by John Harvey
She looked as though she could be very young. Like the song says, not a minute over seventeen.
Very young and very sexy.
I didn’t want to leave her there with the fish, but there wasn’t any point in making love to a photograph. Even I knew that. I’d tried it once or twice before.
Besides it was time I looked in the other rooms. This time I’d make sure I peeped behind the doors first.
Not that that was necessary. The first room I went into was empty, even of furniture. Just a few books propped against the wall on the far edge of the carpet. The second room had a lot more in it.
There was a table which might have been oak, a circular job with one of those massive central legs that splay out in all directions. There were four chairs set around it and an empty fruit bowl at its centre. In front of a white-surrounded fireplace there were two deep, old-fashioned armchairs covered in a floral print. High on a shelf on the far wall, incongruously, was a large television. The wall to my right was taken up with bookshelves and books. The books were nearly all leather bound and some of them were nearly as fat as they were high. They looked very dusty. Directly opposite the doorway there was one of those settees with one curved end against which ladies used to drape themselves decorously.
Only this lady was looking anything but decorous. Her dress had managed to get itself hitched up to the top of her thighs and her tights were exposed to the v where they joined. You could see the dark bush of hair underneath; she didn’t seem to be wearing any pants. There was a wide ladder running down the inside of her right leg.
From where I was standing I could only see the left side of her face and what I could see I didn’t like at all. Not that she wasn’t pretty. She could have been; you couldn’t tell. Not any more.
Somebody had given her a working over which made the tap on the back of my own head seem like a love bite from a passing gnat.
The flesh on that side was swollen out to twice its normal size and was a strange mixture of purple and dark brown. At the centre of this uneven ball of bruising, the skin had peeled back as though a bird had bitten down into it, mistaking it for an overripe fruit.
Above this, there was another swelling around the left eye, which was almost completely enclosed. From close-up I could see that the eye itself was still open. Half of it appeared to be covered by a bright red membrane. The other half stared up at me vacantly.
I looked at what I could of the far side of the face. It was untouched, beautiful even. I had thought she would be the girl in the photograph but she wasn’t. I was pleased, without knowing exactly why.
Except that I didn’t want her to be dead. Dead like the girl who was stretched out beneath me. I wanted to pull the dress back down but I didn’t. I wanted to find out what had killed her, but I didn’t do anything about that either; apart from make one or two guesses.
I could do without being mixed up in a murder. At least, on what I was getting for this job. Murder came higher.
I went out of the room and shut the door behind me. The telephone in the kitchen didn’t work; it had been thoughtfully disconnected. I checked my pockets for change. One call would need to be paid for, the other wouldn’t.
I left the house the way I had gone in; making it seem that the door had never been locked. Then I found the nearest phone box. For a change it wasn’t vandalised. After a short discussion with myself as to which call to make first, I lifted the receiver and got through to the police. They told me to wait where I was. I assured them that I would.
While I was waiting I tried the second number. The one Blagden had given me. I thought a dead body and a sapping counted as something to report.
Only I didn’t like the tone the telephone was adopting. It made me feel sick low in my stomach. The operator was polite but definite: number unobtainable.
If I’d made that call first, maybe I would never have phoned the cops at all. But I had and now all I could sensibly do was wait. The fact that the proof of my reason for being in the flat, in the first place seemed to have disappeared wasn’t anything to worry about. Was it?
2
They soon arrived and began a whole lot of measuring and dusting, taking of photographs and drawing of white lines. After a few curt questions they allowed me to stand in the corner and watch. I was the naughty boy who’d flicked an ink pellet at the teacher and been found out. In case I decided to make a break for the playground or run home and fetch my big brother, these two guys stood on either side of me looking at me as though I was someone’s regurgitated lunch.
The clicking and scribbling had been going on for ten minutes or so when the guy in charge finally showed up. He had the air of a man who has just been dragged out of bed at the wrong time and for the wrong reason.
It wasn’t that late and I wondered whose bed he had pulled from. It didn’t need another look to tell me that I wasn’t going to ask him.
He was around fifty and wore the expression of a cop who didn’t particularly like what he did and so did it all the harder. I guessed that was what had made him chief inspector: but no more. His face was turning to flab low on the cheeks and around the chin; wherever he’d been that evening, he’d been careful to shave before he went. Hoods of skin tended to mask his eyes, so that the pupils looked duller than perhaps they were.
His blue overcoat made him appear bulky, even allowing for his being over six foot. I didn’t think I would like to cross him, but it was already too late for thoughts like that.
He only turned his head in my direction once, when this other plainclothes man gave him a quick run-down on who I was. I couldn’t tell what he thought. Not then. Later I would and it wouldn’t be across a crowded room.
