How the Dead Live (Factory 3) (7 page)

‘Six months’ disappearance can mean eternity.’

‘No, no,’ said Turner, ‘I tell you, she’s just resting up at the house.’

I said: ‘It’s late, but I think I’ll just get in touch with the Chief Constable.’

‘You can’t,’ said Turner, ‘he’s in hospital, he’s had a stroke.’

‘You’re seriously undermanned around here,’ I said.

I was booked into Quayntewayes and lay down on the bed in Room 21. After a while I put out the light and stared at the uncurtained windows; presently I began to smell dead flowers. There was a bad photograph of Marianne Mardy in the file I had and in the darkness of my head I reviewed it, going over her laughing features one by one and adding to them everything I had just learned about her. It wasn’t easy for me to fix her face in my mind because in the photograph the face was blurred; the camera had moved. However, I could see that although she was not beautiful as the cinema thinks of beauty, there was a tenderness in her eyes which was its own beauty. She was in a garden, dressed in old clothes, a skirt and jumper, and running her hand through her hair; she was looking as if towards someone out of shot – her husband, surely. It wasn’t the first time I had smelled dead flowers – they were always the same flowers, chrysanthemums, and every time I smelled them it meant that somebody was dead.

I fell for a time into a mood, not sleep, until I found that I was murmuring words so old that I couldn’t think for a time where I had heard them, but in the end recalled them as Spenser’s, verses of his that I had learned at school:

I felt myself in that hotel room, prosaic as it was, racked by
sorrow, and in the half-dark was aware of arms opening spontaneously to me. I remembered those words of hers that Turner had cited:
I am Marianne, remember me
. Spenser continued:

I had a dream sometime in the night. My mad wife Edie and I were walking through the outskirts of a foreign city, going away from it. There was an atmosphere of terror and sadness everywhere, also an ominous silence broken only by the sound of shuffling feet. We walked into a corner grocer’s shop to buy food. The big woman who served us said: ‘This used to be the administrative part of the city,’ and added: ‘I’m shutting up shop after you. Everyone’s leaving, those that haven’t already left.’ When I asked her why, she laughed and answered ‘Murder,’ and turned off into a corner. I packed what we had bought into a bag we had with us and then we walked back out on to the boulevard we had been following before. People, thousands of them, were hurrying down it, all going in the same direction as ourselves. I wanted to try to reason out why we were doing the same, but couldn’t seem able to. At fifty-yard intervals bodies were lying against the walls. A man in a business suit had collapsed under a sack of cabbages; further on an old man in rags sprawled on a toppled heap of garbage cans; he was dying. A monk in a brown habit stood beside him, holding a syringe; near them stood a shabby woman in her forties, wringing her hands as the crowd went past her, repeating the same unintelligible phrase over and over. No one took any notice of her; they hurried on, heads bent, walking swiftly away from the city centre. Neither Edie nor I spoke to each other – face shut inwards, lips pursed, she moved so fast that I had trouble keeping up with her. We just had Edie’s handbag and a case each.
I knew we were going on a very long journey that we would never repeat and that like the others we would fall when we could no longer go on. I didn’t know where we had come from, or why, or where we were going.

I must have picked Edie up from the asylum at Banstead, for when I looked closely at her I saw there was something very wrong with her clothes. She had stout black shoes on and a rubber bib showed under her coat.

I drove over to the police station at seven in the morning and walked into the reception area; there was a different sergeant on the desk. I asked where Kedward’s office was and he told me, adding: ‘He’s expecting you.’

I went in and said to the inspector: ‘I’ll identify myself.’

‘Don’t bother,’ he said sourly, ‘I’ve had a phone call over you.’

‘You know what it’s about then.’

‘The Mardy business – Christ, what the hell does London have to worry about that for?’

‘You don’t find it unusual, Mrs Mardy having gone missing for six months?’

‘They’re just a couple of middle-aged eccentrics.’

‘I see – not worth troubling about then.’

