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

The detective rolled down his window and shouted: ‘What is it?’

‘It’s a body, you fool,’ I said. ‘Get the surgeon on the radio, an ambulance. Do it fast.’

‘Who’re you giving orders to?’ he yelled furiously. ‘You want to get your knees brown, son!’

I ignored him. Soon the driver joined me, the rain pelting on his cap, and he bent over her too. He listened to her heart for a minute, took her pulse and stood up. ‘I don’t think she’ll be
needing the ambulance,’ he said, rubbing his clean-shaven jaw in a judicious way.

‘Well, she won’t if it doesn’t hurry,’ I said.

He looked at me. ‘You want to watch your tone.’

I said: ‘Just get that ambulance up here.’

He was glad enough to get back to the car and inside out of the rain with the plainclothes man; that showed. I watched them fiddling with the radio in the lit interior of the car until I got fed up and went over. ‘Well?’

‘They’re trying to get the doctor,’ said the CID man, ‘but he’s busy giving some drunk an alcohol test.’ He added, looking at her from the car window: ‘Thrown out of a motor, was she?’

‘Well, what do you think?’

‘What I think is, we’ll never find out who did it,’ he said. Passing traffic drowned out some of what he said. Standing in the rain I shouted: ‘I want to try and save her life!’ I went back to her. She was still alive, just. I turned her until she was face up to me, then put my arms under her broken shoulders. Her face was streaked with mud. There was gravel in her grey hair and a raw wound in her scalp where her head had smashed down on the tarmac when she was thrown out of the car.

She looked at me blindly out of half-closed eyes. ‘Katie?’ she whispered. ‘Katie, is that you, dear?’ She gazed past me, her eyes darkening, her life slipping apologetically away past me out of the torchlight – out into the perimeter of endless rain beyond the squad car’s headlights. I took each of her arms gently in my fingers and they stirred; but when I did the same to her legs nothing happened at all. I told the others in the car this and went back to her. Presently the CID man shouted: ‘Doctor reckons her back’s broken, and the ambulance’ll be about half an hour!’

‘But that’s too long!’ I yelled back. ‘Too fucking long! Tell them it’s got to come quicker than that – it’s got to!’

‘They say they’re short of crews!’

‘They’ll be short of another crew when I’ve done with them!’
I shouted. A forty-ton truck thrashed past us northwards and drowned out my words. Now the rain came down on us in white towers, great lances of water, hissing through hair, up sleeves, soaking everyone, flooding everything. I was crying with frustration as I knelt over her, but the rain skimmed the tears off my face. We waited and waited, well past the half hour, and no ambulance came. We had the first-aid kit in the car but were afraid to use it; she was so badly injured that we didn’t know where to start. We had her covered up as best we could with whatever we could find; she died in my arms, and just before she went, which she did suddenly, one hand crept up and she died feeling at the buttons on my tunic and asking in a whisper for Katie. That was her daughter, we found out later, who lived in Wales. Meanwhile the night trucks pounded away towards Newcastle in great showers and sheets of rain, shrouding all of us.

Of course she had been murdered. She was a Mrs Mayhew, sixty-two, a widow living on her pension at Dungeness Road, Watford, out by the entrance to the M1. When we got to her house it had been ransacked; the robbers might have got seventy quid’s worth of gear, plus maybe a tenner that the neighbours said she kept by her for shopping. What these maniacs couldn’t take they had smashed; they had also shat on her living room floor. Outside you could see where she had been dragged through the mud and into their car, to be hurled out of it as it bombed away north.

Nobody was ever caught for her, and Mrs Mayhew made four lines in the
Watford Observer
.

But that’s why, when they started Unexplained Deaths, or A14, I was one of the first to join; and that’s why I stayed on as a copper, just when I was thinking it was a dog’s life and had considered jacking it in.

Mrs Mayhew, I saw on her papers, had a pretty Christian name. I remember it:

Jonquil.

