I Was Dora Suarez (8 page)

It was most certainly a very old-fashioned room I was in, I should say at least a hundred years old, with a green iron bed standing on a six-sided, tile-patterned floor, terra-cotta, perhaps; I
seemed to be in some foreign country hotel. She wasn’t beautiful or even all that young; she was well dressed and thickset. She smiled at me, reaching out to stroke my face, and said: ‘I have no name.’ But I had only to look at her when she appeared in the dream to think, ‘Ah, good, you’re finally here – now there’s two of us, together we can get something done at last’; and thinking this in the dream had a deeply pacifying effect on me. The single swift movement with which she gave herself to me in her day-clothes gave me no time to think, and I couldn’t be expected to know the whole of what she conveyed in the space of the dream; but there was nothing hurried in the first close look of our faces. I really just remember my astonishment at the slenderness of her hands, at the intense bronze shade of her face, and at her hair, which was short, knotted quickly and practically at the back of her head. Also her hair was scented in a way I couldn’t recapture afterwards; she was the face of a goddess on a thousand-year-old coin that has never been touched, found, damaged or exchanged. Smiling into my eyes, she pulled the skirt of her street suit swiftly up over her hips and we met immediately in my arms. We had no time for anything more, but I managed to say: ‘You are the most heavenly woman I have ever met,’ and she said: ‘I know, and you have been looking for me for a long time, and so I have come because you believed and knew I would come’ – and so we made love and I woke in a state of great peace, knowing that somehow I was sure to be all right.

Later in the dream I sat in a white restaurant, the brilliant sunlight that struck through the glass roof dulled by dark shades. I was sitting alone at a table when she came in with her many children and sat down at another large table at the far end, carrying herself with that same superb assurance. I was perfectly happy, though, to sit on at my own table, smiling at her – indeed, I had never felt so happy. The minute she saw that I had noticed her she put her chair at the table in a position so as to face me squarely; and when she was sitting there, pointed straight opposite me, she suddenly opened her thighs wide so that I could see her sex, and
then her innumerable children, excited and pleased, crowded round me, jostling each other, and she said with her shining eyes in mine, saying it with her eyes since we were too far off to speak ‘There! Does that please you now?’ I didn’t know – I only knew that mercy, love and justice were the same.

Before he left Bowman had said: ‘Is there a chance the killer could have been a woman?’

‘Christ no,’ I said, ‘even Squeaky Fuentes never killed like that. You remember her, and she was as nutty as a shopping bag full of monkeys on heat.’

‘All right,’ said Bowman, ‘it was just a theory I was spinning off at random.’

‘Well, luckily it missed me,’ I said.

He saved a cartridge on that one and said: ‘Anything else I can help you with?’

‘Probably,’ I said, ‘only not with your thinking, more the practical side.’

‘I’ll give you some of that in the mush on my night off,’ he squawked.

‘Why don’t you just go on losing money at snooker with Alfie Verlander,’ I said. ‘That way you’ll only fibrillate, and avoid the major stroke.’

That was when he slammed the rear door of the squad car on my nose and left for the Factory in a smelly roar of exhaust.

I thought how extraordinary it was the number of people that didn’t like the truth and went back into the flat. My wife Edie had said to me one night: ‘You’d be amazed the number of people who don’t like you,’ and I remember I answered: ‘No, I wouldn’t, but I find that the people who don’t like me don’t like themselves, that’s all.’

‘You don’t expect to get on in the police with that attitude, do you?’ she said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s not what the police is for, and I do wish you’d stop worrying about my career.’

‘We need the money,’ she said flatly, turned over with a loud thump and slept.

I had come out of the flat for a moment’s air and to think; now I turned to go back in again, moving round a team of builders on the damp pavement who had just finished loading a skip with rubbish, seen it off the truck, and were now going down to the Queen Anne round the mews at the back of the block for a few pints of Swan, and why not? In their bright yellow helmets with the Wimpy slogan on them, joking away together, stacking their gear for the night, slapping and punching each other, they made me feel better just to be around them for a second or two like that. They were all young men and, I imagined, must be just like I was at their age – either married, going steady or anyhow hoping to get their end away after next Saturday’s match; they made me feel less lonely as I came back to you, Dora.

