One of the men turned his head – Stewart. With a comic carefulness, he eased his way out of the group round the corpse.
It was only when they were back round the corner safely out of sight that he spoke, 'You must be clean off your nut. Peerse would've gutted you if he'd seen you there.' Before Murray could answer, Stewart exclaimed, 'Not another one!'
The Citizen columnist Billy Shanks was being nodded in his turn past the young Constable. He came towards them grinning widely.
'Hold it, Billy,' Stewart said. 'You're not on.'
'There's no chance of a quick look ? You could pretend you haven't seen me.'
'One mug's enough, Billy. Put it in reverse.' Billy Shanks gave a grin of inexhaustible good nature. His long arms waved as if under separate instructions, a parallel conversation using a code whose semaphore was lost.
'Don't blame the Constable, Eddy. You shouldn't have a boy doing a man's job.'
They walked slowly back towards the mouth of the alley. Stewart spoke very fast and softly. 'Man in his fifties – Doc Pritchard's having a look at him now. He's got stab wounds – I suppose one of them killed him. No idea when yet. A van man found him. Maybe it happened last night, small hours this morning. Oh, one other thing – when the doc was looking, I saw cuts on him, he'd been ripped about the lower body.'
'Sexually?' Billy Shanks asked hopefully.
'His ornaments are still there if that's what you mean. But he's got cuts – like I say, on the belly.' The constable made a business of clearing a way for them into the crowd.
'He's doing a grand job.'
'Little Boy Blue,' Stewart said unexpectedly and laughed.
The driver was dithering beside the car. When he saw Stewart with Murray, he blew out his plump cheeks in a sigh of relief. 'Another bloody eedjit!' Stewart said, as if in disbelief that the world could hold so many. Ignoring the driver, they walked on a few paces beyond the car before stopping.
'Have you an identification?'
'He just had on a shirt and trouser – nothing there to give a hint who he is – was.'
‘Just? You mean that was all?'
'The lot.'
'It's a picture job then. Show it around till somebody recognises him.'
At this, Stewart took a quick look at the listening Murray who said, 'Yes – I saw it.'
'What?' Shanks asked.
'The bloody van,' Stewart said and started to laugh, 'the driver must have been half asleep. Didn't stop till he felt a bump. He ran a wheel over the poor bugger's face.'
Grinning, he walked away. In the tenements opposite, women hung out of the windows, their elbows on the ledges as if spectating at a play.
'Your usually reliable source has a great sense of humour,'
Murray said watching him make his way back through the crowd around the alley.
'Ah, Eddy's not the worst.'
'One of the best – laughing all the way to the bank.'
'Don't be like that,' Shanks said seriously. 'So he drops a hint for old times' sake,' one long arm made a complicated explanatory loop, 'why not? “Eat up, eat up, yer growin' boys!” You remember?' And as Murray stared at him, reverted to the same parodic voice, “Eat up, boys, you'll never find better digs than at Ma Donelly's”.’
'Ma Donelly's food was lousy,' Murray said, remembering. 'I'd forgotten it and her. Anyway it was me that had to eat it not you.'
'And Eddy and I would come round and bum supper.' 'Can you give me a run back into town?'
'Everybody was nicer then,' Shanks said nostalgically. At the same time, however, he looped across one long arm and gave Murray a business-like tap on the shoulder. 'What are you doing here anyway?'
'I was just a passenger. The call came through while I was talking to Peerse.'
After waiting for a moment to see if there was any more, Shanks said in a tone of deepest scepticism, 'And you and Peerse are such good friends. You wouldn't like to tell me what you were talking about?'
'That's right.' Murray looked at his watch. 'I have things to do. Can we get on our way?'
'Not right now. I'd like to ask some more questions. Get the feel of it. Maybe put a name to that van driver.'
'Why you? You left the crime beat a long time ago.'
'Oh, the 'Cit' will send one of the usual men,' Shanks said vaguely. 'Connolly probably or young Robertson.'
'So?'