I work on the second floor of the Factory when I’m in. Everything has to have an official name in the police, and my room is Room 205. The listed name of the Factory is Poland Street police station, London W1, but it’ll never shake off the name of the Factory. The name sticks to the men and women who work there, also to the people who get worked over there, downstairs. I don’t go in to the Factory much. If you’re with A14 you work your cases on your own. We’re too undermanned to do otherwise, and we work only on cases where the victims have been written off upstairs as unimportant, not pressworthy, not well connected and not big crime. I don’t do much interviewing in 205. I do all that in my own way, catching the man I want to see on his manor – as often as not at his own place; if not, it might be in his local boozer or else through a grass. Most of the work we get is passed to us from Serious Crimes at the Yard, and the man I generally find myself dealing with there is Charlie Bowman, a cheeky chief inspector of thirty-three with not much on top of his head nor a lot inside it in my opinion, apart from ruthlessness, ambition and drive. To me, Bowman’s the other kind of copper, and he’s only just got back to work again after a rest. The story officially is that he had an ulcer; the unofficial story is that his wife freaked him out with the habit she had of pushing all four buttons on his quartz watch – which he never took off for the occasion – each time he was coming up to orgasm, making it bleep. I don’t believe either version. I think Charlie’s real problem is that he never gets that step up to detective-superintendent that he expects each time the promotions come through.

I’d also better mention that I’m just a detective-sergeant and
certain to remain one. I reckon I’m a sergeant only because I could hardly have managed otherwise, but they could have left me a constable for all I cared. Bowman doesn’t like that. It makes him uneasy that he’s nearly ten years younger than I am, and so much higher in rank. He’s rightly got the impression that I don’t care about rank, and that irks him. We quarrel when we meet, which luckily isn’t that often. He enjoys reminding me: ‘The one sure way of denying yourself promotion, sergeant – and you’re getting no younger – is your bloody insolence.’

But I’m not insolent, I’m just impatient. My trouble is, I can’t stand fools. Justice is what I bother about – not rank. I watch men like Charlie Bowman operating and I think Christ, does anyone really expect to get justice that way?

I admit that with my attitude, it really is a good thing I’m just a sergeant. It certainly suits me being low down the ladder, and it’s a relief not being interested in promotion – that way I can stay on in A14 which is the lowest budgeted department in the police service, and what I like best about my work is that I can get on with it, as a rule, almost entirely on my own, without a load of keen idiots tripping all over my feet. Yes, I’m happy to work at Unexplained Deaths, though naturally I go through the motions of complaining about it just like everyone else.

On the morning of April 14th I was in Room 205 finishing my report on a suicide when Bowman came in. Except that I had a personal problem that I wanted to think about, I was not as sorry to see him as I usually am. I was bored with the report; they’re really just bureaucracy for the file. Any clerk could write them himself from my notes, and a computer in turn could do away with the clerk. But if you work for the State, you’ve always got to make room for the clerks. I also, as I often did in the morning, hated my room with its sickly green paint, its radiator that only worked full blast or not at all, its old police posters that no one renewed, and the plastic tulips I had bought now that Brenda, the WPC who used to bring me real ones sometimes and give me a look or two, had gone off and got married.

I had a paper with me and was looking at the lead story which was to do with the defence minister (yet again) when Bowman arrived. He belched, parked his big behind on the edge of my desk, spread his fat thighs apart and farted.

‘Well, I’ve got one for you.’ He snorted into a paper handkerchief and wiped his nose.

‘Where?’

‘Over at Rotherhithe; he’s stapled up in five Waitrose plastic bags. You can come down with me right now. I’m pushed for time, but I’ve just got enough to give you a lift and I’ve got a car waiting.’

‘Who was he?’

‘Nobody knows. Usual A14 stuff. All we know is, he was murdered.’

‘That’s deduction for you.’

‘Now don’t ride me,’ said Bowman. ‘Not today.’ He added: ‘Nor any day.’ He blew his nose again; the noise rocketed off the concrete walls.

‘You have a look at his jaws?’ I said. ‘His teeth?’

‘Couldn’t. The killer knocked them out and threw them away. Now then, don’t fuck me about, sergeant, I’ve got a big bank job on. It’ll be in all the linens.’

‘Your cases always are.’

‘Look,’ said Bowman, ‘just pick up your bra and brolly and let’s get over there.’

‘Your temper’s improving to the point of no return,’ I said, standing up. ‘You undone any of these bags yourself?’

‘Two,’ he said. He added sarcastically: ‘To see what was in them, you know.’

