Tuesday's Gone

Three

Detective Constable Yvette Long arrived a few moments before Karlsson. She had got the phone call just fifteen minutes previously but already a small crowd was gathering in the street: children who ought to be at school, young mothers with babies in buggies, men who seemed in no hurry to get anywhere. It was bitingly cold but many of them were not wearing overcoats or gloves. They looked excited, bright-eyed with curiosity. Two police cars were parked in front of number three and a barrier had been put up. Just behind it, a thin stringy man with a ginger ponytail was pacing up and down, up and down, with his barrel-chested dog. Every so often it sat down and yawned, saliva drooling from its jaws. There was another man, enormously fat, ripples of flesh encased in his T-shirt, behind the barrier. He was standing quite still, mopping his shiny forehead, as if it was high summer, not icy February. Yvette parked and, as she opened the door, DC Chris Munster came out of the house, holding a handkerchief to his mouth.

‘Where’s the woman who found him?’

Munster took the handkerchief from his mouth and put it into his pocket. He made a visible effort to control the working of his face. ‘Sorry. It got to me for a bit. She’s there.’ He nodded towards a middle-aged African woman sitting on the pavement with her face in her hands. ‘She’s waiting to talk to us. She’s shocked. The other woman – the one who was with him – she’s in the car with Melanie. She keeps talking about tea. Forensics are on the way.’

‘Karlsson’s on his way too.’

‘Good.’ Munster lowered his voice. ‘How can they live like this?’

Yvette and Karlsson pulled on paper overshoes. He gave her a reassuring nod and, for a moment, put his hand on the small of her back, steadying her. She took a deep breath.

Later, Karlsson would try to separate all his impressions, put them in order, but now it was a jumble of sights and smells and a nausea that made him sweat. They walked through the rubbish, the dog shit, the smell, half sweet and so thick it caught in the back of the throat. He and Yvette made their way to the door that wasn’t blocked off. They stepped inside, into a different universe of order: it was like being in a library, where everything was meticulously catalogued and stored in its allotted space. Three pairs of ancient shoes, on top of each other; a shelf of round stones; another shelf of bird bones, some of which still had matted feathers stuck to them, a tub of cigarette butts lying side by side, another plastic container with what looked like hair balls. He had time to think, as he passed into the next room, that the woman who lived here must be crazy. And then, for a while, he stared at the thing on the sofa, the naked man sitting upright, in a halo of slow, fat flies.

He was quite slender, and although it was hard to tell, didn’t seem old. His hands were in his lap, as if in modesty, and in one of them was an iced bun; his head was propped up with a pillow so that his open sulphurous eyes stared straight at them and his lopsided, stiffened mouth leered. His skin was a mottled blue, like a cheese left out for too long. Karlsson thought of the acid-washed jeans his little daughter had made him buy for her. He pushed the thought away. He didn’t want to bring her into this setting, even in his mind. Leaning forward, he saw vertical marks striping the man’s torso. He must have been dead for some time, judging not just from the way his skin had darkened where the blood had puddled on the underside of his thighs and buttocks, but also from the smell that was making Yvette Long, standing behind Karlsson, breathe in shallow, hoarse gasps. There were two full cups of tea by his left foot, which was curled upwards at an unnatural angle, the toes splayed. He had a comb stuck into his light brown hair, and lipstick on his mouth.

‘Obviously he’s been here some time.’ Karlsson’s voice sounded calmer than he had expected. ‘It’s warm in the room. That hasn’t helped.’

Yvette made a noise that might have been agreement.

Karlsson forced himself to look more closely at the mottled, puffy flesh. He waved Yvette over. ‘Look,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘At his left hand.’

The tip of the middle finger was missing from above the knuckle.

‘It could be a deformity.’

‘It looks to me like it’s been cut off and the wound hasn’t healed properly,’ said Karlsson.

Yvette swallowed before she spoke. She absolutely wasn’t going to be sick. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to tell. It looks a bit mushy but it could be …’

‘General decomposition,’ said Karlsson.

‘Yes.’

‘Which is happening at an advanced rate because of the heat.’

‘Chris said the bar-fire was on when they arrived.’