He said: ‘Watch your tone.’ He looked dull, was about ten years older than me, and had a thin face. His wrinkled suit looked wiser than its owner; the material was a light, bitter shade of grey, and it seemed to know what it had coming to it – early retirement from Thornhill, end of line. He said: ‘Have you been up to see Mardy yet?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I want the background down in the town first, I only got here last night.’

‘Background?’ he sneered. ‘Some of you junior officers want to get your bloody skates on.’

‘Mind out when I do,’ I said, ‘I go far and fast.’

He laughed: ‘Convince me.’

‘I will,’ I said. I could tell Kedward and I were never going to get on. ‘Meantime I’d like to hear anything you can tell me about the Mardys.’

‘Before we go into that,’ he said, ‘I’m told you had a run-in with
two of my men last night, a squad car crew.’

‘PCs 281 and 183,’ I said, ‘that’s right. But it was all amicably fixed.’

‘They breathalysed you, did they not?’

How I detest people who say things like did they not. I said: ‘Yes. It was negative. Some of these youngsters are over-keen.’

‘You used strong language to them.’

‘I use it all the time,’ I said.

‘Don’t try it with me,’ said Kedward, ‘I’m not going to have you London people treating us like yobbos; get that straight, Sergeant.’

He was another rank addict. I said: ‘Well, the best thing you can do then is ring my Deputy Commander and tell him that, why not do it now? The answer might really surprise you.’

He flushed; his hand did not reach for the phone.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Now let’s cut out the crap and get back to the question. Are you asking me to believe that you delayed investigating Mrs Mardy’s disappearance until last month, January, that makes five months since she was last seen, because you thought she was a middle-aged eccentric? Now come on, it’s incredible.’

‘We’d no grounds for suspicion,’ said Kedward. ‘That was my decision and I put it in my report.’

‘I’ve got your report and I’ve read it,’ I said, ‘and a skimpy little document it is too; it’s a skirt that wouldn’t cover a gnat’s thighs. Now try harder.’

‘Look,’ said Kedward, ‘everyone in Thornhill knew she was sick last year.’

‘What do you mean by sick?’

‘Appeared in town less and less often.’

‘Did you see her when she did come in?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Make an effort with this, will you?’ I said. ‘I keep asking you.’

‘Well, she just looked sick.’

‘How sick?’ I said. ‘Come on, you’re a detective, you’ve got eyes in your head, haven’t you? White, you mean? Thin and drawn?’

‘Didn’t speak much latterly,’ he muttered, ‘or else just in a whisper. Always wore a veil in the end round the lower part of her face. But you hardly saw her.’

‘Not exactly the person she’d once been then, was she?’

‘How did you know what she had been like?’ he said, sitting up.

‘Never you mind,’ I said. ‘What we’re talking about right now is that a local woman who used to be pretty, happy, vivacious, first starts to wither away behind a veil and then totally disappears. And you don’t find that reasonable grounds for suspecting anything?’

‘I told you it was well known she was ill!’

‘Was she going for treatment? What was she ill with?’

‘How should I know?’ Kedward shouted. ‘Her husband’s a doctor, isn’t he?’

‘Oh he is, is he?’ I said. ‘Do you know when he last practised?’

‘No, why should I?’

‘You really freak me,’ I said, ‘you’re meant to monitor this patch.’

‘That doesn’t mean sticking my nose into other folks’ business.’

‘It’s what the public pays your wages for,’ I said, ‘I’m always being told it. All right, let’s get on to something else. What sort of a man is this Mardy?’

‘Now you’re down here,’ he said, ‘you can be the judge of that.’

‘I will be. Now, did you eventually go up Thornhill Court?’

‘I did.’

‘And when was that?’

‘You must have read my report. It was January 15th. Last month.’

‘And yet it seems Mrs Mardy had been missing since August last year.’

‘Thornhill Court isn’t the sort of house anybody just goes into.’

I was getting weary of this. I said: ‘Why isn’t it?’

