He Died with His Eyes Open (2 page)

'You're a murderer,' said Bowman coldly. 'You're one of the special kind, a killer that don't want to get caught. You beat a bloke to death in a motor—blood all over the fucking place. Next, I'm you. I come round to your place an I say, can I have a look at your motor, please? Routine inquiry, sir. Blood everywhere, you berk.'

'I hadn't thought of it like that, sir.'

'I know,' said Bowman, 'so just draw your pay as a police-constable and try leaving it to us, son. Unless,' he added, 'you'd like to use your crystal ball once more and give us the motive?'

'No, sir.'

'Anyway,' I said, 'you can't beat a man to death in a motor, there isn't room.'

'It could've been done in a truck, maybe,' said the other copper. Nobody took any notice of him.

'Has the pathologist been?' I said.

'All the mob,' said Bowman. 'Been and gone. We was just waiting for you, and you took your time an all.'

The nosy copper that Bowman had put down smiled with mirth in the dark. Bowman turned to him and said: 'If you've something to say, lad, say it out loud and in English so's I can give you the answer—you mightn't find it all on your own.' He said to me: 'What do you think he was killed for? Money?'

'He doesn't look like the kind of ice cream who ever had much on him,' I said. 'Do we know who he was, by the way?'

'Of course we do,' said Bowman, 'we found his papers in his pocket. Charles Locksley Alwin Staniland, aged fifty-one.'

'I don't think I'd kill a man for fifty quid,' I said.

'Oh, I don't know,' said Bowman, 'some of these kids are desperate nowadays. Anyway, you can get going on it now—it's your case. And don't get in my hair at all, will you?'

'You haven't any,' I said, looking at his bald head in the torchlight.

There was no love in the look he gave me. He was a chief inspector at thirty-two, only recently bumped up to his rank; he was cheerful, brutal and clever, cheeky and cocksure. 'It's a derelict death after all,' he said with dismissive contempt that implied he had bigger fish to fry over at Serious Crimes. 'We get lots of them.' He looked at his watch. 'Christ, I've got to get back by eight o'clock. I'll be off, then.' He started to walk back to the road, where the squad car with its revolving blue lamp and chattering radio waited at the entrance to the tangled garden. 'The ambulance'll be down to take him away sometime, only as you know—'

'Union's having a go-slow again.'

'In any case,' he said, 'I'm sick of being pissed on by all this rain.'

He didn't care about the rain at all. What he meant was that Staniland was a case with no promotion in it; he would cheerfully have stood under a cold shower for twenty-four hours fully dressed if there had been. The local law notified him of these cases, and as often as he could work it, he turned them over to us to pick up the bits.

At the gateway he turned to me and stood with his legs apart, at ease, his hands clasped behind his back. We faced each other. As I say, we didn't get on, so it was a good thing we were in different departments and didn't see too much of each other.

'You really want to stay a sergeant, don't you?' he said.

'I like to see justice.'

'Justice? You're a berk,' said Bowman. 'You're forty, you're a sergeant, and you actually despise promotion.'

'I'm not on my way upstairs like you are,' I said. 'Not with cases like this one.'

'It won't even be reported.'

'No, I know,' I said. 'And that sort of thing matters to you.'

'Of course it does.'

'But the trouble with you is, it shows.'

'Have it your own way' said Bowman. 'You can stay on at Unexplained Deaths till you rot, for all I care. Anyway, I'm going. I'm late already.' He dug his chin into the collar of his mac and gestured to his driver to pull up closer. As he was about to get into the car, he turned and said: 'By the way, you'd better call the Factory and I'll have his property sent over to you. There's plenty of it.'

'You've been over his place already?'

'I've had it done. I'll give you the address.'

Well, he was efficient—but I knew that.

'You can leave me your torch while I wait for the ambulance anyway,' I said. 'You won't need it back at the Factory. Not with all that strip lighting.'

He gave it to me without enthusiasm. 'I don't like your manner,' he said. 'You're only a sergeant, but you're cheeky. You reckon yourself, you do. You think you're fast.' He was in the back of the car now, with the window half up against the rain.

'Working where I do makes me feel independent.'

'Don't carry it too far,' he said.

