London Noir

by Cathi Unsworth

  There wasn’t much I needed to ask May, but for the sake of appearance I had to make it look like I was doing my job properly. I told her to wait upstairs with Jilly’s neighbors while I made some further investigations. I was able to go through the flat and remove used needles and various other signs of drug use before the medics arrived. I then examined Jilly’s body. As you’d expect it was cold to touch. O’Sullivan was lying on her side, naked on the bed.

  After the corpse had been loaded into an ambulance I went upstairs and told May she could go home, saying I’d contact her if there was anything further I needed to ask. I had no intention of troubling Marianne again, but since she was a middle-class professional, I had to make it look like I was doing everything by the book. May had fine manners and excellent verbal skills, so there was an outside chance that if she was moved to make a complaint about my investigation, what she had to say would be taken seriously.

  Because Jilly certainly had traces of heroin in her body, it was important I arranged things so that any need for toxicological analysis was avoided. That said, since I knew O’Sullivan was an intravenous drug user, there was nothing to worry about in terms of a purely visual inspection of the body. Indeed, even in instances of suicide brought about by the ingestion of pills, evidence of a drug overdose is only visually detectable in fifty percent of such cases. Likewise, there is necessarily a good deal of mutual understanding between all those involved in the investigation of a death, one which is sometimes greased by the circulation of used fivers. I have many good reasons to request a particular result from a pathologist, and the croaks I work alongside know this without my having to spell it out. Aside from anything else, I don’t have time to properly investigate the circumstances surrounding every death that occurs on my beat. It would waste a considerable amount of taxpayers’ money and my time if the circumstances in which every miserable junkie overdosed were fully investigated. Every pathologist understands, regardless of whether or not a fistful of fivers are being pressed into their greasy palms, that the police know what’s for the best.

  Given that I wished to avoid an inquest into Jilly O’Sullivan’s death, it wasn’t much to ask of medical science that it should back up my false contention that she’d died from natural causes. Something will invariably be found in the lungs after death, so bronchopneumonia would provide a suitable explanation of Jilly’s passing, as it had in so many other instances where I found it imperative to avoid a full-scale investigation. Death, of course, is always the result of the failure of one of the major organs, and according to the legal rule book, what matters is the chain of events leading up to such a failure. In practice, the letter of the law can be safely ignored in favor of its spirit. Only the elderly and homeless die from bronchopneumonia in truly unsuspicious circumstances. Bronchopneumonia is often brought on by a drug overdose, but my colleagues and I will nonetheless routinely treat it as a natural cause of death in a young addict. We see no point in arriving at an accurate conclusion that will only upset and confuse the family of some wastrel who didn’t deserve the loving home she grew up in. Grieving is a difficult process and I’ve done countless decent parents a huge favor by making it possible for them to avoid facing up to the fact that their child was a good-for-nothing junkie degenerate.

  To shift the focus once again to the particular, there wasn’t much in O’Sullivan’s basement flat. Jilly and her pimp Garrett had only lived there for a few weeks. They’d occupied an equally spartan Bayswater bedsit over the autumn. Junkies mainly use possessions as a form of collateral, they rarely hang onto stuff, personal items tend to be stolen and sold as required. However, Jilly’s diary was in the flat and the final entry was dedicated to Garrett:

  COMPUTER IN PURSUIT OF A DREAM

  You lie there, legs straddled, an easy lay

  Like some “gloomy fucker” (your words)

  For hours you have put me through mental torture

  Because I desired you

  Sure I wanted love anyway I could

  But you denied me both fuck & fix

  And then dropping a Tuinal, like an over-the-hill whore

  You became an easy lay

  I knew this nonsense was merely one of many pieces of proof that Jilly’s drug use had been ongoing. That meant jack shit to me because my considered professional opinion was that O’Sullivan’s death was entirely unsuspicious and solely due to natural causes. Any police officer worth his or her salt knows that to lie effectively one must stick reasonably closely to the truth. Therefore, in my official report I wouldn’t gloss over the fact that Jilly had been a long-term drug addict. Aside from anything else, the pathologist couldn’t ignore the track marks on her arms. All I needed to do was claim that her addiction was well in the past.

