I turned to look where he was pointing. Something flew into the small of my back, directly over one of my kidneys. I dropped to my knees and wondered what had hit me. I thought I might have been shot.
‘I do apologize,’ said Moore. ‘I thought you were about to make a break for it. I may have applied a little too much force. If you’d like to fill in a complaint, there’ll be time at the station. Will that be necessary?’
‘No,’ I said. My lower left side ached. I stood.
‘I thought not. Now this,’ he said, raising the plastic bag containing the bones, ‘belongs to someone who has something to complain about. The car really is that way.’
I looked at him.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I won’t thump you again. Not until we’re at the station, anyway.’
He kept his word. The car turned out to be a dull Volvo. It didn’t seem to suit him. I’d have expected a Jag or a crumpled Escort. He drove it at an ordinary speed, with me sitting next to him in the passenger seat. He stopped at traffic lights. I could have got out. I didn’t. I didn’t have anywhere else to go.
III
At the police station I was led past a crowd of uniformed people who couldn’t be bothered to dislike me. So they ignored me instead. Moore led me into a room where three chairs surrounded a desk. A cassette recorder sat on the desk. A video camera in a high corner had a red blinking light on it. Moore told me to take a seat and then left me to it.
I looked at my watch. It was six thirty. That wasn’t even late. That was hardly evening. I wondered what time I’d be going to bed. I wondered where, too.
The room was painted that old institutional shade of pale green. At one time, back in the sixties when the architects all thought that concrete walkways were the next big thing, someone in government bought a huge shipment of pale green paint. Thousands of gallons of it. It had been earmarked for use during the war, if fighting broke out somewhere pale green, but the war ended inconveniently and the paint went into storage.
For years it sat in enormous hogsheads, safe from prying eyes. Then a civil servant, with nothing to do now that the war had left the country bankrupt, came across a docket noting the contents.
He bought the whole supply from the government for sixpence, waited six months, and sold it back to the government for thousands. The government, suddenly flush with pale green paint it had already possessed, passed the lot of it to local councils.
They used it to paint the inside walls of hospitals, schools, police stations and prisons. They painted council offices pale green. If it had been weatherproof they’d have painted roads with it.
In some places it’s still there, always in high rooms, applied directly to unplastered brick walls. In the centre of the dead-flesh coloured ceiling will be a white globular light. Inside the light will be the bodies of fifty generations of house-flies.
It’s cold paint and it hasn’t faded because it hardly had any colour in the first place. When you’re in among it, you’re either in trouble or in a shitty job. It’s bad news paint.
I sat and looked at it. It was all over the walls and the ceiling. There were no windows. I’d expected a mirror. There was always a mirror in the room when Kojak interviewed suspects. On the other side of the mirror would be another room, from where the mirror would be a window, and in there Stavros would be busy taking notes and waiting for the scriptwriter to give him a funny line.
The door was wooden and edged, top and bottom, with metal strips. There was no handle on the side of it that I could see. A peephole in it was open. No one was looking at me.
The floor was of even cement. The table and chairs were loose. The room held several smells. There was the expected smell of cigarette smoke and the unsurprising smell of sweat. There was another, sharper, smell, something like human flesh going off.
It was coming from me. I was muddy and sweating. I was also frightened and confused. I knew that I hadn’t killed anyone, and I didn’t think that Jack would have.
I assumed that Jack was in a room similar to the one I was in. They’d want to talk to him. He was the one who’d confessed in the first place.
That was where I got stuck. Jack had confessed to something we hadn’t done. Jack had made it up.
But there was that finger. That had been solid enough.
Perhaps Jack had planted it to help his confession along. Which meant he must have got it from somewhere. From someone, really. They’re not the sort of things you find lying around, fingers. They come with owners and the owners want to keep them.
Removing them takes a good twist with a pair of pliers, and you have to keep a grip. It’s better if there’s someone else to help. They can hold the wrist steady and you can twist the finger off. Once the skin tears it pops free without a lot of bother.
I didn’t know about any of that. It arrived in my head the way a bullet would. I had no idea where it had come from.
I’m being honest with you here. I have secrets, and I’ll be keeping them. There are things you don’t need to know. I’d never killed anyone. Honestly.
The bones had been too old, I realized. They were years old. Jack couldn’t have acquired them recently. If they were ten years old, that would mean he was right. But he wasn’t right. He couldn’t be.
I saw a finger being popped out of its joint, and a dead woman with cats sitting on her.
It must have been the newspaper reports. Jack must have been talking to me when I was drunk. Perhaps he was playing an elaborate joke. Perhaps the next person in a uniform would turn out to be a strippogram.
I thought not. It was too elaborate to be a practical joke. Besides, I didn’t want to see Moore naked. His little friend Stiles would be all right. Perhaps she’d be along to question me.
When would they be in? I’d been there hours. I was nervous and I needed to go to the toilet on several counts. The smell of cigarette smoke made me want a cigarette. I looked at my watch. I’d been there about eight minutes. Time was in a state. That made two of us.