There was an air of suppressed excitement in the police station: maybe they didn’t get too many murders. In their part of London it was mostly bomb scares at the air terminal and the odd Australian who forgot to put a match to the gas fire as he sat in his bedsit dreaming of Bondi Beach.
The uniformed man who took me down to the interview room even smiled. He must have known what I was in for.
There was another one standing in the ritual position, against the wall directly behind my chair, so that I would know he was there without being able to see him. I sat a while and waited. The chair opposite me was vacant. Possibly he was busy; possibly he wanted to make me jumpy. I leaned my elbows on the table and let a few things run through my brain.
The startled expression on the face of the curly-haired guy who had been sitting on the floor; the empty eye of the girl on the settee; the girl in the leather jacket, her face open to the world. I was wondering what the world had done to it when he came in and pushed the chair back from the table with a dull grating sound.
He stared down at me for long enough to have imprinted my face on his mind for a long, long time. Then he sat down. He took out a packet of cigarettes and lit up; he didn’t offer me one.
The smoke hung lazily in the still room.
Cut off from all of the activity and expectation outside, that room was like a place out of time. A lot of things could happen there. A lot of things already had.
I sensed the man behind me shifting his weight from one foot to another.
‘You’re Mitchell.’
It wasn’t a question, so I just sat there. A mistake. His right hand was flung out across the table and slapped me hard along my right cheek. He was wearing a heavy ring and I could feel that it had cut the skin on the edge of my cheekbone.
‘Don’t play dumb and don’t play smart. If I ask something I want an answer. Understand?’
I must have been a bit slow in nodding. He caught me this time with the open flat of the hand. The sound rose up towards the ceiling then fell back, killed by the deadness of the room.
He fished in his pocket and brought out the wallet I had handed into the sergeant at the desk. From it he took my card and my lic
ence. He placed them on the table between us and looked at them with a sneer. The same sneer he had on his face when he asked me if I’d been working long.
I told him how long.
He asked me how much longer I expected to go on working.
I shrugged my shoulders and said that I didn’t know.
His eyes suggested that he did.
‘What were you doing in the flat, Mitchell?’
He asked the question as though he wasn’t prepared to believe a word I said and I told him the same way. I could have been reciting ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears.’ Only this Goldilocks hadn’t been asleep, she’d been dead and there hadn’t been any sign of the porridge. What was more, the other two bears had split fast and left Papa Bear with the body.
It didn’t look good. It didn’t sound good. The guy behind me didn’t like it either. He changed feet again. Nothing about the face in front of me changed.
‘I know it doesn’t sound much,’ I said, ‘but the truth seldom does.’
His sneer returned. ‘Skip the philosophy, Mitchell. Besides, you’ve been grafting in the gutter so long that you wouldn’t recognise a piece of truth if it spat in your eye.’
‘If it wasn’t true, then why would I have called you in the first place? Why would I have hung around for your men to arrive?’
‘You called us originally because you panicked. You stuck around because you realised that you were so deep in the shit you couldn’t get out without falling head first in it and suffocating. You’re a cheap hoodlum who thinks that a couple of words like private investigator after your name give you the right to take the law into your own hands. You broke into the flat illegally and found the girl there. You tried to get something out of her. It might have been information and it might have been sex. Who knows? It doesn’t much matter. What does matter is that she wasn’t giving you what you wanted so you beat up on her and you beat up too hard. Then you thought up this cock and bull story and tried to save your hide by trying it out on us.’
He looked across the table at me like he was looking at a piece of rotten meat someone had brought in from the abattoir we call the world.
I thought it was time to level with him. ‘You’re talking crap! I’m not the one who’s up to the ears in shit, that’s you! Up to the ears and beyond. You’ve been doing your job in your own stupid way so long that the shit’s oozing out of your ears and eyes and pouring from your mouth each time you open it to speak! If you checked up on the couple of names I gave you, then you’ll know that whatever else I might do, there’s no way I’m going to throw a panic. I’m a professional, too. As much as you are. The only difference is that there are times when my eyes actually open and I can see things through them. What’s more, I’m not into slapping people around the head. That seems to be more in your line. Come to think of it, where were you earlier this evening, chief inspector?
‘Oh, and one more thing, she didn’t die from the beating up. She died from something else.’
He hadn’t tried to say anything; he hadn’t interrupted. He had sat there and taken it, his face growing a stronger shade of purple as he listened. Now that I had finished he didn’t do anything either. Not immediately.
Then his eyes went past mine to the uniformed man standing at the back of the room. They motioned him towards the door. I heard it shut hollowly behind him. Watched the man in front of me stand up.
He walked round behind me. Stood there. The muscles at the back of my neck tensed for a blow that didn’t come. Not yet.
When he did speak his voice was low, controlled. I wondered how much effort that control took.
He said, ‘How do you know the beating didn’t kill her?’
