Blue Rondo (aka Flesh Wounds)

by Lawton, John

  ‘Yes. It usually begins the day well and starts to wear out after lunch. Now’s a very good time.’

  ‘Good. Get dressed. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes. There’s a body I want you to see.’

  Ten minutes later Troy stood in St Martin’s Lane, waiting, unwashed and unshaven, almost certain he could still smell Kitty’s perfume lingering on him. The street was empty of traffic. Jack roared up from Trafalgar Square in his big black Wolseley.

  ‘Are you sure you’re up for this?’

  ‘Do I look that bad?’ Troy asked.

  Jack sniffed the air. ‘You smell better than you look. And my infallible totty-indexing system tells me that isn’t Miss Foxx’s perfume. Why women always seem to want you when you’re only firing on two cylinders has always baffled me.’

  ‘Vulnerability,’ Troy said. ‘Now, where are we going?’

  ‘Hertfordshire. Pretty well to Harpenden. They’re building a new – what d’ye call ‘em? – out there.’

  ‘Autobahn?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Freeway?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Motorway – that’s it. Motorway. The new London to Birmingham road.’

  ‘Motorway it is. There’s a bit of elevated highway – flyover, I believe is the jargon – just outside Harpenden.’

  30

  Arc lights made the earth-moving equipment seem like monsters from childhood nightmares. A local bobby led Wildeve and Troy between metal-toothed giants, around concrete columns, through a roofless pagan cathedral to the heart of the new technology: a scraped-clear circle of compacted clay by a wooden hut. By the time they got there Troy felt as though he’d arrived at a place of primitive sacrifice. Instead of Isaac and Abraham, they had a site foreman in a hard hat, a police sergeant in uniform, and a small figure kneeling next to a dark mass of tarpaulin, shirtsleeves rolled up, Homburg pushed back on his head. Kolankiewicz.

  He turned as they approached. ‘You should be in bed,’ he said bluntly to Troy. ‘This bugger drag you out at crack of dawn just to look at a stiff?’

  ‘I’m happy to do it. I’m at my best in the mornings.’

  ‘I known you twenty-five years. You’re always crap in the mornings.’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing like a bang on the head to change the habit of a lifetime. Now, can we get on?’

  Kolankiewicz stood up, hands caked in mud and cement and human gore. ‘It’s not a pretty one.’

  ‘Show me.’

  Kolankiewicz whipped back the tarpaulin. It was Bosch-like – so many bodies were – large bits of flesh and bone set in concrete, hacked out and hacked up. Kolankiewicz had made an attempt to reassemble the body. Looking past the distortions created by the lumps of concrete, Troy could discern the outline of a human form. This was the body of a tall man, age indeterminable to Troy, who had had the misfortune to be decapitated and hacked limb from limb. There appeared to be no sign of the head.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Impossible to say with any accuracy, but allowing for the good weather we’ve had recently and the state of decomposition, say thirty-two hours. Maybe forty-eight.’

  Troy turned to the site foreman. ‘What can you tell us?’

  The man tilted his hard hat up a little. Looked down at the corpse, drew breath and looked straight back at Troy. It was as though he found bodies on a daily basis. ‘We clad the supports with wooden shuttering. You can’t fill ‘em all at once or it takes too long to set and you get cracks. Takes four days to fill a support as big as this. Yesterday morning we poured concrete. But the boards split and we had to redo it tonight. When we knocked out the last day’s work we found this.’

  ‘In the top layer?’

  ‘Right. Top layer.’

  ‘That means the body was dumped yesterday?’

  ‘Had to be or it would have been further down and we’d never have spotted it. Site was empty last night.’

  ‘A night-watchman perhaps?’

  ‘Keeps the insurers happy. Most night-watchmen nod off before midnight. I’ve even known buggers get hired as watchmen who were deaf as bleedin’ doorposts.’

  Troy and Kolankiewicz knelt down. Wildeve conspicuously kept his distance.

  ‘OK. Follow the bouncing ball. First no head.’

  ‘I had noticed.’

  ‘No hands.’

  ‘They don’t want him identified.’

  ‘They don’t call you smartyarse for nothing. But what I want you to see are the cuts and breaks. Look at the femur. The incision, if you can call it that, begins about half-way between the greater trochanter and the lateral epicondyle. It then careers raggedly-jaggedly to emerge an inch and a half lower on the inner side.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Whoever did this knew nothing about anatomy.’