  After acquiring some cash from Jilly’s landlord in return for overlooking the fact that drug dealing was taking place in his gaff, I phoned my chum Paul Lever to acquire suitable evidence to back up the fictional content of the report I was in the process of compiling. PC Lever had a thick file on Jilly and this included several of the fraudulent job applications he’d directed her to make. Back in the mid-’70s Paul had wanted to know exactly what was going on in various local drug charities, so he’d sent Jilly into them as a spy. He provided me with a copy of a successful application she’d made for a job as a social worker at the Westbourne Project. In this Jilly claimed to have a degree and postgraduate qualifications in philosophy from UCL, despite the fact that she’d left school at sixteen and had never attended a university. Something else that made the document Lever handed me fraudulent was Jilly’s claim that although she’d been a smack addict, she’d cleaned up in 1972. While I knew this was untrue, it placed her long-term drug addiction seven years in the past, which was good enough for my purposes.

  Since the general public is blissfully ignorant of the problems police officers face, people are often surprised to learn of my working methods, should I choose to speak openly about them. What needs to be stressed in relation to this is that since it is impossible for the police to completely suppress the West London drug scene, the next best thing for us to do is control it. Only dealers we approve of are allowed to carry on their business, and cuts from their profits serve to top up our inadequate pay. Likewise, Paul Lever and various other police officers, including me, had been getting our jollies with Jilly during the early ’70s.

  Lever had the evidence, both real and fabricated, to get O’Sullivan banged up for a very long time. To avoid jail, Jilly had made a deal with him. O’Sullivan had to sell drugs on Paul’s behalf and provide him with information about anyone who set themselves up as a dealer without his approval. She also agreed to see us once a week at the police station where we had a regular line-up with her. Jilly wasn’t the only junkie Paul had providing us with sexual favors, all of which might give the impression he’s a hard man. Certainly this is the appearance he cultivates, but actually he’s somewhat sensitive about his macho self-image. Back in 1972, Jilly had the singular misfortune to be around just after a colleague made a crack about Lever always taking last place in our gang-bangs.

  Paul, like any virile male, enjoys slapping whores around while he’s screwing them, and on this particular occasion he was determined to prove through sheer ultra-violence that he didn’t harbor any unnatural sexual desires. As I gave Jilly a poke, Lever grabbed her right arm and broke it over his knee. O’Sullivan was in agony, but Paul took great pleasure in amusing himself by making the bitch indulge him with an extended sex session before allowing her to go to the hospital. On the surface this might sound somewhat sick, but Paul is basically a good bloke, and he genuinely believes that being a bit psycho is the most rational way to deal with whores and crims. After all, the only thing these reprobates respect and understand is brute force. Indeed, what other way is there to deal with someone like O’Sullivan? In the early ’60s she had offers of marriage from more than one of her upper-class johns, but she turned them down and became a junkie instead.

>   It was Jilly’s decision to live the low-life and what she got from us was no more than she had coming for choosing to subsist, as her extended Irish family have done since before the days of Cromwell, beyond the pale. Jilly wasn’t just a junkie and a prostitute, she was also a pickpocket, a thief, and she engaged in checkbook and other frauds. Any reasonable person will agree that without laws and police officers prepared to carry out a dirty job vigilantly, society would collapse into pure jungle savagery. That said, there are still too many do-gooders who love besmirching the name of the Metropolitan Police, and an inquest into Jilly’s life and death would in all likelihood bring to light the type of facts that fuel the enmity these bleeding hearts feel toward us.

