He Died with His Eyes Open (Factory 1)

by Raymond, Derek

  I supposed I might as well eat. I kept some frozen things in the fridge; I took out a packet and started reading the instructions on the back. The contents sounded disgusting, so I let the packet fall on the Formica-topped kitchen table, which it hit with a crack. I took a can of beer out instead and went back to the sitting-room. I felt ill at ease and disturbed after my conversation with upstairs. They knew I was in a hopeless position and were just letting me sail on into it.

  Presently I got out the cassettes I had found at Romilly Place and put one on the player that I hadn’t heard yet—I still hadn’t had time to hear them all. I switched the player on. Soon there was a noise like a rasping sigh, and Staniland started to speak. He began talking about his daughter, Charlotte. I sat and listened, drinking some beer from time to time. Staniland said:

  Darling, talking to you like this somehow brings me a little closer to you. I know I’ve wronged you terribly, and it does hurt me so. I’ve hurt your mother, too; when you’re older you must ask her for the truth. Oh, darling, I know you’re only ten now, but always try and think very straight and then everything will come out right, you’ll see. I am capable of so much love, but it has been crowded out by my doubt and disbelief in myself. Though I set such store by the truth, I have found it difficult to be honest—I think through life being so temporary—and that’s why I never loved you and picked you up and kissed you as I should have done, I see that now. Please try and forgive me; I loved you so much, but I was trying to do something very difficult in life at the same time.

  There was a pause on the tape and I drank some beer, which was getting warm as I held it forgotten in my hand. I thought that by rights the child’s mother must have the tape, but wondered if perhaps it might only make her suffer even more. Staniland continued in a sort of aside:

  Oh, please, God, make her understand; I can’t bear to make any more mistakes … It’s all right, I’m talking to you again, darling. I want you to know how happy I am we had you, in spite of everything. Everyone down at Duéjouls, the neighbours, your schoolteacher Madame Castan, everyone, says what a sweet, happy, intelligent little girl you were and how they miss you. The house at Duéjouls is for you and Mummy, sweetheart, only for you; the deeds and my will leaving it to you both are with Garlenc, the notaire in Rodez.

  That settles it, I thought, switching off. Staniland’s widow must have the tape. I brooded about it for a bit, then turned on the player again. Staniland said:

  Darling, you’re the sort of girl that other people will live and die for when you grow up—if only I could have told you that myself. But I quarrelled with your mother too much, and I drank too much. I spread only sorrow and disaster among us because somehow I knew too much, and wanted to find out even more. But I haven’t. All I’ve done is massacre our family life.

  It has all been for nothing, and I don’t care what happens to me now. I really was no good and you must try to forgive that if you can. Don’t let people defame me, though. People who do that never know all the facts; they base their judgements on nothing but hearsay, and are no good, either.

  All this nightmare inside me began when I was a child, after your great-uncle was killed in the Second World War. His ship, the Ceramic, was torpedoed in the Atlantic in May 1941; he was in the engine-room when it happened and he was scalded to death by steam when the boilers exploded. There was only one survivor picked up out of fifteen hundred aboard, a stoker, and he told my father about this. I adored your great-uncle, and it was then that I began to wonder what we were all for. My dear little sweet girl, we shall meet again somewhere, I know we shall. What I did was—

  But I couldn’t bear to listen to what Staniland had done, not right away. I had had enough for a while, and switched the player off. I looked at the tape to see if there was still a lot of it to run. There was. Presently I thought, It’s no good, I’ve got to play it. It was a horrible experience, like listening to a man choke to death. But I lit a cigarette, threw it away, and managed to switch the tape on again. Staniland’s voice ran in my ears, sounding desperate:

  I had a stab at the great experience, at the truth … But I hadn’t the equipment, I hadn’t the strength of will, I made a dreadful mess of it. I got what I was trying to do mixed up with banal desires; in the end I put you and your mother on the table like my last chip, and I lost you too. Your mother and I quarrelled too much; we both drank too much. One night at Duéjouls she told me I couldn’t get another woman if I tried. Well, I went away and got one and your mother left and took you with her. But none of it did any of us any good. All our troubles started there, in fact.