  ‘Do they ever?’

  ‘Some murderers, as well you know, have a precision that matches mine and a cunning that matches yours. This bloke is an amateur. He killed and then disposed of the body with whatever was handy. In this case I rather think some kind of mechanical saw.’

  ‘A chainsaw?’

  ‘If that is indeed the term, yes, a chainsaw.’

  ‘Good God. I hope he was dead when they did this to him.’

  ‘He was. Now . . .’ Kolankiewicz picked up his geologist’s hammer and chipped away at the cement casing on what Troy took to be a section of the humerus.

  ‘See. Same again. A quick, ragged cut at the deltoid tubercle. A neat butcher would joint the corpse – literally, by incisions at the joints. Anything else is messy, blood and bone fragments everywhere. If you ever find out where they did this, there’ll be more evidence than they could ever wash out or sweep up.’

  ‘Well, there are certain advantages to the chainsaw if you don’t mind mess. It’s quick. But it’s not for the squeamish.’

  On cue they both turned to look at Wildeve. He was listening, and looking and not getting too close. He hadn’t spoken in a while.

  ‘Are you all right?’ said Troy.

  ‘Fine,’ Wildeve lied. ‘Just thinking.’

  They turned back to the corpse. Kolankiewicz took up his hammer again and picked up a blob of cement about the size of a cricket ball. It cracked open like a walnut. He hacked away at the interior, picked up tweezers and teased the skin of a small, fleshy object away from the sides.

  ‘Greaseproof paper in my bag. Quick.’

  Troy held out a strip and Kolankiewicz gently placed a severed penis on it.

  ‘Amazing,’ said Troy.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘It puts us into a different league. You chop off a bloke’s head and hands, and there is motive and purpose. Without them we stand next to no chance of identifying the body. Chopping this off serves no purpose. It’s . . . gratuitous.’

  ‘Barbaric would be my word.’

  They stood again.

  Wildeve moved closer. ‘What’s up?’

  Troy acted on instinct. Put his hand over the penis. Spoke on instinct. ‘What were you thinking, Jack?’

  ‘That it might be Bernie Champion.’

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘How long’s Bernie been missing? Ten days? A fortnight?’

  ‘He need not necessarily have been dead all that time – if you’re going by the rate of decomposition.’

  ‘That’s a factor, but it’s not the clincher. Bernie Champion was Jewish. None of King Alf’s lieutenants were goy. House rule. Look at the cock.’

  Troy held out the offended object on its strip of greaseproof paper. Mangled manhood. A two-inch squib, severed intact from the body – intact to the tip of its puckered akroposthion.

  Wildeve went white. Looked at the fading moon and pinched the bridge of his nose. It was thirty seconds before he spoke. ‘Sorry. I was being dumb. I don’t suppose there’s such a thing as an uncircumcised Jew, is there?’

  ‘Not in Alf Marx’s gang, and not in Bernie Champion’s generation. I got invited to
a couple of Brith Milahs in my time in Stepney. They’re loaded with symbolism. A boy is not quite a Jew until it’s done. I rather think the first test for joining Alf’s mob was to drop your trousers.’

  ‘Makes my blood run cold,’ said Jack.

  In the presence of a body that had been totally dismembered, limb from limb, limb from torso, head from neck, cock from balls, this struck Troy as unnecessarily squeamish. But, then, Jack was famous for puking at the scene of crime. It was a minor blessing he hadn’t yet. But the day was young.

  ‘Oh,’ Kolankiewicz said, with an air of remembering something he had forgotten to mention, ‘there is one more thing you should know now.’

  ‘And?’ said Troy.

  ‘I examined the backside before you got here. The rectum is full of semen.’

  Wildeve leaned over and vomited.

  31

  Troy could not resist. It spelled temptation, it spelled stupid, and he did it just the same. He had to see for himself. Part of him, the larger part of him, was relieved when the box office at the Hippodrome told him they were sold out for the next two weeks: Vince Christy’s music did nothing for him. He would kill an hour or so in the pub, then wait by the stage door in an alley off Cranbourn Street, itself but a stone’s throw from Leicester Square.