‘It’s not a bloody council estate.’

‘Bollocks,’ I said. ‘You call yourself a copper. Council estate, high rise, country house, the law can go anywhere it likes any time it likes, as you know full well.’

‘The Mardy family’s been here in Thornhill for three centuries.’

I said: ‘I don’t care if they moved in with Julius Caesar.’

‘You work in town too much, but you’re ninety miles from London here.’

‘People don’t seem to change, though.’

He shouted: ‘Will you mind your manners with me, you cheeky bastard!’

‘I’m not into minding manners,’ I said, ‘but solving cases. I tell you I’m here to find out what’s happened to Mrs Mardy, how when where and why, and I’m going to, with your help or without it. Now then – you never got a warrant out to search the Mardy house. Why not? Why didn’t you?’

‘I don’t have to explain that to you.’

I said: ‘I think you’d better, and I’m asking you that question again.’

‘Because I had no grounds for suspicion, I keep telling you!’ He added: ‘All right, we both know it came from the Chief Constable for me to go up there.’

‘And didn’t it take some pushing for you to do it,’ I said, ‘what you should have done anyway months before. What was the reason you gave Mardy for your visit when you finally did get up there?’

‘That I was acting on information received.’

‘But what information?’ I shouted. ‘Whose information? Why isn’t any of this information to be found in this pathetic report of yours I’ve got here?’

‘That’s just it,’ said Kedward, ‘in my view none of it was information, just gossip.’

‘Well, with a local woman having disappeared for six months like that,’ I said, ‘yes, I’ll bet there was plenty of it. Now, did you go up to the house alone?’

‘Certainly not. I went up with Sergeant Turner.’

‘All right. And did you turn the house over?’

‘We did not.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I formed the opinion after talking to Dr Mardy that there was no necessity for it.’

‘And what was that opinion based on? The fact that his wife was nowhere to be found? Or did you find her? Did she appear? If she did, what the hell am I doing here?’

‘No, she did not appear.’

‘And what was Mardy’s explanation for that? Or didn’t you ask him for one?’

‘He told us that his wife was absent for a time, that her health was not all it might be, and that she’d gone abroad on a long visit, back to her home in France.’

‘And you were quite satisfied with that.’

‘Why shouldn’t I have been?’

‘I don’t know yet. Was your sergeant satisfied with it?’

‘I don’t ask my sergeants for their opinions.’

‘What a pity,’ I said. ‘You know, Inspector, as one detective to another, I’m frankly wondering if you’ve ever tackled such a thing as crime in your life before. Or are you wilier than you make out?’ I added. ‘Are you concealing anything from me, Inspector?’

He had taken a beating from me; his gaze slid across the room. ‘No.’

‘Because if you are,’ I said, ‘I very strongly advise you not to do so.’

‘Sergeants don’t give advice to detective-inspectors,’ he said. ‘They take it as a rule, if they know what’s good for them.’

‘I’ve never known what was good for me,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’m in my mid-forties and still a sergeant. But don’t be an idiot, I’m working for the Yard on this one. I’m not local law.’ I didn’t believe what I was going to say next but I said it just the same: ‘Of course, I’ve no grounds yet for supposing that you are holding anything back, but what I’m confronted with so far is your investigation into this business, which is so fucking inept that it doesn’t even deserve the name. I can’t believe that you’re as stupid as you would like to make me think you are – I think you could have done much, much better than this if you’d wanted to, and of course it’s natural for me to want to know why you didn’t want to.’ I pointed my finger at his nose. ‘And if it turns out at the end
of this case that you were withholding information from me all along, and if I have to find out what that information was all by myself, then you are going to find yourself in very, very serious trouble, do you understand?’

He snapped: ‘I’m not withholding anything from you.’

‘Well, I’ve given you your chance.’

‘Yes, thank you so very much,’ he said poisonously, ‘I am grateful.’

I let that slip on by. ‘There’s something else I want to know,’ I said.