I watched them go; but now suddenly a new voice whispered into my ear: ‘It’s very sad about the colonel; he’s not what he was, of course, old age.’
‘What used he to be?’ I said.
‘A war hero,’ he said gravely. ‘Thornhill is proud of its Colonel Newingtons.’
He had his hand on my shoulder, something I hated; I disengaged myself and turned to look at him. It was the man in the black suit that I had seen just now going into the other bar, where he could listen to us. Meanwhile time had run on and the big bar had filled up with the roar of young voices ordering beer from the staff at the other counter that had come on, asking for darts and cards – suddenly the pub was full up. I looked at this man. He was in his fifties, mostly bones inside his black suit, and gave off an odour, if you were as close up to him as I was, of a long-closed keyboard opened suddenly in an empty house. Now he smiled at me with a set of expensive false teeth, but above those his eyes didn’t smile at all; they were slaty and still, like hundreds of eyes I’ve seen in villains’ pubs in London.
He looked as if he had had all the practice on earth backing out of five-door Mercedes estate cars.
‘What’s done in youth,’ he was saying to me, feeling for my elbow, ‘can never be undone in age – that’s what my old grandparents always used to tell me, you know.’
‘Well, if your grandparents ever really did say that,’ I said, ‘I can only tell you that they copied it from Mrs Gaskell.’
‘Eh?’ he said, dumbfounded, and it was perfectly obvious to me that he had never heard of Mrs Gaskell, but had unconsciously drained the allusion off as an appropriate undertaker’s platitude in the presence of a bereaved family, from the recent TV adaptation of The Old Nurse’s Story – his grandparents be damned. He had a fruit juice on the bar beside him, and took a sip of it. The white fingers, the colourless but cracked nails held the glass delicately and also jealously away from me and he beamed on me as one does on an evident inferior. He took another sip, and his stomach growled in him somewhere far down: ‘I should like it if you would join me in a half of bitter.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I never drink halves. Or bitter.’
‘Something stronger, perhaps?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘I hear you’re a police officer.’
‘That’s correct.’
‘Might I ask what you’re doing down here in Thornhill?’
‘I’m doing what I always do,’ I said, ‘minding the public’s business.’
A titter went up from the big public bar whose counter I could see opposite us; people were leaning across. ‘What’s your name anyway?’ I said to him.
‘I’m Baddeley, Walter Baddeley,’ he said. ‘Estate agent.’
The titter became a gust of laughter. A young man from by the dart-board shouted: ‘He’s Baddeley, Walter Baddeley, an agent of this town! He owns it, he loans it, he’s known for miles around!’
‘Nice to have an audience,’ I said.
Baddeley didn’t appear to think so. He stopped smiling, his hand fell away from me to his side and he said: ‘Young, well young somethings, only I naturally won’t say it.’
I said: ‘Are you also the Baddeley whose name I noticed over the undertaker’s place up the street?’
‘That most certainly is me,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
The crowd in the other bar roared out: ‘Going out to bury, makes Walter Baddeley merry! He sends in his bill, gets a clause in the will, and then he’s happy, very!’
Baddeley started moving away, furious, but I caught him by the arm on an impulse and said: ‘What do you know about the Mardys?’
‘I’d rather not talk about them,’ he said. ‘It’s too sad.’
‘What’s sad?’ I said. ‘Come on, you start getting familiar with police officers in a pub, you can’t complain if you get asked questions – I’m here to do that.’
‘They were going downhill,’ said Baddeley. ‘Of course, I went up occasionally for Madam Mardy’s concerts.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘you like music, do you?’
‘All I can tell you,’ he said, ‘is that the Mardys were both very, very special people.’
‘And of course you were upset when Mrs Mardy disappeared last August?’
‘I was naturally very distressed, like everyone else here in Thornhill.’
‘And what did you do about it? Did you go up to see her husband, try to console him at all?’
‘We weren’t close friends,’ he said primly, ‘I didn’t feel I had the right to intrude.’
