Goodnight, John-boy: Chapter 43
He knew from his days as an errand boy that many bodies are washed straight out to sea, and those that are recovered are often unrecognisable, so he was confident that he would get away with it.
Welcome to Book Two of my dark comedy thriller series, Read Em And Weep.
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If you’re new to the Read Em And Weep series, start with Book One: Serial Killer.
As a storm raged outside his turret, Dave looked out into the darkness and reflected on his forthcoming freelance existence. In a week’s time, Fleetpit House would close its doors forever and he’d have to find new accommodation.
So he was moving in with his sister Annie for a while, which really didn’t please her. The reason he was so hard up, despite living rent-free, was because he had just had his birthday and he’d celebrated by buying a vintage silver fox gilet for his mother. It was hanging up now, waiting for the next time she visited.
It certainly did look as though the Fabulous Keen business was over. He had meant it when he promised Keen and the Inspector that he would stay out of their way in future.
The Inspector had described graphically what would happen if he didn’t.
He could carry on writing Caning Commando for The Spanker until Pete Sullivan had destroyed the comic, which was probably after he’d destroyed Aaagh!
One thing at a time.
And he could still put in his homicidal suggestions to readers, which a man who didn’t know the difference between a Death Cap and a Field Mushroom would never notice. Dave was addicted to his sedition now; he couldn’t let it go.
Perhaps he was always destined for a life of crime, he speculated.
He found his mind drifting back to that one time he had ended up in a police cell.
He had been taken as a boy to the police station by his mother for his youthful criminal activities. He had been going door-to-door, selling cloakroom tickets as fake raffle tickets to raise money for Doctor Barnado’s. The first prize, Dave told his customers, was a parrot in a cage.
He made nearly five pounds before he was caught. A young Dixon of Dock Green-style policeman gave him a fourpenny one, and then let him stew in a cell for a couple of hours. There was no going through the courts and Social Services reports: it was instant justice in the 1950s. He was then returned to his mother, who came to collect him from the station.
‘It’s all right, Mrs Maudling. He’ll be a good boy now. We’ll beat the badness out of him and beat the goodness in. It’s a long process, so you might need to bring him back a number of times. School holidays would be best.’
Mr Cooper was standing at the counter and watched, gloating, enjoying Dave’s snivelling. He was gently warned by the same cop: ‘So keep it indoors in future, Stan. If you hit the missus in the street again, we can’t really turn a blind eye.’
‘Neither can she,’ grinned Mr Cooper.
The adult Dave reflected on the encounter. The young cop believed in the ubiquitous ‘a good clip round the ear’ method of dealing with delinquent kids, but Dave had been born with the ‘fuck you’ gene.
He was alienated from his clergy, his school and the police. He was as Alien as any of Leni’s ‘Boys’.
He heard footsteps coming up the stairs and wondered if it was the phone killer. He had a foot-long spanner ready for him.
‘So how are you, Dave?’ grinned Mr Cooper. The adult Dave did a double take. His Nemesis was standing in front of him. Swaying from side to side, and – with the fumes emanating from him – clearly drunk.
‘What the hell do you want?’ snapped Dave.
‘Now that’s no way to talk your old man. I thought I’d come and see you. You wanted more information about the nig-nog.’
‘No. I know Ernie would never harm my mother. Unlike you.’
‘I keep telling you, Dave. I’m not the one who topped her.’
‘Oh, no? What happened to your wife then? I liked her. She tried to protect me from you.’
Cooper laughed a dirty, Sid James laugh. ‘I remember now. Silly cow.’
‘You practically admitted you killed her and buried her on your allotment. Is that what you did with my mum? Murdered her and buried her on the allotment?’
‘I should have done. But I didn’t. Now do you want this information or not?’
‘No. It’s worthless.’
‘But I need money, Davey,’ Cooper whined. ‘They’re making me redundant. When Fleetpit moves over the water, I’m gonna be out of a job.’
‘My heart bleeds for you.’
‘There must be something you want to know.’
‘Yes. As a matter of fact, there is. Why would my mother have ever got involved with someone like you? It doesn’t make any sense. What did you do? Drug her?’
His father grinned and gave that dirty Sid James laugh again.