  But fuck the facts.

  I’m trying to write again now on a tape recorder. I’ve left it very late, but I know I can do it, and I’ve got such strange things to tell. I want what I write to be like a buoy that marks a rock; I don’t want anyone else wrecked on it.

  Barbara … I don’t want to talk about her much, darling. If we manage to teach each other what goodness means, she might prove a friend to you in the future. But she might not. Atrocious suffering, but I believe I may be breaking through with her now …

  I miss you desperately, my darling Charlotte. I feel as if I had been killed—as if my mistakes had turned into someone with a gun and shot me. I have to try to explain everything in the time I have left—all the errors, the grief and the love. Good-bye, my little one, good-bye, good night, my sweet, and remember one thing—all the evil in the world is powerless against intelligence and courage. Never pretend. Anything, even death, is better than that.

  Good night, my darling.

  There was a long pause. The tape rustled on, then stopped. Staniland had said elsewhere: ‘Why must we suffer like this? Others have behaved worse than I have, yet got off scot-free. My whole brain feels bruised.’ And: ‘I have taken a terrible beating from the truth and feel tamed, wise and desperate, as if I had taken a short route to wisdom through a mirror, and cut myself badly on it as I passed through.’

  I don’t know how long I sat there thinking about him, but the shadows had altered, and there was no more sunlight in the room when I was brought to my senses by the ringing of the telephone. I thought it might be Barbara as I picked it up. But it was Bowman.

  ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘what are you doing in that pad of yours at this time of day?’

  ‘Don’t get up my nose just now,’ I said, ‘if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Fuck that,’ he said. ‘You’d better come over to Soho on the hurry-up. Petworth Street. Christ, why do your cases always turn up right where I happen to be?’

  ‘Fate,’ I said. ‘What’s happened up there?’

  ‘Another of your bleeding Stanilands,’ he said, ‘and he was bleeding.’

  ‘Dead for long?’

  ‘Twelve hours or so.’

  ‘I’ll be there in the time it takes me to get over.’ I rang off and thought: What does it matter how long I take? He’s dead, isn’t he?

  31

  ‘It was suicide,’ mused Bowman. ‘Must have been.’ He was alone when I arrived, standing by the window in Eric’s room. He had opened it, which was a good idea, because the weather was close and Eric had been in there dead for a while. Bowman came across and we stood over him. The bundle was covered with a red blanket; Eric’s Doc Martens poked out from under it. There was fingerprint dust everywhere. Bowman pulled the blanket down.

  ‘Not very nice, is he?’

  ‘He was never noted for that,’ I said.

  Bowman stepped back and looked at me. ‘All right,’ he said simply. ‘Why did he do it?’

  I didn’t answer. I gazed down at the body. Its throat had been cut under the left ear. Bowman watched me as I looked and said: ‘E nearly took is bleedin ead off.’

  There was a razor blade between Eric’s right thumb and index finger. The carotid had been severed, and there was a thick spray of blood over the wall where it had happened, shaped like a fountain.

  ‘Amazing way for a man to take his life,’ said Bowman
. ‘I never can understand it. No trace of anyone else in the room when it was done—not as far as we can see. As I said, would you like to comment?’

  ‘Well, if you and your people say he was a suicide,’ I said, ‘why should I have anything to say? You lot examined him.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Bowman impatiently. ‘Look, we’re two coppers alone in here. Now, I’ve already sent a detective-constable over to his mother’s, and he’s told me that you went round to see her and that she gave you the lad’s address. She told the officer that you’d promised to break the news of his step-father’s death to him. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s right.’

  ‘Now look,’ said Bowman, ‘was you leaning on this geezer?’

