How the Dead Live (Factory 3)

by Raymond, Derek

  ‘Must I talk about that now?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Tell me rather, how long has she been in this?’

  ‘Since she died last August,’ he whispered. He bent mechanically to check the temperature at the outer case. I read it over his shoulder; it recorded minus seventy.

  ‘Who built this machine?’ I said.

  ‘I had it built for the two of us,’ he said, ‘by a firm in London to my own specifications. I told them what I wanted, they built it and I paid for it, that was all.’

  I knew I would get the name of the builders and just store it in case; there weren’t four firms in the country that built fridges like this – the size for two bodies and the temperature for a corpse. ‘Open it now,’ I said.

  He nodded and swung the lid up. A cloud of frozen vapour rose from the inside, where lay a shocking bundle of green plastic in the rough shape of a human being. It lay on its back, masked, bound and tied.

  ‘I’m going to be frank with you,’ Mardy said.

  ‘You’d do best to be.’

  ‘It’s her face you’ll want to look at, of course.’

  ‘Yes, to identify her.’

  ‘There isn’t much left,’ said Mardy, ‘I’ll explain,’ reaching in as he spoke. The head and face were also swathed in green plastic. He added: ‘I uncover her face sometimes, a minute or two never hurts.’ The freezer’s motor hummed under her. ‘I spend a lot of time down here with her, at night mostly. Yet I need to be careful. It’s her brain that needs most protection against any warmth. The vital organs too, of course, heart, liver – and her face.’

  ‘What did you do to her?’

  ‘Loved her.’

  ‘Did you kill her?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, starting to cry. It’s terrible to see an old man cry. ‘It depends what you mean.’

  ‘Try and go on.’

  ‘Marianne was very beautiful.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen photographs.’

  ‘She’ll be beautiful again, of course.’

  ‘Please tell me what you mean.’

  ‘I mean when she rises again,’ said Mardy, ‘when she comes back. She’s only resting here. In fifty years’ time science will be so far advanced that everything about Marianne will be cured. My task is to preserve her during that time; you heard that tape.’ He was leaning in over his wife’s body as he spoke, busily loosening the straps that bound her bust and head. ‘Every limb must be separately encased,’ he muttered, ‘an arm frozen to the ribs, or one leg to the other, that can cause frightful damage under ice.’

  ‘You packed her yourself?’

  ‘I did everything myself, now do you understand what hell is? Losing your entire world? I mean to cheat her death, what else could a doctor be for?’

  ‘I’m afraid I must see the face,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I’ve unpacked it,’ he said, ‘she’s all ready for you.’ He coughed. ‘She’s not as she was, not yet.’

  ‘My nerves are all right,’ I said.

  ‘It’s like the face of someone waiting for a train just at the moment,’ he said. He leaned over her and took the plastic away from her face: ‘Now don’t be alarmed.’

  It was frightful; it wouldn’t have been so bad if it had been an animal, but this was a human being like us who had once been happy and given concerts. She had no lower lip at all; the dubious teeth of a middle-aged woman grinned in a jaw locked solid in ice and her eyes, no longer startled, shook only the onlooker. They were milky in colour and hard as glass.

  ‘I see you’re looking at her eyes,’ said Mardy in a professional way, ‘it’s only natural you should, but that’s not as serious as it looks. At minus sixty-five she lives in a different world, but her sight will come back with the rest in fifty years.’

  I said: ‘Why is she bald?’

  ‘That’s nothing,’ said Mardy, ‘I’ll explain it to you. Her hair will grow out again, as beautiful as it ever was. But I had to shave her head so that I could operate.’

  I said: ‘I think the best thing we could do is for you to close Mrs Mardy up again for now, and for you and I to go upstairs and talk.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He relocked the freezer when he had finished repacking the body. He made sure the temperature was correctly set. He picked up the flowers that had fallen when he opened the lid and replaced them. He got out the keys to the cellar door to lock that after us, but I held my hand out and said: ‘I’ll take the keys.’

  ‘Of course.’

