I shan’t take a weapon, I thought. Anyway, I hadn’t got any weapons. Still too early, so on to the last tape.
Duéjouls. I remember what it was like down there when I first got back from London, after Margo and Charlotte had gone. I had to learn all over again how to take existence quietly. The house had been broken into by hippies. There was practically no furniture left, there was shit everywhere; someone had written up the phone number of the talking clock on the kitchen wall. The telephone had been smashed anyhow, probably because there was seventeen hundred francs owing. I thought I was finished that time. I looked round the wreck of our home and I remember how I went up to bed in the boiling-hot darkness to the squeak of mice and the rustle of bats shifting on the rafters or whipping out through the broken windows for a night’s hunting. The bare floors were littered with the butt ends of old joints; the planks of my daughter’s bed, an old oak one given her by a peasant who loved her, had been stove in, and someone had pissed on her mattress, which had been piled into a corner by the wall. There were mattresses everywhere in the house with holes burned in them by the marginaux.
Oh, God, protect and save me: be a true God! Crowns, flowers and everlasting peace for the departed: beauty and innocence for the dead, Amen.
The tape ended. It was slowly getting late. I went over to my window and looked out across the balcony that wasn’t wide enough to be useful for anything. I felt strange, having caught what Staniland had; now I, too, had been pushed finally beyond my limits, but I felt very sane and calm.
It was dark over Acacia Circus. I watched the sway of the treetops, leaves curled in unsatisfactory sleep, prevented from their natural rest by the harshness of the neon strips and tilting in a poisoned and erratic breeze. Far off, across the fake countryside, I heard the mumble of city traffic that never ended and the scream of a police siren. I opened the window and sat on the sill for a time, facing into my plain little room that had never cheered anyone up. I thought seriously about the brand-new tabulated phone that seldom rang and the mass-produced door that never opened. I could see part of the fridge out there in the purpose-built kitchenette—it was full of the flesh of things that had been bred to die: processed, force-fed chicken and machined veg, curry beef dinner for one, cod slicelets from factory number three for two. The room was so quiet now, without Staniland’s voice in it. But I felt he had given me my instructions forever.
I sat and thought about Staniland while I waited patiently for the right hour. He had made me care about what I was in a way that I didn’t know I could. He had framed the question that finally mattered in the two lines he had quoted on a cassette. I found them and played them just once more:
What shall we be,
When we aren’t what we are?
I rang the Factory and left a message (‘I’m going now’) and the address.
38
I decided it was time to move at a quarter to one. I went down into the street, where the moon shone directly over the circle of concrete that was Acacia Circus and had turned it silver. I went over to the car and checked my gear. I hadn’t much—a torch. I had my latchkey to Barbara’s, too.
I started the car and made for New Cross, taking the South Bank route through Wandsworth and Battersea. I wanted Harvey and Barbara, both together. I would get them. I didn’t think while I drove; I just experienced a sad emptiness. I circled the Elephant roundabout and selected New Kent Road. It was deserted. A minicab flashed past me—Planet?—going back west empty, its long aerial bowing; a cruising squad car; an old red banger with chrome bumpers and down on its shocks making for Peckham, loaded with yelling blacks and spewing oil smoke like a shot-down fighter. I watched the buildings speeding past me backwards—a purple-painted façade, Occult City, chip shops, a boarded-up disco. When I got to Barbara’s street I turned into it and parked a little way up from her door.
I got out of the car, walked back and had a good look at her building. Her flat on the second floor was dark in front, and the street was quiet and empty; you could just hear heavy stuff moving distantly on the A20, mostly lorries going up to the market at Nine Elms. A warm breeze stirred a little dust in the gutter. It seemed a calm night to be doing this work—but it had to be some sort of weather.
Barbara’s flat was in a low-built house, just the two floors with a flat on each. I didn’t want to make any noise if I could help it, so I went through the space between her house and the one next door into the garden. It was knee-deep in weeds; wire netting strayed in coils among the bindweed, clamped by it into other junk. There was no light at the back of her flat, either. I walked silently to the house wall and looked for a time at the fire-escape ladder bolted to it. Then I made a leap for the bottom rung; it was about nine feet from the ground, but I got hold of it all right. It gave slightly, though; it was eaten away with rust. However, I climbed up one rung, set the soles of my sneakers against the wall and hung by my arms, looking up at her back window, the kitchen. There mightn’t be anyone in, seeing everything was dark. I didn’t care; if there wasn’t, I would just wait until there was. In silence I ran swiftly up the ladder and reached the window. I knew it would open for the simple reason that I had found it would never shut, and the next thing I knew, I was through it with my feet safely in the sink. I felt my way softly out of the kitchen into the passage, controlled my breathing, and made for ‘our’ bedroom. Here a faint light shone under the door. I stood and listened, but heard nothing.
Anyway, I stepped back a pace and kicked the door open.