For I kissed your hair and I can’t understand why, but I am bound to you.

Dora, I don’t know how far into the dark I shall have to go to find you, but try to help me reach you, help me to find you, don’t just slip away. Try your hardest to help me.

I’m not afraid of your killer, Dora. Listen to me, I’ll try to explain this through the words of another man – one of my best friends, a police officer called Frank Ballard who was shot in the back down Fulham Palace Road opposite the Golden Bowl by a little cunt with a sawn-off twelve-bore who was ripping off a takeaway, which has left my mate Frank paralysed from the waist down for life. Well, Frank has organised his new life as a cripple wonderfully, and I wish you could have met him because he would have done you good. He knows how to explain difficult things; I respect Frank and I like him and always ask him for advice when I’m in a jam; we were on A14 together and worked on some tricky things. Well, just after he was shot and he was in the Charing Cross hospital with flowers and books round him which we brought in, I saw him alone one afternoon and he said: ‘It seems to me that
the worst of a serious police enquiry – by which I mean enquiry into a murder – is that too often the investigating officer, and he can be the best you like, can’t stop unconsciously thinking about how he is getting on with his enquiry in relation to his superiors – he will always tend to commit the error of thinking of himself. The result of this is that it blinds the officer to the dead person, and since he is generally unaware that he is committing it, it is a very hard fault for that officer to correct. Yet he must most certainly do so; for if he did not, he would be deprived of his objective sense of justice, and so would not be a proper person to be an investigating police officer. He could not be because, if the dead do not count sufficiently with the officer, then how would that officer weigh at a bar, supposing that the dead were to be sitting there? Supposing that they could still form an opinion in our world where they, too, used to live, the dead would want to know:
Where was this officer’s true interest?

Do you know, Dora, Frank smiled then and said, ‘Excuse me for running on like this …’

But I never forgot what he said because it was what I have always believed myself, and Frank knew it.

I knew I would find Dora’s things in the end if I looked long enough, and I did, in the fortieth box I opened in the kitchen. There were just a few papers in it – her National Health Insurance card and an old black-and-white photograph, with its corners bent, of her dancing with a man in a club somewhere with his back to the camera, a dark-haired man, and an exercise book. I opened the book; it was about three-quarters filled with her handwriting. I wanted to read it immediately, having looked through everything else in the flat and found nothing else significant of hers. For I was certain of one thing – that Dora was the key to both the deaths, not Betty Carstairs.

When I got into Poland Street and said who I was, the sergeant on the main desk looked up sharply and said: ‘You’re to go straight up to the fourth floor.’

The fourth floor was where the Voice lived. I thought that for the first time in my life I might meet it, but I was right out of luck there. I took the lift up to Room 471, and there the Voice’s deputy, Chief Detective Superintendent James Jollo was waiting for me.

I said: ‘Well, here I am.’

He said: ‘Yes. And it’s usual to address me in a proper way, Sergeant.’

‘You’ll soon stop bothering about all that once you get to know me better,’ I said. ‘Is the commander away?’

‘What do you care?’ Jollo said. ‘He don’t move in your shitty little world.’

‘I know,’ I said, ‘that’s the trouble with him – not knowing what’s going on gets him just like you, all kind of confused, and that’s when he sends for people like me and not you. Silly, isn’t it?’

‘I didn’t send for you to have an argument,’ Jollo said.

‘Good,’ I said, ‘let’s not have one, then. Let’s get on to the Carstairs/Suarez murders.’

‘You’ve been, have you?’

‘Yes, I have,’ I said, spreading them out. ‘Look, I’ve got their blood on my hands.’

‘You really are a horrible man,’ said Jollo. ‘You don’t give an amber light – I find you’re everything Chief Inspector Bowman says you are.’

‘That comes from the dead I mix with, Jollo,’ I said, ‘so why don’t you try it yourself one day instead of dressing up as a detective chief superintendent and licking arseholes and stamps?’

‘Don’t you ever talk to me like that,’ he said, ‘and your first warning’s your last, cuntie.’

‘Well, that’s how I talk to most people,’ I said, ‘so don’t bother warning me, it’s breath wasted.’

‘How do you get away with it?’ Jollo said. ‘What’s the great secret?’