‘You didn’t rape her, did you?’ asked Dave, suddenly alarmed. ‘’Cos if you did…’ He started to get out of his chair, ready to take a swing at Cooper.
‘Relax, Davey. Relax. Nah. That’s far too much effort. All that biting and scratching and struggling. No. I couldn’t be doing with that anymore.’ He shook his head and grimaced. ‘I didn’t need to. It was a doddle. I’ll tell you if you really want to know.’
‘Of course I want to know. I need to know how I ended up with someone like you as my dad.’
‘It’s gonna cost you, son.’
‘How much?’
‘A tenner.’
Dave handed it over. He had to know. How his beautiful, stylish mother – who had the pick of men at The Eight Veils, men with money, culture and status, like Peter Maudling – could have sunk so low as to form a relationship with Mr Cooper.
‘Well, she was lonely when she came back from nig-nog land. Missing Ernie. And hubby had the hump with her. He was like a fucking camel. So I’d take her dancing, she loved that. The movies. Music. Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington. And I finally won her heart with poetry.’
Dave couldn’t believe it. He had imagined any number of seduction scenarios but not that. The rain lashed menacingly against the windowpanes. ‘You and … poetry?’
‘Part of my technique, see? Find out what they want and give it to them. The perfect way to get them to drop their drawers. She told me how Ernie was happy-go-lucky, lighthearted, and read her poetry, so I just became Ernie.’
‘You read her poetry?’
‘I did better than that. I wrote her love poems, specially for her.’
‘And she liked your “poems”?’
‘Lapped them up.’
‘What were they? Dirty limericks?’
‘She couldn’t get enough of them. I could do anything with her after I read her one. And I mean anything.’ He looked meaningfully at Dave. ‘Including wanting to have our love child.’
Dave stood up, repelled by this new level of loathsomeness. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘I’m whoever they want me to be.’
Dave could see it now. Cooper was able to soak up other people’s personalities like a sponge. So he could be the perfect mirror to women’s fantasies, because he had no character, no dreams, no personality of his own. There was no one really there. He modelled himself on the latest movie star or singer; anyone who had the charisma, the charm, the vitality he lacked.
He had modelled himself on Ernie Gambo. Because he was just a husk. A nobody. When he wasn’t pretending to be someone else, his lack of identity created a raging emptiness inside him that he filled with meanness and rage and spite and violence.
‘You don’t know who you are, do you?’
For one moment, a sadness; a rare moment of vulnerable self-realisation, crossed Cooper’s face as he acknowledged the terrible truth.
He quickly recovered, his face creasing once again into its habitual scowl. ‘I’m your fucking father and don’t you forget it.’
‘So how could someone like you write love poems?’ asked Dave. ‘A nobody.’
‘Copied them out of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Verse,’ Cooper grinned, then recited:
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
Why not I with thine?
‘And we did a lot of … mingling, Dave,’ leered Cooper, walking slowly towards him.
‘Shut up!’ said Dave, backing away from the awfulness of the truth. ‘I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know!’
But Cooper continued his triumphant advance:
And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?
‘She gimme a gam after that one, Davey boy. I can still remember how good it felt.’
‘I said shut up. Shut up! Shut up! I’m warning you!’
It was all a game to Cooper, just like the endless games he played on Dave when he came into the newsagents every Saturday for his Fourpenny One.
He had finally found a way to torment Dave again.
But a smooth and steadfast mind,
Gentle thoughts, and calm desires,
Hearts with equal love combined,
Kindle never-dying fires :-
Where these are not, I despise
Lovely cheeks or lips or eyes.
‘Now that got her really hot, so she …’
‘Enough!’ Dave smashed him in the face. The storeman recoiled, bashed his head against the wall, slid down it and slumped to the ground.
Dave stood over him. ‘Get up! Come on! Get up, you bastard!’ There was a trickle of blood from the side of his father’s mouth.
‘Come on! I said get up!’
Cooper flopped limply over to one side. Dave knelt down and felt his pulse. Casually at first, and then desperately. And then panic-stricken. There was nothing there. Nothing there! It couldn’t be.
He looked at Cooper’s blank, staring eyes.
It was.
