‘Turn to the wall.’
She turned and I checked the window. It was nailed shut. If she kicked it in she’d have a twenty-five-foot drop in the dark onto the garbage bins, the cans and the broken bottles. I wouldn’t have risked it.
‘Take off your shoes, easy.’
She bent her legs up, unzipped the boots and kicked them off onto the floor. I slung them into the passage, smashed the light bulb with the gun barrel and went through the door in three strides. I pinned the door closed with my shoulder and ran around the key ring until I found the one that locked it. It seemed unlikely that she’d have a spare key, but I waited outside for a while to be sure. I heard the bed creak and scratching noises as she felt her way around and that was all.
Going through that house was one of the most depressing things I’ve ever done. I did it methodically, starting at the top back and working through to bottom front. There were thirteen single rooms and five flatettes with twenty-three occupants. Without exception they were middle-aged or older, and defeated. The ones doubling up in the flatettes were the worst off. A few of them got abusive when I barged in, youngish, healthy and carrying a gun. One old man made a pathetic attempt to take me and I had to gentle him back into a chair.
The squalor of the rooms was profound. They smelled, were dirt-encrusted and there were signs of the depredations of vermin everywhere. The people were living on bread, pet food and cheap wine. There were three toilets in the building, cracked, creaking affairs that flushed about a pint of water. I looked at one chamber pot in one room. Only one.
Most of the occupants wore pyjamas or nightgowns and dressing-gowns. I had to look closely at some of the sunken-in, hopeless faces to determine their sex. They were so far gone it didn’t matter, but some of those who looked like women wore pyjamas and some of those who looked like men wore night- gowns, pathetic nylon affairs with filthy, phony lace.
I forced myself to do the whole round. In one single room a woman tottered towards me, holding out a photograph. I took the picture, which was of a young woman wearing a bathing suit and high heels in a cheesecake pose.
‘Is this you?’ I said.
She cackled at me. She was skeletally thin and she scratched at her groin with fleshless, bony hands. When she stopped scratching there, she moved the hand up to her head. I stepped back.
‘What’s your name?’
Scratch, scratch. Hair and flakes of skin fell onto her shoulders. ‘I don’t know,’ she said hoarsely. ‘What’s yours, dear?’
There were no radios in the rooms, a few magazines, no books. I only glanced into a few drawers and cupboards but there were no pens or pencils. Spoons, bowls and cups were made of plastic.
The smell was bad everywhere, but in one room I nearly vomited from the stench. The floor was a sea of cockroaches and a man was sitting on the bed watching them with a rapt, engrossed smile on his face.
I locked all the occupants in as they were, because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. They mumbled at me and each other in slow, toneless voices that were curiously alike. They dribbled and spat. None of them was John Singer.
16
The only habitable part of the place was the flatette in front where the turnkey lived. The four rooms were only moderately clean but their toilet and bathroom, small kitchen and functioning furniture put them in the luxury department. There was food for humans in the cupboards and refrigerator and a decent flagon of red wine on the kitchen table. I rinsed a glass, filled it with wine, drank it down and poured again. I thought very seriously about the packet of cigarettes on the table beside the flagon, but decided on more wine instead. I drank more of it than I wanted to and was feeling the effect pretty soon. I was drinking to get the stink and taste of those foul rooms out of my head.
Then I searched the flatette and I didn’t care what got disturbed or broken. I felt bad when I started-bad from the beating I’d taken the day before and because of the prisoners’ empty eyes and from the wine-and I felt worse as I worked. The woman I’d locked up in room twelve was one Mary Mahoud, thirty four, a naturalised Australian. Ms Mahoud had been doing a highly illegal stunt, one that would earn her about twenty years’ worth of imprisonment. The records were thorough and well-kept: the occupants of number ten Monk Lane were all recipients of pensions of one sort or another. They were registered at a few different addresses and their cheques arrived and were cashed regularly, but not by them. She had something like two thousand bucks coming in weekly. From what I’d seen, the overheads were low.
I found the explanation for the sameness of the prisoners’ apathetic and listless behaviour-a cupboard full of Valium, Mogadon and other preparations. There was also a big stock of laxatives, sleeping pills and painkillers. A bottom drawer in a dresser was locked and I smashed it open. There was a different set of records inside-envelopes with the surnames printed in bold, black capitals and a date. I flicked through a few: ‘Jane Harman Ogilvie 23.6.79’; ‘Elizabeth Hodges 1.12.80’ There were about a dozen of them, and it wasn’t hard to guess what they were-the dead file. The name ‘Singer’ didn’t appear.
I didn’t fancy the next part and when I went out into the lobby Mary Mahoud gave me a chance to put it off. She was drumming on the door of number twelve and sobbing to be let out. The door was holding strong.
‘Shut up!’ I gave the door a thump with the gun.
‘Out, out, out!’ She chanted the word like a street demonstrator. Then she started to scream it and a racket started behind a door further down the passage. I went down and rapped on it.
‘Be quiet. You want to get out of this, don’t you?’
No reply.
‘I’ve got this Mahoud bitch locked up. You’ll be out tonight. Just be patient.’
The voice from behind the door was slow and querulous. I couldn’t recall much about its owner; all the occupants had blended in my mind into one geriatric mass. ‘Locked up? Mary?’
‘Right. It’s over. She’s going to gaol.’
A low, ragged chuckle began, growing into a piercing, near-hysterical laugh. Mahoud must have heard it because she went quiet for a minute and then started sobbing again and hitting the door. I went back and spoke harshly with my mouth close to the wood.
‘You heard that, didn’t you? If you don’t shut up, I’ll come in there and knock you out, then I’ll put you in a room with nine or ten of them and watch what happens. How’d you like that?’
‘No, no. Out. Anything… there’s money.’
‘Forget it and keep quiet.’
There was an interesting assortment of gear in one of Mahoud’s drawers-a studded belt, a pair of handcuffs, a heavy sheath knife and a key on a ring. I took the key and went to the back of the building. The key opened the inner chamber to the cellar. It was the cleanest room I’d found so far. The concrete was swept and the whitewashed walls gleamed under the hard fluorescent light. In one corner was an instrument that reminded me of my mother’s washing copper. It was a large metal tub, with a close-fitting lid. It was gas heated and mounted under a tap. Beside it was a shelf carrying a five-kilo bag of lime and a bigger bag of cement. I lifted the lid. The tub was scummy and smelt bad. There was also a scummy, foul-smelling bucket behind it I went back to the outer chamber and used my torch to look in the corners where the light didn’t shine. There was a set of gardening tools leaning higgledy-piggledy against the wall and a heavy straight digging bar lay on the floor in front of them.
The claret I’d drunk wasn’t giving me courage, but it was stimulating my thinking. The name ‘Singer’ didn’t appear on the house records, but I remembered what Ann had said about the changeability of names on this social level and the dodges used to beat the social security computer. The wine was also stimulating my imagination: under the severe light I could see the tub bubbling and the lime-laced water breaking down tissue. Bones broke and pulverised easily, most of them. The gardening tools were clean and the lush growth in the backyard was an obscenity.