  I pocketed them and said: ‘Look, I know nothing about surgery or the year 2030, but I’m a policeman, and as far as the police are concerned your wife is judicially and clinically dead.’

  ‘Metaphysically—’

  ‘It’s no use talking to a judge about metaphysics,’ I said, yet as I spoke I wondered if there wasn’t something wrong about that. As for the police, I thought it’s a good thing he’s got me and not Charlie Bowman to deal with.

  ‘I didn’t murder her,’ he said. ‘She was my love. I was trying to save her, not kill her.’

  ‘But from our point of view she died under your knife.’

  ‘If a surgeon were to be told that each time he lost a patient, there’d be no more operations carried out at all.’

  ‘But you weren’t qualified to carry it out.’

  ‘That’s why I wanted you to hear the tape.’

  ‘I understand all right,’ I said, ‘but prosecuting counsel won’t. You have to realize that. Now tell me formally why you didn’t report her death.’

  ‘Because they’d have buried her. She’d have rotted in the ground.’

  ‘That’s going to happen anyway, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘There’s no way either you or I can prevent it. The autopsy, the coroner’s verdict and then—’

  ‘I’m sixty-three,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t matter for me. I wouldn’t mind dying – I’ve had enough of horror and loss. It’s for her.’

  I studied him and realized that madness is the last defence of the mind when it can’t hope to reconcile itself with events; I, too, was standing between routine and the unknowable. I could not say what I ought to have said: we all have to die. Why prosecute a mind at the end of its tether when far more villainous people get off scot-free? The morbid desire that bores have for a headline?

  I locked the door to Marianne’s cellar myself and we stood outside it, talking in low voices.

  As we started to go back upstairs by the light of our uneasy torches he said, without turning to me: ‘When I think how I started. I was one of the most brilliant students of my year.’ He added: ‘What is brilliance, I wonder? The refusal to accept an end?’

  20

  We were upstairs in Mardy’s room. Four walls can suddenly become a heart too full for words, a space of indescribable pain, unspoken yet felt. Love’s unseen but broken wings batter on window panes as words most urgently meant, and your own anxiety is sharply fastened on the invisible. I sense death in houses that I go into, even ancient murder – the short stab, the red glare of a pistol, the ungovernable tension of a moment, the trigger word that nobody can revoke.

  Mardy had crossed to a corner. He looked at me and said: ‘I’ll be lucky to get out of this.’

  ‘Out of what?’

  ‘It’s been a long time to the crisis is what I mean.’

  ‘I’m sorry I have to be here,’ I said. I felt myself to be what I was, a public agent sent to weigh up and destroy values.

  ‘I’m sorry too.’ He said: ‘I want you to listen to this. Do you know how a person, like my wife, can get a better understanding of existence in a foreign country sometimes than they can in their own?’

  ‘I believe I can imagine it,’ I said, ‘but it’s no use trying to persuade me out of being a policeman.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m trying to do,’ he said, ‘I’m trying to get you to see something I feel.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘well?’

  He said: ‘My wife wrote this – she wrote and sang
our language better than I do. “I looked out when the cuckoo sang, Winter had gone, now summer ran down from the sun. No dreams or rest, no final sleep be mine, Your love and breast be mine. The fruit turns red now, swelling in the dark. And can we ever touch with love, the dark? Passion’s all colours, beauty only one. I’m glad to go into the dark with you, our comprehension singing, for blindness is nothing black if we come out singing like a season after the long dark and after madness, after sighing, after the hatred and the losses, our fighting and our dying.” “Poor prince, cold prince, your hands are cold.” “I’m dying Sweet queen, your passion in my absence flying away, hold us to all our tears, our nearness dying. No dreams or rest, no final sleep be mine, your love, sweet breast, be mine.”‘

  He had forgotten me, as he was justified in doing, and I saw him as he was, quite absent from us in his wasted shape, his hair and poor clothes, bent in that grief which is the terrible element of amusement for the uninvolved, the temptation to laugh as a primitive form of hiding from sadness being the most terrible kind of ignorance.