  What surprised him was the age span of Christy’s fans. He found himself at the back of a throng of thirty or forty women who were anything from fifteen to fifty. Not that that seemed a large number – Tommy Steele and the new teen heart-throb Cliff Richard had been mobbed at personal appearances, and forty-odd didn’t make a mob – but they screamed in what Troy could only think of as a sexual frenzy, the way women had at Sinatra in the late 1940s. If this ever became the norm, if Elvis ever got out of the army and played England . . .

  He turned over a dustbin and stood on it to get a better view. Christy must be just inside the stage door, or they were screaming at no one. He saw a stout man with thinning hair crushed among the women. He turned, as though feeling Troy’s eyes upon him. It was Gumshoe. Gumshoe without his hat. Troy would hate to be Gumshoe right now, he thought. One step too far and they’d trample him. Troy got a good look at Christy as he ducked out of the stage door and into a white Rolls-Royce – the famously wavy hair, the famously orange suntan, a beaming, pearly smile as he threw signed photographs into the air and used the scrum he’d created to dive into the car with a leggy blonde in tow, her face hidden by dark glasses and a headscarf. Troy would like to be her even less – they’d rip her to pieces if they could. As the Rolls pulled away, a dozen of the younger women pursued it, banging on the doors and windows. At the end of the alley it turned left into Leicester Square, half the crowd was gone, and suddenly Troy could hear the murmur that remained. A sad, tearful sound of joy half glimpsed, of pleasure half denied. A girl of seventeen or so was kissing Christy’s photograph, and saying, ‘My lovely,’ to herself, over and over again. Some of the women were slumped on the ground where they’d dived to grab a photograph. It looked like the closing scene of Hamlet, after all the betrayal, after all the slaughter. He’d no wish to cast himself as Fortinbras. Too late the hero. It was . . . repellent.

  Troy walked out into the square. A cab was parked a few yards down, towards the Empire, its back door open. The cabman waved at him. Troy ignored him. He cut through the alleys to St Martin’s Lane and emerged by the Salisbury, opposite Goodwin’s Court. The same cab was parked there, back door open. The cabman waved again. ‘Sorry to trouble you, guv’ner. The fare wants a word.’

  Troy looked into the darkness of the cab.

  A small woman, dressed in black.

  ‘Freddie?’

  His sister Masha.

  ‘Oh, Freddie.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  He held out a hand. Masha took it and pulled herself to her feet, stepped out of the cab and wrapped herself round him. He didn’t think she’d done this since they were children.

  ‘You’d better come in for a bit,’ he said. ‘I’ll put the kettle on … or something.’

  A polite cough from the cabman.

  ‘How much?’ said Troy.

  ‘Twenty-seven an’ six, guv’ner.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We was stood up by the ‘Ippodrome an age with the meter running.’

  Troy fished in his pocket, found a pound note and a ten-bob note. The cabman trousered the lot, said, ‘You’re a toff, sir.’ And drove off.

  Troy found himself supporting a sobbing Masha. Like it or not, the night was going to cast him, deus ex machina, as the late-arriving hero.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The bastard.’

  ‘Which bastard? There’ve been so many in your life.’

  ‘Vince.’

  ‘What’?

  ‘We went to the Dorchester. Wouldn’t even see us. Sasha just said “Well, fuckim, then.” But I couldn’t do that. I had to see for myself.’

  ‘I didn’t know you—’

  ‘His last tour, nineteen forty-nine. The winter he played the Palladium. Sasha and I . . . well, you know. We had him. Had him all winter. A lovely, juicy, Italian-American sandwich. Lots of lovely garlic and basil and mozzarella and Cole Porter all wrapped up in me and my sister. Now he won’t even speak to me.’

  ‘As you said. A bastard.’

  ‘Did you get a look at his bit of totty?’

  ‘Yes. Blonde. Tall – well, taller than you. That’s about all I could tell you.’

  ‘So that’s it. Blondes are in. And dusky beauties pushing fifty are on the scrap-heap. Bastard.’

  ‘Come inside. I’ll put the kettle on.’

  ‘Do stop saying that, Freddie. It’s so bloody English.’

  He made a pot of tea that neither of them drank. It sat on its little tray with its china teacups, just to remind them they were almost-English. He sat opposite Masha while she dried her eyes and told him a tale of unequalled heartbreak.