'You can turn your back on me if you like,' I said. 'I wouldn't shoot you with your own torch.'

I just wanted him to leave.

When he finally had, with the blue lamp flaring in the rain and a smazz of pistons and exhaust from the red-striped and white Rover, I sent the two turnips back to the gate and squatted down by the dead man's face again with the torch on. I wanted to see if I could get some line on why the man might have died and how he had got here before the people who knew it all started to try and tell me.

After a while I began to reflect on the withering remarks Bowman had passed on Unexplained Deaths. The fact that A14 is by far the most unpopular and shunned branch of the service only goes to show that, to my way of thinking, it should have been created years ago. Trendy Lefties in and out of politics or just on the edges don't like us—but somebody has to do the job, they won't. The uniformed people don't like us; nor does the Criminal Investigation Department, nor does the Special Intelligence Branch. We work on obscure, unimportant, apparently irrelevant deaths of people who don't matter and who never did. We have the lowest budget, we're last in line for allocations, and promotion is so slow that most of us never get past the rank of sergeant. Some of us transfer to other branches out of desperation, but not many; and of those who do transfer, most do it sooner rather than later. We can solve a murder with as much skill as any of the Bowmans, whatever our rank, pay and pension—the difference is in our attitude. Just like Bowman, we spend our time looking into dead men's faces, round their rooms, into the motives of their friends, if any, lovers and enemies. But unlike some policemen, we never make excuses about being undermanned; nor do we care if the case we're investigating never gets into the papers, nor becomes a national manhunt—and when my friend Sergeant Macintosh was killed by the man he had trapped in a bedsitter off Edith Grove last year, there was no posthumous George Medal for him. No murder is casual to us, and no murder is unimportant, even though murder happens the whole time in a city like this.

While I was looking down at the dead man, the two coppers came back. The eager one that Bowman had put down looked at me. He was much too clever to say anything this time, and even when he did speak he wasn't exactly polite or impolite— he just managed to leave the politeness out. The other PC, who hadn't annoyed me yet, slipped up when I asked him to call the ambulance again on the walkie-talkie, and he called me 'son'.

'Is that what you call your station sergeant?'

'No.' He was a brutal-looking blond of about twenty, who moved about with a controlled restlessness, cherishing his fists.

I could tell he despised anyone who was different from him, older than him, cleverer, weaker, or in disagreement with his views of the society he helped to administer.

'I'm about twice your age,' I said. 'Would you like me to call you son, son?'

'No.'

He wasn't suitable to be a police officer. He was much too partial to a battle with 'enemies' of whom he took far too sharp a view. He wasn't the kind of man you could depend on to ensure a democracy. He wasn't a quick thinker, either. The Met was too full of people like him, and it was no good the bosses upstairs saying they had to take what they could get. With three million unemployed, they could get whatever police force they wanted, like they did with the army. But a policeman's job, properly carried out, is much harder than a soldier's—or should be. You don't just obey orders. You have a code, but you are often on your own (I always was) and then you have to invent your orders.

'You haven't been with us long,' I said.

'A year.'

'Just take being a policeman easy,' I said. 'No need to rush at it like a bull at a gate.'

'Okay,' he said. He said it softly and unpleasantly, with a reserved chill in his eyes. I wondered what would happen to anybody he was questioning if he ever made CID, if they gave him a bit of cheek.

'That's all right,' I said. I noted the number on his shoulder-strap. I always noticed those things.

There was an uneasy silence, so I said: 'To pass the time till the ambulance comes, have either of you any comment to make on this case? Anything at all that comes to mind?'

'That isn't our business, Sergeant,' said the brighter police-man, with the air of having learned a lesson.

'Come on. I'm asking you both.'

'Hard to say,' said the blond.

'Was he on drugs, for instance?' I said. 'You've got what evidence there is in front of you, same as I have.'

'I wouldn't know,' said the blond, absently. 'After all, I'm just a copper on the beat. With only a year's service in.'

'You'll never make CID with that attitude,' I said.

'Who says I want to?'

I turned to the other one. 'Why does a middle-aged drunk end up on a piece of waste ground looking as if he'd been hit by a shell?'

'He had enemies.'

'Most people wouldn't give a fuck about a poor slob like this,' I said. 'They might give him a push or smack him just one. Why a terrible beating like that?'