'I – caught the call on the radio in the car. I was talking about murders yesterday in the Shot with Tommy Gregory. You know him!' Murray shook his head. 'Interesting guy, anyway, when I heard the call, I took a notion. And you're here. And then Peerse. God intends me to take an interest in this one.' He waited for a response to that; gave up on Murray's silence. 'A dead man – half dressed – with no shoes. He didn't have shoes on, did he? It looks as if he was killed somewhere else and brought there, eh? You're the Detective - don't you feel it's a strange one?'
Murray shrugged. 'I'm only a Detective when someone pays me.'
'Why is it then I feel you have an interest in this one too? You didn't recognise him as a client?'
For answer, Murray rubbed his hand down his face and scowled.
'Oh, that's right, the van smashed his face in. If it was the van – what do you think?'
'I need a run back into town. The paper will send a real reporter out on this – why not give me a lift?'
'You lack a sense of vocation.' Shanks, rising to the bait, wagged an arm in distress. 'I've forgotten more than young Robertson will ever have the wits to learn. Anyway, for the column I need an angle. I need a handle -something that lets me pick this thing up. There's something about it. '
Murray pretended to think. 'I did hear the word rape mentioned.'
Shanks blinked, struck by the idea. 'Did they say that? The guy had been raped? Could Pritchard be sure of that – without tests? I wouldn't have –’
'Billy! Billy, you have vocation enough for both of us.'
And then he had to walk back. Moirhill Road was long; if he turned north, it would have taken him all the way to the suburbs and green fields; but his way lay in the opposite direction towards William's Cross, taking one at a time the shoddy fronts that had passed so easily glimpsed from a car. His flat was on the first floor of the last close in the Road before the Cross: the other marker he used for first-time visitors was that it was next to the Chinese take-away. He stopped to read the menu in the window. He did this regularly but had never been inside since he had a prejudice against such places based on the fate of an alsatian when he had been a young policeman. When he had finished reading the list, he went into the fish and chip shop round the corner and bought a supper. As an afterthought, he got them to add a meat pie on top.
The phone was ringing when he opened the door of the flat. He listened to a Mr Foley complain in his ear while he unpicked the newspaper parcel one-handed and extracted the pie. Mr Foley was voluble concerning the importance of finding his ex-partner Beddowes, his embezzled money, even his wife – though this last sounded most like an attempt to enlist sympathy. He had a lot to say and Murray bit into the pie and gazed bleakly at the desk with the phone and the old Adler portable, the pair of chairs for clients, the filing cabinet with the reference books on top.
'We're making progress. I've no doubt we'll find Beddowes – and your wife.' Not to mention the money. He cleaned a piece of pie out of a back tooth as the voice got excited, 'I'll be submitting a written report… tomorrow. No, I can't be more definite…That's your privilege...'
In the back room, he turned on the water heater. He managed half the fish but the chips had waited too long. Slippery and lukewarm, they were wadded into the paper and dropped in the bucket under the sink. His prejudice where tea was concerned, favoured Chinese and he drank the first of too many cups, its perfume tickling his nostrils, and wondered how he could keep Mr Foley going, and thought about Merchant, and the man in the lane and the bad joke played on him in death by the van driver's wheel. Merchant's story of the butcher who d
id not know the meaning of circumcision came into his head and ran there like an offensive tune which would not be dislodged. Eddy Stewart had a sociable memory for jokes; he wondered if he had heard the one about the butcher. Every day was an anniversary of something. For Merchant there would be a day in every year which was the anniversary of the guard from the camp: 'I saw worse things later but because it was the first I never forgot him.' And now Merchant was claiming to have seen the man again, in a different time, a different place, a different world. Crazy. He thought about how too many anniversaries might make you crazy. He wondered what had driven his neighbour Miss Timmey crazy. 'It wasn't what he did to the boy,' Merchant had said. 'It was the noise. There's a noise a baby makes crying.' He thought about Miss Timmey and why her madness should take the form of accusing the young couple across the landing, who were so crazy for one another, and might now be lying entwined on the bed –
And it was time then to stop thinking. Solitary is not lonely. Loneliness, as much as water on stone, will wear away the hardest substance.