I said, ‘I don’t. It just didn’t feel right.’
He stood there, not saying anything. His presence bore down on me.
‘What did kill her?’ I asked.
I thought he wasn’t going to answer, but then he said, ‘Somebody injected an overdose of something, probably morphine, into her system.’
I thought about it for a while, then said, ‘Or she did it herself by mistake.’
I couldn’t see him shake his head, but I thought he might have. ‘She was a regular user, from the marks on her. She would have known what she was doing.’
‘On purpose then?’
‘Suicide? No note, no explanation. How many cases do you know of people who’ve killed themselves right after being smashed around the face the way she was?’
He was right. I didn’t. He didn’t. Two professionals together. But he was still standing behind me. The muscles in my neck were still tense, waiting.
‘Get up.’
I got up.
‘Turn round.’
I turned round.
‘All that stuff you gave me a few minutes ago. You know there’s no way you’re going to get away with that, don’t you.’
I knew. I told him so.
Still he did nothing. Just looked, his face very close to mine. I could smell something on his breath that might have been brandy and I wondered again where he had been earlier. Not that I supposed it really mattered. It was just that I had a naturally curious mind.
Something to do with my line of work.
‘Are you charging me with anything?’
His eyes told me he wasn’t.
‘All right if I go then?’
He said, ‘Get out!’ through his teeth. But he still didn’t move out of the way; even without his top coat he was broad. I couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t hit me again.
He said, ‘There’s no hurry for me, Mitchell. I can haul you in any time I want you. And want you I do. But I’ll wait until the right time, when you can’t wriggle out. Then I’m going to throw everything possible at you and you’ll wish that licence of yours was somebody else’s confetti.’
I turned my back on him again and picked up the licence and my card. Something plopped on to the table alongside my hand. My wallet. I put the things back inside it and slipped the wallet into my inside pocket.
I didn’t like the way it felt light; I was still annoyed about getting taken for the money. I knew that I was going to try to get it back.
I faced him again. ‘There’s nothing else?’
There wasn’t anything else. I stepped around him and walked to the door. When I opened it to leave and looked back he was still standing close to the desk, looking over at the blank wall: a man with things on his mind.
But then, who didn’t?
The car crawled along the kerb as though it was aiming to pick up a girl walking home alone and late. It was a dark Ford and there were three men in it. One in the front, two at the back. It had caught up with me by the time I reached the Natural History Museum. It was unmarked, but I thought I could guess where it had come from; who had sent it. It wasn’t looking for girls.
There didn’t seem to be anything else to do, so I carried on walking. I didn’t even have enough money for a cab. I thought of waiting for the car to catch me up and asking them for a lift.
After all, they could follow me better if I was inside there with them. But I didn’t want to be in there with them. I didn’t want to be with them at all.
I had the usual kind of choice: none.
I walked on. The car followed slowly, fifty yards behind. At least there was no danger of feeling lonely.
I had a flat, but that was too far away so I thought I’d go back to my office near Covent Garden and spend the rest of the night there on the sofa. I could use a good sleep. There were a lot of things I wanted to do in the morning.
Like see if I could track down Mr Hugh Blagden.
Like taking a look for the guy in the pepper and salt overcoat.
Like calling Tom Gilmour at West End Central and asking him a few questions about a West London cop with preoccupations.
Like
…
I realised that the sound that had accompanied me for so long had disappeared. I looked round and the car squatted close to the kerb, stationary.
They couldn’t have run out of petrol. Perhaps they’d simply lost interest. Then again, they might have realised where I was going. I turned a corner and when next I looked back there was nothing but a grey and white cat stalking the empty street.
The office was up a couple of flights of stairs with a landing in the middle. It was dark but I didn’t bother with the light. Why should I? I’d been up them enough times before. Knew the number of steps, the number of paces along the lino-covered floor to the outer office door.
I unlocked it and stepped inside. Still I didn’t reach for a light switch. The second door now. Inside, I nearly locked it behind me but what was the point? I didn’t want the door kicked in. I couldn’t afford to pay for a new one.
This time I did flick on the light. Just for a moment. There were one or two things I wanted to do, one or two things I wanted to stash away where even the most prying eyes might not find them. Things like my Smith and Wesson .38. I didn’t want them getting the wrong ideas about me.
I put out the light and went over to the window. I was in time to see the dipped headlights ease along the street, then halt, then cut off. I went over to my desk and sat in my chair. It was quiet enough to be able to hear their footsteps all the way up the stairs, even through the two closed doors. If you listened very hard.
I was listening very hard.
One of them stopped half-way up; the other two kept on coming.
Then they were in the room. Big men. Hard, anonymous men. Night visitors. They had nothing against me; I had nothing against them. The finger had been pointed. They had a job to do. I hoped they were good. I hoped they wouldn’t be careless or messy.
