An Individual Will

by J.G. Ellis

  Chapter Three

  “What?” This was Simon, laptop sealed in plastic under one arm, bothered by something: me, or my mien, to be more precise.

  I smiled. “Sorry, Simon?” I said.

  “Ma’am?” Suggesting a degree of disingenuousness on my part, or a minor economy with the actuality. Put prosaically, he was worried I might know something he didn’t.

  Simon knew the Hannah Lawrence story, as, it seems, does everyone else who has had even a passing working relationship with me. It’s the first story that anyone tells about me. When questioned about it at the time, I attributed it to a moment of heightened intuition. Unfortunately, DI McBride, a craggy Glaswegian who died three years after the case, chose to describe it as uncanny. That’s Scottish uncanny, you understand, which is far more dramatic than its English equivalent. Scottish uncanny has a mad, other-worldly glint in its eye, has Auld Nick perched on a winnock-bunker playing pipes, and a plesiosaur swimming about in a loch. “Aye,” he said to all and sundry; “it was uncanny.”

  Fourteen-year-old Hannah Lawrence had been missing for two days, sparking an immediate and large-scale search. Another girl of the same age – Donna Jacobs – had gone missing a month earlier, and her body had subsequently been found, by a young man out jogging, in a wooded area near a local reservoir in Wood Hill Green, a leafy suburb in the north east of London. DI McBride, for want of something better to do, had joined in the house-to-house inquiries. He was two years short of retirement. He took with him a young WPC called Barbara Black, who was impossibly polite and looked about twelve years old. She rang the doorbells and showed the photo, and gently urged the cursory and curious alike to take a closer look.

  At ten past two on a slate-grey Thursday in October, we knocked on the door of 17 Lonsdale Road, a recently painted semi with a bay window and an extension over the garage. It was answered by a man in his late-twenties or early-thirties dressed in jeans and a dirty white T-shirt. His hair was dark and close cropped. He had a thin nose and thick lips, and his blue eyes were dim and misty. He said, “Yes?”

  McBride, not for the first time that day, said, “I’m Detective Inspector McBride and this is WPC Black. I wonder if you’d take a look at this picture and see if you can recall seeing her, sir.”

  The man looked at it briefly, very briefly, his eyes flicking up to McBride. He said, “Who is she?”

  I explained and urged him to take a closer look. McBride emphasised the importance of the inquiry and mentioned the suffering of the girl’s parents.

  The man said, “Girls of that age go missing all time. She’s probably run off with her boyfriend and is too scared to call her parents.” His voice was nasal and repining.

  McBride’s face twitched with impatience. Speaking slowly, he said, “Sir, would you please just take a close look at the picture and tell us if you think you may have seen the girl?”

  The man glanced at it again and said, “No, sorry, I haven’t seen her.”

  “Thank you, sir,” McBride said. “Sorry to have troubled you.”

  The interview over, the man closed the door. It was white panelled with a round window in the top half. It grew large in my sight, like a door closing in a dream. And then everything went black for a moment, and then I was in a box or an enclosed, windowless space. In a flash of light, like lightning in a forest, I saw a girl with terrified, pleading eyes, her mouth covered with black Gaffer tape. It played out in my mind in a second or two, and then I was back on the street with DI McBride, who was ready to move on to the next house.

  I placed my hand on McBride’s arm and said, “Sir, this is going to sound terribly silly, but I think that the girl is still alive, and that that man is holding her prisoner. I’m not sure where, sir, but it may be in the boot of a car or the back of a van.”

  McBride looked down at me. His face seemed to hold the wisdom of the ages – amiably aided and abetted by his country’s national drink, but I didn’t know that at the time. He said, “Aye, girl, silly,” and turned back towards the door.

  The man looked less than pleased to see us again. McBride said, “I wonder, sir, if it would be possible to have a look in your garage.”

  The man said testily, “Have you got a search warrant?” The question turned an old man’s willingness to indulge a young girl’s intuition into a near-certainty that something was amiss.

