“Know anything so far?” I asked.
“Well, the coroner reckons time of death to between two and four this morning. The lad over there,” he pointed to one of the other onlookers, “called it in on his mobile around four.” Just after I’d found her, then. “We might get a more accurate time when we get her back to the coroner’s office but I doubt it. She’s probably dead from a fall but it looks like she’s got a broken neck, too boot. You’ll love this,” he added. “There was a note.”
“Yeah?” I asked. “What did the note say?”
He showed us the note in a little doggy bag. I took it politely and read aloud to everyone.
I am as a shadow. You will never catch me.
It was hand written, in blue ink. Capital letter only, neatly formed. There was very little to go on for a handwriting expert.
“Succinct. Sounds like a taunt.” I said.
“Yeah” said Joe, “why leave a note?”
“Don’t know,” said Harvey. “Anyway I’ve got to ride back with the meat wagon. I’ll see you all later. Don’t go getting into any trouble now, you hear?”
“Maybe Reb left the note,” said Harry as he left.
“Nope it wasn’t me. I’m too smart for that,” said Reb. He ran a hand through his flopsy curtains. It was a posh person’s hair cut. He dressed like a skateboarder though, all arse hanging out and wispy body.
“Well, the world is full of smart people underachieving and stupid people overachieving.” I said.
Pill came back scratching at the seat of his pants.
“Did you find anywhere?” asked Harry.
“Nope, I had to make do,” said Pill, rolling up his left trouser leg to show us his missing sock.
“Eugh!” said Harry. I shook my head from side to side. It was, after all, only to be expected.
*
I was happy. I had a case to solve, the mystery of the broken woman. Perhaps she was only a girl. But I was happy anyway. My friends were around me and I had frozen ears. Their previous warmth had all but left them. Aside from chilly ears life didn’t get much better than this. We all had that look about us. Like we were about to get it on. I almost felt joy. It’s difficult to recognise true feeling when you haven’t sleep for days but I was happy.
I have a theory. People who can’t feel joy, those who are missing serotonin, or whatever that is, think. Serotonin is what’s holding back our intellectual development. All those people wandering about grinning like idiots and patting themselves on the back for working to give money to someone for a shiny new watch and not troubled in the slightest by a thought entering their heads. Consumerism replacing the soul. Depression isn’t the lack of happies, it’s the excess of thought.
Anyway, I was happy. It was a rare feeling for me and I savoured it. My mind was ticking over nicely now. I could do with a cup of tea but like all things once we’d started on a case it could wait. There was plenty to do. I lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into the freezing air.
“Anyway, I’ve got to go,” said Reb. “Early start for me. I’ll call later and let you know what I know.”
“Yeah, see you,” I said. The others said their goodbyes and Reb left. He’d have to go into the mortuary today. The dead don’t indulge in Sabbath.
A couple more bobbies showed up at the scene, obviously looking for clues, and the two originals left to go up to the top of the multi-story. They’d had the same idea as us. To see where the girl was, allegedly, pushed from. It looked like a cut and dried murder. Someone pushed the girl out of the multi-story. There might be CCTV footage of her attacker in there. If they even had CCTV. It was an old multi-story. It’d make our involvement pretty much redundant, though.
I was huffing and puffing as we walked up to the third floor, following the bobbies. They didn’t seem to mind us tagging along. It wasn’t like they could do anything about it anyway. It’s a free country after all.
There on the top floor wrapped around a pole in the car park, one of those unexplained protuberances that frequent lonely car parks, overlooking where the girl had fallen, was her scarf. It was a long scarf, long enough to have reached the girl’s feet if she hadn’t wrapped it round herself a few times. It hung over the edge of the car park, its tail pointing to where the girl lay.
We wondered if her car was on this floor but it was deserted. There was no good reason for her to have been up here. The wind was pickling my ears. Harry took Joe’s arm for warmth. I looked away. Pill stared into the sky.
The police bagged the scarf and took photos of it in situ. We packed up camp and headed back to mine.
We talked on the way.
“Why was she up on the top floor in the first place? She didn’t go up for her car,” I said.
“No CCTV covering where she fell from,” said Harry.
“Was pushed from,” I corrected.
“Yeah, pushed. Note aside who commits suicide at three in the morning?” said Pill.
We discussed it on the way back to mine, walking past parked cars. Some of the early morning crowd were already waking. Lights were on in some of the houses we past. The corner shop was already open. I stopped in to buy some milk.
After a short walk we were back in my front room. Pill skinned up and we prepared to smoke a little. His overly large ears twitched with concentration.
Pill’s drug rituals were excessive and extreme. It was like watching someone checking which way Mecca lay, getting out a prayer mat and getting down on their hands and knees to make their obeisance to Allah. Except Pill’s house was all Rizla and pipe, there wasn’t a hubbly-bubbly in sight. Pill said his prayers and made his burnt offerings to the gods, licked a paper and twiddled its nubbin and rolled.
It was now seven o’clock in the morning. Today we would find out the girl’s name and start our own investigation.