‘And what did you find first?’

‘His head. I told you his teeth were missing.’

We went out through the main door of the Factory and got into the car. As we drove fast down Gower Street Bowman remarked: ‘Yes, this is a tasty one.’

It wasn’t raining for once; there was some weak sunshine about, although cloud the colour of a bank manager’s suit was scudding over Waterloo Bridge.

Bowman said: ‘The forensic mob have been over and looked at it and put everything back again for you to see. But they reckon it’s going to take the lab a while to get any real report out on it. All they can say right now is that it was a male, white, probably in his late forties.’

‘Why couldn’t they tell more than that?’ I said. ‘Like how he was killed, for instance?’

‘The killer didn’t seem to want to make things easy,’ said Bowman.

‘But the head, the trunk.’

‘It was all boiled,’ said Bowman, ‘and let’s go easy talking about it, shall we, especially in a moving car, it makes me want to throw
up, and I’ve seen most things. That’s why there are no prints, the skin has been boiled off his fingers – he’s been altogether boiled, cooked up, see?’

‘No traces of blood around? Nothing spilled at all?’

‘No. What I think is, there was more than one individual involved, and that they killed him, bled him into something, boiled the blood away with the rest, butchered him and cooked him.’

‘No clothing? No object the victim had dropped? Nothing?’

‘Well, they didn’t find anything,’ said Bowman. ‘And of course no clothing. They must have stripped him, bundled his clothes up and destroyed all that later.’ He added: ‘They’re fucking cannibals, these people, the sick bastards.’

‘Methodical, though,’ I said. ‘Professional.’

‘Well, I agree it isn’t the work of a nut,’ said Bowman, ‘at least, not in the ordinary sense. Too neat, too careful – yes, OK, professional. Just the five bags of gear, grey, pinkish a little here and there.’ He thought for a moment and added: ‘You know, like pig’s trotters. Or veal.’

‘Smelling?’

‘No, not yet. Good point,’ he added grudgingly, ‘especially stapled up in plastic like that, you’d have thought it would’ve. Also, there was still a faint smell of cooking. So that’s why they think he was done in the warehouse, and in the last twelve to eighteen hours.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘particularly since the weather’s warm.’ I thought for a minute. ‘Well, I don’t know, early to say. But Rotherhithe, the professionalism, etcetera – it sounds like good old gangland again to me. Who reported it?’

‘The caretaker. He’s waiting for you. He found the bags when he was doing his rounds and prodded one. He didn’t kind of like the look of them somehow, so he called us in.’

‘That was discerning of him,’ I said. ‘Plenty of people these days would have just dumped them out with the garbage without even looking inside.’

‘That’s what the killer ought to have done, I reckon,’ said Bowman. ‘Why he left them sitting up there in an orderly row like that I do not know.’

‘Maybe whoever it was didn’t want to take the risk of carrying them out in case there was a stray squad car about and anyway, they probably thought they wouldn’t be found for weeks.’ I added: ‘Oh, so the bags were in an orderly row, were they?’

‘What are you on about?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Anyway, it’s a good thing the bags were left. If none of these people ever made mistakes our solution rate would look even worse than it does.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Bowman. We were stopped in heavy traffic. Bowman sat forward and said to the driver: ‘Don’t just sit in this like a berk, constable. Get your arse in first gear and put your siren on, that’s what the fucking thing’s for.’ The driver obeyed, his ears and the back of his neck turning a dull red.

‘When I think of the booming recruiting figures for the Met,’ I said, ‘I think of people like you, and how you deserve a medal for them.’

‘Now look,’ said Bowman furiously, ‘you may never rise above the rank of sergeant at A14, but you could always go back down to constable; I could fix it easy. I could put you back on the beat – how about Brixton?’

‘I might see you there if you don’t get your brains in straight from time to time,’ I said. ‘I know a cafe in Brixton Road where they do a plain copper a really nice egg and chips and a good pot of tea for a quid.’

‘Don’t take the piss,’ Bowman shouted, ‘they’re waiting for me over at that bank. If I’m late I’ll get a roasting from the Commissioner.’ He blew out through his lips with exasperation, looked at his watch and rubbed his fingers down his face. ‘I’ve got something else on besides this bank business.’