‘Mr Hall?’
‘It’s all right Libby, love…’
The woman gave her pearls another tug and went the way he’d come.
‘What is it?’ hissed Hall.
‘About Janice Ryan?’
‘Who?’
‘Fuck off, Eric,’ I said, leaning into the doorway. ‘Don’t be a silly cunt.’
He blinked, swallowed, and said, ‘You know who I am, who you’re talking to?’
‘A dirty copper named Eric Hall, yeah.’
He stood there, in the doorway to his nice house with its back to the Denholme Golf Course, his eyes full of tears.
‘Let’s go for a drive, Eric,’ I suggested.
We pulled up in the empty car park of the George.
I turned off the engine.
We sat in silence and stared at the hedge and the fields beyond.
After a while I said, ‘Have a look in that bag at your feet.’
He opened his fat little legs and bent down into the bag.
He pulled out a magazine.
‘Page 7,’ I said.
He stared down at the dark-haired girl with her legs spread, her mouth open, her eyes closed, a prick to her gob and spunk on her face.
‘That yours?’ I asked him.
But he just sat there, shaking his head from side to side, until he said, ‘How much?’
‘Five.’
‘Hundred?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Five fucking thousand? I haven’t got it.’
‘You’ll get it,’ I said and started the car.
The office was dead.
I knocked on Hadden’s door and went in.
He was sat behind his desk, his back to Leeds and the night.
I sat down.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘They’ve let Fraser go.’
‘You seen him?’
‘Yep,’ I smiled.
Hadden smiled back, an eyebrow arched. ‘And?’
‘He’s been suspended. Reckons Rudkin and some bloke from Bradford Vice are up to their ears in it.’
‘What do you think?’
‘Well, I went out to have a look and Rudkin’s up to his ears in something, but I’m fucked if I know what.’
Bill Hadden didn’t look very impressed.
‘Saw Tom,’ I said.
Hadden smiled. ‘He apologise, did he?’
‘Sheep-faced, he was.’
‘And rightly-bloody-so.’
‘Said they still reckon the letter’s genuine.’
Hadden said nothing.
‘But,’ I went on. ‘He didn’t have anything on this Bradford copper.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Hall. Eric Hall?’
Hadden shook his head.
I asked, ‘You got anything new?’
‘No,’ he said, still shaking his head.
I stood up. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then.’
‘Right,’ he said.
At the door, I turned back. ‘There was one other thing.’
‘Yeah?’ he said, not looking up.
‘You know the one in Preston?’
He looked up. ‘What?’
‘The prostitute they say was a Ripper job?’
Hadden was nodding.
‘Fraser said she was a witness in the Paula Garland murder,’
‘What?’
And I left him with his mouth open, eyes wide.
He was sitting in the dim lobby in a high-backed chair, his eyes on his hat, his hat upon his knee.
‘Jack,’ he said, not looking up.
‘I dream of rivers of blood, women’s blood. When I fuck, I see blood. When I come, death.’
Martin Laws leant forward.
He parted his thin grey hair between his fingers and the hole leapt from the shadows.
‘There has to be another way,’ I said, tears in the dark.
He looked up and said: ‘Jack, if the Bible teaches us nothing else, it teaches us that this is the way things are, the way things have always been, and will always be until the end.’
‘The end?’
‘Noah was insane until the rain.’
‘And there’s no other way?’
‘Must it be it must.’
Radio Leeds
Wednesday 15th June 1977
Chapter 20
And Piggott drops me outside St James and is saying how if there’s anything I need or there’s anything more he can do, I should just give him a call, but I’m out of the car, door open, and up the stairs, out of breath, pulling myself up on the banisters, skidding across their polished floors, into the ward and shouting at that one and the other one, the nurses coming running, me pulling back the curtains on an empty bed, one saying how she’s so sorry and it was quite sudden in the end, quite sudden after all that time and how it’s always so difficult to predict but at least my wife was with him and in the end he’d closed his eyes like he just stopped and how upset she’d been but, in cases like this, it’s for the best and the pain’s gone and it wasn’t that drawn out in the end, and I’m just standing there at the bottom of his empty bed, staring at the empty bedside table, doors open, wondering where all the barley water’s gone and then I see one of Bobby’s cars, the little Matchbox police car Rudkin got him, and I pick it up and stand there just staring at the little car in the empty corner of the ward, the other nurse telling me how peaceful he looked and how much better off he is being dead and not alive and in pain
