Play Dead

by Bill James

  But Harpur had decided a long time ago now that to deal with Iles it was occasionally necessary to get barbaric, as answer to his own lofty, frequent, effortless barbarism. The Assistant Chief would understand this - consider it absolutely normal, in fact, required. Iles despised non-resistance. Perhaps his mother had said something to him about it as he grew up: ‘Matador, bull, Desy. Likewise, you nobly honour your opponents.’ She’d probably leave vague which of this pair - matador, bull - he was.

  ‘Did we learn anything, sir?’ Harpur asked again.

  But Iles didn’t answer. He seemed to grow very tense suddenly. Harpur thought, God, is this poisoned ground? Had the pen picked up some contamination over the months, years, lying here, that could kill instantly, like cyanide? ‘You OK, sir? I mean, you as you, not Gerald or Jane.’

  ‘What the fuck’s this, Col?’

  ‘What, sir?’

  ‘Listen.’

  Iles pulled back a bit to clear the way to Harpur’s ears. Now, he could hear a police car siren, perhaps more than one.

  ‘Some bugger saw what looked like a scrap or worse here and dialled nine-nine-nine,’ Iles said. ‘People will be sensitive about this spot after the murder.’ He stood. Now, he did offer Harpur a hand and pulled him up, too. ‘We disappear, Col. “There’s blood upon thy face.”’

  ‘It’s yours, then.’

  ‘Don’t get sentimental and possessive about that. Wipe it off.’ He gave Harpur a handkerchief from his coat pocket. ‘They’ll come in as if from Riston. We withdraw the other way.’

  ‘What’ll we do with the shopping - leave it?’

  ‘Stop pissing about, Col, will you?’

  They ran. Harpur had some difficulty with that after the kicking.

  FOUR

  ‘Yes, as to your questions, Col, we learned something, didn’t we, or half a something, anyway?’ Iles said as they drove back to their hotel, Harpur at the wheel. The Assistant Chief sounded perky enough: able to distinguish between a something and half a something. A Reader’s Digest article Harpur had come across not long ago said a person’s intelligence level could be judged by his/her ability to see similarities and differences. The ACC’s mental state must be OK or even OK-plus.

  The Biro face incision was on the far side from Harpur and out of sight. Speaking generally, Harpur felt glad of that. Although he thought the damage had been necessary as a playful deterrent in case Iles went totally and murderously berserk from sex jealousy, he didn’t want to spend much time looking at it, any more than he’d enjoyed hearing that wound lovingly try to hang on to the pen by flesh grip when Harpur pulled it out. Blood had rivuletted down the ACC’s face, soaking his shirt collar and jacket lapel. He looked like a fencing slip-up - sabre fencing as a sport, not the building site, Keep Out kind of fencing. In the sport, someone on the end of a hit would cry ‘touché’ to acknowledge token contact from the other’s foil. The delve into Iles’s face by Biro went several millimetres beyond a surface touch, though. The Assistant Chief’s mucked-up clothes could go with Harpur’s suit to the cleaners in the morning, unless Iles objected to having his gear treated as a unit with Harpur’s. He’d probably regard that as disgusting impudence, like being asked to use Harpur’s comb. The front passenger seat would need some scrubbing.

  ‘What actual type of thing did we learn, or half-learn, sir - its ballpark category?’ Harpur asked. ‘Just for clarification.’

  ‘Fuck ballparks. That’s not our lingo.’

  ‘What actual type of thing did we learn, sir - its broad British category?’ Harpur asked. ‘Just for clarification.’

  ‘I knew you’d get there eventually, Col.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Off the beaten track, Harpur.’

  ‘In which respect, sir?’

  ‘Yes, off the beaten track.’

  ‘New methods of looking at things, do you mean, sir - methods off the beaten track, so to speak? What’s referred to, I gather, as “lateral thinking”? Escape the narrowness and clichéd response of the usual approach?’

  ‘Off the beaten track,’ Iles replied. ‘This comes out of our little sojourn on the Elms Estate housing project tonight. You might ask, “Who is or was off the beaten track, and which beaten track?” That’s an entirely reasonable question in the present circs, and a sign of your not by any means negligible acumen.’

  ‘Which, sir?’

  ‘Which what?’

  ‘Well, circs,’ Harpur said.

  ‘These.’

