‘That’s all right, then,’ I said, ‘you’re local.’
He scratched his head under his cap. ‘What do you want to go up there for anyway?’ he said. ‘Are you a friend, or related? Do you know them?’
‘No.’
‘Are they into you?’
‘No.’
‘Why do you want to have anything to do with them, then?’
‘Never mind that,’ I said, ‘just where do they live, these people, do you know?’
‘Of course I know. You’re on your way there now. Go on a mile and the road turns left uphill. I hope your tyres are good,’ he added, ‘they need to be – it’s rugged, that road.’
‘Old place?’
‘Old? Broken down, you mean. We call it Arnold’s farm. The Sanders rent it – pay the rent to Oldford’s the solicitors in the town. Sometimes, that is. There’s a gaggle of them up there.’ He spat across his dog’s back. ‘Since you’re not related nor a friend I’ll say it – they’re a load of rubbish up there.’ The dog barked and wagged its tail. The old man added: ‘Got a weapon with you?’
‘Why? Do you think I’m going to need one?’
‘Wouldn’t be the first time folk did. Still, if you’re anxious to be shot at you can have my ration; I had all I could stomach in the war and it earned me nothing.’
‘You think I could get shot at up there?’
‘Wouldn’t be the first time folk had come howling down from that place with some number nine up their arse. Writ servers, mostly. Are you one of them?’
‘No.’
‘None of my business,’ he said, ‘you could be a copper for all I care. Anyway, old Ma Sanders can’t show her face in Thornhill – she owes too much money, she’s made too much trouble, been in too much. Most of the money she owes is for alcohol – Christ, she drinks. Her old man fucked off years ago. I don’t blame him; she’s handy with a shotgun when she’s drunk. Or a kitchen knife.’ He looked at me again. ‘Another thing. If you don’t mind me giving you some advice, the first thing I’d do in your place would be to turn straight round and leave anything you’ve got on you that’s valuable somewhere safe – that load of no-hopers’ll have it off you somehow or other if not, they’ll find a way. And don’t turn your back on your motor while you’re up there – next thing you know, it’ll have no engine in it, no radio and no wheels.’
‘Relaxing,’ I said, ‘the countryside.’
‘Same as the city now, nearly. You a Londoner?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You sound like one.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, what’s the difference now? I’m just the remains of Thornhill; the best went into the two wars and stayed there – maybe they were lucky after all, at that. I just walk the dog round, still see the fields as they were, not the semi-detacheds on them. Horse and cart, traps I see, no cars.’ Rain started to drive through the hedge on a cold wind, coming down through two ragged hills the shape of half-empty breasts. The old man began coughing and turned his coat collar up. ‘No weather to be staying outdoors,’ he said, ‘the dog and I’ll be getting back into the warm.’ He coughed again and spat into the hedge; it was painful to listen to him. ‘German gas,’ he said, ‘and I’d take the bastards on again, give me a rifle. Yes, well up you go, son, and a mile on your left you’ll see a track with a post marked Lakes Mill. It runs out at a farm and that’s the Sanders’ place. Leave me something in your will if you do get killed,’ he added, ‘if you’ve anything to leave. I’m an OAP on thirty a week, and I find things tight at eighty-eight.’
He turned back with his dog and I watched them go away, two shapes on the road in the last pallor before the night, and drove on until I found the track that ended up, as the old man had said, in a neglected farmyard. I parked with a ruined barn on my left; ahead of me was a low building not much better than a barn itself, but still a house, a patchwork of mouldered bricks and breeze-blocks. There were no farm animals about, but four big dogs, no, five, came bounding over as I got out of the car; they were of no known breed, but they were savage, surrounding me whining and snarling, showing their teeth. Now, near the barn, standing so still that I hadn’t noticed him before in the gloom, I saw a young man holding a rake with his hat on the side of his head. I said to him: ‘Is your name Sanders?’ He didn’t move and I went up to him so that I could see his face. I instantly wished I hadn’t; he presented me with vanished eyes and a mouth open to show black, shattered teeth, a cheek covered with bruises. The dogs circled him contemptuously; it was me they were interested in. The boy’s jeans and jacket, never made for him, were in rags, and where they weren’t wet through with the rain they were rotten. His pants were soaked with his piss, and he smelled worse than a pig.
