Gordon Ferris - Truth Dare kill

Enough. I stood up, pulled my hat and coat off the rack behind the door and made ready to go out into the night. I kicked the new briquette back with my toe so that it would die and I could use it to start the fire in the morning. A last impulse pulled me to the window. I eased the bottom pane up and looked out into the street. I was just in time. Kate Graveney was being handed in to the back seat of a big Riley by a bloke with a flat cap. The car was standing with its engine running, as though petrol rationing only applied to the hoi polloi.

As she bent to enter she turned her head up and looked up at my window, as though expecting to see me. I didn’t withdraw. We should have waved but we didn’t know each other that well. She gave no sign, but got into the car, and I watched it drive off down the street. Its exhaust left a trail of grey smoke on the dank air. I thought I saw her face looking back at me from the rear window, and another head wearing a hat, but I couldn’t be sure.

I closed the window and dug back into my desk drawer to check it hadn’t been an illusion. Sometimes things get blurred. I see things that turn out to be flotsam from my memories. I folded the four very real, very crisp notes and tucked them into my breast pocket. As I was closing the drawer I saw the front page I’d torn from this morning’s Daily Sketch. The rest I’d already quartered and hung in the shared lavatory on the floor below. I made sure I got a paper every day; it was one of the ways I could tell if I’d had a blackout.

The headlines were howling about the third body found in a flat in Soho. A prostitute again. But not a single clue, other than a man sighted going into the building around the time of the murder. Hardly noteworthy, given her occupation.

No fingerprints that matched any found at the other sites, and lord knew how many prints they found.

The body was naked and brutalised. Words like gruesome and sadistic were bandied about. But the details were omitted from this family newspaper: just vague references to a knife wound to the lower body and the head. My detective sergeant’s imagination translated this as genital mutilation and a killing stab through the base of the skull up into the brain. I hoped she got the skull thrust first.

I stuffed the page back in my drawer. I’d file it later. I’ve kept them all from the very first that merited only half a column on an inside page four months ago. Maybe it was getting to know Mama Mary and her girls. Maybe it was the way they’d died. Maybe it was the echo of a recurring dream. But these killings revolted and intrigued me at the same time.

I’d read and re-read the reports. I bought other papers to see if they said anything more, and kept picturing the dead women, naked and bloody, as though I’d been an eye witness. And I couldn’t recall if my dreadful dreams began before or after the first killing. Doc Thompson told me that it was my way of coping with the violence I’d seen in the camp. Violence without reason. Violence for pleasure. Trying to understand how a so-called civilised world could co-exist with such widespread perversion and sadism.

That’s what worried me. I used to think that most of us would rather cut off our right arm than beat a child to death with a rifle butt. That only a handful of warped bastards would set to with a will and enjoy the exercise.

But what if the devil were in all of us? Christ knows they’re still counting the corpses in the thousands of camps across Europe. They’re talking of millions, but I can’t believe that. Who would kill a million people just because they had bigger noses? And it wasn’t just the poor bloody Jews that copped it – as I knew to my personal cost. Every phobia catered for: gypsies, homosexuals, communists, book readers, hunchbacks, noisy neighbours…

Nor could you point the finger at the Germans and say it’s something in their blood. We know that Poles and French and Italians – half the Continent – sent women and kids to the camps knowing what would happen. And then there are the Russians. Just don’t start me on the Russians. I even feel sorry for those bloody Berliners.

If our allies could do that, why couldn’t we? Why couldn’t I? Three dead prostitutes in London hardly figured in the scale of horror over there. But it showed that the sickness was here among us too.

Outside, the crowds were getting excited. They were heading to Westminster and Waterloo, and then on to Trafalgar and Piccadilly. I went the other way. I rammed my hat tighter on my head and pulled the coat collar up, as much against the mounting revelry as against the night air. It was just gone eleven by the clock on the tower in Camberwell Green. The cheerful crowds began to thin. I pressed on up Denmark Hill enjoying the gradient and the need to put some effort into my stride.

I didn’t know what I wanted; company or to be alone, a drink or just a walk. A bit of me – to be frank, a baser bit of me – would have liked to be meeting up with Sandra tonight and cosying up with her in front of a warm fire with a full bottle. But three months back, with my face as healed as it was going to get, I called at the King Billy, and Sandra told me to get lost. More precisely, she got Big Alec, the guv’nor, to tell me.

She was standing behind the bar as though a year hadn’t happened, her hair piled up the way I loved. She saw me come in and her face went pink. Then she gave me a look that made me want to check the date of my last anti-tetanus jab. I know I’m not as pretty as I used to be, but a monster?

She walked straight over to Alec and spoke to him, quickly and quietly. Alec raised his brooding eyes and found me. He didn’t hesitate; he lifted the bar flap and came over, full of intent. He was an old pug, with hams for hands and plasticine for a nose.

“Piss off, Red. You’ve done enough damage round here.”

“I just wanted a pint, Alec. What’s the problem? Don’t returning heroes get a beer?”

“Red, you’re no fucking hero for Sandra. She don’t want to know. So, save you, me, and all of us, some trouble and sling your ’ook.”

I was aware of how quiet it had got. Sandra was standing as far away as she could from me, watching with hard eyes and sucking nervously on a fag. It had been the same eyes that had caused the barney the last time, over a year and a half ago. We’d been going out for a couple of months. I’d got digs round the corner in Peckham while I was getting trained up by the SOE. Sandra was fun, lively, beautiful and a champion cock-teaser. I never knew where I was with her; she could be dragging me into bed one night and sending me packing the next.

I guess I’m slow. It took me five weeks to realise I was one of a string. I don’t like that; don’t like being taken for a ride; don’t like sharing. I told her so and she promised to be faithful. But I didn’t trust her. And I was right; the night she should have been out with her mates – one of them was supposed to be getting married – I found her with her tongue down the throat of a right wee spiv round the back of the Streatham Locarno. He deserved the pasting I gave him, and she came back to me; she liked men fighting over her, I suppose. She was less happy when I gave her a clip, and from then on Sandra and I were fireworks. So I suppose Alec was right to get me out of his pub before we started some new slanging match.

“Ok, Alec. Point taken. I suppose I’m not as gorgeous as I was.”

His eyes softened, as did his voice. “S’nothing to do with your fizzog, Red.

You’re still prettier than me. She’s not bleedin’ worth it. She’s a tart with big tits. Which is what my clientele pays for. Forget her.”

I looked round at his clientele, over to Sandra, and nodded to Alec. I turned and walked out. I tried to put Sandra out of my head, but couldn’t help wondering if I should have just done a Nelson and ignored what she was up to; enjoyed what she gave me. For when she gave, it was memorable. Jealousy is my curse.