He Died with His Eyes Open (25 page)

'For the last time,' said Harvey, 'I tell you Staniland wanted to die!'

'Even if that were true,' I said, 'you still go in for the kind of euthanasia the public doesn't like. And you weren't even clever. If you'd wanted to get away with this, you should have destroyed all the man's cassettes.'

'We would have done,' he said sullenly, 'only we didn't know what was on them. We never bothered with his being a bloody writer.'

'Well, too bad,' I said. 'People like you always make mistakes.'

Barbara said, turning to Harvey: 'Look, what it seems to me like, is that we've got to waste a copper.'

'I know,' said Harvey, 'and I don't like it, and I've tried everything because you know you really drop in the shit, Babsie, doing a thing like that. A bum like Charlie, that's one thing, but this is something else.'

Barbara took no further notice of me. She turned her back on me and said to Harvey: 'Well, are we going to rabbit on like this all night or what?'

'I tell you we're over the top if we do it to him, Babs.'

'Trouble with you is, you've got a yellow streak.'

I heard their voices in a murmur as they sat up in bed talking about me. I couldn't have got out of the room if I had wanted to, because they were between me and the door; I was at the foot of the bed. I felt like a patient with a mortal sickness being discussed out loud by the two doctors in charge of him, because there was no point in hiding his condition from him now. Still, I said to them: 'You've got to understand that once I'm dead you'll have the whole Met after you, and you won't either of you last a week.'

Only Harvey looked at me backwards, alarmed. Barbara was saying: 'When we've done it, we just take the keys off him and dump his car. Shame, really, nice Escort like that, nearly new. Still, it can't be helped, we've gotter do it.'

'For the last time, Babsie, I tell you, topping frizz—'

She whipped round on him in the sheets. 'Don't you fall to bits on me like a cheap screwdriver,' she said savagely. She shook a finger at him. I've trained you. You just be my tough, clean, shitless Harvey.'

I knew that everything had come to its climax and I moved, which made her face me bolt-upright in bed, and I heard the catch go in the handle of the flick-knife she had. All I can say is that we felt contempt as we faced each other, and I still didn't know why she looked so avenging, even at the last moment when the blade leaped out with a sharp snap and glittered through the air, because now she had thrown it and a great hand had been played. Such was my concentration on the weapon that it seemed to me it flew quite slowly; I could even see, for instance, that the handle was black. Barbara's right hand was now still again, the index finger still thrust out, crooked, bent towards me. I could see the carmine nail of that finger distinctly, and wondered how recently she had repainted it. Defiance and hatred blazed out of her face; she devoured me as she watched me, and I had a silly image of my school playground, filled with similar warring faces with nowhere to go, nothing to expect. Harvey hadn't moved; the stroke with the knife was too sudden for him. But now he knew what danger he ran, living with a woman who took a knife to bed with her. He was still leaning against the head of the bed with his last expression on, gazing at me; but his face was already growing white and his mouth dropped open, slightly more on one side than the other.

When the knife struck me in the right centre of my throat, it didn't hurt at all at first, it just felt very odd, being able to see the handle sticking out under my chin. I made a gesture as though to pull it out with my hand, but only in a quasi-humorous sort of way. But I immediately felt weaker because of the shock; the things in the room seemed much brighter, and the two figures much bulkier, more obvious and solid; they had a black, undulating halo round them. I moved about at the foot of their bed, not too unsteadily at first, to left and right, not doing anything special, just moving casually around. I found at the same time, however, that I could not really feel my feet now. I looked down at them and noted with surprise how absolute my sneakers were; I had never known before that sneakers could be as absolute as that. I was anxious because this difficult conclusion seemed meaningless, but even as I looked at them, the sneakers started to turn darker. The other thing that struck me was the yellow counterpane these people had on the bed. A deep scarlet design was appearing on it, perhaps not to everyone's taste; it reminded me of my childhood again, how I had watched my mother icing a cake. But it was red icing, and there were some solid chunks in it that shouldn't have been there— something out of my mouth, perhaps; my mother certainly wouldn't have allowed that.

I suddenly felt so bloody cold and fell on the floor on my arse, half lounging against the wall. There was a whole lot of black coming up round the edges of my vision now; the knife was such a dreadful interruption in my throat all the time, and my hearing had turned into a dark roar like a train in the Swiss Cottage tunnel on the Bakerloo line.

'Leave it in him,' I heard her saying, 'till I get something to catch the blood in. It'll go everywhere otherwise.' The words reminded me of something Staniland had said, but he was nowhere near me. Both these people had got out of bed, and this dull-looking woman was moving out of the room. But she turned at the door... what door? All her words and surroundings seemed a hundred miles long. Then, abruptly, I couldn't see any more.

