A Commonplace Killing (17 page)

“Sir,” she said after they had walked a few hundred yards more, “I’m thinking of applying to “C” Department.” She had half turned towards him and was smiling as his heart broke into a hundred thousand pieces. They passed a wood yard, a watchmaker, one of those hardware shops that smell of polish and paraffin and clutter the pavement with a paraphernalia of buckets and broom handles: the bleak scenery of his
disappointment
, destined to be imprinted on his memory for as long as the grey enduring ghastliness of his life stretched out before him.

“Don’t do it,” he said, managing, just, to keep from begging. He was thinking how there was nothing for it now but to run away. He had not run away from Marjorie, but that was only because she had taken herself off.

“Why ever do you say that?” she asked. She sounded
genuinely
surprised.

Because, he wanted to say, I love you.

“It’s an awful, sordid business,” he said, “dirty and depressing at worst; dull as ditchwater at best.”

“Well, I can’t think of anything I’d rather do,” she countered.

“Modern police work isn’t like a Harriet Vane novel, you know,” he said. Harriet Vane! Good God! That dated him. Why not bring in
The Perils of Pauline
and
Mutt and Jeff
while you’re at it, old man, he thought. He really was an ass. “Besides, it’s man’s work.” He knew that these were feeble objections; the dying clutches of a drowning man, and she, quite rightly, snorted in derision.

“Man’s work?” she exclaimed. “With respect, sir, this is 1946. I suppose you think I ought to be living in the suburbs with a nice doctor husband and a couple of children.” As a matter of fact he did, but with him instead of some dull provincial GP. “You sound like my mother!” She laughed; she had a very jolly sort of laugh. “You know I was in Nairobi with the ATS.”

“So you’ve told me.”

“I was a motorcycle despatch rider. I know ju-jitsu.” She drew her bottom lip over her top lip and he wondered if she was about to cry. “I just want to do my bit, sir,” she said, “like I did in the war.”

He had one last stab at putting her off.

“What does your father think about you wanting to spend your time parading about the streets dressed like a prostitute, or acting as a decoy for a sexual maniac?” It was a low blow; unworthy of him, and he despised himself for dealing it.

“My father died when I was twelve,” she said, simply, unaffectedly. “He was gassed in the Great War and never really recovered.”

He might have told her that he knew how that must have been – the gassing, that is, but his generation hardly ever talked about such things; of course, she was not his generation, and it would have been entirely the wrong way to go about making amends. His heart was sinking fast as they walked along. Why did she have to be so very lovely? Why did he have to want so very badly for her to like him? He was lonely: that was the whole matter. He was lonely and in danger of making a fool of himself with a lovely girl half his age who had not the slightest interest in him.

They walked along the Seven Sisters Road in a
desultory
silence, steeped, on his part, in embarrassment. He was fervently praying that they could both forget that the
conversation
had ever taken place when they passed another café, even dirtier than the one they had just left, and his attention was taken by a familiar face hunched in the farthest, dingiest corner and slurping tea from a saucer.

“Hello,” he said. He tapped on the window and exchanged a brief telling look with the man. “It’s safe to talk,” he told Tring, and they both entered the café.

“Will he know anything?” she asked. He was relieved that they appeared to be back on speaking terms.

“He knows everything.”

The price of information, swiftly negotiated, was a plate of watery dried eggs served up on a round of milk toast. Cheaper than the customary ten-bob note, but times were hard.

“I’m looking for someone called Dennis,” Cooper began, once the eggs had been declared satisfactory. He rattled off the description, and Tring handed the nark the artist’s
impression
. It met with a blank stare and was handed back with a brief shake of the head.

“What about a woman called Nesta? Deals in an under-
the-counter
sort of way.”

“I know her,” said the nark, shovelling a fork of the egg mixture into his mouth. “I ain’t seen her for a few days, but she drinks in the Feathers. She goes with an Irish fellah and I heard they’d come into a bit of luck and he’d taken her off to Brighton. He’s called Jimmy.”