  ‘Who is or was off the beaten track, sir? I think that’s an entirely reasonable question in the present circs.’

  ‘Interesting, isn’t it?’

  ‘Which?’ Harpur replied.

  ‘Which what?’

  ‘Which beaten track?’

  ‘That’s the heart of it, in my view,’ Iles said. ‘Certainly worth some consideration. You’ve put your finger on it, Col. I was convinced you would. People say all those things about you, but I think they’re hasty.’

  ‘Which things?’

  ‘Malign.’

  ‘In which respect, sir?’

  ‘Don’t let them depress you, Col. You have your positive aspects. They’re not on palpable show but they’re there somewhere in you. I tell these critics it’s impossible and unfair to judge a man entirely by his slouch appearance and casual attention to hygiene.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  So, after their little charade on Elms, flitting in and out of their true selves, flitting in and out of their make-believe selves, alive and dead - Harpur and Iles went next evening to call on the real Jane and Gerald at their flat off Guild Square. It must be a weird experience for the ACC to, as it were, hand back their identities to this couple, Iles having been both of them less than twenty-four hours ago in very memorable conditions, voice bang-on for each, characters passably defined: she large-minded, bold; he cautious, sceptical. ‘But surely the case is closed,’ Gerald said, smileless, letting them in. ‘The arrest, the trial, the conviction. We gave our evidence then, dealt with cross-questioning, too. Does it drag on, then?’

  Harpur sympathized. ‘And very valuable evidence. But some tidying is still necessary,’ he said.

  ‘Tidying?’ Gerald said.

  ‘Several untouched elements,’ Harpur said.

  ‘Two very senior officers sent again from another force to do “some tidying”?’ Gerald said. ‘Is it really so? Hard to understand.’

  ‘An aftermath is like this sometimes,’ Harpur replied. ‘The exact shape of an aftermath is often hard to figure. I don’t know whether you’ve had any experience of aftermaths, but pinning an aftermath down is tricky sometimes.’ He couldn’t tell him that the Home Office - or, at least, Maud Logan Clatworthy, star of the Home Office youth team - no, couldn’t tell him that Maud believed the conviction reached only an edge of Larkspur’s organized villainy and corruption; was not much more than a token conviction, a fall-guy conviction. She thought it required a serious, incisive, follow-up pry by the original outside investigators, already knowledgeable about the area: Iles and him. To date, the mission was based only on rumour and loose talk. Maud possessed no hard information, and neither did he and Iles. Maud had intuitions, though, plus, probably, that Oxbridge first-class degree. It could give her intuitions a touch of credibility, solidity and oomph.

  ‘Yes, Detective Chief Superintendent Harpur has always been one for a phrase,’ Iles said. ‘“Some tidying” in an “aftermath”. And because it’s an aftermath we might have to go over certain old material again. A quick glance at it. Forgive us that, will you, please?’ Harpur could see both Jane and Gerald were fixated on the Assistant Chief’s face crack. Very dark bruising had gone up and down: up to his eyelid and lower region of the forehead, and down almost to the corner of his mouth. You’d often see women marked like this in domestic violence courts. That comparison would probably please Iles. He liked to feel he had a link with all sorts across gender, religion, weight, class, education, medical
state, race, as long as they didn’t try to get objectionably close.

  He said: ‘Miss Matson - Jane, if I may - you declared in your trial evidence and statements earlier that you and Mr Beatty - Gerald, if I may - yes, you two were crossing the Elms building site between Ritson mall and Guild Square on the night of the killing, when you saw the body of Detective Sergeant Mallen about forty metres to your left.’

  ‘I didn’t know it was a body immediately,’ she said.

  ‘No, quite,’ Iles said. ‘A good moon but still fairly dark.’

  ‘It was a shape, a heap, that’s how it seemed at first.’

  ‘You thought possibly a pile of discarded clothes,’ Iles said. ‘This is in the court narrative.’

  ‘At first, yes. All sorts of litter on that site, the clothes possibly dumped as unwanted from a stolen suitcase,’ Jane said.

  ‘But then you corrected?’ Iles replied.

  Gerald Beatty said: ‘Jane had drawn my attention to . . . to, well, something unusual over on our left. Yes, she thought just discarded clothes. I thought so, too. I joked that it might be an out-of-season Guy Fawkes.’