I shouted up at the house. The boy in front of me never moved but just stood with the wooden rake in his fist as if I wasn’t there, gazing away from me. I shouted again, and this time a huge, dirty woman rushed out of the main door of the farmhouse. She had a moustache and stockings that only reached to her swollen knees, and the whole of her body that I could see was ingrained with dirt among the dents in her fat. The dogs ran to her, their bellies and tails flat, and she grunted at them as they came to her: ‘Down, Flossie. Down, Bess. Down, Fiver,’ and they turned their muzzles up at her to growl in answer. She held a spade in her hand in much the same way as the boy held the rake. I had been looking at the dogs, but when I saw the woman’s hating expression as she looked at me, I didn’t bother about the dogs any more, but concentrated on the spade.
‘What do you fucking want?’ she said. ‘Get out of here.’
‘I will when I’ve seen your son,’ I said.
‘Who the hell are you?’ And when I showed her she screamed: ‘Police? Was that you on the phone? Ah, the fucking law.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Now get those bloody dogs away and get your son Dick down here for me to talk to.’
‘He isn’t here!’
‘Then I’ll wait till he comes back,’ I said, ‘though for my money I shan’t have to wait long because I think he’s upstairs behind that window there. But whether he is or he isn’t, the longer I have to wait the rougher it’ll be for him.’
‘What do you want to see him for?’ she shouted.
‘Could wind up being a judge’s business.’
‘You fuckers never let go,’ she shouted, ‘you miserable load of bastards.’
‘No, that’s right,’ I said, ‘we don’t let go.’
‘You’re on your Jack Jones,’ she said, ‘and I’ve got four more sons hanging around this shithole besides the half-wit there.’ She jerked her great chin at him.
‘Thinking of setting your mob on the law, are you?’ I said. ‘I should think about it very hard first, if I were you – that carries five years bottom weight.’
‘I know,’ she said, ‘but by Christ I’ve a mind to.’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘you old villain.’
The woman shook with fury at me, her thick grey hair falling down her back over her army fatigue jacket.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘there’s no point in us going on like this all night, though we can if you want to. I don’t care – it’s the taxpayer looks after my wages. But your boy Dick’s a tealeaf, I’ve had Records phone his form through – he’s been in bother with the law since he was a muppet. A petty thief, and too stupid not to get caught.’
‘All right,’ she said, defeated. She turned towards the house, and the blazing eyes of the dogs beside her followed every single thing she did. ‘Dick?’ she shouted up at the darkened house. ‘Come on down, you’ll have to come!’
Nothing happened except that a tattered curtain moved at the window I had spotted on the second floor. The old woman said: ‘Look, what could I offer you to go easy on him?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s to do with this Mardy business.’
‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘I just knew.’
‘It looks like a death to me,’ I said, ‘and Christ help anybody that’s been in any
way mixed up in it if it is.’
‘You mean it can’t be smoothed.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s gone rotten now and too far up, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.’
‘You bastard,’ she said. ‘Time was when I could have pulled my skirt over my tits and shown you something that would have sent any cunt down the dark path.’
‘Too late now,’ I said, ‘on either side.’
‘All right,’ she said, ‘but Dick’s trying to go straight, he’s done his time.’
‘He’s making a strange job of going straight if I’m reading this right,’ I said.
‘You bastards,’ she said, ‘you come on so hard.’
‘And the Mardys, who cared about them?’
‘We’ve got to live how we can,’ she said, ‘these days there’s no other way to protect your own.’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘I’m getting on in life and I’m no bastard. But the law’s what it is, now get that boy of yours down here.’
Beaten, she turned, the coils of her hair twisting down to her great arse, and called up at the house: ‘Come on down, Dick, Dick, hey, you’ll have to come.’