I knew instantly that he was lying. ‘I find you quite interesting,’ I said. ‘I hear a rumour you’re running for mayor, yet something bad happens to quite prominent fellow citizens of yours and you just let them drop, if I’m reading you properly. You enjoyed their hospitality and their music while it lasted, showed your face because it was the thing to do and then, when things went sour, you forgot all about them, terrific.’
‘You’re bending what I’ve said.’
‘No I’m not,’ I said, ‘but you might be; I think you might be quite wicked.’ I added: ‘Just tell me something as a one-off, did you ever have any business dealings with the Mardys?’
‘Why should you think I had?’
‘Instinct,’ I said. ‘I didn’t order you in this bar, but you saw Colonel Newington pointing at you just now, and my bet is that you’ve also heard that I’m down from London to inquire into Mrs Mardy, and now by Christ you’re sticking to me suddenly like shit to a blanket, you can’t keep away from me. There must be a reason for it, and of course I want to know what it is. It’s just routine, Mr Baddeley; you know how we always say that.’
‘I’m not obliged to answer!’
‘No you aren’t,’ I said, ‘it’s merely that if something turns up later on in the course of what I’m doing here and you haven’t cooperated with me, you could find yourself hanging upside-down by your balls and having to answer me under what I’ll call disagreeable circumstances, so why don’t you do it now?’
‘I don’t like your manners,’ he said.
I said: ‘That’s why I cultivate them, they’re specially for you, now answer, cough it up, it might be a gold watch and chain.’
I was enjoying myself. I can tell a villain when I see one, no matter how well he’s disguised.
‘I’m not answering questions of any kind in front of all these people,’ he said, ‘that is absolutely not on.’ He was very pale, and his right hand was shaking where he had rested it on the counter. ‘I cannot and will not answer questions of a private nature in a public house – any business transaction, if there were one, is complicated, and can’t be answered by a straight yes or no.’
‘Oh yes they can,’ I said, ‘and if you had any with the Mardys they’re going to be.’
He said: ‘I think the best thing would be if we were to discuss anything that needs to be discussed out at my house, privately.’
‘I get results better the way I’m going,’ I said, ‘but still, very well, I’ll ring you and make an appointment convenient to both of us; I’ll be round.’
‘All right,’ he snapped. ‘Meantime I’d like to point out that I simply imagined you were new to the local police and I approached you because I thought that, being a man of some standing here in Thornhill, I might be able to give you a few tips.’
A face peered round at us from the other bar and I said: ‘Well, you couldn’t have got it more wrong. I’m nothing to do with the local police, I’m working from the Yard.’
‘All I wanted was to give you some advice, Sergeant.’
I said: ‘I’m afraid in my job I don’t take much of that.’
In the other bar the crowd that was listening had got going and roared out: ‘He wanted to give him advice, but got his cock caught in a vice! He thought he’d found someone to fleece, then found it was just the police!’
‘It’s nice to be liked in your local pub, isn’t it?’ I said to Baddeley.
‘
You have got the most abominable cheek,’ he said.
‘I need it. Now then, do you know a man called Richard or Dick Sanders?’
‘No.’
‘I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,’ I said. ‘Take plenty of time over your answers, don’t just snap them off. OK, now play that one again.’
‘I know who you mean, of course.’
‘Did he ever work for you?’
‘Whether he did or didn’t,’ he said furiously, ‘it’s not going to be discussed in here.’
‘We’ll save it up for our appointment, then,’ I said, ‘by which time I’ll doubtless have the answers anyway. Try and understand, Mr Baddeley. I work for a department called Unexplained Deaths, and I’m inquiring into Mrs Mardy’s disappearance. I have to dig till I find the right place to drill into.’
‘I wouldn’t drill hard into me,’ said Baddeley, ‘whoever you are. You’re just a police sergeant, and I could give you a hard time down here that you’ll never forget.’