  Iles chuckled for several seconds - no, Harpur realized it was more than several: say ten - a thorough-going, durable, entirely uncontemptuous chuckle. Iles said: ‘Some jokes are all the better for avoiding too much subtlety.’

  ‘But then she revised this,’ Gerald replied, ‘and said it looked like a man, sort of hunched on the ground, maybe ill, perhaps a heart attack. Possibly a vagrant. I wasn’t sure, but she insisted. I suppose I felt reluctant to make the detour. We were each carrying two full carrier bags from Ritson.’

  ‘Yes, and I expect they could put you off balance slightly,’ Iles said, ‘especially when negotiating around and over obstacles such as flattened lengths of fencing and so on.’

  ‘The car was in dock,’ Gerald said.

  ‘Eggs?’ Harpur asked. ‘A need to be careful with the bags when you set them down.’

  ‘And Jane had it more or less right,’ Iles replied.

  ‘Yes,’ Jane said. ‘I’d gone a few steps off towards whatever it was to cut the distance and could see him more clearly then.’

  ‘But not a vagrant, of course,’ Gerald said. ‘A police officer, as we discovered later.’

  ‘I expect you’ve been to the Elms site as part of your investigation?’ Jane said.

  ‘Well, yes, we’ve had a quick look around there, just to get the geography in our minds. That’s basic,’ Iles said.

  ‘You’ll know it’s quite a big development,’ she said. ‘Not always easy to see accurately what’s what far off.’ Harpur could tell she tried to keep herself from staring at the unusual mess on the left side of Iles’s face, but this was difficult. Jane’s eyes would switch to it automatically for a half second, then get deliberately pulled away - then sneak back involuntarily for another short, appalled gaze, and so on. Gerald, the same, more or less. It was that kind of prominent, mysterious pit and widespread blemished vista. They’d be speculating in their heads about the cause, but would probably never think of a mock-up ribcage massage and the pre-emptive old Biro as explanation. These were fairly unusual events, not easy to imagine.

  If Harpur and Iles were back on their own manor, and one of those important civic functions took place, Harpur felt sure the Assistant Chief would refuse an invitation because he looked such a deep-pecked calamity. Already, Iles detested his Adam’s apple, considering it too glaringly prominent and gristle-craggy; and to have another defect in his appearance could make him very jumpy. The city treasurer, and/or director of parks and baths, shouldn’t be allowed to see him like this. He’d realize they and others would be laughing in private about it, even if they didn’t know the lesion was caused by a shagged-out bit of pen during a dramatization snippet on a stricken building site.

  But Harpur and Iles were here now in Larkspur, not back home on Cowslip. They had easy chairs with tea and biscuits in the flat’s large, very spruce living room. There were pictures, prints and photographs of animals and birds on the walls. Iles would be noting these as a guide to Jane and Gerald’s tastes and characters. Iles had told Harpur several times in the past to be careful what art he displayed in his house because art told tales about the owner’s psyche. ‘Stick to watercolours of dinky little sailing boats on a calm, azure sea, Col,’ Iles had said. ‘They’re so wishy-washy and slight they haven’t got the strength to reveal anything but their individual triteness.’

  ‘That Elms estate - an ugly nuisance now, really, so near the town centre,’ Gerald said. ‘Off-putting for visitors. And it can still be troublesome.’

  ‘Oh?’ Iles said.

  ‘In what respect?’ Harpur asked.

  ‘I heard the police were up there again last night,’ Gerald said.

  ‘Really?’ Iles replied.

  ‘An incident?’ Harpur asked.

  ‘Possible mugging or a fight, a kicking, perhaps? Violence, anyway. Possibly not far from the area where Mallen died - Davant Road, to be, perhaps, perhaps. People can get so savage, given a chance,’ Gerald said.

  ‘Yes?’ Iles replied.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Harpur said.

  ‘A colleague in the office was passing and watched the police activity. He didn’t think the patrol found anything. The offenders had run off, alerted by the sirens. But you see what I mean,’ Gerald said.

  ‘Yes, a problem,’ Iles replied.

  ‘Last night?’ Harpur asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Gerald said. ‘Why? Is that significant?’

  ‘Harpur’s keen on dates, times, and suchlike,’ Iles said. ‘It’s a sort of tic with him, a tick-tock tic.’