Harvey and Barbara were in bed. I saw there was a chamberpot in a corner of the room with something in it, but all the same they had been making love, or anyhow trying to; the stuffy room smelled of sweat and the fetor of their bodies. Each half-raised on a left arm, they gazed at me sleepily.
‘Get up,’ I said. I spoke coldly, automatically, in a long-rehearsed way.
‘Nobody’s getting up,’ said Barbara quickly; she recovered first. ‘You must be fucking mad coming in here.’ She made a movement under the sheet.
‘Don’t touch anything under there,’ I said icily. ‘Not even your fanny.’
‘Listen,’ I heard Harvey saying, ‘you got a warrant to come barging in here?’
‘No.’
‘Are you rodded?’ he asked in a pathetically artful way, like a conjuror asking a kiddie which day Christmas was.
‘No.’
‘Well, then you’ve got yourself in an almighty fucking jam, haven’t you?’ Barbara said.
‘He can’t be on his own,’ Harvey said to her. He looked at me. ‘Are you? Are you on your own?’
‘Work it out for yourself,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you one thing, though, you look fucking sad in there, trying to come on as a man.’
‘Look,’ he said urgently, ‘look, what’s all this down to? That thing about Charlie Staniland?’ When I didn’t speak he said: ‘You got any proof it was us?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly what I’ve come for.’
‘You’ll wait a long time,’ Barbara said, ‘you cunt.’
‘You’re wrong,’ I said.
We were all quiet for quite a time, then Harvey said: ‘Was it you broke my whip in half? Over at my mum’s place?’
‘Of course it was him,’ said Barbara, ‘you stupid bastard.’
‘You could go down hard,’ I heard Harvey telling me, ‘poking around like that in a feller’s private life. You know that?’
‘As if I cared,’ I said.
‘Anyway,’ said Barbara, ‘you’re going down much harder than just hard.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Harvey. ‘Easy, easy, Babsie, maybe we could make a deal. We could split up the three ton we got off Eric before we topped him and still end up mates over this.’ He looked at me.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Now come on,’ said Harvey coaxingly, ‘most of you coppers is bent. I can’t think of one that objects to picking up a few bob and no questions asked.’
‘I can,’ I
said. ‘Me.’
There was another silence in the room, while everyone thought about his position.
‘Why did you kill Eric?’ I said. ‘Because you both enjoy killing people?’
‘Well, all right, we’re a bit screwed up, I’ll admit,’ said Harvey, ‘but he did talk to you about us, didn’t he?’ When I didn’t say anything he said: ‘Anyhow, we couldn’t take the risk.’
‘And we was a bit bevvied,’ said Barbara.
‘Fuck all that,’ I said. ‘Staniland.’
‘That was a contract, almost,’ said Harvey.
‘Almost.’
‘He wanted us to top him. It started off by us taking the piss out of him in the Agincourt, but in the end he was begging us to top him. Pleading for it! He paid us to top him, that’s what it came to.’
‘That’s what you made it come to,’ I said. ‘And I’ve never seen a more thorough job.’ I picked up a bottle of makeup from the table behind me and threw it at him; glass and makeup shattered all over his head: ‘Beautiful piece of work, you murdering bastard.’
‘Calm down, calm down,’ said Barbara, moving her hands like a pianist’s, ‘what happened was, Harvey panicked and dumped the poor old cunt in the bushes instead of in the roadway. Course it was meant to look like a hit-and-run! Albatross Road? I told him, You’ve only got to leave him there five minutes and he’ll be squashed a hundred ways over an then no one’ll ever know the truth, specially as it was rush-hour.’
‘All right, all right,’ said Harvey, looking at her irritably. It was so strange, their still lying in bed together like that. ‘Okay, so I made a balls-up.’
‘Panicked, you mean,’ she said. She cast her eyes upwards. ‘And after all that potty-training!’
Harvey tried to take no notice of her; it three-quarters worked. He said to me: ‘Come on, be reasonable. Take the hundred quid.’
‘You reckon Staniland’s life’s worth a hundred quid.’ I nodded. ‘Have I got it right? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Yeah,’ said Harvey, lying back in the pillow and caressing his red hair, ‘sure. Pick up your money. We’ve got it right here in the room—it’s all old fivers that can’t be traced.’ He winked at me.
‘You are a stupid berk,’ Barbara said to him. ‘He is not going to take the money. No hundred quid’s enough to buy the law these days.’
‘And in my case,’ I said, ‘nor would a hundred thousand.’
‘See?’ she said to him savagely, digging him in the ribs. ‘See?’
‘You have had it,’ I told them. ‘You may get me over Staniland, but the law will get you over me.’
‘Don’t be a fucking hero,’ said Harvey.