The second one in a month. He was turning into a proper serial killer now. No murders by remote control anymore. He was the real thing. But no time to think about that now. Concentrate on the practicalities. Focus. What was he going to do with the body? Where was he going to hide it?
But he already knew the answer.
* * *
The lift slowly whirred and clanked and creaked its way down through the darkened, silent building to the basement. Pushing back the scissor gate, he dragged out Cooper’s corpse and slowly made his way past endless rows and rows of empty Dexion shelves and over a few remaining soggy magazines and pages of art silently growing mushrooms in the darkness. Everything else had been incinerated.
At night, the vast, now empty basement was creepier than ever, even when he turned the lights back on, especially with the distant sound of the storm howling and thundering outside.
Puffing and panting, he manhandled Cooper towards the sewer pipe. He could hear the River Fleet within, in full turgid flow, thanks to the storm. Once, Sir Christopher Wren had tried to turn the Fleet into an elegant Venetian canal. But his plan failed miserably when a tanning factory released its chemicals into the water, setting the river on fire. Now it had found its true destiny as a sewer.
Dave unlatched the hinged square cover, raised the hatch, and the grill below, and threw them back with a clang that echoed in the deadly silence. Inside the huge pipe there was a steady stream of fast moving but recognisable sewage, seething and roaring as it sought an escape, smelling as disgusting as it looked. He dragged Cooper’s body up onto the side of the pipe, feet first. Cooper was a dead weight, and he had to keep taking breaks, but he eventually managed to get his feet down into the opening.
With so much rain, the Fleet interceptor tunnels had come into their own. The usual system that carried the sewage to a treatment plant, couldn’t cope, so the Fleet shared the load. It would result in the Fleet sewage flowing into the Thames. It was the perfect answer.
Sweating in the damp air, Dave hauled and pulled and dragged the rest of Cooper upwards, and then his corpse slowly dropped down through the hatch. Dave just had to shove his shoulders through and he’d be gone forever, along with the rest of the filth below.
Jonathan Swift had described the Fleet during such a storm:
‘Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts and Blood, Drowned Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drenched in Mud, Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.’
And Mr Cooper.
Just one last push should do it and Cooper would be joining the flood. The stench was appalling and so was the thunderous sound of the furious river.
It was like the Fleet was a living creature, hating and resisting its humiliating incarceration in a pipe, desperately wanting to be free. It had once actually exploded, the sewage gasses ripping open the street above it, destroying houses and smashing boats into Blackfriars Bridge.
It didn’t die easy, and neither did Mr Cooper.
Incredibly, he had regained consciousness and swung a fist at Dave, trying to land one last fourpenny one on his son.
The memory of so many past punches, so many humiliations, seethed within Dave and gave him the strength to deliver the ultimate fourpenny one in retaliation: slamming his fist into Cooper’s twisted, snarling, vicious face.
Next moment, his father had dropped into the sewer, hit his head on the pipe wall with a resounding bong!, and was carried away in the raging brown torrent.
‘It’s all right,’ Dave laughed manically into the void. ‘It’s only Dirty Barry!’
If the blows didn’t kill him, then he would surely drown by the time the Fleet reached the Thames beneath Blackfriars Bridge.
It was fitting, Dave thought, that the ex-newsagent’s departure down the sewer should coincide with the closing of the Fleetpit itself.
He knew from his days as an errand boy on the docks that many bodies are washed straight out to sea, and those that are recovered are often unrecognisable, so he was confident that he would get away with it.
He’d sometimes had to ride his trade-bike down to the U-bend at the Isle of Dogs where the dead bodies tended to collect. A chatty policeman explained to the fascinated teenager that forty bodies are generally pulled out of the river every year. He pointed out the police trawler gathering up one in a body bag, to be towed to Wapping.
‘They’ve got to keep the bloated bodies in the water in case of possible infection, see?’
‘What happens when they get to Wapping?’
‘They’re photographed straight away ’cos the corpses blacken in the air.’
‘Who are they?’ asked young Dave.
‘Tramps. Deadbeats.’ The cop shrugged indifferently. ‘Nobodies.’
Goodnight, John-boy is the second book in the Read Em And Weep series and you can buy it digitally or as a paperback.