I said: ‘This is more like it. Now you listen to me. After years of the work I do, I find that a terribly bald line, besides you’ve missed out half of it. The rest of it goes: if you don’t shut your boat I shall report you to your superiors and have you busted. Well, don’t bother. It’s all a load of blag and I’m not in the market for it.’
‘This is the first time I’ve ever heard of a police inquiry being carried on in a public house!’ he shouted.
‘You’d be surprised how many are,’ I said. ‘Thieves, grasses, heavy villains – I see them in pubs all the time. It’s better than an office at the Factory. It’s a good way of getting results fast.’
He went spare. ‘Are you putting me in the same bracket as people like that?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ I said. ‘I might be.’
‘You’re libelling me! Slandering me!’ He poked me in the shoulder.
‘Don’t do that,’ I said.
‘I’ve been publicly defamed! You’ve made me look an idiot in my own town, you’ll pay for it! I shall speak to my solicitors, Messrs Carrow & Carrow—’
Many of the people who had been in the public bar were round the door of our small one now. They were loving the scene. They roared out: ‘Carrow & Carrow, their credit’s very narrow. They’ll defend you, they will, and send you the bill, and cart you away in a barrow!’
‘How many times have I told you that this has got to stop, Captain Goodinge!’ Baddeley shouted to the governor above the din. ‘This is an impossible situation!’
I said to Baddeley: ‘Were you in the forces too? What was your rank? Everyone else in here seems to have one.’
Baddeley said loudly: ‘I too was a captain!’
The crowd, intoxicated with beer and delight, began to chant: ‘When I was a captain, a captain, a captain, when I was a captain, I got ’em in a fright!’
‘That’s another song I’ve told you about!’ Baddeley screamed at the governor. ‘Can’t you do anything about this, Goodinge?’
‘Well not really, Walter,’ the governor said mildly. ‘As far as I’m concerned it’s within permitted hours, and you can’t expect the lads not to talk and sing.’
‘But they’re insulting me!’
‘Why don’t you sue them?’ I said.
‘These ignorant people,’ said Baddeley, ‘they can’t help it, I daresay, they’re jealous because I’m going to run for mayor of Thornhill. I don’t care about their vote; they’re all on the dole anyway.’
‘You’ll make a very fine mayor,’ I said, ‘if I may express the opinion.’
‘I have certain ideas for the town,’ he replied smugly, ‘yes.’
The mob in the public bar, the folk that couldn’t get into ours because the doorway was full to bursting, had put in for another round, and when the beer came up they started singing again: ‘We’d march for Captain Baddeley, for Baddeley, for Baddeley, he doesn’t run too badly, he runs the other way!’
Then they all cheered.
‘It’s going to be a close contest for mayor,’ I said. ‘I can see that.’ I had trouble making myself heard.
‘All right, lads and lasses,’ Goodinge shouted, ‘that’ll do. Little place like Thornhill,’ he added to me confidentially, ‘you know what a little place is like.’
I wasn’t sure if I did, but I knew it was like any other place when you had to pee. I went out through some plastic panels, one marked toffs and the other toffees. I ended up by deciding I wasn’t a toffee. Beyond the doors was the usual freezing draught I was used to in pubs from Stoke Newington to Battersea – also the smell of urine, disinfectant, vomit and wet concrete.
I wasn’t thinking of the Mardys in the splashback, nor of Sanders, Baddeley or Kedward. I thought of Claire from High Court, straight as a little stick in thirty-eight: She led me back to my dead philosopher girl who said to me: if you’re too tired for love, I’ve something else in a drawer to speed up our frightful experience. I was back with her in West Hampstead again, questioning her for what she knew, and I heard her all over again saying: Despair? But there’s no intelligence without despair. To find yourself as a good brain in this world and then be ended in a random way, it defies all logic, it’s no better than a fucked-up orgasm. Naked thinking, she said, is the last indignity – the dead breast covered by your only lover long after he has died, been run over, gone mad or gone away: in the end what we name love is nothing but a thin remembrance, a deferred loss. Great ghost, you are a broken officer, our spirit is denounced, stripped and reduced to the ranks where it can shuffle unseen; bitterness, disgust and self-interest remain. All defeat, all battlefields are the same. Even Napoleon after Jena, even Wellington after Waterloo finally learned how to weep over the waste of trust, over faith in death lying where it fell, the lazy eyes, the broken arms and the stink of last meals bursting open for the rats into fresh, uncaring air – birds, flies, sun settling expertly on ideas according to earth’s primitive necessity, her sanitation and her plan. Our pub arguments were settled with a shell – our gods, our politics and beliefs picked over by lame men in tears, cracked skulls turned over, the brains gone, great pain. True, the remains were dealt with in style at a convenient date, a few children following to ask why and to learn, and some women white with grief, asking themselves why they had ever let him go.