I could see how drunk she was; and still I thought, what do I truly represent? In my job I couldn’t afford to think like that, which was just why I did it. And the idiot still stood motionless in the yard. I took stock and saw that this place that had begun by looking threatening and dangerous was really just what it looked, very sad, very hopeless.
At last I heard someone coming downstairs in the house, and a young man came out. He looked like any of the other youths I’d seen trailing about in Thornhill – or in the East End for that matter.
‘Are you Dick Sanders?’
‘Suppose I said no.’
‘Let’s get this right – I’m saying are you?’
‘You’re looking at my hair. Just because I grow it long, preacher.’
‘Don’t swop language with me,’ I said, ‘that’d be the silliest thing you ever did. It’s the length of your form that interests me, not the length of your hair – I’m a police officer. Now are you Dick Sanders or not?’
‘Yes all right, I am,’ he said, ‘and so what’s it about this time?’
‘You know bloody well,’ I said, ‘it’s not about a TV set that fell off a truck – you’ve got to where you might be going to star in court, you’re in the big time, Dick, so let’s just go over it and see if you know your lines.’
He thought that lot over, and I watched him do it. ‘You’re going to be headlines exactly where you don’t need them,’ I said. ‘It’s down to the Mardys, you’re gone, now work that out, I want to know everything, OK?’
He stroked his wiry hair, long and tied back with a ribbon, in a weary way; his face was pinched and tired, his lips like a machine that refuses a credit card.
‘I’m just a gardener.’
‘No, not just a gardener,’ I said, ‘more an odd job man, and very odd jobs. So odd that I’ve come all the way down here to find out more about them – now let’s start.’
‘You nauseate me,’ he said, ‘I find you nauseating.’
‘The smell a corpse makes is worse than all the smell of us put together,’ I said, ‘and I believe that there’s one around here somewhere in Thornhill not far that’ll make me vomit if not you. Now don’t be arrogant and look at me in your funny way, it’ll get you nowhere. You just tell me what you know about the Mardys during the time you worked for them and realize you’re in deep trouble.’
He began to get afraid. ‘I tell you I just gardened for them.’
‘And that was it? Just planting and digging?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I don’t think that’s right at all, my darling,’ I said, ‘so speak up before I tune you to the song – there was a lot more to it than just that, and I’m going to pitch your strings to the point where you’ll sing me the lot, so get going.’ The old woman was still standing near us, silent and weaving with drink, and I said to Dick: ‘Is your mum strangling your throat? She can go or stay as long as you talk, I don’t care.’
I didn’t; he did though. He turned to her with eyes like a swivelling shotgun and said: ‘Fuck off out of this, Mum, will you.’
She screamed at me: ‘Don’t you go victimizing my boy, do you hear?’
I said: ‘I’ll do what I have to,’ and the boy said: ‘Just go back indoors, Ma, didn’t I say – I can manage.’ I said: ‘Yes, and take your dogs with you.’
‘Why? They bother you?’ she sneered.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they stink, now get them out,’ and at that she turned heavily away towards the house, trudging across the mud of the yard on swollen ankles. She said backwards to her son, the words streaming on her frozen breath: ‘You mind yourself with that cunt, Dick, my son, he’s a copper and he’s got an evil mind,’ and so she slunk off back into the house, dogs and all, and the warped door banged to after her.
‘That’s better,’ I said to Sanders, ‘much better. Better for me definitely, and maybe for you too – if you spill about the Mardys we could perhaps do a deal.’
‘Money?’ he said.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said, ‘what, you? It’s your liberty I’m thinking of, you’ll be lucky to keep it.’
‘Still, a few quid greases the wheels.’
‘You are an idiot first class, you travel free to the nuthouse,’ I said. ‘Didn’t I just tell you? You’ve got a lot to learn.’
He said: ‘If you’ve the money for it, they say you can do that in bars.’