  ‘Perhaps some folk are drawn there in a macabre way, knowing of the murder and, in a sense, trying to re-run the situation, repeople the scene, recapture the frightening atmosphere,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘In which sense would that be, Col?’ Iles asked.

  ‘Yes, in a macabre, bizarre sense,’ Harpur said. He had his other suit on today. His daughters had told him never to wear it if he were with anyone he wanted to take him seriously, but he didn’t have another with him.

  ‘God, hooked on a killing! What a notion,’ Gerald said. ‘A sort of lunacy.’

  ‘Right. A dark, obsessive fascination with the scene, regardless,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘Regardless of what, Col?’ Iles said.

  ‘Mud.’

  ‘Obviously, we shouldn’t have been there on that awful night, the night of the killing,’ Jane said. ‘But we weren’t, aren’t, the only ones to use the site. A kind of unofficial set path has been made by so many people crossing on the shortest, most direct route.’

  ‘Ah!’ Iles said. He smiled and the cheek bruising wrinkled, like small, unadventurous waves in a murky patch of sea.

  ‘Something, Mr Iles?’ Gerald asked.

  ‘Exactly what I want to talk about, as a matter of fact, the set path,’ Iles said. ‘A beaten track?’

  ‘Sort of, yes,’ Jane said.

  ‘And, as Gerald told us, you had to detour,’ Iles said. ‘You left the beaten track because of what you’d seen, Jane?’

  ‘Like that, yes,’ she said.

  ‘So, Harpur, you were right about the beaten track,’ Iles said.

  ‘Was I?’ Harpur replied.

  ‘Jane, Gerald, you go to him, this unknown man, and attempt resuscitation,’ Iles said.

  ‘Gerald tried kiss of life,’ Jane said. ‘He’s trained in first aid.’

  ‘Of course, some authorities prefer chest massage these days,’ Iles said.

  ‘Is that right, sir?’ Harpur said.

  ‘The BBC put out an instructional film,’ Iles said. ‘They had an actor, a famous ex-footballer, demonstrate the procedure.’

  ‘The BBC? Is that a health organization, then?’ Harpur said. ‘Is the actor-footballer medically qualified? Which would you go for, sir, if you met this kind of crisis?’

  ‘Which what?’ Iles said.

  ‘Which emerge
ncy method?’ Harpur said.

  ‘But in vain, Gerald?’ Iles replied.

  ‘Yes,’ Jane said.

  ‘It was during this physical closeness that you found the holster and pistol, wasn’t it, Gerald?’ Iles said.

  ‘Alarming,’ Jane said.

  ‘In which respect?’ Harpur said.

  ‘We thought it indicated some kind of street warfare,’ Jane said. ‘And that turned out to be a fact, of course.’

  ‘We’d accidentally become involved,’ Gerald said.

  ‘Involved?’ Harpur said.

  ‘Helping one of the participants,’ Gerald said. ‘As if we belonged to his side in the battle. Dangerous.’

  ‘Possibly,’ Iles said.

  A painting of the head and long neck of a cormorant was over the fireplace in their flat. Harpur studied it, liked it - liked it because he thought the artist had done the head and long neck of a cormorant damn well. No doubt, that long neck helped with the fishing. Despite Iles’s theory, the bird couldn’t tell Harpur anything about the minds of Jane and Gerald, except they admired a picture showing the head and neck of a cormorant and had a space for it over the fireplace.

  ‘So, you had left the established path - unofficially established, but nonetheless established - and done what you could for detective sergeant Mallen, though, of course, not aware he was detective sergeant Mallen - not aware of who he was. He didn’t speak, did he?’ Iles said. ‘These were admirably responsible reactions towards someone you knew only as another human being, and rightly commended by the judge.’

  Iles raised his hand and skimmed it across last evening’s skin rip, maybe to test whether it had begun to improve; alternatively, whether it had begun to erupt, cascading something colourful and utterly unwanted. Iles hadn’t so far asked what creviced him on Elms, although he’d probably corner-eyed it when Harpur raised the Biro from ground near him and swung it up in a bent-arm, accelerating arc to give the ACC that invasive, warning poke, Hiroshima mode. Or he could have glimpsed it on withdrawal. Iles might consider it shaming to have been waylaid by a time-expired, cheapo pen, and wouldn’t want to discuss what happened. Getting quelled by a Biro was not normal for Assistant Chiefs.