Free How the Dead Live (Factory 3) by Derek Raymond Page B

this was not so. A long way off, it sounded as if it might be high above me upstairs, I was sure I heard the murmur of voices, muffled, as though coming from behind closed doors. The voices sounded like those of a mans and a womans, alternately strident and persuasive on both sides, though there was no making out any words.
    What could be easier than to stand in a pub with a few drinks inside you and tell everyone that you’ve got solid nerves? All I know is that when I saw a feeble light wavering down the staircase from the gallery that ran away above each side of the organ, I was glad I had the open door behind me, the torch and the car. However, I stood quite still and turned the torch off. There was no sound of any voices now. The light came slowly nearer down the stairs, appearing and disappearing at the bends. I thought of Hamlet –
I’ll cross it though it blast me
. The light shivered, throwing patches along the sick walls; then it descended the last stairs and came over to where I stood. Above the lamp was the face of an elderly man.
    I said: ‘Are you Dr Mardy?’
    ‘Yes. Who are you?’
    ‘I’m a police officer.’
    ‘You surely don’t want to talk to me,’ he said. ‘You should go and see Inspector Kedward down in the town. He knows all about my affairs.’
    ‘No, it’s you I want to talk to.’
    ‘I don’t generally talk to anyone very much.’
    ‘This is going to be different,’ I said. ‘You and I are going to have a long talk.’
    He sighed. By his dim light I watched him shuffle towards a corner. I heard his hand feeling along the wall; a switch clicked anda light sprang on. I looked at Dr Mardy. He was a hollowed-out shadow of a man in his sixties, as white as if his face had been dusted with chalk; his eyes were black and intense. He was dressed in an anorak, slippers and shapeless corduroys and had a dirty yellow scarf round his neck. He put his gas-lamp down on a table and turned it out; then he faced me. ‘What is it?’ he said in a dead tone. ‘Why can’t you leave me be? Are you a local man?’
    ‘No. From London.’
    ‘From the Yard?’
    ‘Yes, I’m working from A14, with Serious Crimes.’ I showed him my warrant card.
    ‘What is A14?’
    ‘Unexplained Deaths,’ I said. ‘I’m here to inquire about your wife.’
    ‘About Marianne,’ he said. ‘Yes, I see.’
    ‘Perhaps we could go somewhere and sit down,’ I said. ‘This’ll take a minute.’
    ‘Everything’s very primitive here, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘I seldom receive people now.’
    ‘Why is that? You used to, you and your wife.’
    ‘My wife isn’t here.’
    ‘All right,’ I said, ‘we’ll go into that presently.’
    ‘We could go into my study,’ he said, ‘it’s warm and hardly leaks at all – it’s my base here now.’ He relit his lamp, picked it up and said: ‘This way.’ He turned out the light in the hall and I followed him upstairs, We passed through suite after suite of rooms; they were all ruined. In some, books, reviews and medical magazines stood in piles up to the ceiling. In others the ceilings themselves had been shored up with beams. In one, a mountain of sodden books had collapsed.
    When we had gone a reasonable way I asked: ‘How many rooms have you got here?’
    ‘Eighty.’
    Everywhere plaster littered the floor; the house stank of wet. Curtain rails, the curtains themselves, lay where they had fallen.Furniture leaned against beds steaming with damp; mould, green and black, had spread across the walls.
    ‘Be careful of this piece of floor here, there’s some dry rot.’
    ‘Since when was the place in this state?’
    ‘I never noticed,’ he said, ‘I suppose that it slowly declined. My wife and I each had our own work. We were never ones for detail, and there would have been the cost.’
    Had, I thought. We were never ones for. There would have been the. ‘You’re not a rich man,’ I said to him, ‘why do you live here?’
    ‘Where else would I live?’ he