'Yes, and it was planned. They topped him in one place and dumped him here.'

'Right,' I said. 'But what motive could they have had? They took a risk.'

'Yes, okay,' said the brighter police-constable. 'Yes, I'd buy that.' He spoke with a South London accent that guttered in his throat like a flame in a cracked chimney. The other one sulked in the rain on the edge of the torchlight. 'Well, if they went so far as to kill him, maybe he knew too much about something.'

'Maybe he was a grass—a snitch.'

'Maybe,' I said. 'And he might have done bird, but somehow I don't think so. Anyway, that's easily checked.'

'Or a spy?'

'No,' I said. 'Foreign powers don't operate like that. Nor do terrorist groups. They blow people to bits, shoot them, or even run them over. But they don't beat them to death and then move them. They haven't time.'

'Money, then.'

'It doesn't look as if he had any.'

'Well, it must be one of those three, Sarge. I can't think of anything else.'

'No,' I said, 'nor can I. At least not yet. Not till I've been through his gear, talked to his friends, if any.' I added: 'You've been a help, anyway. What's your name?'

'Marvell.'

Just then the ambulance appeared. It arrived with a groan of expiring sirens, though it hadn't been in any hurry. When it stopped, no one exactly erupted from it. After a decent pause two men in blue uniforms got down from the vehicle in a calm, quiet, British manner. The man who wasn't the driver got the back steps of the ambulance folded down and produced a stretcher which he couldn't manage to make work right away. The man who was the driver walked slowly over to us and remarked: 'Well, here we are.' We were obviously meant to feel that this was in the nature of a revealed truth. He glanced at Staniland's body and said with a knowledgeable look: 'This him?'

'Well, if it isn't,' I said, 'it was.'

'Fraid as he was dead,' said the driver, 'he rather come at the bottom of the list, there being a case of industrial action on.'

'You're right,' I said, 'he was in no bigger a hurry than you are.'

'You'll excuse my asking,' said the driver, 'but would you be trying to take the piss?'

'Well, if I was,' I said, 'there'd be fuck all you could do about it. Now get him on board, or I'll report you for wasting police time.'

There was a very long pause indeed. 'As a police officer, you're supposed to be impartial as to union action,' the driver said.

'And I am being,' I said. 'I'm just telling you to get on with it. What's not impartial about that?'

'You,' said the driver bitterly. His mate said, without looking up from the official notebook he was scribbling in: 'Okay, George, let's get out of the rain and weigh him off.' He looked at his watch, noted the time down in his book and shut it. He said to the two police-constables, 'We'll just be in time for this new TV series they're running. It's all about some old king being murdered way back by a lot of geezers in baggy shorts and funny hats with pearls on. They all prowl about rabbiting a lot and waving swords at each other, see, then there's a bloke in a fur cloak has em all up in court and gives them a long rabbit, then he has em all topped. It's good.'

'I don't think it's good,' said the blond copper. 'I think it's a load of crap.'

'You're biased against hist'ry, you are,' said the driver's mate, 'if you won't mind my saying so, Officer.' As he spoke, he was shoving the stretcher with the corpse packed onto it under a blanket into the white interior of the ambulance. When he had finished he slammed the doors on it, walked round to the front and climbed in. The driver, with a choked look, got in too and started up. The ambulance pulled away at a sedate speed. 'Night, all,' the driver's mate called back.

Nobody answered.

Inside the ambulance the ruined face of Charles Locksley Alwin Staniland screamed silently up at its white roof which a British Leyland operator had sprayed one day when he happened not to be on strike and needed the overtime.

2

I went to see the police surgeon who had examined the body on arrival and said: 'What did he die of?'

The surgeon said wearily: 'Everything.'

When I asked the pathologist the same thing, he said: 'You tell me what he didn't die of, I don't know.'

'Why don't you know?' I said. 'You're the pathologist. You're supposed to know.'

'The wounds happened so quickly on top of each other that it's hard to say which came first. Not impossible, only I'm not through yet. But you can take it that they broke the arms and the leg first, also the fingers, and that the blow that put paid to him was the one to the frontal lobe of the brain, which was delivered with something like a builder's two-pound hammer.'