“Jimmy what?”

“Jimmy,” the nark repeated.

“You’re sure it’s Jimmy. Not Dennis…”

“Jimmy. He’s Irish.”

Cooper sat back and sighed. If he was a man who worried he’d be worried: every corner they turned, they seemed to run into a blasted brick wall.

 

The landlord of the Feathers was well known to Cooper. He had a look of Stanley Holloway about him, that air of common, salt-of-the-earth decency that everybody finds reassuring. Publicans, Cooper told Tring as they prepared to enter the saloon bar, are in general more forthcoming than other sorts of witnesses: they had a good deal to lose, and it paid them to keep in with the police. She seemed to respond positively to being told things of this nature, and he had begun to harbour a hope that, by showing willing to train her up in the ways of detection, she might favour him. There was no indication that she had forgiven him, but neither did she appear to be holding him to account; and in this way he reassured himself, all the while knowing that the reality was far worse than either of those possibilities. He was too good a detective to be capable of much self-delusion: the fact was, she had no feelings for him
whatsoever
, and he could bear anything except indifference.

The Feathers was, unusually, open for an hour or two at lunchtime, but he didn’t recognise any of the faces which turned, with palpable lack of interest, to look him up and down over the top of their half-pints of stout. The tables, which
probably
passed muster in the smoke-laden gloom of the evening, in daylight were scarred terribly with cigarette burns and beer mug rings; the whole place was suffused with the bitterness of stale beer and gaspers.

The publican’s cheerfulness was at odds with the
surroundings
. He was keen to help, but in practice had very little to tell them. It had been exceedingly busy on Saturday night, quite the busiest night they’d had for a long time. The warm weather was good for business; as was the word, somehow got out, that a supply of gin had come in.

“We ran out of bitter fairly early on, but the gin kept people going until closing time,” he was saying. They’d been rushed off their feet from the moment they had opened at eight o’clock, until last orders were shouted at half past ten. “This Dennis,” the landlord had told them, handing back the artist’s
impression
, “he’s not one of the regulars, not as I recollect, anyway.”

The barmaid said the same.

Cooper was not about to give up.

“What about a stout, middle-aged woman, name of Nesta?”

The landlord chuckled.

“Oh yes, we know Nesta,” he said. “You can’t miss Nesta. She’s the life and soul when she’s had a few drinks – nothing troublesome, you understand. Is she mixed up in all of this, then? I can assure you, Mr Cooper, if she came in here trying to sell BM tins or anything of that sort I’d have seen her off. You can bet your life on that. It’s more than my life’s worth to encourage that sort of carry-on.”

Cooper reassured him, but made a mental note about the BM tins.

“Was Nesta in here on Saturday night, as far as you know?”

“Try and keep Nesta away when there’s gin in! She seems to know before I do when there’s any in town.” The landlord laughed again.

“Was she with anyone as far as you remember?”

“She was with an Irish guardsman she walks out with when he’s on weekend leave. Nice enough fellow – young enough to be her son, though, but then that’s Nesta all over. They spent some of the evening with a gang of Irish boys who were spending pretty freely.”

“Irish boys, eh?” said Cooper. “Can you remember what any of them looked like?”

The landlord scratched his bald head and thought for a moment.

“They’re mostly working men,” he said. “Navvies, you know.”

“Well dressed for a night out?”

“Not so’s you’d notice.”

He already knew from Joyce, the café waitress, that the guardsman and Dennis were two different people, so there was no point in pursuing that line.

Tring handed the publican another of the cards with the Caledonian Road station number on it, and he assured her that he would telephone right away should Nesta, or any of the Irish boys she liked to spend time with, come in.