So we spoke once as our thighs locked in the night – love’s own old lost story.
11
I went back to the hotel; the woman that looked like Pinocchio had gone. Instead, a young man with flat disappointed cheeks was sitting reading a soft porn mag, his chin confused in a little beard. His narrow chest was sheltered by an army woolly, patched in places where woollies never wore out. His eyes were sharp, though, and gave me an unkind look that I think was copied from the new series that television was running on the SAS.
‘What do you want?’ he snapped.
‘Not a bullet,’ I said, ‘not tonight. Just the key to Room 21.’
‘Oh that’s you, is it,’ he said, ‘the great detective, how’s the case going?’
‘Not the same way as you are,’ I said, ‘now mind your own fucking business and give me the key.’
He took on a shaken look. I said: ‘Now you can make yourself useful for once. I want a direct line from my room twenty-four hours a day, and I don’t want anyone listening in, OK?’
‘It’s not hotel policy,’ he said, ‘that isn’t. Normally they—’
‘Do yourself a favour with the law, darling,’ I said, ‘and change the policy, do it right away.’
‘I’m not sure if I know how,’ he said. All the same, he pushed a few plastic buttons on his switchboard and finally said: ‘That seems to be it.’ Then he opened his mag at a much folded page and murmured: ‘Hey, look at these snaps, see, you can look right up her. I love it – she’s a little wanker from the cradle up, she says here; it really makes my knees tremble, this little mystery does, she tells it all on page thirteen, she can’t leave it alone, she tells the whole lot in
here.’
‘It’s very sexist,’ I said, ‘what you’re saying.’
‘I know,’ he said, licking his thin lips, ‘and don’t I just love it.’
I went up to my room, took my jacket and shoes off and called the voice. It was out; I got the deputy voice instead. I was pleased; it was easier to get on with than the real thing. All this voice wanted was good manners, so I gave it some of that for a minute or two. ‘I wonder if you could give me a hand over this Thornhill business I’m on,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry to bother you when you were probably just going home.’
‘That’s quite all right, Sergeant.’
In spite of my rare effort to please, urgency got into my tone. ‘I’m afraid it’s a question of more banking,’ I said. ‘William Mardy, get the name down. I think there’ll be a drain on his account. Any big transactions over twelve months back will do for the present.’
‘Every withdrawal?’
‘No,’ I said, trying not to shout at him, ‘I mean the kind of withdrawals that people normally can’t afford.’
‘Say so, then,’ said the deputy voice, ‘and wait while I get it down.’ Presently he said: ‘OK.’
‘Now if you could just get the computer on it,’ I said, battling with my temper, ‘it’d be a lot of help.’ I gave him the name of Mardy’s bank, which I had got at the price of a few phone calls. ‘I want to know who cashed any big cheques he drew over the period – where and when.’
‘You want to know everything,’ said the deputy voice.
‘It’s my silly job.’
‘Things breaking where you are, Sergeant?’
‘I think a heart,’ I said.
I braked the car beside an elderly man who was walking his dog down a road outside Thornhill. I said: ‘Could you tell me the way to the Sanders’ place?’
‘You want to go up there?’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Are you local here?’
‘I suppose so,’ he said, ‘I’ve lived here sixty-eight years.’
How the Dead Live (Factory 3) Page 9
