The Devil's Home on Leave (Factory 2) (3 page)

‘Yes, the bank sounds more like the Fraud Squad to me.’

‘Yes,’ said Bowman, ‘but Alfie Verlander over there can’t crack
the man and that’s why he sent for me; Alfie and I are old mates.’

I knew that, and a sinister pair they made, too, playing snooker together on Saturday nights. ‘What’s this other thing?’ I said.

‘You been reading about the Russians lately?’

‘I’m always reading about the Russians,’ I said, ‘but I’m too busy ever to bother with them; I leave all that to the Branch.’

‘I can’t tell you everything,’ said Bowman, ‘except that this one really is dodgy.’

‘You’ll be telling me next that it’s to do with this commotion I read about over at the ministry of defence.’

Bowman turned and poked me in the chest with a stubby finger. ‘You forget I spoke to you, sergeant, do you understand?’

‘Yes, I understand,’ I said, ‘I understand I’m just to let you know if I hear anything.’

‘You just might,’ he said. ‘Meantime, get on with your plastic bags.’ He added: ‘Christ, what a bleeding miracle; we’re here.’

Where I go, the ghosts go. I go where the evil is. I was walking across the street with Bowman. Six months ago I had my worst case to date. Serious Crimes was over-extended and I was helping Bowman out. I had to arrest Fred Paolacci in his council flat in Hanwell, dressed up in the blood of three women. First he had gone round to the next housing estate to see to his ex-wife because she wouldn’t let him screw her; he ripped her up the stomach with a butcher’s knife and stuck his cock in her entrails. Next he went round to his new bird, a black prostitute who wouldn’t marry him, and saw to her the same way. Then he went back to his wife’s place with the knife and waited until his ten-year-old daughter came in from school.

‘I don’t want you to see your mother the way she is just now,’ he explained to her as the child ran up the stairs with her satchel on her shoulder and calling to her mother – he made the point to me later how happy she looked, running up the stairs. Well, they went into the flat together, and then the kid got a look at her mother, one leg in a boot sticking out through the bedroom doorway and blood everywhere. The child started to scream, and when he couldn’t stop her he opened her up (‘but only a little way, not like the others’) and raped her.

‘I really came that time,’ he said, ‘the others was really just like wanking.’ He admitted everything, except raping his daughter, straight away. But after I had patiently proved it to him, the traces of his semen that had been found in the child’s body and the rest of it, he dropped the eager, honour-bright way he had been staring into my face while he answered my questions; his face went dark and he nodded and looked away and said: ‘Oh well, that’s it, then.
Yes, I feel easier admitting it, really – it was out of order, that was.’ He added accurately: ‘Bloody women.’

I got hold of a man who had seen him walking in the street out there that evening, covered in blood. His conversation with Fred was casual:

‘Hurt yourself, Fred?’

‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘cut myself on a fucking knife, just going down to the doctor’s.’

‘OK, well, see you over at the Cricketers later for a pint.’

The fact that Paolacci could coldly lie about what he had done made him fit to plead. My witness had never thought to come forward with what he had seen; I had to find him. ‘Well, I thought that was the end of it,’ he said indignantly, ‘once you’d got him. Lord, do I have to go to court? The wife and I are booked on this package holiday to Mallorca.’

Some people.

Attractive-looking bloke, Fred. Dark-haired, regular features, neat dresser. Italian father, British mother, thirty-eight, worked on the assembly line at Ford’s. None of his mates on the shop floor had a word to say against him.

‘Fred Paolacci? Lovely feller! Buy you a pint any day, lend you a few bob if you was short till the end of the week – I can’t believe it. You sure you haven’t got the wrong man?’

The wrong man! I see him now as I saw him the day we were in the police van on our way to court, biting his nails to hide a sly dark smile, his eyes far off and vicious. On the way he asked me if I thought he would ever be forgiven.

‘Only by Lord Longford,’ I said. I added: ‘What do you mean by forgiveness, anyway? Where did you get a word like that, Fred?’

He thought about it. ‘I don’t rightly know,’ he said in the end. ‘Can’t remember. Must’ve read it in the
Mirror.
’ As we took him away he looked back into his flat, leaning away from the cuffs and said: ‘One last look at my tools. The tools of a man who’s finished die with him. You can always tell a man who’s finished by looking
at his spanners; spanners know when a man’s not coming back.’

