The Dwarves of Death

Interlude

So I thought about it. That is, I thought a lot about Chester, and about Paisley, and the strange encounter I had half-witnessed in the pub that afternoon. I thought about it over the next week, and I thought about it on that dreadful Saturday night, as I ran through the back streets of Islington, each step taking me further and further away from Paisley’s smashed and lifeless body.

I must have run for about ten minutes without stopping. Perhaps that doesn’t sound like very much, but for someone like me, who hasn’t taken any proper exercise for years — not since I was at school — believe me, it was quite an achievement. I tried to keep some sort of sense of direction at first, but soon I found myself in totally unfamiliar territory. Looking now at the A — Z, I think I must have started off by heading west, towards Camden, but then a series of leftish turns must have taken me in the King’s Cross direction. The first place I can remember stopping was a bus-shelter, and the first thing I can remember doing was forcing myself to think: forcing myself to look at the situation I was in and imagine how it would seem to an outsider.

I had been spotted at the scene of the crime. I had been seen by two policemen, emerging from the house where Paisley had been murdered. And instead of trying to explain myself, I had turned around and run, thereby immediately drawing suspicion on to myself. Well, perhaps when they caught up with me — which I was convinced they would — I could account for that, saying that I was in a state of shock and I didn’t stop to think about what I was doing or how it would look. One or two other circumstances were in my favour: at least there wasn’t a murder weapon with my fingerprints on it, for instance.

As for the killing itself, I was just about in a fit state to realize that there were two possible explanations. Either somebody, for some reason, had wanted to get rid of Paisley, or, more likely, they had mistaken him for someone else — the mysterious ‘landlord’ of the house where they all lived. Who was he, though? The only person who knew him, it seemed, was Chester himself, and he had been very unforthcoming about his identity. Deliberately unforthcoming, perhaps? Karla had told me that Chester had some strange friends. She had also pointed out to me that I didn’t really know him very well. Had I been a little too trusting with our friendly, resourceful, enigmatic manager? What sort of hold did he have over Paisley that could give rise to a scene like the one I had witnessed in the pub that Sunday afternoon? Maybe Chester himself was the owner of their house — maybe he was the one the telephone callers kept asking for, under a succession of different names. Or perhaps I was on completely the wrong track: was Paisley the real target of the attack, and if so, could it have been Chester himself who was behind it?

As I sat in the shelter I saw that there was a bus approaching, and suddenly I decided to get on to it. There was no way the police could have issued a description of me yet, so it wasn’t as if any of the passengers would recognize me. All the same, I paid my fare in cash, rather than showing the driver my travelcard with the passport photo on it. I jumped on without even looking at the front of the bus and without any idea of where it was going to take me. The important thing was that it took me away from here as soon as possible. I sat on the bottom deck, near the back, and willed the bus to move.

And then, of course, panting up to the bus-stop came the bane of every journey — the passenger who gets on at the last minute and doesn’t have the faintest idea where he wants to go. Usually a tourist who can’t speak much English and has decided to use the driver as a combination of policeman, street map, bus timetable and change machine. So the bus is stuck there for what seems like a million years while he names some street in Greenwich or Richmond where he wants to go, and the bus driver has to get out his A — Z and explain to him which stop to get off at and which bus he’ll have to catch next, and then the bloke tries to find his fare and he only has a twenty-pound note or ninety-five pence in Japanese yen and the driver has to fish the change out of his back trouser pocket and you could have travelled to Glasgow and back on an inter-city sleeper by the time the bus starts moving again.

When we finally got going, I began to relax very slightly. The experience of being on a bus had a comforting familiarity and normality to it, so that the horrible thing I had witnessed less than twenty minutes ago began to seem almost absurd. The world I was in — the world of half-empty London buses on a Saturday evening, carrying young, smartly dressed people off to parties and clubs and cinemas — didn’t seem to admit of anything as fantastic as the spectacle of two screeching dwarves bashing a man to death. It was stupid. It was crazy.

Stupid and crazy… and yet this was familiar, too. Dwarves and death. Why did it strike a chord — where had I come across these words recently? And then I remembered. It went back to a conversation we had had, the four of us, on the morning we recorded our demo tape.

Was this just coincidence, or had I actually stumbled upon a clue?