What I wanted to say was: 'I'm going.' I wanted to tell someone that I knew everything now. I had got very cold, and I wanted to tell someone I knew very well that it had got dark, that soon now it would be very dark, too dark for me to see any more, or to hear, perhaps even to know, or even need to see or need to know where I was going: but perhaps, when it got utterly dark, the peace of the darkness would become the same as light, so that my last experience would become as mysterious and musical as my first, so that in my last darkness there might not be the same need of understanding anything so far away as the world anymore.

39

A figure was bending over me like a chunky, half-opened safety-pin. It took me a long time, coming back from a long way off, to get my throat to make a noise like a throat; even when I did I had to speak past lips that felt fat and numb because of some drug I was on.

'Christ, it's you,' I said. 'I thought I was up with the angels somewhere, but you look like the angel of death in tweeds.' I paused and shut my eyes; it made me feel as if I were swinging slowly round a black sun, so I opened them again.

'I thought I was dead,' I said, 'I really did.'

'So did I,' said Bowman. 'So did the ambulance crew.'

'All right, I can see I'm in a hospital,' I said. 'Which one?'

'My life,' said Bowman, 'you might make a detective yet. You're in the Westminster and have been for three days. On a drip.'

'I'd like to know how I survived.'

'Well, you didn't deserve to, you berk,' said Bowman. 'But when I got your report on Staniland and that last phone message of yours I got over there with a squad car and two men sharpish.'

'And then?'

'Well, we didn't bother knocking,' said Bowman reminiscently. 'I hadn't a warrant—there was no time—so we stove the door in anyway, shot upstairs, smashed the flat door in, and there you were, the three of you, you with the knife still in you, the woman stark bollock naked holding a plastic bucket under you and the blood pissing into it—blood all over the place—and that nut Fenton giggling and gettin his jollies off on the bed—he loves a death, that one does, as long as it's not his own, of course, and the more blood about, the better. Anyway, we got the buckles on them—her screamin and goin on like a maniac, let me go you bastards and all that cobblers, stuck em in the car, radioed for an ambulance—and you were lucky that the Union go-slow was over, because it was down in just seven minutes, you'd have been dead otherwise. Christ, when I think—'

It was unlucky for me that he did think just then, because his mouth compressed with rage at the memory: 'No one but a half-arsed idiot like you would have gone over there on your own, and not even a kiddie's spade to protect yourself with!' he shouted.

'What have you booked them on?' I said when he had calmed down.

'Attempted murder for a start,' he said. 'Yours. What do you bleeding well think? The rest'll come after, Staniland and Eric— they'll have spilled the lot by the time I've finished with them, you'll see. We'll have a lovely case to go to court with by the time I'm through—the Public Prosecutors ought to pin a medal on me.'

'Why on you?' I said. As always between Bowman and me, things were getting heated again—nothing ever changed. 'It was me that got my throat cut.'

'On your bike,' said Bowman. 'No one at A14 ever gets anything, you know that. Your picture was on the telly, though, last night—what for, I can't think. Must be a record for A14.'

'Did they say if I was going to be all right?' I asked him. 'That's what I want to know.'

'Well, yes, seems you are,' he said ungraciously. 'I had a word with the quack just now. You was dead lucky that knife never nicked an artery, how it missed one I can't think.' He added with relish: 'But you'll have to be in bed for quite a while, which'll keep you out of my hair.'

'And even then,' I said, 'I suppose my voice'll always sound odd.'

'Well, it will if you don't stop using it,' said a nurse who had come into the room, and Bowman muttered:

'No odder than it's always sounded.'

The nurse rounded on him and said: 'You. You can leave. Right now. You've well overstayed your welcome.'

'It's always the same with people like me,' he said. 'It must be something about the work I do.' He stood up, reached for his hat, and put it on.

'You should throw that horrible old thing away,' I said, 'and get a fedora. Then you'd look like Bogart, only bald.'

'You can half kill this man,' said Bowman, turning to the nurse, 'but it won't stop him getting cheeky with his superiors. Well, I'll be back,' he said, scowling at me from the doorway.

'So will I,' I said.

'Don't be so stupid!' he shouted. 'Just draw your pension and retire, damn you!'

'Oh, no,' I croaked, 'you won't get rid of me that easily.'

It wasn't until after he had gone that it occurred to me I had never so much as thanked him for saving my life.

I lay back, thinking. Staniland would go to his grave avenged. Fenton would do life, in Rampton or Broadmoor as like as not. I didn't think Barbara would be gracing the bars of any more South London clubs for a while, or seducing any coppers.

She would have to do thirty years first.