I watched them from a distance, working it all out. It was high time they did. They both had form, and they knew there were still enough judges and juries, not only to find them guilty over Staniland, but to throw the book at them as hard as it would throw. And that was if they didn’t top me as well. If they were stupid enough to do that, they would both draw life, and do it with the other people where life meant what it said—do it with Hindley and Brady and Sutcliffe and Peter Manuel and the piano-wire man from the Midlands. They would do their bird in a maximum-security jail; Harvey wouldn’t have any potties or whips or Mum or Babsie; he’d ask a screw for a potty and they’d die laughing at him on the Island.
‘My report’s over at the Factory,’ I said.
‘Just pick up the money,’ said Harvey. ‘It’s your last chance.’
‘No.’
‘But Christ, you’re asking to be killed.’
‘No, what you could do is both get dressed, come down to the Factory, and make a statement. You might as well—you’re both cooked.’
‘For the last time,’ said Harvey, ‘I tell you Staniland wanted to die!’
‘Even if that were true,’ I said, ‘you still go in for the kind of euthanasia the public doesn’t like. And you weren’t even clever. If you’d wanted to get away with this, you should have destroyed all the man’s cassettes.’
‘We would have done,’ he said sullenly, ‘only we didn’t know what was on them. We never bothered with his being a bloody writer.’
‘Well, too bad,’ I said. ‘People like you always make mistakes.’
Barbara said, turning to Harvey: ‘Look, what it seems to me like, is that we’ve got to waste a copper.’
‘I know,’ said Harvey, ‘and I don’t like it, and I’ve tried everything because you know you really drop in the shit, Babsie, doing a thing like that. A bum like Charlie, that’s one thing, but this is something else.’
Barbara took no further notice of me. She turned her back on me and said to Harvey: ‘Well, are we going to rabbit on like this all night or what?’
‘I tell you we’re over the top if we do it to him, Babs.’
‘Trouble with you is, you’ve got a yellow streak.’
I heard their voices in a murmur as they sat up in bed talking about me. I couldn’t have got out of the room if I had wanted to, because they were between me and the door; I was at the foot of the bed. I felt like a patient with a mortal sickness being discussed out loud by the two doctors in charge of him, because there was no point in hiding his condition from him now. Still, I said to them: ‘You’ve got to understand that once I’m dead you’ll have the whole Met after you, and you won’t either of you last a week.’
Only Harvey looked at me backwards, alarmed. Barbara was saying: ‘When we’ve done it, we just take the keys off him and dump his car. Shame, really, nice Escort like that, nearly new. Still, it can’t be helped, we’ve gotter do it.’
‘For the last time, Babsie, I tell you, topping fuzz—’
She whipped round on him in the sheets. ‘Don’t you fall to bits on me like a cheap screwdriver,’ she said savagely. She shook a finger at him. ‘I’ve trained you. You just be my tough, clean, shitless Harvey.’
I knew that everything had come to its climax and I moved, which made her face me bolt-upright in bed, and I heard the catch go in the handle of the flick-knife she had. All I can say is that we felt contempt as we faced each other, and I still didn’t know why she looked so avenging, even at the last moment when the blade leaped out with a sharp snap and glittered through the air, because now she had thrown it and a great hand had been played. Such was my concentration on the weapon that it seemed to me it flew quite slowly; I could even see, for instance, that the handle was black. Barbara’s right hand was now still again, the index finger still thrust out, crooked, bent towards me. I could see the carmine nail of that finger distinctly, and wondered how recently she had repainted it. Defiance and hatred blazed out of her face; she devoured me as she watched me, and I had a silly image of my school playground, filled with similar warring faces with nowhere to go, nothing to expect. Harvey hadn’t moved; the stroke with the knife was too sudden for him. But now he knew what danger he ran, living with a woman who took a knife to bed with her. He was still leaning against the head of the bed with his last expression on, gazing at me; but his face was already growing white and his mouth dropped open, slightly more on one side than the other.
When the knife struck me in the right centre of my throat, it didn’t hurt at all at first, it just felt very odd, being able to see the handle sticking out under my chin. I made a gesture as though to pull it out with my hand, but only in a quasi-humorous sort of way. But I immediately felt weaker because of the shock; the things in the room seemed much brighter, and the two figures much bulkier, more obvious and solid; they had a black, undulating halo round them. I moved about at the foot of their bed, not too unsteadily at first, to left and right, not doing anything special, just moving casually around. I found at the same time, however, that I could not really feel my feet now. I looked down at them and noted with surprise how absolute my sneakers were; I had never known before that sneakers could be as absolute as that. I was anxious because this difficult conclusion seemed meaningless, but even as I looked at them, the sneakers started to
turn darker. The other thing that struck me was the yellow counterpane these people had on the bed. A deep scarlet design was appearing on it, perhaps not to everyone’s taste; it reminded me of my childhood again, how I had watched my mother icing a cake. But it was red icing, and there were some solid chunks in it that shouldn’t have been there—something out of my mouth, perhaps; my mother certainly wouldn’t have allowed that.
He Died with His Eyes Open (Factory 1) Page 20
