by John Harvey
‘Baby, I reach for you in dreams,
The more I reach for you it seems
As though these hands of mine just pass right through you.
I try in vain to kiss your lips,
But find your dear face only slips
Past my reach and I just can’t get close to you.
Oh, tell me lover, why must it be so?
When I want to come to you,
Why must you tell me to go?
The ghost of your love haunts me now,
And I will always remember how
You breathed a new kind of life into me.’
It was some time before I got up and lifted the stylus from the tracking groove in which it had stuck. I didn’t want to take the record with me; I didn’t think I would ever want to listen to it again. I would not be able to hear it without seeing that delicate line of blood disfiguring her face. And I didn’t want that: I had memories enough already.
But I did take the second thing I found—or, rather, things. They were in a shoe-box at the bottom of the wardrobe. A number of small, cylindrical pills in a bottle; a quantity of what smelled to be good grass; an envelope with a few round pills, dark red in colour; and, on a piece of paper folded and re-folded into the smallest size possible, what appeared to be a telephone number.
All these I put into my jacket pockets. Then I put out the lights and stepped out into the hallway.
After taking so much care about getting into the room through that door, you might have thought I would have given some attention to the manner in which I went back out of it. You would have been wrong.
As soon as I had set foot outside the flat and into the darkness of the landing whoever was there waiting swung at me. I don’t know what with exactly. But I do know that it was hard and cold and it was aimed at my head with a lot of force. I must have sensed something just ahead of the swishing sound behind me for I had begun to leap to one side when the blow landed. Instead of taking away a sizeable section of my scalp, it merely bludgeoned into the side of my head just above the ear and cannoned into my left shoulder with sufficient force to numb it
As I fell to my right I tried to see who it was who was hitting me so lovingly but it was too dark. Too dark to distinguish anything other than the kicking shape which now drove me hard against the wall. I grabbed at the foot, too late, and rolled across the floor, dimly aware that he was above me. This time his boot was more accurate and it caught me under the ribs and sent the breath spinning out of me. I reached up again and succeeded in catching hold of an arm.
The wrong arm.
The right one came crashing down on top of me and whatever it was wielding found its target properly. The top of my head felt as though it was being slit in two like a brittle coconut. I had a last thought about hanging on to the arm at all costs and then I became one with the darkness.
When I came round my head still felt brittle. I must have let go of his arm, though, for there was no one else on the landing. Hesitantly, I levered myself to my feet and leant against the wall.
I really didn’t need to feel in my pockets, but I did anyway. It was wasted effort all right. The things I had taken from the shoe-box had gone. If it wouldn’t have hurt my head too much I would have shaken it. Instead I tried to keep it very steady as I walked down the stairs and out into the street. Maybe I would find the right size dustbin, and then I could just throw it away with all the other old trash.
I had only walked some fifty yards down the street when I saw the car parked against the kerb, waiting.
2
It was not a marked car. It just sat by the kerb, sidelights on, waiting. The two men inside the car looked big from their shapes through the windscreen; when they got out of the car they looked even bigger.
They got out slowly as though they had all the time in the world, as though they knew that I wasn’t going to make a run for it. For what? A bullet in the back? No way. They didn’t have guns: I didn’t have a gun. It was just a cosy little English arrest in a quiet English street.
Well, almost. Even the ordinary English cop isn’t exactly like Dixon of Dock Green any more. Perhaps they can’t afford to be. Perhaps they didn’t know I wasn’t carrying a gun. I mean, how could they?
They came up on either side of me, two men in their late thirties, in raincoats. They moved slowly, confidently, without bothering to speak. They didn’t need to—they had done this before.
One of them wore a hat: he hit me first. Hard, with the flat of his outstretched hand into my solar plexus. While I was bending forward the one without a hat rabbit-punched me from what seemed to be a great height. Then one of them tripped me. I don’t know which one—by this stage in the proceedings I had lost interest in their wardrobe.
Together they hauled me from the pavement where I was quietly retching and slung me into the back seat of the car. Somehow they had managed to slip the handcuffs on me during the same brief moments. Real professionals!
With timing like that they should have been in variety. Except that variety had already died when I was a kid and God knows when that was. If you were a variety artist you either died with it or television embalmed you shortly after. That is, unless you are a genius like Max Wall and even he’s had to go straight.
I glanced at the two cops and wondered if that was something they’d had to do lately. For a moment I even thought I might ask them. But I decided against it—I had been hit enough for one evening.
With little fantasies like that we keep ourselves going.
The one with the hat was sitting in the front of the driver’s side, making notes in a little book. I wondered what resemblance his report bore to what had happened. I might as well have wondered who would be the next British heavyweight champion of the world. The warm-blooded one sat beside me; he was taking more than his fair share of room, but it wasn’t because he wanted to hold my hand.