  ‘It was just a pimple to start off with,’ he was saying, ‘on the left corner of her lower lip. Yes, at first we both laughed it off as a cold sore, but then it didn’t go away.

  ‘The horror of loss,’ he said, ‘the immutable ruthlessness of existence that you can only be young to ignore.

  ‘The horror,’ he said. ‘I walk the narrowest of ropes. Do you think that I sleep? The walls round my bed, if I go there, are spattered with the mad figures of dwarves in the plaster, sneering deities, insane judges with Habsburg lips and half their head missing, a peasant coming at his wife with an axe, she laughing in a corner, and God is a middle-aged man with a moustache like an army officer’s whose stare varies from wicked to kind according to the sun’s position behind the curtains, which I always keep drawn. Cryogenics?’ he added. ‘The Americans go far too low. They freeze theirs at minus 196 degrees, but sixty-five’s ample in my opinion.’

  I said: ‘Explain why Walter Baddeley was blackmailing you.’

  He said: ‘Because there was an electricity strike and the temperature started to rise. The only solution was to go to the undertaker’s to get dry ice.’

  ‘That was a delivery that cost you thirty thousand pounds,’ I said. ‘I’ve got the cheques.’

  ‘I had to keep her temperature down,’ he said. ‘I don’t care about the thirty thousand pounds.’

  ‘Whether you do or you don’t,’ I said, ‘I do. I care very much indeed; I loathe blackmailers; it’s a form of bullying and cowardice I can’t stomach.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have interfered,’ he said.

  ‘I had to; it’s my job.’

  He groaned in despair.

  ‘I’m a police officer,’ I said. ‘I can’t help it, but it’s against the law to conceal a death, you know that.’

  He hid his face in his hands. ‘Why can’t you just go away,’ he said, ‘and leave us both alone?’

  ‘You know that’s not possible.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, tears rolling down his face, ‘but she was my wife.’

  ‘I’m not here to argue that,’ I said, ‘your counsel will have to.’

  ‘I don’t care about any punishment I might get,’ he said, ‘not at my age. That’s not the point. What matters is that if they take her away we’ll be lost to each other for ever.’

  ‘I want to help you,’ I said, ‘but there’s a point where I can’t. I know it’s absurd, but I’ve my own people to deal with. Who brought you the dry ice?’

  ‘Do you know anyway?’

  ‘Nearly all of it.’

  ‘It was a man called Prince and a man I used to have as a gardener called Sanders.’

  ‘Employed by the undertaker.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He bled us white. He started by offering us an annuity when Marianne first looked ill. I refused, but when death happened and then the electricity strike as well, I had to go to him to keep her temperature down.’

  ‘And you never had any trouble from the local police?’

  ‘No, that was in our contract.’

  ‘Between you and Baddeley?’

  ‘It wasn’t put like that. It was between two companies.’

  ‘Baddeley set them up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know what they were called,’ I said, ‘Wildways and Clearpath.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And with all the gossip about your wife going round Thornhill,’ I said, ‘why didn’t the police down here intervene?’

  ‘The inspector’s wife and Baddeley are brother and sister; they’re also in business together.’

  ‘Yes, gambling,’ I said. ‘I know. Kedward’s tame, a tame copper, but I wanted to hear you say it.’

  ‘Well, now you know.’

  ‘But they weren’t going to leave it at that, were they?’ I said. ‘I can guess. Baddeley and Kedward were just going to wait till you ran out of money, then force that annuity on you in exchange for this place, and for their continued silence.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mardy, ‘and I’d never have done it. This place is for Marianne when she comes back, and for no one else.’

  ‘But they’d left you no way out.’

  ‘It may look like checkmate on the board,’ Mardy said, ‘but I’d have found some way.’

  We paused for a while and then I said: ‘This will probably go to trial, I have to warn you. I’m not cautioning you now, but just make sure you’re well represented. You’ll get good counsel for nothing; no fair-minded man likes a blackmailer.’

  Blackmail an old man who has lost the wife he hopes to save? What land is this whose laws I operate?