‘Not in your case,’ I said. ‘In your case you won’t learn it in them but you’ll be buried and forgotten behind them, so try and play lucky for once. Now tell me what I want to know and we’ll see what we can do, all right? OK, answer these questions. What was Mrs Mardy doing during the time you worked up at their house? How did she behave? How did she look? What did she wear? Come on. Talk.’
‘I can’t. I didn’t see. I was just there.’
‘You lying bastard,’ I said. ‘Look, I know how thick you are, a man has to be thick with the form you’ve got, but you can still see the difference in the woman who employs you when she’s got a veil round her face and when she hasn’t, surely, can’t you?’
‘All right,’ he said, ‘all right, let up, will you?’ Now he was really frightened.
‘I don’t see why I should,’ I said. ‘You didn’t.’
‘Yeah she wore a veil,’ he said, ‘but what you said just now is threatening.’
‘I haven’t begun,’ I said. ‘A worm like you, I could have a W in my jacket for you right now, so really sing, it’s the disappearance of a human being we’re talking about, you’re getting the message at long last, so speak, speak, fuck you.’
He knew when he was beat. ‘All right, well, yes,’ he said, ‘while I worked up there, like over a period, you know, I watched her getting weaker, kind of drained, it’s dificult to know how to put it, trundling about in the garden and that, yeah, her face veiled – she’d always go into what they called the rose garden, all overgrown, no roses, no man could keep up, it was all just weeds but you could see where the flowers had been, and she’d turn her veiled head away if I was around and stretch her arms up a moment into the sunlight, it was always afternoon, and then go back into the house. As for the husband, poor old gent, he’d be fumbling somewhere behind her, bending to pick wild flowers, there were no others, and he’d have made a bouquet of them which he’d always give her on the balcony at sunset, there above the front door.’
I said: ‘Had you any idea why she always covered her face?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘nothing to do with me! No, Christ, of course I don’t fucking know!’
‘I hope for your own sweet sake that you’re telling the truth,’ I said, ‘because if you’re not you could find yourself being stood in a concrete corner for a very long time. Your best option now is to tell me the entire truth over what you know about the Mardys. Do it now, Dick, while you’ve still got
a chance.’
‘You mob never let up,’ he said.
‘No, never where there’s a death,’ I said. ‘Use a little imagination and try to see what it means to die.’
‘I’d never thought about it,’ he said and I said start before it’s too late, Dick.
‘You folk from London are really murder,’ he sobbed.
‘It’s the filthy business we’re into,’ I said, ‘like it or not – so how did you get the job up at the Mardys?’
‘I was recommended. All right, I’ll talk – have you ever heard of a man here called Walter Baddeley?’
I said: ‘Where do you fit in with him?’
‘I fit in with him where everybody else in Thornhill does, nearly,’ he said. ‘We’re all on sup. ben.’
I said: ‘Was it Baddeley sent you up to work for the Mardys?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, nodding and bowing his thin head. ‘Yeah, it was.’
‘And you didn’t just garden,’ I said. ‘You spied, listened and watched.’
‘This is very tiring,’ he said, ‘all this is.’ His face set obstinately.
‘So is Canterbury,’ I said, ‘specially since it’ll be the third time round for you in there, now choose.’
He laughed in my face. ‘You think you’re so bright and so tough, you think you can do anything with a warrant card. But I reckon you’re just a cunt.’
My voice turned grey on him and in me and I said: ‘You’re a fool to take me for a cunt, you know nothing about me, what I’ve done, what I’ve been, what’s happened to me. But all right, let’s play cunties, now supposing I were to take this’ (removing the rake from the hand of the motionless figure beside us) ’and hit you so hard with it that you had to wear a scarf round your face for the rest of your days, then what?’
‘Oh come on,’ he said, sniggering yet backing off, ‘you’d be in dead trouble if you did that, now you would, wouldn’t you? Hey, man, that’s enough.’
‘You’re so right, it is,’ I said. I was never going to hit him and didn’t need to, for he broke slowly over on his knees in a corner of his own accord, sobbing, covering himself up with his hands. ‘You pitiful man,’ I said, ‘get up, get up.’
How the Dead Live (Factory 3) Page 10
