held them at arm’s length and took them down to the garbage.’

‘Oh well, they were getting faded looking anyway,’ I said. ‘Too bad – I’ll buy some more with my first pay cheque if I ever live to draw the fucking thing. By the way, you seen Charlie Bowman around the buildings anywhere?’

‘Well, fancy that now,’ Stevenson said, ‘hold on, here he comes bowling in right now asking for you, and judging by the look on his face, which is all red and funny looking, you’d better do the same. I’ll wait for you.’

‘I’m on my way,’ I said.

‘Well, it’s good you’re back,’ said Stevenson, ‘it means there’ll be a few brains around the place for once.’

‘Some people won’t be happy about that,’ I said.

‘Fuck them.’

On my own at last, thank God, I went back into the flat and walked round its half darkness very quietly. The folk from the lab had left everything as they had found it. The back window, by which everyone was agreed the killer had entered and left, still stood half-open, the dust on the base of the frame still smeared by his hastily departing glove.

I walked round and round the flat; I was beyond the two corpses now because I was already with them.

I knew what it meant when Serious Crimes said they had been through a place. They were thorough, all right; the trouble always was, though, that they were thorough but not absolute; that was because they often didn’t take enough time to think out what they were looking for. Thus, they would ignore what I would seize on, thinking it unimportant; conversely, they would preciously gather up in their special bags items that turned out to be of no interest at all.

What I wanted from Betty and Dora immediately was traces they had left – writing, letters, a scrawled note, even – anything that spoke of them.

Locking myself into it against all interruption, I began existing in that golgotha. I searched among the boxes, trunks and suitcases. There were over a hundred of them in the kitchen alone. But except for a few of her clothes at the end of her bed and a bra and slip hung out to dry in the bathroom on a line, there seemed to be nothing of Dora’s.

What was it Wilfred Owen had written on the Sambre front in 1917?

It struck me that rooms like these, situations like these, were the front line of the eighties – but this flat seemed to me to be worse than what I usually got, because the very people that the dead armies had fought to protect had been murdered in their turn, and this time there had been no one to protect them.

Such light as there was in the flat faded as I searched it and waited for the ambulance to come until I had to turn the lights on; the afternoon assumed a short, steep winter slant, dulling the high windows a grimy yellow and blackening the plane trees outside, while in the basement flat someone played the same Chopin prelude over and over and over.

I had the most marvellous dream the night before I went down to Brighton; in it I met the sweetest woman I am sure I have ever seen. I was lying in bed in a strange room in a hot, foreign country; but the southern light was dimmed, altered by half-closed shutters, and the high room was cool. I was just wakening in the dream with a feeling of regret at some absence, but tenderly and without sadness, when suddenly she came in and knelt beside me on the bed.