W
hen he finally came round he could remember very little, and what he did remember came to him in nightmarish splinters for the most part. He had the vaguest recollection of being in the back of some shop with a seedy Jew, selling or buying something. He had the idea that he was with someone for some of the time, but couldn’t for the life of him think who it could be. He had a sour feeling that didn’t sit right: he’d
probably
been sick at some point, at least once, but that was not it. It was the vaguest memory of something momentous; something horrible. His head was pounding as he drew forth the image of himself in the Feathers drinking with that dirty bitch, Nesta, and some Irish boys; he remembered that the Feathers was a dump, but it had gin in, so you had to go. No bitter. Just gin. He remembered that it had cost an arm and a leg to get drunk enough not to care how much it was costing you. He
remembered
that it was rough stuff, too; like downing a glass of paraffin. And then he remembered (or thought he did) leaving the Feathers and going into another pub. After that, nothing more apart from another blank and a few reminiscences in which the world appeared to be swimming all around him. Somehow he must have found his way back to his lodgings, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember how. Perhaps Nesta had helped him home, but he could not be sure of that. Fact was, he could not be sure of anything.

He wondered how long he had been under this time. It might have been for days for all he knew. Since the crack on the head he had suffered the blanks when he’d had too much to drink. It went with his condition: the missing part. The first few times it happened it had scared him shitless, so much so he had even thought about giving up the booze altogether; but over time he had grown accustomed to it for the most part, and usually his first thought on coming to was of a drink and a smoke. He was thinking of that now. He wondered what time it was. He lifted his head from the pillow. It hurt like fuck. He had fallen asleep, or been put to bed, in his clothes. When he moved the stink of drink and fags coming off him made him retch. The fawn-coloured slacks were covered in stains; the nylon shirt was stuck to him in places. His shoes, lying on the floor at the foot of the bed where he must have kicked them off, looked like they’d been marched through a ploughed field. With a start he remembered the green tweed swingback jacket: he was relieved to see it on the other side of the room, draped across the back of a chair. It was only later that he remembered the mackintosh, gone for good. Someone most likely pinched it from one of the pubs. That’s what happened when you let yourself get into a state. When he went to check the time he was dismayed to see that his watch was also missing.

His head was splitting in two. His eyes were bleary and hard to focus. He sat on the edge of the bed and tried to accustom himself to solid ground, walls, ceiling. It took a few minutes before he felt confident enough to stand up and grope his way across the room to the table where his fags were. He went to shake one out of the box but they were all gone, so there was nothing for it but to go outside and buy some more. The thought made him want to go back to bed, but his need for nicotine proved stronger than any other impulse and so it was that a few minutes later he found himself slouching along a morning street – which morning he had no idea – dazzled by sunlight.

The tobacconist looked at him with ill-concealed distaste.

“You alright, Dennis?” he asked. “Only you don’t half look rough.”

“What time is it?”

“Half past eight. Up early? Or ain’t you been to bed yet?”

“What day is it?”

“Cor blimey – you’re in a right old two and eight, ain’t yer? It’s Tuesday, innit.”

Tuesday. Christ, he had lost two whole days. No wonder he was feeling so queer, mouth like the underside of a doormat.

“Usual is it?” He was a good customer. Under the counter. The tobacconist brought out a packet of twenty cigs. “Only Kensitas this time,” he was saying. “That’ll be two and fourpence.”

He reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out the empty lining. The same on the other side. He patted his shirt, but he knew that he wouldn’t find anything there. The thought came to him slowly, swirling into his consciousness. Some bastard must have pinched his money along with the mackintosh and his watch. He had a vague idea who, an’ all. The filthy whore… He’d see to her alright. Then he had another blank, talking himself out of it, refusing to drop. “Can I have a glass of water, mister?”

The tobacconist called up the stairs at the back of the shop.

“Edie! Edie! Bring Dennis a glass of water. Quick. He’s come over all queer.”

The next thing he remembered was the budgie tweeting in its cage, then the back of the armchair holding up his head which was still splitting, and finally, as he was gradually restored to reality, the comfortable outline of the tobacconist’s wife against the net-curtained window. She was looking down at him with a concerned expression.

“Would you like a cup of tea, dear?” she was asking. “Fancy letting yourself get into a state like that. And you always so nicely turned out.”