He set up the chess board with a problem he had worked before. It was a conversation with a familiar acquaintance. After a time, he moved a piece, but as he reflected on the responses that made possible, the unwanted image came to him of a couple entwined on a bed. How could a woman, a woman on her own, kill a man? Even if the pain had been unexpected and terrible, would he not have defended himself by instinct? How could she have been sure, a woman on her own, that she could kill him? Crazy. The woman – crazy idea – carried the man's hand to her mouth and bit at the soft webbing beside the thumb. Perhaps he was expecting to be fondled; perhaps he was smiling. Like an animal, she tore out his flesh. Murray stared at a ruined face given one hard edge by the inspection lamp and at the hand thrown out under its glare and at the half moon of blackened flesh torn from the root of the thumb, and remembering drove away the maggot ideas silence bred sometimes until the room darkened and the pieces on the board withdrew into the shadows.
7 Clients
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1ST 1988
'I'm a busy man,' Superintendent Standers said.
'I'm sorry your time's being wasted like this,' Murray said. 'It was stupid of me going into the lane. I did it on impulse and I can't apologise any more than I have done. I was out of line. But it isn't anything to do with the murder – I don't know why Peerse bothered you with it.'
'Inspector Peerse. And let me decide what's a waste of time.'
Meaty hands folded in front of him, the Superintendent had a countryman's complexion, though scored with lines in the cheeks and the deep pouches under the eyes that seemed to come with the job. He was new into the city and, recognising the type, Murray guessed at an uneventful progress with the neighbouring county force from constable to Training School to Chief Inspector until regionalisation had put several forces into one command structure and brought him into town as Superintendent of the Moirhill sub-division of Northern. Through the half-open door came the sound of people talking and moving about, the ringing of telephones, all of it echoing under the high roof of the school hall.
A man in shirt sleeves holding a clipboard appeared in the opening. 'It seems it's okay for the bottom jaw,' he said. 'So that's good news, sir.'
'What the hell are you talking about?' Standers asked.
The man with the clipboard looked flustered. He had been standing with one hand resting on the handle of the door as if able to pause only for a moment in mid-flight. Now he came another step or two into the room.
'The victim, sir. It seemed as if there might not be any help at all from the teeth – but it turns out they've got the front of the lower jaw and most of the right side still attached. And he had quite a bit of work done. It should help to confirm identification.'
'Once we find out who he is,' Standers said. Unexpectedly then, he smiled and said on a different note, 'That's a good bit of news, eh, Tom. Things are beginning to move. Carry on.'
Puzzled by the altered tone, Murray looked towards the door and saw beyond the shirt-sleeved detective the hovering ramshackle figure of Billy Shanks. Glancing back, he found Standers' eye upon him.
'You can go,' the Superintendent said. 'And shut the door on your way out.'
'Not for a ticking off. What gave you that idea?' Standers said. He tapped the newspaper lying folded open on the corner of the desk. 'I think this could be useful to us.'
From where he sat, folded into a chair to which he anchored himself by one long tendril leg, Billy Shanks could see under the Superintendent's finger that morning's copy of the 'World of the Streets' column.
'I'm glad about that. When I got your call, I was worried,' he said. 'You shouldn't have to waste your time. I wouldn't want to have written anything that caused a problem – not on a murder case.'
'Most cases of homicide,' Standers said, taking the tone of a man accustomed to them, 'are over before they start. It's the boyfriend or the father or son – the wife who's taken one kicking too many. Most murders are family affairs, you could say. Or pub jobs – when a broken glass catches the other guy in the wrong place.' He touched his neck. 'Cut there and jump back before the blood hits you in the eye. This one could be more complicated.’