*
6. Locked out
The day was dawning with a grey, dismal light. It was still early in the year and the days were dark and miserable mostly. Outside the wind was picking up and my poor old sash windows were rattling. Pill, Harry Joe and I would have to wait to find out the girl’s name from Reb until we could do anything constructive, but while we waited we had tea and smoked. We passed a joint round slowly, Pill always holding it for longer than was polite but then it was his gear so nobody said anything. My little ashtray was full to overflowing. We passed around the ashtray as nobody wanted to get rocks on themselves. Pill could only afford solids this week. He only got grass at the end of the month when payday’s bounty was still fresh. I was already a little stoned and the time was slowing down. It was only eight o’clock. We didn’t talk much, we just smoked and watched telly. The Emporium was open at nine so we had a little time to kill before we could go out for a slap up breakfast.
“Tom’s a dummy,” said Joe suddenly. I jumped.
I relaxed when I realised what he was talking about. It didn’t require any input from me. It was a conversation he and Harry had been having on the way back from Carter Street. They were talking about the barman in our local, Tom. We all knew Tom. As far as I was concerned he was a stand up guy but Joe, no surprises, didn’t like him.
“He’s stupid. He couldn’t find it? It’s really not that difficult. It’s just off Germaine Road.”
Tom had gotten lost trying to find Joe’s house for a barbeque. Why Harry and Joe had decided to hold a barbeque at Joe’s I didn’t know. It was a good barbeque, though. I’d had a few too many and proselytised about New Labour's links to Nazism. I’d been very drunk and making things up (well, mainly). I remembered a young lady of eighteen years being very impressed with my intellectualism. I’d rambled about complete and utter bollocks for hours, with her fawning over me, thinking I was funny, which I guess I was until I threw up on her.
“Well, you know what he’s like.” Harry took a dainty, loveable sip of tea from an oversized mug with Harry Potter on the side. Chamber of Secrets I think it was. The film, not the book. I don’t know why they don’t mak
e book mugs.
“I don’t think he’s stupid as such. It’s just that his brain doesn’t work in the same way as most peoples’. He doesn’t even know there’s such a thing as geography. I’m like, I’m going to Spain on my holidays, and he’s like ‘Spain? where’s that?’ So I say you know, the country, Spain? So he says ‘nope, not ringing a bell’ so I sigh and say you know, Spain, under France? He shakes his head. Behind Portugal? Then he says ‘oh! Madrid, Barcelona, all that.’”
“So he’s no sense of direction then?” said Pill.
“No, it’s more like nonsensical omnidirectionalism. I can’t say I really like him but he’s interesting,” said Harry.
I listened to this with half an ear while I mused about the death of the girl. The tea was on the table and Pill drank his in a meaningless language of slurps. On any other day it would annoy me but my brain was too busy. I wondered about the scarf, wrapped around the pole in the car park, floating loose and free like an unemployed noose.
“So what do you think, then? It’s obviously not a suicide. There’s the note after all,” says Pill. “Perhaps there’s a serial killer on the loose.”
“Oh, you think everyone’s a serial killer, Pill,” says Harry. “Like the last time when that lad’s body was dredged from the river. Someone drowning young lads in the river for kicks, after that boy the year before.”
“We still don’t know what killed him.”
“Like the police said, death by misadventure. He just got drunk and fell into the Whinny (that’s the local river, which runs from Capston to Huntingford.)”
“Well anyway… what do you think?” I asked.
“It looks like she was pushed from upstairs,” said Joe, just to have his tuppence worth.
“What was she doing up there? There was no car. And why was her scarf wrapped around the pole? That’s what I’d like to know.” I took a sip of tea and looked around pointedly. “Do you really think she was pushed and the killer left a note tucked into her pocket? Why leave the ring next to her body? Why wasn’t she wearing it? And nobody leaves notes when they kill someone. That only happens in stories and suicides.”
“Well, it said she’d been killed. There’s nothing about this that looks like a suicide. We’ve definitely got a murder on our hands.”
“It didn’t say she’d been killed. It said we would never catch them.”
“Well,” said Pill, “it didn’t sound like a suicide note, did it?”
“So we’re all agreed about that are we?” I asked.
This is met by murmurs of approval.
“Something to get our teeth into,” said Joe.
“We don’t know it’s her scarf. Come to think of it we can’t even be sure that’s where she jumped from,” I said.
“Jumped? Don’t you mean pushed?” said Joe.
“Yeah, yeah, pushed. Or thrown perhaps.”
“No witnesses, you reckon?” asks Pill.
“It seems that way. I think we might be onto a tough one here.”
“Well, Harvey caught it. He’ll tell us what the police find at least.”
I didn’t say anything more. I just smoked and thought about the note. I am as shadow. I wondered what it all meant. I should have left the ring there for the police, but I don’t suppose they’d make anything more of it than I had. Why had her legs been arranged so neatly? Who would break someone’s neck when their head had been caved in? It didn’t make sense. I thought it was an interesting case. I couldn’t wait to find out what had happened. It was like reading a new book. A good one, not something you can put down after you’ve read the first chapter and know what’s happening. Something that really grabs you and holds the attention. One where you want to read the whole thing, not just the last page. I always thought that was stupid, people reading the last page because they want to know how a story turns out. It’s the journey that tells you about the story, not the end. Besides, a book never ends on the last page. It always ends way before that.