‘That house you came out of. We heard there’s a singer called Candi Carter living there. You know her?’
Easy now, Mitchell, I thought to myself, you’ve got to play this one cool. I looked up at him. ‘Maybe,’ I said.
He wrenched hard at the cuffs and scraped several layers of dirt, sweat and skin off my wrists. Before he slapped my face.
Very good, I thought to myself. Very cool.
He repeated the question, his mouth close to mine. He stank of beer, stale cigarettes, hamburgers with sour onions.
‘I used to know her.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning I don’t know her any more. Meaning she’s dead. Now nobody knows her.’
His partner turned round from the front seat and stopped writing fiction. I must have said something interesting.
‘What kind of dead?’ he asked.
‘The usual.’
He looked as though he was going to clip me as well, but his intentions were interrupted by the car radio calling for a report on his position. Tersely he told them where he was and what I had said about Candi. The station told him to wait until more officers came, then bring me in.
While we were waiting, we got real friendly. They even asked me my name: just when I had begun to think that they didn’t care. The only thing was—when I told them I got the impression that they had known all along.
The central police station was quite a new building. Outside and in the fabric was impressive, strongly made and clean. The rooms were sparsely furnished with upright chairs which never did seem to be the right height, pearl-grey filing cabinets, wooden tables barely marked by cup rings and cigarette burns. On the walls there were the usual posters: missing since last July; tickets for the Police Ball; wanted in connection with the murder of a publican in Sutton-in-Ashfield; measures to take against potato blight; watch out, there’s a thief about; dull it isn’t.
Men in uniform and out of it moved quietly around the building.
Policemen doing their job with as much seeming efficiency as men who are worked too hard and paid too little can muster. From room to room they went, sifting the steadily gathering detritus of the city night: a group of drunken youths with coloured scarves tied to their wrists and plastic-flowered pennants on their coats; the first few of the many prostitutes whose soiled bodies would spend the remainder of their working hours in custody; a couple of lads—not older than fifteen—who had been caught breaking into a tobacconist’s shop and beating up the owner when he discovered them; a sad queen who had announced his desires a little too loudly and obviously in the public lavatories of the city centre; and the car thieves, the junkies, the down-and-outs.
You couldn’t work in the midst of all this without it getting to you. It didn’t matter how clean the building was, how new. The corruption of man was old, old, old.
And yet it was not the petty and the unsuccessful who really corrupted. It was those who made it big outside the law and stayed outside it. Easy money and good times just for the asking. Just for turning an eye in the other direction, just for overlooking a piece of evidence, just for picking up a guy and shaking him down hard. A guy walking along a darkened street one November night, a guy who had been looking at the murdered body of a girl he might once have loved, who had been sapped and booted, then hit and hit again.
The room I was sitting in held no surprises. By the door stood a uniformed constable, his mind firmly on other things. Across the table from me a C.I.D. Inspector was checking through my statement. The only sound was a steady hum which seemed to come from nowhere and fill the heavy air.
Since the law had found out that what I had told them about Candi being dead was true they had been treating me a little more carefully and a lot more seriously. The two heavies who had picked me up first had obviously been working on a quick tip-off that I might be worth turning over and a request that they did it hard. But murder made it all different. Maybe.
At least the Inspector had asked my name first.
A call to Tom Gilmour at West End Central had brought me a certain credence, even a little grudging respect. What it didn’t bring me was any love. Cops who left the force and opened newsagents shops they could understand, cops who crossed the line and went bent full-time even, but a cop who wanted to do the same work by himself and probably for less money … ?
He had finished reading my statement—for the second time. A methodical man: or maybe he just didn’t read too well.
He was not far off retiring age, I guessed. Maybe he even had a little calendar somewhere on which he ticked off the final months. He had a small moustache of the kind that had long since gone out of fashion, one eye was slightly runny and he dabbed at it from time to time with a handkerchief. He looked tired: he had been tired for a long time now.
When he spoke his voice sounded far away, beneath the hum that still permeated the room.
‘You’ve made a full statement, Mr Mitchell, and what we have been able to check so far substantiates it. The marks which the police doctor found on your body correspond to your assertion that you were attacked by persons unknown after leaving Miss Carter’s flat.’
The phrases peeled from his lips like dead skin.
‘You say that you were shocked by what you found in the flat and did not think to call the police from there. That you were on your way downstairs for help when you were struck from behind. All that is not necessarily admitted by us to be so. Not yet. So you see, Mr Mitchell, it is most likely that we shall want to speak to you again.
‘However, I can see no reason for holding you here any longer at present and you may return to London as soon as you wish. I must ask you to report to West End Central police station in the morning and to keep them informed of your daily whereabouts until further notice.’
He paused and looked up at me, till a stream of rheumy fluid caused him to turn his head away.