‘The autopsy should tell us. They’ll need to get a move on.’

Karlsson looked at the cracked window and its rotting sill, the thin orange curtains. There were things that Michelle Doyce had collected and ordered: a cardboard box of balled-up, obviously soiled tissues; a drawer full of bottle-tops, colour-coded; a jam jar containing nail clippings, small yellowing crescents. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said. ‘Talk to her and the woman who found him. We can come back later, when he’s been taken away.’

As they left, the forensic team arrived, with their lights and cameras, face masks, chemicals and general air of professional competence. Karlsson felt relieved. They would take away the horror, turn the ghastly room boiling with flies into a well-lit laboratory where the objects would become data and be classified.

‘What a way to go,’ he said, as they went back outside.

‘Who the hell is he?’

‘That’s where we start.’

Karlsson left Yvette talking to Maggie Brennan and went to sit in the car with Michelle Doyce. All he knew about her was that she was fifty-one years old, that she had recently been discharged from hospital after a psychological evaluation that had come to no real conclusions about her mental health, and that she had been living in Howard Street for a month, with no complaints from neighbours. This was the first time Maggie Brennan had visited her: she was standing in for someone else, who wouldn’t have paid a visit because she had been on sick leave since last October.

‘Michelle Doyce?’

She looked at him with eyes that were very pale, almost like the eyes of a blind person, but didn’t reply.

‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Malcolm Karlsson.’ He waited. She blinked. ‘A police officer,’ he added.

‘Have you come a long way?’

‘No, I haven’t. But I need to ask you some questions.’

‘I have come a very long way. You may well ask.’

‘This is important.’

‘Yes. I know it.’

‘The man in your flat.’

‘I’ve been entertaining him.’

‘He’s dead, Michelle.’

‘I cleaned his teeth for him. Not many friends can say that about their guests. And he sang for me. Like the sounds of the river at night, when the dog has stopped barking and the shouting and crying dies down.’

‘Michelle, he’s dead. The man in your flat is dead. We need to find out how he died. Can you tell me his name?’

‘Name?’

‘Yes. Who is he? Was he?’

She looked puzzled. ‘Why do you need a name? You can ask him.’

‘This is a serious matter. Who is he?’

She stared at him: a strong, pale woman with uncanny eyes and large reddened hands that floated in vague gestures when she spoke.

‘Did he die in your flat, Michelle? Was it an accident?’

‘One of your teeth is chipped. I am quite fond of teeth, you know. I have all my old teeth under my pillow, just in case they come, and a few of other people’s, but that’s rare. You don’t find them so often.’

‘Can you understand what I’m asking you?’

‘Does he want to leave me?’

‘He’s dead.’ Karlsson wanted to shout it, to use the word like a stone that would shatter her incomprehension, but he kept his voice calm.

‘Everyone goes in the end. Though I work so hard.’

‘How did he die?’

She started to mumble words he couldn’t make out.

Chris Munster was making a preliminary assessment of the rest of the house. It repulsed him. It didn’t feel like a criminal investigation at all: it was about people who were hopeless, who had slipped through the cracks. This upstairs room was full of needles: hundreds, no, thousands of used needles covering the floor so at first he’d thought it was some kind of pattern. Dog shit here too, most of it old and hardened. Bloodstained rags. One thin mattress with nasty stains near the middle. Right now, he didn’t care who’d killed the man downstairs. He just wanted to empty everyone out of this house, torch it and get out, breathe some clean air, the colder the better. He felt dirty all over, outside and in. How could people live like this? That fat man with the red-veined eyes and the livid skin of the drunk, hardly able to speak, hardly able to balance his bulk on his small feet. Or the skinny dog-owning one, with his punctured arms and scabby face, who grinned and scratched himself and bobbed around: was this his room and were these his needles? Or maybe it was the dead man’s room. That was probably it. The dead man would turn out to be part of this household from Hell. Fucking landlord. They’d been pushed in here, the hopeless misfits, the ones society didn’t know how to deal with, had no money to treat and abandoned so that now the police had to clear up the mess. If the public knew, he thought, his feet in their heavy boots sliding among the syringes, if they knew how some people lived and how they died.