  ‘I questioned him as to what he knew about his stepfather’s death, certainly.’

  ‘How hard?’

  ‘Pretty hard. I don’t like being consistently lied to any better than you do.’

  ‘He have anything to do with it?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘Eric was a pusher. He worked clubs and pubs all over London. He was chronically short of money, because he had a habit himself. I’ll never have a chance to prove it now, but I’m convinced he knew the villains who topped his stepfather. I’m convinced they used Eric to force money out of Staniland. Then, after I’d been over here to see him, Eric lost his nerve and told them I’d been. Eric didn’t fancy another spell in the nick, and against my advice he went to see them to see if they would get him off the hook. And so they did,’ I said, looking down at him. ‘So they did, in their way.’

  ‘So what you’re saying is that you don’t think this is suicide, you think it’s murder.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ I said, ‘only like everything else in this case, I can’t prove it. It’s my balls-up. I should have charged him with possession of drugs and held him. But I didn’t want to, I wanted to let him run.’

  ‘You let him run right off the edge of the plate,’ said Bowman. He looked round the room. ‘Christ, what a mess for a bloody murderer to make.’

  ‘Okay, but don’t forget that some of them enjoy making a mess,’ I said. ‘That’s half the fun for these demented bastards, that’s how they get their kicks. You get a hundred cases a year of it at the Factory, as you well know. It’s dark, bloke’s got a car parked downstairs, he strips off in here when he’s done the work in overalls and a pair of sneakers, dumps all that in a plastic bag, changes, and burns the lot when he gets home. And who’s to know?’

  ‘They did it with the razor blade?’

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘There’s no other wound. They’re a well-built pair. Hand in his hair, drag his head back, do it to him, and tidy up.’

  ‘Two of them?’

  ‘Just two. Man and a woman.’

  ‘Sounds to me as if they ought to set up in wedded bliss at Broadmoor,’ Bowman said.

  ‘Suit them very well,’ I said. ‘They love to kill, the pair of them, and the longer it takes, and the more mess they make, the better they like it. And they had a motive,’ I added. ‘I’m that close to them that they don’t want me to get any closer.’

  He looked at me with something very nearly like concern. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Sergeant.’ He said: ‘You got any chance at all of proving this, do you think?’

  ‘A faint one.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said gloomily, ‘it sounds like a right fuck-up to me. Thank God it’s your problem and not mine.’ He picked up his expensive tweed jacket and put it on; I got a glimpse of the Savile Row label sewn onto the inside pocket. ‘You want to see any more?’

  ‘No, that’s it.’

  ‘You’ll have to make your report for the inquest.’

  ‘I hadn’t forgotten.’

  ‘I’ll have him taken away, then.’

  ‘Yes, call the ambulance,’ I said, ‘if there is such a thing.’

  32

  The next tape of Staniland’s I played started:

  I dreamed I was walking through the door of a cathedral. Someone I couldn’t distinguish warned me: ‘Don’t go in there, it’s haunted.’ However, I went straight in and glided up the nave to the altar. The roof of the building was too high to see; the quoins were lost in a dark fog through which the votive lamps glowed orange. The only light came through the diamond-shaped clear panes in the windows; it was faint and cold. This neglected mass was attached to a sprawl of vaulted ruins; I had been in them all night; I had wandered through them for centuries. They had once been my home; burned-out rafters jutted like human ribs above empty, freezing galleries, and great doors gave onto suites soaked by pitiless rain. Angry spectres, staggering with the faint steps of the insane, paraded arm in arm through the wrecked masonry, sneering as I passed: ‘The Stanilands have no money? Good! Excellent!’

  In the cathedral there were no pews or chairs, just people standing around, waiting. No service was in progress. Knots of men and women from another century stood about, talking in low voices to bishops who moved in and out of the crowd, trailing their tarnished vestments.

