Free I Was Dora Suarez by Derek Raymond Page A

sat in a white restaurant, the brilliant sunlight that struck through the glass roof dulled by dark shades. I was sitting alone at a table when she came in with her many children and sat down at another large table at the far end, carrying herself with that same superb assurance. I was perfectly happy, though, to sit on at my own table, smiling at her – indeed, I had never felt so happy. The minute she saw that I had noticed her she put her chair at the table in a position so as to face me squarely; and when she was sitting there, pointed straight opposite me, she suddenly opened her thighs wide so that I could see her sex, andthen her innumerable children, excited and pleased, crowded round me, jostling each other, and she said with her shining eyes in mine, saying it with her eyes since we were too far off to speak ‘There! Does that please you now?’ I didn’t know – I only knew that mercy, love and justice were the same.
    Before he left Bowman had said: ‘Is there a chance the killer could have been a woman?’
    ‘Christ no,’ I said, ‘even Squeaky Fuentes never killed like that. You remember her, and she was as nutty as a shopping bag full of monkeys on heat.’
    ‘All right,’ said Bowman, ‘it was just a theory I was spinning off at random.’
    ‘Well, luckily it missed me,’ I said.
    He saved a cartridge on that one and said: ‘Anything else I can help you with?’
    ‘Probably,’ I said, ‘only not with your thinking, more the practical side.’
    ‘I’ll give you some of that in the mush on my night off,’ he squawked.
    ‘Why don’t you just go on losing money at snooker with Alfie Verlander,’ I said. ‘That way you’ll only fibrillate, and avoid the major stroke.’
    That was when he slammed the rear door of the squad car on my nose and left for the Factory in a smelly roar of exhaust.
    I thought how extraordinary it was the number of people that didn’t like the truth and went back into the flat. My wife Edie had said to me one night: ‘You’d be amazed the number of people who don’t like you,’ and I remember I answered: ‘No, I wouldn’t, but I find that the people who don’t like me don’t like themselves, that’s all.’
    ‘You don’t expect to get on in the police with that attitude, do you?’ she said.
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s not what the police is for, and I do wish you’d stop worrying about my career.’
    ‘We need the money,’ she said flatly, turned over with a loud thump and slept.
    I had come out of the flat for a moment’s air and to think; now I turned to go back in again, moving round a team of builders on the damp pavement who had just finished loading a skip with rubbish, seen it off the truck, and were now going down to the Queen Anne round the mews at the back of the block for a few pints of Swan, and why not? In their bright yellow helmets with the Wimpy slogan on them, joking away together, stacking their gear for the night, slapping and punching each other, they made me feel better just to be around them for a second or two like that. They were all young men and, I imagined, must be just like I was at their age – either married, going steady or anyhow hoping to get their end away after next Saturday’s match; they made me feel less lonely as I came back to you, Dora.
    For I kissed your hair and I can’t understand why, but I am bound to you.
    Dora, I don’t know how far into the dark I shall have to go to find you, but try to help me reach you, help me to find you, don’t just slip away. Try your hardest to help me.
    I’m not afraid of your killer, Dora. Listen to me, I’ll try to explain this through the words of another man – one of my best friends, a police officer called Frank Ballard who was shot in the back down Fulham Palace Road opposite the Golden Bowl by a little cunt with a sawn-off twelve-bore who was ripping off a takeaway, which has left my mate Frank paralysed from the waist down for life. Well, Frank has organised