  ‘I couldn’t stand a trial,’ he said. ‘I’m in enough pain.’

  I said: ‘It’ll depend on the coroner’s decision, and of course the DPP.’ I thought, I’ll have to tell him this, too. ‘There’ll be a lot of publicity about it as well, I’m afraid – we might as well go on being frank with each other.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘no, I couldn’t.’ He said to me: ‘Won’t they ever stop?’

  I thought, no. The lower levels of the Sunday press will have fun with this for ever.

  Mardy bit into the side of his cheek and said: ‘If you had been there! If you could have seen her! I told you, it looked like nothing but a cold sore getting worse on the outer edge of her lower lip. We laughed about it to begin with, though I never liked the look of it from the start. But she was so proud of her looks – and rightly so – that what could I say? However, I remember one evening in May last year, we were having supper, she said to me, William, I don’t like this spot I’ve got on my lip here, don’t you see that it gets bigger all the time? I know you’ve had it some time now, I said, describe to me exactly how it feels. Well, it’s hurting me, she said. I said, is it like a throbbing pain? She said, it is, rather. A month later it looked quite wrong for a cold sore. It was the wrong colour. It had become angry, a purple colour, with a hard cracked scab on it. For several weeks she had taken to gnawing on it and I said, don’t do that, dear. She said I can’t help it, it’s driving me mad. You’re the doctor, do you think it might be malignant? My blood ran cold in the face of my opinions; I had absolutely put it off that she could be right. You know how we’re all weak? My weakness was that I laughed at her and told her not to be so silly, though of course I knew much better. But a fortnight later, one evening, we were out in the garden, she suddenly said to me, William, I don’t think I can stand this place on my lip any more. Are you in pain? Yes, I’m in pain, and I don’t see how you can go on kissing me on this place any more.

  ‘Then I knew what death meant.

  ‘Of course it could be removed, I said, that place, only a sample of it would have to be taken first and sent for analysis. She turned to me among the roses and said simply: I want you to do it, William. Marianne, I said, I’m not qualified to do it, I’m struck off, you know that. But if you want, I can send you to some of the top surgeons in Londo
n, men I know, we were students together. But she would keep going on: no, no one but you is going to touch my body, I love you and I have faith in you. This is how it happened, Sergeant. Why, William, she said, you can do it, I know you can do it and it must be done; you’re not getting soft, are you? She said, you had the most brilliant future ahead of you as a surgeon.’

  ‘But something happened to it,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you about that in a minute. Meantime I yielded to her. You know what women are? Or any people? I ended by going up to London and equipping myself with everything I should need. Where she is downstairs, that cellar, I turned that into a theatre for her. She came down with me and said, half curiously, I’ve never performed in a theatre like this before. It was such hot weather. We decided the date over dinner the night before, and I said, have a good dinner now, and then nothing till after the op. We ate everything we liked most; I remember it was oysters to start with, then roast beef, potatoes and a green salad, also two very good bottles of wine. You’ll be on a drip after this, I said, and she said yes, I know. All our tragedy was in our happiness over that meal. It’s for tomorrow evening, then, she said, and I said yes, if you’re sure you agree. I insist, she said.’

  He turned to me and said: ‘Oh, what a fool I was ever to agree, but you see it was our love.’

  I said: ‘You took the sample?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And had it analysed.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and it was malignant, a sarcoma. Of course, I had had to cut her lip a little for the sample and she already looked different because of it. We had another dinner but she couldn’t keep it down. Later we toasted each other with champagne and she said, William, it is malignant, isn’t it? And I said yes, because we’ve never had any secrets from each other. She said, I knew it was, deep down.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘I told her that the whole growth would have to be removed but I said, Marianne, listen, you’ll have to go into hospital for it. No, never, she said. I’ve got no anaesthetist, nor possibility of any help, I said, you’ve got to understand, and that growth on your lip has got to be removed. But she said, no, I believe in you, and only in you, William. I said, and supposing I won’t remove it? She said, well then, I shall die, shan’t I?’