‘The secret’s simple,’ I said. ‘The secret is that I don’t fucking care.’

He started to open his mouth but I said, ‘Don’t open that, Jollo – you used to be a good detective before you bottled out. Now I haven’t any time, so would you give me an envelope I’m told you’ve got in one of your drawers with a warrant card in it and let me get on catching the Suarez/Carstairs killer – that’s all I’m here for.’

He said: ‘I’d like to see you outside somewhere, on a piece of waste ground, I really would – any time’d do.’

‘Now don’t get hurt in your pride, Superintendent,’ I said, ‘just give me the gear and I’ll get out of here because it smells of rank in here – in fact it smells dead fucking rank.’

He gave me the envelope because he had to, but he handed it to me as if it were a pistol that he was inviting me to blow my head off with.

I opened it and there was a warrant card in it. I said to Jollo: ‘Well, fancy that, I’m a copper again.’

He said: ‘Worse luck, and may it not last, mazel tov.’

I said: ‘Stack the commentary. By the way, do we still have a Detective Sergeant Stevenson on the strength at A14?’

‘Yes,’ said Jollo, ‘he’s on a case just now; feller name of Roatta over at Clapham had his head shot off about the same time as your thing happened.’

‘Roatta?’ I said. ‘Really? Well, that’s one king-sized filter-tip turd the world can now forget about. And you say Stevenson’s on it?
Good, because if there’s one detective capable of working out of this building, it’s him.’

I left. I raced for the lift to get down to the second floor where A14 lived because I immediately wanted to start reading Suarez. One of Charlie Bowman’s promising young minions, one of these teenage inspectors with the world on his shoulders and glasses that Charlie liked recruiting for Serious Crimes got into the lift at the same time as I did and started down with me; his razor had left three bristles under his chin, but that was his business, not mine.

‘Hullo,’ he said, ‘so you’re back again, are you?’

‘Well, your keen detective’s eyes must already be telling you that I’m not absent,’ I said.

‘You’ve lost none of your charm, have you?’ he said.

‘I need all the charm I can get,’ I said, ‘because I don’t know about you, but the bodies I find have lost all theirs.’ As the lift slowed I said to him: ‘You’re an intellectual; one day why don’t you ask yourself why it is that not one tear ever leaks out under those glasses of yours, and no troubled thought ever slithers about in that thing that your Regent Street hat keeps the rain off?’

‘Well, we’re rather giving up the footwork; detective work’s more and more computerised nowadays,’ he said seriously.

‘Wait till you see your wife’s death come up on the fucking thing,’ I said as the lift doors sighed open, ‘and then speed over to find her with her head cut off, and a swastika smeared over your front door in her own shit, happy programmes, bye-bye.’

‘You bastard,’ he shouted.

‘The truth is very painful,’ I said. ‘Didn’t any of the thousands of villains you’ve interrogated ever tell you that, or haven’t you ever met any?’

I got to 205 and kicked the horrible plastic chair into a position where I could sit on it without either wrecking my knee caps on the underside of the table or getting my balls crushed. Luckily for me I didn’t care about the revolting green paint or the rabies posters, and it was a good thing I didn’t care about the heating
either, because there wasn’t any; the heating was a special system which was designed to work flat out only in August. The top left-hand drawer of my desk had been turned into a kind of death row by seven of last year’s flies; but except for them that piece of furniture was empty, so I decided to prove to everyone in the place, including myself, that I existed by picking up the phone. The phone sounded dead for quite a while, but after I had dialled zero nine and rapped its grey plastic head very hard on the woodwork several times I finally got a WPC with a bright little voice which said: ‘Who is this, please?’

‘I’ll come down and introduce myself if you don’t look out,’ I said.

‘Line 205 is not in use,’ she said.

‘Well, that must explain why we’re both a couple of cunts talking down it then, mustn’t it?’ I said. ‘Now pull your finger out with a loud pop, missis, get it functioning like five minutes ago was a hundred years too late and then I will give you permission to go even further and go totally and utterly mad by stopping all incoming calls while I read up on two murders, which, though you mightn’t believe it, is the bizarre, rather sordid kind of work that goes on in this part of the building.’ I added: ‘And try not to waste my time, because with the current crime rate we never have any.’