I tapped my fingers on the table. It made me think of fingernails and I stopped. My scalp itched. The red light on the video camera blinked. Did that mean they were filming me? I tried to remember if I’d done anything incriminating while I’d been there. It had only been eight minutes. I couldn’t have done much.
I’d picked my nose, but only to pass the time. It hadn’t been what you’d call productive. I’d scratched my scalp. I’d rubbed drying mud from my hands and crumbled it onto the floor. None of that could get you hard time.
Being implicated in murder could, of course. That was held to be bad. If they were talking to Jack he’d be confessing. He had a history of it. He had form. If Jack was confessing he’d be including my name. He told Eddie Finch that it had all been my idea.
I looked at the watch. Another minute had elapsed. It had done it very slowly. Time was doing interesting things.
I had a lot of time to study it.
At eight-thirty I was escorted to the toilet by an expressionless uniformed man built like a Soviet shot-putter. I washed using a tiny bar of filthy soap and cold water. I was moved to a cell. It was like the room I’d spent my evening in, except that there was no table or chairs. There was a bed and a bucket.
The graffiti was cleverer than you might expect.
I lay on the bed. There was a peephole in the door made of metal. Someone was watching me. I lay down, knowing that I wouldn’t sleep.
I went to sleep.
I’m not going to tell you what I dreamt.
Chapter Fifteen
I
I woke up on a filthy bed. I’d done that before. I didn’t know where I was, and I’d woken up in that state plenty of times too. There was a light on. I didn’t sleep with the light on. My father used to turn lights off wherever he went. As you went from room to room he’d follow you, turning lights off where you’d been. He thought that if you left lights on the house would catch fire or the electricity bill would increase exponentially.
/> These days we turn the lights off to save electricity to save the planet. The trouble with that is that the planet is too far gone. It’s not the ice caps or the ozone layer. It’s that the seasons have got out of whack, and the wind blows all year round. It’s that we get sunsets that you only used to see on canvas. It’s bees bumbling about in February and flowers dropping dead in June. It’s never having a winter, just this period of colder rain and then back to the drizzle and wind.
Perhaps that’s just Dudley. But I don’t think so. I think saving the planet by putting less water in the kettle is like putting a sticking plaster on a leper. It’s too late. The world is on its way somewhere. We’re going with it.
Leave the lights on. At least we’ll be able to see what happens.
I sat up. The bed was narrower than I was. It was hard and it had the smell of a dead dog in summer. The walls were painted that institutional shade. There was a metal door. Everything snapped into focus.
There was an eye watching me through the peephole. There were metallic sounds from the door and it opened. Moore stood outside, looking at me with no particular expression. Behind him stood PC Fields, his legs slightly apart. His bored expression looked as though he practised it in front of the bedroom mirror. Moore had the hang of it. Moore just looked bored.
‘Mr Haines,’ said Moore. He had the hang of speaking drily, too. ‘Would you care to join us for a chat? A cup of tea perhaps? Most of our interviewees like a cigarette. I hope you have one, because we’re not running a tobacconists here.’
He ushered me into a pale green corridor, and along it to the room I’d spent yesterday evening in.
‘There. You take one side of the table and we’ll have the other. I don’t suppose there’ll be much to say, to be honest. There you were with the evidence. Caught you with your finger in the till.’
‘Someone else’s finger,’ said Fields, closing the door and helping me to sit by putting his hands on my shoulders and pushing me down into the chair.
‘Fields,’ said Moore, despairingly.
‘Sorry,’ said Fields. ‘I always get a bit carried away when we finger a suspect.’
Moore gave him a pained look. The two of them sat next to one another. The table was between us. Moore pressed a button on the cassette recorder and it began to play a tune.
‘Ah,’ he said. Fields stepped in and pressed another button. Moore leaned over the table and told the recorder what day it was and who was present. The red light on the video camera was still blinking. Perhaps it was a false camera. Perhaps it was a decoy.
They make them. You buy them and attach them to your house and they have a light that blinks and that’s all they do. They aren’t cameras. It’s a bluff. It’s a sign of something. I know about this. Everything is a sign of something. When you need a camera that isn’t a camera to keep uninvited guests out of your house, that’s a sign.
The world is on its way somewhere.
And wherever it’s going, someone will be filming it.
It doesn’t help, anyway. The more elaborate the security, the more equipped the people who will come through it. And – let’s get this straight – someone will come through it. Whatever you have, infrared sensors, intemperate canines, gin traps, pungee sticks or landmines, one day it won’t be enough. One day it’ll be breached, and so will you.
And then they’ll kill you, remove the odd finger or toe, and maybe (if they have time) burgle the house.
It must have been the room getting to me. I tried to think cheerful thoughts. I tried to think what I’d been told on those outward-bound management courses. We’d done imaginary interviews. Teams of managers would throw questions at you across a desk, and you’d fail to return them. It was like being in the British Olympic table tennis team. Everything that came at you caught you unawares.
This was the same thing. All I had to do was field their questions.
They were quiet. Moore was looking at me gloomily, as though I was a hole in his favourite slipper. Fields was cleaning nine of his fingernails with the remaining one. Moore looked at me. I waited. I had seen this in films. They were waiting for me to fall apart and tell them everything. Their problem was that I had nothing to tell them.