  ‘Lawrence has left me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s gone off to live at Albany. Some old crony from his army days has lent him a flat. He’s having an affair.’

  The words ‘pot’ and ‘kettle’ competed for space in Troy’s mind.

  ‘He’s having an affair with Anna Pakenham.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you, Freddie?’

  ‘You’re not blaming me?’

  ‘No, I’m not. You introduced them, but it’s hardly your fault if my husband decides to go off and fuck her, is it? There’s only one person to blame for that.’

  ‘Does Lawrence know about. . . ?’

  ‘About all my affairs? Yes. I’ve never rubbed his nose in it, but I’ve never made a secret of it either. I shouldn’t think for one second he knows the half of it, but to know even a fraction would be enough. And do you know what really hurts?’

  Troy could not even begin to guess.

  ‘She’s younger than me. Isn’t she?’

  ‘I suppose she is.’

  ‘Suppose bollocks you know damn well the woman isn’t even forty!’

  ‘I think she’s thirty-nine.’

  ‘And I’m forty-nine!’

  Masha dabbed at her eyes with her hanky, fought back a sob. ‘That’s why it was so important to me to see Vince, to – to have him again. I was thirty-nine that winter he and I and Sasha – but now I’m forty-nine, I’ll be fifty next spring. At thirty-nine I was perfectly acceptable. Now I’m an old bag!’

  ‘You’ve kept your looks. You don’t look anywhere near fifty.’

  She didn’t, but it struck Troy as a minor miracle. This was a woman who had danced naked on the rim of hell for thirty-five years.

  ‘That’s very sweet of you, Freddie. But the fact of the matter is I’ve been turned down for younger women twice in one week. My life is in pieces. My children don’t want to know me. I can’t even begin to think how I’ll tell them if Lawrence opts for divorce. Dammit, Freddie, I’m fifty years old and there’s no one in my life. No one.
A loyal, decent man has left me for one of your cast-offs – it is over between you and her, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Troy lied. When was it ever over?

  ‘And a shit of a man I shouldn’t let near me with a bargepole, who I only want because I want to be wanted, treats me like a rag he’s wiped his thingie on and thrown away. Jesus Christ! I keep asking myself, what have I done with my life? What have I done to deserve this? To have it all come down to this. What have I done?’

  She sobbed now without restraint, slid off the chair to her knees and puddled on the floor. Troy gently lifted her up, and sat her on his lap, much as she used to do with him when he was nine or ten and she was fifteen and he’d grazed or cut or bruised himself.

  It was like watching a ship approach on the horizon. Troy could see. And seeing it so clearly did not offer any way out. It had that same sense of inevitability. Heading for them inexorably and, however indistinct, never less than obvious. Masha slumped on him, wept into his chest. A woman several times larger than life now seeming smaller than she was, curling up like a child, her feet not touching the floor. Then her head lifted and Troy saw the wind hit the sails, felt the rigging stretch taut, and saw her face approach his, a close and blinding blur. She kissed him, he kissed her back – foundered on the barren skerry of her want.

  Masha fumbled. Clumsy as a teenager. His shirt tore, buttons pinging off like bullets; her knickers snagged on her heels and she ripped them off with one hand without bothering to look. She fell back on the floor, he banged an elbow and pulled back, wincing. Masha locked both hands behind his neck and drew him down.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I have to have someone right now. Please.’

  She wriggled and scrambled until she had her skirt round her waist, his trousers pushed below his arse, his cock in her hand ready and far too willing.

  He found he had literary expectations of incest. An arsenal of clunky metaphors mostly to do with looking-glasses and cameras, all telling him what he was supposed to feel in the midst of the outrageous. But it didn’t feel outrageous. It felt like the culmination of a long seduction his sisters had begun on him before he was ten. They’d dressed and undressed in front of him, bathed in front of him, fucked all his friends, bored him with the details of every love affair they’d ever had. All, from the vantage-point of being flattened on her breasts and joined humping at the groin, seeming like a mixture of flirtation and proxy-sex. He wasn’t outraged at himself or her, simply because it felt as though they’d done this all their childhood days. And what was childhood but a journey without maps? What was the adult life but the piecing together of the jigsaw of childhood into a map, into the illusion of coherence? It felt natural. It felt like . . . like what? Like vengeance.