‘You have been very co-operative. Thank you for that. There is still a train for London tonight, if you don’t mind travelling up with the mail. If you ask at the desk, there may be a patrol car going towards the station. You could get a lift.’
I hesitated for a moment, thinking he was about to stand up. He was not. When I turned again at the door, he was still sitting behind the table, notebook open in front of him, eyes open, staring at the blankest of bare walls.
I went out of the station without talking to anyone. I had had enough rides in police cars, had spoken to enough policemen, had seen enough of humanity for one night.
I crossed the empty square where the fountain no longer played and headed for the railway station. It was still cold.
There was a guy once who told his wife that sleep was the balm of hurt minds. Well, it didn’t do too much for him and, since she turned out to be some kind of insomniac, it didn’t help her much either. As for me, I usually find it soothes the body and sometimes brings a pleasant memory or two. Usually some old movie with a heart of gold. But not this night.
In my dream I awoke in the small, plain room of what had to be a motel. Dressed and went outside. It was night, I guess, but there appeared to be a lot of light. I suppose I should have looked for a full moon, but it didn’t seem important at the time. Maybe it wasn’t.
I walked through this batch of scrubby trees towards a tall, battered-looking house. My movements were slow, as if stepping through invisible waves. Inside the front door I hesitated, not knowing at first which way to go: there was a staircase leading up to the floors above and another which went down to the cellar.
Then I knew which way I was to go; knew also that I didn’t want to go that way; didn’t want to follow those steps down to the basement. But something drew me down, something which left me no choice.
A door. Again, a door. A door which creaked slowly, then swung wide. I wasn’t aware of stepping inside, but somehow I had.
And suddenly it flailed at me. It. Something. Something large and whirling, like a giant bird, flapping its black wings across my face. Then a blade, huge, shining strangely and swinging at my body.
I threw myself at the thing, whatever it was. My hands touched nothing but sticky, cloying dampness. Strangely swinging—shining—a single bare light bulb. A face. An old woman’s face approaching me, smiling, toothlessly, invitingly. The mouth opening till I could see the pulp of the gums seeming to swallow me up. The sickly-sweet stink of over-ripe fruit was everywhere.
Then the face was that of a young man, high cheek bones, small dark eyes staring. I summoned all my strength into one punch and drove my fist at that face. As I did so it changed into the mask-like features of Candi, the line of dried blood a hair-line crack in the white plaster. I tried to pull back the punch but it was too late.
My knuckles drove through the unearthly surface of Candi’s face, passing through bone and flesh as though delving into some strange fruit.
From somewhere, Candi’s voice singing:
‘The more I reach for you it seems
As though these hands of mine just pass right through you.’
I shouted and shouted for release but no sound came, only a blackness into which those flailing wings disappeared until they tore and tore at the inside of my brain.
At some time my nightmare must have ended and allowed me to sleep, though when I eventually woke it was still imprinted on my mind. When I could lay in bed with it no longer I got up and pulled on some clothes and walked unsteadily into the kitchen.
What I needed now was a little honest routine. I remember reading in one of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels that he began the day by making coffee in a set and practised way, each morning the same. It also said somewhere that Marlowe liked to eat scrambled eggs for breakfast but as far as I can recall it didn’t say how he did that.
What I did was this. I broke two eggs into a small saucepan, added a good-size chunk of butter, poured in a little off the top of a bottle o
f milk and finally ground in some sea salt and black pepper. Then I just stirred all of this over a medium heat, while I grilled some bacon to go with it.
They say that a sense of achievement is good for a man.
After breakfast I had a bath and examined my bruises. Then I made a second pot of coffee and thought about opening the morning’s mail. From the nature of the envelopes it didn’t seem too good an idea. Then somebody rang the doorbell. I wasn’t sure how good an idea answering that would be, but Į went anyway.
She was standing a couple of paces back from the doorway, smiling a smile which would have thawed out the frostiest of November mornings. Her face was beautiful and I stared at it for what seemed a long time. A fine face, without a disfiguring line of blood: Candi’s face.
3
I stared at her for what seemed a long while. Mouth, eyes, bone structure: all the same. The hair was the identical colour, but was cut shorter and turned up just above her shoulders. When I took in her whole body I could see she was shorter by several inches and when my eyes swept back to her face they found it lacking the hardness that Candi’s had developed.
She had frowned at the coldness and surprise in my stare. Until she guessed the reason and then she smiled at me again. I should have known then that smiles like that meant trouble for men like me. But then I never did learn that kind of thing until it was too late.
‘Hello, Scott. It’s a long time since we saw each other.’ She wrinkled her nose in a way her sister would never have done. ‘Are you going to invite me in?’
By way of answer I stepped aside and watched her pass by me, on into the living room.