I thought that I probably had more problems than they did. I knew what they were up to. The cassette recorder ticked quietly, recording nothing.
After a while Moore stopped looking at me and looked at Fields.
‘PC Fields,’ he said, ‘I was under the impression that you would be conducting this interview.’
‘Oh,’ said Fields. He gave up on his nails. ‘Now. Last night you were found at the scene of what we suppose to be a crime.’
‘We suppose that,’ said Moore, ‘because there were human remains there. They were in a poor condition. There were several of them. They’re with Forensics. I don’t suppose they’ll find anything out from them. We’ve had people digging all night, and now everything is with the boffins.’
‘I used to do that,’ I said, meaning digging. I watched the two of them misunderstand.
‘Is that thing recording?’ asked Moore.
Fields nodded.
‘That must be a first. Now, I think we’ve just had some sort of a confession. It isn’t as lengthy or detailed as the one your friend Mr Ives gave us. That was more of a memoir than a confession. You say you used to bury people?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I meant I used to do digging.’
‘So it was Mr Ives who buried the bodies?’
‘Partial bodies,’ noted Fields.
‘Indeed. Partial bodies. So you were just there to do the digging? Well, I have to say that isn’t the way Mr Ives tells it. He tells us that you made him do the digging.’
‘And the murders.’
‘So how did it happen?’ Moore leaned forward, putting his hands on his knees. He looked mildly interested.
‘It didn’t happen,’ I said. ‘I know nothing about it.’
‘And there we were getting somewhere,’ said Fields. ‘That’s something we often hear. No one we talk to knows anything. I find that aggravating.’
‘It would be nice to have some variety,’ agreed Moore. ‘Now. The thing I find interesting is this. I’ve done this job for a very long time. I can’t say I’ve learned much from it. I haven’t gained any special insights into human nature. I can’t always spot the guilty ones. Sometimes younger people do it. Sometimes Forensics come up with something.’
‘Not very often,’ said Fields.
‘No, not very often,’ agreed Moore, putting his head on one side. ‘But it does happen. It’s always nice for them when it does. After all, they get most of the money, so it’s only fair that they get to solve things now and then. I can’t spot the innocent people either. I don’t understand that. I’ve read about detectives. I ought to have evolved specialized senses. I should be able to smell guilty people.’
‘Some of them smell,’ said Fields, tilting his chair back onto two legs.
‘Not of guilt. Now, by way of balance, from time to time I get hunches. I watched you dig up those bones. You looked as though you were surprised to find them. That doesn’t suggest that you knew they were there. To me, it suggests the opposite. Then there was the way you slept. Guilty people behave strangely. They have moods. They become paranoid.’
‘Until they’re caught,’ said Fields.
‘Until they’re caught,’ agreed Moore. ‘Once we catch them they stop all that. There’s no point to it. They seem to be relieved. Obviously, they deny everything.’
‘They weren’t there,’ said Fields.
‘They didn’t see anything,’ said Moore. ‘They can’t remember anything and anyway, it wasn’t them. But they’re easy. The people who have a hard time of it in here are the innocent ones. That’s partly because they do feel guilty. They feel guilty about all sorts of things. Little infidelities.’
‘Family things,’ said Fields. His chair was precariously balanced. I felt the same.
‘Ove
rdue library books,’ said Moore. ‘They don’t know what they’re going to be hit with.’
‘That’s an unfortunate turn of phrase,’ said Fields. He had looked cheerful until then. His face tightened around a sharper expression.
‘Possibly so,’ said Moore. ‘That may be the case. So innocent people have a hard time of it because they think about all sorts of terrible things, and guilty people know exactly what they’re here for.’
‘Innocent people also have a bad time of it,’ said Fields, ‘because it takes that much longer to get them to confess.’
‘Most of them do, given the right stimulus,’ said Moore. He sat back. ‘Now, you are an interesting case. You behave as though you are innocent. You seem worried. You have things on your mind.’
‘Family things,’ said Fields for the second time. I wondered what he knew.
‘And you seemed surprised to find those bones,’ continued Moore. ‘But then, on the other hand, we have the confession of your friend Mr Ives. He places you at the scenes of the crimes. And it’s clear he’s not making the whole thing up, because we have evidence. We have something to go on. Which gives me a little puzzle to consider. Because you can’t be innocent and guilty. You have to be one or the other. So, what’s the story?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I know nothing about any of this. All I know is that Jack imagined all this.’
‘He imagined it in some detail,’ said Moore. ‘He went to the trouble of imagining some body parts and doing such a good job of it that the rest of us can see them. Even Forensics can see them, assuming that they haven’t lost them or eaten them or something. So we’ll assume that he didn’t imagine it, and that you do know something. You do know something, don’t you?’
He leaned over the table and switched off the cassette recorder.
‘Clumsy,’ said Fields.
‘That’s the thing with old detectives,’ said Moore, standing and removing his jacket. ‘Too used to old methods. I do find that I switch things off accidentally.’ He flexed his arms. He interlaced his fingers and cracked his knuckles.
Seeing the Wires Page 20