‘That's quite an incident room you're setting up out there.' Shanks wrinkled his nose at the memory of the smell that had stung his nostrils in the entrance corridor. Generations of children had left it to haunt the place, poverty's equivalent of clanking chains. It oozed from walls painted institutional green and hovered uneasily outside the headmaster's door, whose reversed title he could make out worked in spidery silvery tracery on the opaque glass which separated them for the moment from the bustle of activity. 'It surprised me to see the school opened up.'
'It was before,' Standers said, and paused as if for a response.
'For the Robertson case.'
'Of course.' Twin girls, Shanks remembered, and only eleven years old.
'It was my decision to set up here,' Standers said. 'It could be easier in the long run, if things get complicated.'
'The way they did in the Robertson case,' Billy Shanks said in a carefully neutral tone. The killing of the twins had been linked to three other child deaths, one of them years previously; it had attracted national attention. The case had promoted the officer in charge out of Moirhill.
'This is a very special patch,' Standers said. He got up and took up a position in front of the map. The bastard! Shanks thought, he's dragged me down here to make sure I'll know how to spell his name properly. 'Deacon Street, Carnation Street, Florence Street,' a finger followed their course, 'they make a triangle – with Merse Street lying on top of it and curving back to join Moirhill Road. Put a circle round that lot and you'd cover half the pros and ponces in the city. And the rest of them would be either neds or ne'er-do-wells. It's a human sump. It's a garbage heap. Don't quote me on that, of course – or I'll have some do-gooders complaining.'
Shanks joined him in front of the map. With a wild loop of the arm, he dabbed at it.
'I was born about…there,' he said. '14 Florence Street. Two up. Left-hand side.' But could not prevent himself from adding, 'Right enough, it's gone down a lot since then.' Standers gave him a look of placid indifference.
'The body was dressed in just a shirt and trousers. Pulled on after he was dead – at least that's what forensic guess. His though, they fit well enough. What does a man with his underpants off in Deacon Street suggest to you?'
Shanks discarded the first two answers which occurred to him
– the hardest thing he had learned on his way to becoming a professional was when not to be funny – and said seriously, 'Looks as if he was after a bit of fun, right enough.'
'Our present problem,' Standers explained sitting down again, 'is to identify the victim. What he’s wearing is good quality, but off the peg.'
'And you can't take a photograph? Have you let the van driver go yet? Or is he still “helping with the enquiries”?'
'He's hom
e. He had his breakfast with us. For a while it just seemed too bloody convenient- him putting his wheel right over the face.'
'But you're satisfied?'
'Accidents happen. What we're left with is a description of height, hair colour, estimated age - no scars or warts, nothing helpful.' He rubbed a hand across his face, moving the heavy flesh under his chin. 'It's a sex killing. If you were writing about it, you could describe it that way.'
'I don't know that I'll be writing about it again,' Billy Shanks Said with a pleasant stirring of malice. 'I don't do crime, you know.'
The Superintendent picked up the newspaper and held it out towards the other man as evidence. 'You did this morning.' It had the tone of an interrogation.
'It was the way the body was cut about.' The journalist's hands flew apart as if truth was something measurable between them. 'And the coincidence of the date. And, yes, somebody had been talking to me about Jack the Ripper. It all came together, but that's the way it happens. Just ideas. Just speculation. When you have to find something new every day…It's not really got anything to do with your murder case.'
Standers gave him the same placid look as before. 'Jack the Ripper,' he said, after a pause, 'how many did he see off then?' Shanks tried to remember what Tommy Gregory had told him. Since it had only been his point of departure for the column, he hadn't even bothered to do any checking. 'Four, no, five. One of them was a double murder, two in the same night.'
'I thought there were more,' Standers said with a touch of disappointment or what might have been suspicion. 'All whores, weren't they?'
Before Shanks could answer, there was a tap on the door. To his surprise, Standers got up and went to it instead of calling on whoever was there to come in. He stood in the open doorway and spoke quietly. 'I didn't realise... I'll cover that... Phone them!' That last phrase came more distinctly with an edge to it, but then his voice fell to a murmur again. When he was finished, he closed the door once more and coming back to his scat behind the desk, said again, 'All whores.'
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