  Police officers like me deserve whatever perks we can pick up, providing this doesn’t impinge upon the rights of law-abiding citizens. Bending the rules goes with the territory of upholding the law; if I stuck to official procedures my hands would be tied with red tape. Punks and whores really don’t count as far as I’m concerned, nor do the pinkos who bleat on about police oppression. In a sane society criminals wouldn’t have rights, and the police wouldn’t have to break the law to protect decent folk.

  MAIDA HELL

  BY BARRY ADAMSON

  Maida Hill

  Above the sound of sirens, my view is as always: stark, sullen, and eldritch. I’m prone to believe that it’s a vile and disgusting world below.

  Where I stand, the Harrow Road Police Station is to my right, and Our Lady of Lourdes and St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church is to my left.

  Crime and redemption carved into each set of knuckles.

  I catch myself on the turnaround—reflected in stained glass. I am at once as black as night and yet somehow as white as a sheet.

  Moiety me!

  I hang my head and lean on a knee that sways gently. The smell of tumble dryers and fried food pique my hunger for something more than the reminders of a not so comfortable existence.

  Beneath me: the Harrow Road. This is the main artery that divides (at this juncture) Notting Hill and Maida Vale into an area uncommonly known as Maida Hill.

  More commonly known as Maida Hell.

  If it were a pen it would be broken. The scribe’s grasp sullied by an unthinkable, irremovable liquid; marking him forever as the guilty one.

  If it were a book it would be stolen. Pushed into a dark alley; fingers around its throat; gasping and bleating for its very existence to be ratified before being hauled over the coals and the very life beaten out of it.

  Sucked in.

  Chewed up.

  Spat out.

  Stepped on.

  MAIDA HELL.

  I spy with my little eye; the red, white, and blue blood vessels that jam their way through this darkened gray conduit we’ll refer to as the “Harrowing Road.” The number 18 bus domineeringly crawls the entire length of it like a fat, hideous tapeworm; its red and shining sixty-foot body bulging with sweating parasites. This Dipylidium caninum heads as far west as one can imagine, taking in “Murder Mile” Harlesden, where you could very well be “starin’ down de barrel of a ’matic,” as though you were merely being greeted by an old friend. Then forever you’ll sit on your backside next to some undesirable with few manners, as the nauseating carrier snakes its way through Wem-ber-ley and finally sets in Sudbury. Which is as far west as one can imagine.

  Or: it heads northeast, over Ballard’s Concrete Island; ceremoniously known as the Paddington Basin (which, in my opinion, is as good a place as any to let go of the contents of a now infested stomach!). Scolex features, then slithers up the Marylebone Road, and finally breaks itself down by Euston Railway Station to complete its lifecycle and let everybody get the hell out to the rest of the country. Which is precisely what I intend to do when all this is over.

  Not a hundred yards from where I stoop, the Great Western Road jumps over the lazy Harrow Road and becomes Elgin Avenue. This is also the sector where Fernhead Road comes to an end, along with Walterton Road, creating a psychic wasteland of sorts. This circumambience consists to my mind of five corners. (Traditionally four. Nineteenth-century ordinance survey maps will forever testify that Walterton and Fernhead came much later. However, bananas to all that.) These five corners shall become evinced and bring into our very consciousness the indurate domain of:

  THE SPACE BETWEEN.

  I’ll take you there.

  On one corner: the bank.

  Always full and with few tellers, most of who are off shopping in Somerfield and grabbing all the reduced-priced stock before it goes out of date later that day. Outside of the bank, they’ll flirt with the locals they looked down upon not a moment earlier. (Don’t kiss her, she’s a teller!) Then stroll lazily back to the jam-packed treasury, where one guy is now screaming the place down.

  “YOU KNOW ME! NIG NOG. WHERE DID HE GO?”

  The toothless, yellow-eyed man with the pee stains on his coat then begins to cry, and shamefully leaves.

  “Tosser. Jennifer, will you buzz me in?”

  The teller then shirks in to stuff her face with tuck and gossip, before slipping into a dream of tonight’s date with the new business manager, Clive. Twenty-two. Looks a bit like Ronaldo without the skills.

