The Owl.
There were a lot of other faces about, that rat-faced journalist Whitehead from the Post for one.
They didn’t know me then, but they would.
Douglas was sedated and Craven ought to have been -
Lying there, head back, calling out from the depths, eyes twinkling up from those same depths, screaming:
‘Kill the cunt! Kill ‘em all!’
But that was as close as we ever got -
Jobson wouldn’t let us near him: ‘Man’s in no state. Took a butt to the head.’
And for all the promises we’d got coming, all the cups of tea up the Wood Street Nick, we never did get a good go at him.
Over the Moors, snow across their cold, lost bones -
Clarkie turned to me and said: ‘It stinks. Fuck knows why, but it does.’
And I stared out at the lanes of lorries, the black poles and the telephone wires, thinking -
Murder and lies, lies and murder -
War:
My War -
‘Bloody Yorkshire,’ hissed Clarkie. Over the Moors -
Cold, lost bones:
It stank then and it stinks now, that same old smell -
Bloody Yorkshire.
The house, my affluent detached house and two-car garage is quiet, dark, one light on in an upstairs room, the curtains open.
I push open the bedroom door and there she is, in front of the mirror in her dressing gown, eyes red.
‘You OK?’
‘You startled me.’
‘Sorry. You been crying, love?’
‘No,’ she smiles. ‘Just soap.’
I walk over to her and kiss the top of her hair.
‘Didn’t expect you so soon,’ she says.
We’re looking at each other framed in the mirror, something missing.
‘I thought I’d put the tree up.’
‘We’ve left it a bit late, haven’t we? All the stuff’s up in the attic.’
‘I’ll get the steps from the garage. Have it up in no time.’
‘You’ll get filthy.’
‘Got time, don’t worry.’
‘Up to you.’
‘Got to make the effort.’
She’s nodding, staring back into the mirror, back into her own eyes -
‘Those lights are so old,’ she says.
The Christmas Ball, the Midland Hotel -
Saturday 13 December 1980.
Through the black city streets, the broken lights and the Christmas ones, down Palatine, Wilmslow, and the Oxford Roads, the official black car and driver taking us in towards the red and the gold, the money and the honey, the home of the loot, holding hands in our rented clothes on the back seat of a car that is not our own, through dominions of disease and depopulation, the black streets that would have you dead within the hour, taking us in towards a thousand hale and hearty Manchester folk, drunk in the seclusion of the Midland Hotel, the castle of loot, an abbey to the anointed and self-appointed City Fathers, with their city mothers, wives and daughters, their secret lovers, whores and sons.
Without no one -
Through the black city streets to the place where the red carpet meets the street at the doors to the Midland, these gates of iron in these strong and lofty walls with no hint of ingress or egress, where all that is outside can never be in and to hell with it, damn it, for here inside are the bright lights, the purples and the gold, the servants and the servings, the musicians and the music, the dancers and the dance, the Masked Christmas Ball.
Without nothing -
Through the beauty and the beautiful, the security and the secure, the fat and the fat, we are led to our seats, Joan’s arm tightening inside my own, our masks in place, through the high double doors into the dim velvet sea and the palatial splendour of the Dining Room, her Gothic windows of stained glass, the thrown shadows of her lamps and candles, her ornaments and tapestries ceiling to floor, all heavy with the weight of wealth, the stains of class and brass and the deep blood colour of Christmas reds, of Herod and his kids.
Within dreams -
‘Something wicked this way comes,’ smiles Clement Smith, the Chief Constable raising his mask with a wink as our wives fall into the comfort of compliments.
I sit down next to him, shaking hands with an MP, a councillor, a millionaire and all their present wives, local Masons and Rotarians the table of them -
‘How goes the war?’ laughs Clive Birkenshaw, the councillor drunk on a punch as crimson as his face.
‘The hunt more like,’ says Donald Lees of the Greater Manchester Police Authority.
‘What?’ I say.
‘You’ve been over in Yorkshire after their Ripper?’
I nod, the laughter and the music too much.
‘Most apt,’ Lees carries on, leaning across the corpse of his wife. ‘Hunter in Ripper Hunt, said the Manchester Evening News.’
‘Apt,’ comes the echo around the tablecloth.
‘Any luck?’
I look down at my hand, shaking my head, and I bring the whiskey up to my lips and let it fall down my throat.
Joan and Clement Smith have changed seats so the wives can chat.
I take another mouthful.
Clement Smith orders more.
I’m exhausted -
The cigars already out, the dance-floor filling, time flying -
And then suddenly across the room I think I see Ronald Angus and Peter Noble on another table by the door but, when I look again, it isn’t -
Can’t have been and Leeds is just a dream -
A terrible dream -
Like the Ripper, their Ripper.
I sit back in my chair, letting the Velvet Sea wash over me, playing her tricks with the horizon; the wail of violins, the hoarse voice of Clement Smith deep in debate, his wife and mine making their way through the waves, off to powder their noses.
Then I feel a hand on mine -
I look down at a man crouched beside my chair: ‘Pardon?’
‘I said we have a mutual friend.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘Helen,’ he grins, a short thin man with brown stained teeth.
‘Helen who?’
But he just winks: ‘From her Vice days. Tell her I said hello.’
‘What?’
But he’s wading away, back into the velvet sea, waving, back into her dance.
I interrupt Clement Smith: ‘Who was that?’
‘Who?’
‘That man, the one who was just at the table? Talking to me?’
Smith’s laughing: ‘Wearing his mask was he?’
‘No, but I can’t place him.’
He sits up slightly in his seat: ‘I didn’t see him. Sorry. Where is he?’
‘Doesn’t matter, just wondered who he was.’ I pick up a glass and drink some more, lost -
‘Peter?’
I look up from the drink: ‘Richard. Merry Christmas.’
‘If only,’ he says.
The man is tall and gaunt, pale as a ghost, the black mask in his hand and a blood-red shirt only accentuating his grim pallor, mumbling.
‘What?’
He asks: ‘We talk?’
I stand up, nodding, leaving my cigar in the ashtray, and follow Richard Dawson through the tables and out into the Lobby -
Richard Dawson, businessman, Chairman of one of the local Conservative Parties, a friend.
He’s shaking, sweating.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
He says: ‘Do you know Bob Douglas?’
Ghosts -
Again the ghosts of Christmases past:
Again the Strafford Shootings -
Again the wounded coppers:
Sergeant Robert Craven and PC Bob Douglas.
I nod: ‘Used to. Why?’
‘Well, I’ve been using him as a security advisor. Anyway, late last night he calls to tell me that he’s heard that I’m the subject of a bloody police investigation; then at lunchtime today my bank in Didsbury calls and says that a couple of detectives have taken away all their financial records pertaining to my accounts with them.’