All the police do is remove the bodies from a scene; it isn’t our job to clean up. That’s down to the council or the incoming tenant; we’re too busy.

Anyway, nobody did clean up; that was why, when two squatters, a girl and a feller, broke into the flat, the girl had a heart attack.

‘Teach the bastards to respect council property,’ Bowman said when I told him about it.

But I could really have done without the plastic bags just then. As I mentioned, I was distracted by a matter in my personal life, and I wanted time to reflect on it. The day before I had been to see my ex-wife at the place she has lived in for a long time now, and always will live. Going down there in the car I found myself, I don’t know why, remembering how, while we were courting, we went down to Petticoat Lane market one Sunday, and bought a decorated plate there.

Edie always had to masturbate before she could make love. She used to do it in the bed, on her knees, her thighs straddled across my face while I watched her fingers racing away in the blonde fur of her vagina with patient, concentrated fury. Her eyes were far away, and she kept her lower lip trapped in her teeth so hard that, at her climax, she sometimes bit it till it bled. It turned me on hard. Yet I married the wrong woman. The woman I should have married went off with another man, who beat her up. I always knew there was something wrong with Edie really; but what got me about her was, she had the most beautiful breasts I have ever seen – calm, swollen and white, the nipples a dark red and stiff as castles.

The place wasn’t guarded, not even by walls. It was for people who didn’t know any more where places meant, outside their minds, or how to get there; inside their minds it was always hell. I drove through the gates and across broad iron grids like the ones farmers and rich country people put down to keep their cattle in, went through a park and drove up to a big, old building in brick the colour of a burned-out fire. There was a half-tended lawn in front, and you wouldn’t believe you were only twelve miles from
Hyde Park Corner. Birds sang in the beech and plane trees, the boughs tumbled in the wind just as if they surrounded an ordinary house; I could even hear a transistor going somewhere. On the lawn, old nurses who ought to have retired years ago walked about in their white caps and blue and scarlet cloaks because the breeze was cold, looking after their charges who hopped, skipped, screamed, ran or strolled under the yews and oaks making compulsive or vague gestures, looking down at the ground.

I found Edie in the day room; it was dirty in there and the place smelled funny – well, it smelled of shit. When I came in and said hello, Edie, she snatched her hands out of the pockets of her tear-proof dress, looked at them and shouted at her hands: ‘Why are all the Royal Family in my garden? I thought I’d killed the whole lot of them with these!’

‘She’s been very aggressive all day,’ said the male nurse in charge, a new young one I didn’t know.

‘She senses when I’m coming somehow,’ I said, ‘and it makes her like that.’ I noticed how grey her hair was turning, though she was only thirty-six. It was matted and dirty as well, and I saw how she was reducing to skin and bone because they couldn’t get her to eat – not that that surprised me, the crap they gave them. As usual she was far too intense, racing along the tracks of her fantasies. She looked straight through us; human beings, to her, were as flat as the court cards in the pack she had let fall on the floor.

‘Yes, what are these kings doing here?’ she shouted. ‘How dare they be in my garden? Look at Lord Wentworth there! Bold as brass, if you please!’

I followed her gaze to an old man sitting on a bench outside the barred window. He was playing with his healthy, fresh pink cock and shouting grimly: ‘Tuppenny nuts! Tuppenny nuts!’ His face wore an expression that was tearing him to pieces.

‘Valuing the last of his spoons, I see,’ said Edie. ‘He won’t last long.’

The male nurse turned to me and said: ‘She should have been
sedated at three, but I didn’t want to put her down until after you’d been.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘thanks.’

‘I think she’s better off when she’s catatonic,’ said the nurse, ‘she seems to suffer less then, though how can you really tell?’ He walked away to deal with a male patient who was pissing against a wall on the far side of the room. Others sitting on wooden chairs sang, knitted their fingers together or sat stonily wrapped up in their world; some wept, some prayed, at grips with their terror, rocking to and fro.

Edie’s hands shot out and wrenched at my coat pocket. ‘Give me a cigarette!’ she screamed. ‘Go on, give me one, or else I’ll set the whole fucking palace alight!’

I stepped out of her way and said to distract her: ‘What colour are those spoons they have, Edie?’