  He’ll part my lips with first and third and slip in the second. He’ll stare into me. Through me …

  Cream oozes from the doughnut she scoffs and lands on her skirt, which she wipes off with her hand. The rest of us? Well, we just lose another day silently practicing the art of queuing; bemoaning a self-confidence we just don’t seem to have been born with.

  On the other corner: the mobile phone shop.

  “Mobile phone, please?”

  A skinny girl in a tight sweater hands out flyers, which nobody takes, except this one bizarre-looking guy who lurks ominously, scratches his crotch, and then approaches her with a greasy smile.

  “Oh, this is the new Ericsson, right?”

  “Yes. Please. To take. My boss …”

  “It’s the flattop, isn’t it?”

  “Please, just take.”

  “Yeah. It’s got those buttons that really stick out. You could play with them all night. What are you, love? Polish? Latvian?”

  “Please, I don’t …”

  He gives her the killer’s stare.

  “Mark my words, love. You fucking do. And you fucking will. All right?”

  He holds her gaze before leaning away and into the distance. Feeling exposed by the coruscating sunlight, she pulls her coat together, mumbles an idea of faith while thinking about her mother and the friends she left behind, and moves onto the next.

  “Mobile phone, please?”

  On the other corner: the public toilets.

  Usual setup. Standard, heading underground. Disabled, at floor level. Toilet of choice for drug addicts.

  “The animals went in two by two, hurrah, hurrah.”

  “Fuck off. Give me the gear.”

  “You make me feel like dancin’, gonna dance the night away.”

  Lucy takes the first boot. The back of her knees fold and immediately she’s scratching like a monkey.

  “Gimme that.”

  Sandra, not singing for the first time since these two scored, squirts Lucy’s blood into the sink and then rinses the syringe in the toilet bowl before drawing up the heroin, tying up, shooting up, tying off, and time ending and trouble saying goodbye. She looks to Lucy who now slides down the wall like a lifeless doll, smashing her head on the toilet bowl in the process.

  “Get up, you stupid bitch.”

  Nothing.

  Sandra gets the hell out of there. She makes a fuss to an oncoming guy who’s wheelchair bound.

  “They’re broke, love. You should try downstairs.”

  The guy looks at her. “Un-fucking-believable.” Finally she notices the wheelchair; scratches her face in slow … motion.

  “Sorry, love. You must have done all right though, eh? Couldn’t lend me a fiver, could you?”

 
On the other corner: Costcutter. The most expensive twenty-four-hour supermarket in the world.

  What the fuck are they on about? Nine pounds sixty for a couple of newspapers, some fags, and a drink?

  “Nine pounds sixty.”

  Someone bursts through the door.

  “Give me a single, you get me?”

  The shopkeeper (There’re six of them. Remember the time some posh kid walked in followed by fucking Crackula himself, wielding a crook-lock and swinging at the poor cunt, whose only crime was to point out that the Count could take a piss in the bogs instead of in the road?) responds with, “No more singles. Out. Get out.”

  A couple of stray Australians, believing themselves to be in the warmer reaches of Notting Hill, wander in. Seeing a chance to exercise an act of old-country benevolence, the Aussie guy pulls out a smoke and gives it to this arsehole. Now this idiot’s all over him.

  “Nice one, bruv. SEEEN. Let me carry you shit for you.”

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  “I WASN’T TALKING TO YOU. I WAS TALKING TO THE LADY.”

  “It’s cool, buddy, just er …”

  “Just what?”

  He stares hard into the Aussie guy’s eyes and presses his head against him, the poor sod now reeling; purblind; red in the face and his girlfriend is starting to really get the shits.

  “Tell him to go fuck himself, Dobbo.”

  Dobbo decides to wade in, kakking himself.

  The shopkeepers surround the scene and the guy walks, lighting the smoke; grinning and staring between the Aussie girl’s legs as she puts some breakfast stuff, eggs and the like, on the counter.