He Died with His Eyes Open Read Online Free Page A

away. I knew Charlotte could never, and would never, come back. Life had never permitted her any fairy-tales, not with me as her parent: and it never would. I cried with fury and despair and loneliness as with a last gesture I threw on her old gumboots and school satchel, and burned her exercise books with their drawings of frogs and flowers, and the scraps of poems she had copied out with Madame Castan: 'Jamais, jamais, tu ne la rattraperas!'
    I have to explain what the agony of her loss means—she was my heart, my soul, my other self. But I could never possibly have told her so, and so I lost her. Once I knew I was going to lose her, I suddenly preferred to lose her at once, not wait. I rushed onto the loss, I sent everybody away, then went away myself. Ah, existence is like water, it is everywhere and yet it flows away. They say I have Polish blood on my mother's side. When I came back, as I had to, I burned everything that had belonged to her. Are the English inhuman? While I was in England my brother said I shouldn't take everything so seriously. But if you don't take love seriously, what do you take seriously? Belongings? Money? Property?
    I put the fire out in the evening. I wonder how much of this I can really stand?
    After a pause on the tape Staniland answered himself:
    Only so much, of course. I'll find out when the time comes.
    He had found out all right. I put Staniland's tape down on the floor. I wondered how much Bowman, or the two PCs, or the pathologist, or anyone else, would have understood of them.
    I wondered how much I really understood.

5
    Bowman had given me the wrong address for Staniland. It wasn't the Battersea address on the national insurance card they had found on him, but the one on the letter from a bank saying they'd be really very glad if he'd drop in pretty well at once and see them about his overdraft. It was dated only a fortnight before his death, and the address it was sent to was in Lewisham, the clock-tower end of it. I had found the letter mixed in with his papers.
    I started to think about everything I knew of Staniland so far, beginning with his being smashed to pieces. He was fifty-one. He was balding. When they washed the blood off him, he had nice hands (you could see from the one he still had the shape of ) and had perhaps been attractive to women. Too attractive? But he didn't read like a love-'em-and-leave-'em specialist. The fingers on that hand—his right—were stained with nicotine. He was a drinker, too—you could tell that from his nose, and from his problems, as shown up in what he had recorded. Not an alcoholic, though; his handwriting was too precise, the letters as a rule well-formed for a man who had written quickly, and well-spaced between the lines, the lower loops never entangling themselves with the upper loops of the line below. It was an educated, reflective, intelligent hand that didn't go with the cheap suit he was found in.
    What the hell had the man been doing?
    Bowman hadn't found any money on him. He was on welfare. That didn't mean he was broke, though; plenty of people these days fiddled the rules; they had to, to survive. Besides, there was the letter from the bank—he must surely have had money in it once, even if he only owed it when he died.
    I kept shutting my eyes till it was late enough on in the morning for me to go out and get information, trying to visualize Staniland and how he had lived. A writing man. A self-confessed failure, tortured by the loss of his daughter. A man who had lived abroad, probably for a long time (I should have to listen to all his tapes to verify that, but there were so many of them that it would take time), an educated man.
    I rang Bowman and got him at home just as he was leaving for the Factory.
    'Staniland,' I said.
    'Well?'
    'Why did you give me that address in Battersea when he lived in Lewisham?'
    'I didn't know I had.'
    'Surely you knew the address where your blokes had picked up his gear from,' I said. 'His