  I realized with a paralysing horror that the place really was haunted. The people kept looking upwards, as though waiting for an event. I managed to overcome my fear and went on up the nave towards the altar. As I passed, groups of people crossed themselves and said nervously: ‘Don’t do that!’ I took no notice, but opened the gate in the rails and went and stood in front of the altar. Behind it, instead of a reredos, hung a tapestry with a strange, curling design in dark red; the tapestry was so high that it lost itself in the roof. As I watched, it began to undulate, to flow and ripple, gradually and sensuously at first, then more and more ardently, until it was rearing and thundering against the wall like an angry sea. I heard people behind me groan and mutter, praying in their anguish and fear. Then my waist was held by invisible hands and I was raised from the floor; at the height of the roof I was turned slowly parallel with the ground and then released so that I floated, immobile and face downwards, far above the people whose faces I could make out in the half-dark as a grey blur, staring up at me. After I had floated the length and breadth of the building I descended quietly, of my own accord, and landed lightly on the spot from where I had been taken, whereupon I walked directly out of the building without looking back. As I walked swiftly away down a gravel path someone like Barbara came running towards me in a white coat, approaching from a thick hedge that surrounded the graveyard. ‘Quick,’ she said over her shoulder, ‘don’t let him get out!’

  But I walked straight into a wood that confronted me without a qualm; no one had any power over me now.

  33

  I had played all of Staniland’s tapes now, but there were certain passages that had made an indelible impression on me. I put one on now, on the player I had in the car. Staniland said: ‘The terrace at Duéjouls, a north wind in June. Recorded in great agony of spirit.’

  There was a traffic jam in front of me, spreading right through the West End. I eased the car along automatically, moving up in the queue, but I was in a different world, Staniland’s. The horrible position he had got himself into over his wife and child, and his oncoming fate, stared through his words. Dead though he was, I had begun to suffer from the delusion, because of his cassettes, that he was still alive—it was as though, for me, he was already in the morgue before he had got there. The passage that I was listening to now ran:

  Unhook the delicate, crazy lace of flesh, detach the heart with a single cut, unmask the tissue behind the skin, unhinge the ribs, disclose the spine, take down the long dress of muscle from the bones where it hangs erect. A pause to boil the knives—then take a bold but cunning curve, sweeping into the skull you had trepanned, into the brain, and extract its art if you can. But you will have blood on your hands unless you transfused it into bottles first, and cure the whole art of the dead you may, but in brine—a dish to fatten you for your own turn.

  What better surgeon than a maggot?

  What greater pass
ion than a heart in formaldehyde?

  Ash drops from the morgue assistant’s cigarette into the dead mouth; they will have taken forensic X-rays of the smashed bones before putting him back into the fridge with a bang; there he will wait until the order for burial from the coroner arrives.

  Those responsible for the end of his mysterious being will escape or, at best, being proved mad, get a suspended sentence under Section Sixty.

  I switched the player off and began thinking for no apparent reason about a friend I had once when I was a young man. He was a sculptor who used my local pub in the Fulham Road; his studio was just opposite. He wore sandals but no socks, whatever the weather, and was always powdered with stone dust; this gave him a grey appearance and got under his nails. He wore his white hair long and straight over his ears. He was a Communist, and he didn’t care who knew it, though he only said so if people asked. They didn’t bother often. He was a Communist as an act of faith, like a Cathar. He accepted the doctrine straight, as Communists used to before they won and everything turned sour. But he rarely spoke to anyone about politics; there were so many other things to talk about. He and I used to stand at the bar together and drink beer and talk about them. But few people talked to him. That suited him. Most people couldn’t be bothered because he was stone deaf and could only lip-read you. He was deaf because he had fought for the Republic with the XIIth Brigade in the Spanish war. He had fought at Madrid (University Buildings), and later at Huesca and Teruel with the XVth. But at Teruel he had had both eardrums shattered when a shell exploded too close to him.