The conversation went on for sometime, until we left my home behind for the Emporium and some eats. The conversation didn’t really get anymore enlightening. After all, at this stage we knew next to nothing.
I felt a sad tug as I always did when I closed the front door behind me. There was nothing there to remind me of anything past but my books. I still felt sad leaving it, though.
*
‘Why don’t you take photos?’ Harry had asked once. There are no photos in my house.
I don’t keep photographs. When asked why I have no photos I explain it’s because I am worried if I move the photo it will affect the subject of the photo. Everything takes on significance for me. It wouldn’t be fair to the person in the photo if I accidentally burned down their house and it made all the people in the photo die at the same time just by dusting.
It’s the not-sleeping you see. It makes me a little paranoid.
*
The Emporium was practically deserted. It was still too early for most of the Saturday night revellers to break their fasts. We all had the breakfast special, mine without tomatoes. I hate tomatoes and don’t understand why pubs and cafes everywhere insist on putting them on and in everything on the menu.
The Emporium was a grand place. It had red and brown sauce on all the tables and an ashtray. I finished my plate, cleaning it with a slice of bread. The bread was too much to eat really but I didn’t like to leave a fry up. Harry ate like a horse but left her fried bread, saying it clogged arteries. I didn’t have the heart to tell her everything here was fried in clogged arteries. Joe ate like a pig, and got bean juice in his beard, which he wiped away with one oversized hand. Pill was coming down and kept quiet while we ate. He ate like a starling.
*
When we came back from the Emporium there was a message on the phone from Reb. He said to call him back, so I did. He had a lot to say. Most of it was drivel though and I only report the important bits here.
“Cause of death was a broken neck. The tox screen won’t come back till later this week and they’re only just getting started on the autopsy.” Reb wouldn’t be in on the autopsy. He just trolleys dead people about. He’s kind of a porter but they let him watch the autopsies. I don’t know why anyone would want to watch but we got more information from Reb than the police would give us sometimes, with the exception of Harvey and Johnny, who seemed to think of us as cute meddlers, not some kind of public enemy, like most of the policemen who knew us did.
The radio on in the background was amusing Joe, Pill and Harry with adverts. I spared a thought for the hard-pressed advertisers. There’s something on about cheapo sofas. It must be hard for advertisers to continual come up with such blatant lies. It’s a whole other language. In advertising speak for example a non-drip cap means ‘drips like a son-of-a-bitch.’
I was a little stoned so my attention was drifting somewhat. I tried to concentrate on what Reb was saying.
“So what about the head caved in? Did they say anything about that?”
“They’ve just opened her head. They think the damage was post-mortem. Not enough intra-cranial bleeding or something.”
“Right, so she died of having her neck snapped and then she was pushed off the top floor of the car park. That doesn’t make sense. It looks like they were trying to make it look like a suicide but why leave a note and go to all that trouble?”
“I don’t know, Jake, that’s what you do. You figure out the tough bits. I just tag along for the ride.”
I sighed. “Right, Reb. Thanks for letting me know. Will you be over later?”
“Yeah, sure. After work.”
I said fine.
“What happened to you Friday night, then?” he asked. “Did you pass out again?”
I’d been asleep, unusual for me, when he’d called two nights ago.
“I did pass out, but on the couch. And it was a conscious, lazy sort of passing out, like going to sleep. In fact, I went to sleep. What about that note? What do you think?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said into the phone.
“Well, that’s enlightening. Anyway, do you know who she was? Have you found out yet?”
“Tracey Hardingham.” He told me where she lived, on the Gressland estate.
“Anything else?”
“Yep, as you ask. She was a user.”
“Tracks?”
“Thick like leather. A long time user I’d say.”
“Right, thanks Reb. See you later.” I didn’t want to get into too much detail over the phone. You never know who might be listening.
The adverts stopped and the local news came on the radio. Joe was talking to Harry but I tuned out and listened to the news. There was no mention of the murder.
As the phone cut out I thought about another of my little time killing masterpieces. I like to ask people how much money they’d want to live. I do this when I feel low. I say, go away and think about it. It makes me feel better about people. Very rarely do they say they would want a million. Most people seem kind. At least the ones I talk to. I don’t know about the others, they seem like arseholes. I guess on form though it’s fairer to say only 90% are decent.
I felt low now. My moods swing. I was happy earlier now I felt sad. My moods keep me on my toes.
I thought I might ask Harry how much she’d want to live. I’ve never asked her but I guess she’d say she has everything she needs. I disagree. I think she needed a new boyfriend.
I tuned in again.
“There’s chemistry between us, you must see that!” said Joe wildly. He was looking at Harry and Pill was looking embarrassed.
I figured it was the latest part of an on-going argument.
“Maybe for you, love. The only chemistry going on for me involves half-lives and mutation,” said Harry.
Give her full marks for a put down. I fair sizzled with pride. Would that she were mine.
BLOOD DRUGS TEA (A Dark Comedy Novel) Page 4