‘Electro-plate,’ she said instantly, without looking at me. ‘No, that’s wrong – they’re base metal, repainted to look like gold; these people are so pretentious! Wentworth?’ Her raucous voice rose. ‘It’s not even an old title. Mind,’ she added, ‘I fancy him, the lucky bastard.’

I noticed how bad her language had got; Edie used hardly ever to swear. I watched the terrible violence rising in her. In its way it was worse than the kind I spend my time dealing with; I felt horror, watching a human being I had known so intimately out of control, no longer human and racking herself to pieces. Oh God, why don’t they stop it, I thought, stop it? Why don’t they give her the last quarter twist and let her leave?

‘What else do you see, Edie?’ I said.

‘Further down the rose garden, there’s that greedy old Queen Mary talking to George the Third.’ She peered out of the barred window, her yellow face seamed with rage. ‘They’re talking about money,’ she snapped. ‘They’re related, of course, but only on the distaff side and that doesn’t count with royals, Mother says.’

Oh, didn’t I remember how middle-class Edie had been – the
hiccough politely hidden behind the hand after a thin lunch, the distasteful use of the word toilet, the sitting room at Blackheath, the best china picked up as seconds in an Oxford Street sale. How, when we first met, she used to remove my hand from under her unfashionable skirt with surprising strength so as to plunge into labyrinths of meaningless genealogy, until it turned out that she was related through her mother to King Clovis of France.

But her father was a tradesman in the fruit business, and cruel to his children; he and I never got on. ‘Edie marrying a copper,’ I heard him say to his wife on the eve of our marriage, ‘what’s the future for our girl in that?’

Edie had lost her thread. ‘The writing on the wall,’ she was muttering. ‘King, king, king, king. The writing, the writing on the wall, the one with the – with the urine on it. There!’ she giggled bitterly. ‘I’ve said it, haven’t I?’

‘I’ve brought you these,’ I said. I had packed up some biscuits and toffees in a parcel. She used to like things like that; yes, in the old days, Edie had a sweet tooth.

She took the parcel without looking at me and let it fall on the floor.

‘Oh, come,’ said the nurse, ‘now that’s a pity, Edie.’

‘Don’t patronize me,’ she sneered, looking past us.

‘I’ve never seen her so not on my wavelength,’ I said. ‘She’s worse.’

‘Worse?’ he said with bright guilt. ‘What, Edie? Why, she’s fine; she’s got a long, long way to go yet!’ It was what he had to say.

‘I know,’ I said, ‘but don’t come the acid with me, friend.’

Edie’s brow creased with fury, her look much farther off than the cement corner with the puddle of piss in it that she was gazing into. ‘Why don’t they show her the kind door?’ I said to the nurse. ‘Why imprison her?’

‘You should know,’ said the male nurse tartly, ‘you’re in the business yourself.’

‘You knew I was a copper?’

‘She keeps saying so.’

‘How do you stand this, day after day?’

‘The way you stand your job.’

‘These vulgar Hanoverians,’ said Edie. ‘They call themselves Windsor these days, but that’s a blag; they’re all Germans. What I don’t understand is, why they all join the navy. Why the navy? Why not the NAAFI?’ She burst out laughing and added triumphantly: ‘Anyway, I don’t fucking care. I’m a baroness in my own right. Plantagenet.’

A haggard man who had wet the pants of his old suit started chasing an elderly visitor, who came out of charity and whom I had seen on other visits, for his cigarettes. They ran up and down the yard several times; at last the patient got the visitor cornered. They stood glaring at each other, the visitor out of fright.

‘Help!’ shouted the visitor in a high, feeble voice. ‘Help!’

‘It’s funny how they can always tell when you’re patronizing them,’ muttered the nurse. ‘I warned Mr Hodgkin last time not to come in here again. Wait a minute, I’ll just see to it.’ He went off down the day room, his nylon jacket rustling.

‘I don’t care how many affairs they have,’ said Edie viciously. ‘These German kings, they breed like rabbits. They’re outsiders! Rabbits!’ She started to scream, dribbling down her rubber bib.

The male nurse, who had ushered the visitor out, heard the noise and rejoined me, shaking his head. He ignored Edie. ‘They’re all disturbed on this wing,’ he said. ‘You just can’t condescend the way Mr Hodgkin does. They spot it every time.’ Edie had her back turned to us again. Suddenly she farted. ‘
Fuck!
’ she said. She added, tight-lipped: ‘There! That wasn’t a ladylike thing to do.’