He Died with His Eyes Open (Factory 1)
Page 21
I suddenly felt so bloody cold and fell on the floor on my arse, half lounging against the wall. There was a whole lot of black coming up round the edges of my vision now; the knife was such a dreadful interruption in my throat all the time, and my hearing had turned into a dark roar like a train in the Swiss Cottage tunnel on the Bakerloo line.
‘Leave it in him,’ I heard her saying, ‘till I get something to catch the blood in. It’ll go everywhere otherwise.’ The words reminded me of something Staniland had said, but he was nowhere near me. Both these people had got out of bed, and this dull-looking woman was moving out of the room. But she turned at the door … what door? All her words and surroundings seemed a hundred miles long. Then, abruptly, I couldn’t see any more.
What I wanted to say was: ‘I’m going.’ I wanted to tell someone that I knew everything now. I had got very cold, and I wanted to tell someone I knew very well that it had got dark, that soon now it would be very dark, too dark for me to see any more, or to hear, perhaps even to know, or even need to see or need to know where I was going: but perhaps, when it got utterly dark, the peace of the darkness would become the same as light, so that my last experience would become as mysterious and musical as my first, so that in my last darkness there might not be the same need of understanding anything so far away as the world anymore.
39
A figure was bending over me like a chunky, half-opened safety-pin. It took me a long time, coming back from a long way off, to get my throat to make a noise like a throat; even when I did I had to speak past lips that felt fat and numb because of some drug I was on.
‘Christ, it’s you,’ I said. ‘I thought I was up with the angels somewhere, but you look like the angel of death in tweeds.’ I paused and shut my eyes; it made me feel as if I were swinging slowly round a black sun, so I opened them again.
‘I thought I was dead,’ I said, ‘I really did.’
‘So did I,’ said Bowman. ‘So did the ambulance crew.’
‘All right, I can see I’m in a hospital,’ I said. ‘Which one?’
‘My life,’ said Bowman, ‘you might make a detective yet. You’re in the Westminster and have been for three days. On a drip.’
‘I’d like to know how I survived.’
‘Well, you didn’t deserve to, you berk,’ said Bowman. ‘But when I got your report on Staniland and that last phone message of yours I got over there with a squad car and two men sharpish.’
‘And then?’
‘Well, we didn’t bother knocking,’ said Bowman reminis-cently. ‘I hadn’t a warrant—there was no time—so we stove the door in anyway, shot upstairs, smashed the flat door in, and there you were, the three of you, you with the knife still in you, the woman stark bollock naked holding a plastic bucket under you and the blood pissing into it—blood all over the place—and that nut Fenton giggling and gettin his jollies off on the bed—he loves a death, that one does, as long as it’s not his own, of course, and the more blood about, the better. Anyway, we got the buckles on them—her screamin and goin on like a maniac, let me go you bastards and all that cobblers, stuck em in the car, radioed for an ambulance—and you were lucky that the Union go-slow was over, because it was down in just seven minutes, you’d have been dead otherwise. Christ, when I think—’
It was unlucky for me that he did think just then, because his mouth compressed with rage at the memory: ‘No one but a half-arsed idiot like you would have gone over there on your own, and not even a kiddie’s spade to protect yourself with!’ he shouted.
‘What have you booked them on?’ I said when he had calmed down.
‘Attempted murder for a start,’ he said. ‘Yours. What do you bleeding well think? The rest’ll come after, Staniland and Eric—they’ll have spilled the lot by the time I’ve finished with them, you’ll see. We’ll have a lovely case to go to court with by the time I’m through—the Public Prosecutors ought to pin a medal on me.’
‘Why on you?’ I said. As always between Bowman and me, things were getting heated again—nothing ever changed. ‘It was me that got my throat cut.’
‘On your bike,’ said Bowman. ‘No one at A14 ever gets anything, you know that. Your picture was on the telly, though, last night—what for, I can’t think. Must be a record for A14.’
‘Did they say if I was going to be all right?’ I asked him. ‘That’s what I want to know.’
‘Well, yes, seems you are,’ he said ungraciously. ‘I had a word with the quack just now. You was dead lucky that knife never nicked an artery, how it missed one I can’t think.’ He added with relish: ‘But you’ll have to be in bed for quite a while, which’ll keep you out of my hair.’
‘And even then,’ I said, ‘I suppose my voice’ll always sound odd.’
‘Well, it will if you don’t stop using it,’ said a nurse who had come into the room, and Bowman muttered:
‘No odder than it’s always sounded.’
The nurse rounded on him and said: ‘You. You can leave. Right now. You’ve well overstayed your welcome.’
‘It’s always the same with people like me,’ he said. ‘It must be something about the work I do.’ He stood up, reached for his hat, and put it on.
‘You should throw that horrible old thing away,’ I said, ‘and get a fedora. Then you’d look like Bogart, only bald.’
‘You can half kill this man,’ said Bowman, turning to the nurse, ‘but it won’t stop him getting cheeky with his superiors. Well, I’ll be back,’ he said, scowling at me from the doorway.
‘So will I,’ I said.
‘Don’t be so stupid!’ he shouted. ‘Just draw your pension and retire, damn you!’
‘Oh, no,’ I croaked, ‘you won’t get rid of me that easily.’
It wasn’t until after he had gone that it occurred to me I had never so much as thanked him for saving my life.
I lay back, thinking. Staniland would go to his grave avenged. Fenton would do life, in Rampton or Broadmoor as like as not. I didn’t think Barbara would be gracing the bars of any more South London clubs for a while, or seducing any coppers.
She would have to do thirty years first.
Derek Raymond’s
Factory Series
“No one claiming interest in literature truly written from the edge of human experience, no one wondering at the limits of the crime novel and of literature itself, can overlook these extraordinary books.”
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He Died with His Eyes Open
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An unflinching yet deeply compassionate portrait of Margaret Thatcher’s London—plagued by poverty and perversion—and an unnamed police Sergeant from the Unexplained Deaths department who may be the only one who cares about the “people who don’t matter and who never did.”
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The Devil’s Home on Leave
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The unnamed Sergeant stands up to both mobsters and his superiors while engaged in a harrowing game of cat-and-mouse with a psychopath who seems to have ties to the highest levels of the British government.
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How the Dead Live
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With growing desperation and enraged compassion, the nameless Sergeant fights to uncover a murderer—not by following analytical procedure, but by understanding why crimes are committed.
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Gentle Dora Suarez was already dying of AIDS. So why kill her? As the Sergeant digs deeper into a diary she left behind, the fourth book in the series becomes a study of human exploitation and institutional corruption, and the valiant effort to persist against it.
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thing about I Was Dora Suarez shrieks of the joy and pain of going too far.”
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