  “No, sir,” McBride said. “Of course we don’t. Why would we? I was just hoping you’d be kind enough to oblige us. It’s possible that she was messing around, perhaps with a friend, and has got herself into some difficulty. Drugs perhaps?” This was lame, and McBride knew it, but he didn’t care and it didn’t matter. There would have to be a pretty compelling reason for the man not to open his garage.

  The man considered, and then said, “Hold on. I’ll get the keys.”

  He came out half a minute later and brushed passed us without making eye-contact. He unlocked the garage door and swung it up and open. The garage was more like a surrogate loft than a garage. There was no vehicle, but there were piles of old clothes and blankets; framed pictures; a broken office chair; a computer monitor; an old cot; and a pyramid built of paint pots. Tools and a stepladder hung off the side walls.

  McBride said, “Do you not drive, sir?”

  This was something that could easily be checked, so the man said, “Yes.”

  “A van, sir?” McBride said.

  “I drive a van for my work,” the man said. “Why?”

  McBride said, “Can I ask you where it is now, sir – the van, I mean?”

  “At the depot at work. We don’t get to keep them for our private use.”

  McBride said, “I wonder if you’d be kind enough to tell us where you work, sir?”

  “Bartons in Rainham. I do their deliveries.”

  I was listening to this while peering into an empty cardboard punnet sat atop the broken office chair. It was empty but for a balled up piece of paper. I lifted it out. It had been neatly done, as if for a game of office paper toss. I unfolded it, and had the sensation of my blood suddenly becoming very hot. In turquoise felt-tip pen, and in unsteady block capitals reminiscent of a small child’s early crayoned attempts at printing, were the words: HELP ME. And below that in smaller letters with no space between them, the initials HL.

  A trick of memory gives me a picture of the three of us frozen in time, two as yet unknowing, the other – me – holding ineffable significance in the shape of a scruffy piece of paper. I turned. Holding the piece of paper in both hands, like a child about to read to class, I said quite calmly, “Where is she?”

  McBride turned to me inquiringly. The man said, “What?”

  “Where is she?” I repeated. I waited a moment before passing the piece of paper to McBride.

  The man snorted and said, “What is this? Am I being accused of something?”

  McBride said, “Yes, sir, you are. You’re being accused of having knowledge of Hannah Lawrence. You’re being accused of having lied to us at the door. Why would you do that?”

  “This is a stitch up,” the man said, but he didn't sound persuaded or persuasive.

  “I want to search,” I said to McBride. “I want to find her.”

  McBride simply nodded.

  The man said, “You can’t do that. You have no right to search without a warrant. The that in question was my pulling open a side door that led into the house. I went into each and every room in the house and shouted her first name; then I stood in silence, waiting and hoping for a response. None came. Something about the man's mien – I still didn't know his name at this point – as I moved into the back garden caused a leap of hope in me. Getting warm, Barbara, I thought.

  The man said, “You can’t do this. You have no right. I'm calling a lawyer.”

  I was halfway across the lawn. I was finding him extraordinarily irritating, like a pettifogger insisting on adherence to procedure when the ship was sinking or the house burning. Of course, in his case, it had
to do with desperation. With something of the air of a sulky teenager, I said, “I don't care what you do,” and, like a sulky teenager, meant it absolutely. There was a beech-coloured lean-to plastic shed at the end of the garden. The door was shut and padlocked. I asked for the key, but was already stooping for a stone to dash against the lock.

  The man ran into the house, ostensibly to get the key, but I knew he was simply running. As did McBride, who went after him. It took me three attempts to break the padlock. I unhooked it and pulled open the door. The usual gardening tools: a rake, a lawn-mower, sheers, a hoe, a spade. And something, a box of some kind, covered with a grey blanket. I said, “Hannah?” Actually, and illogically, I whispered it, as though inviting her to share a secret. Repeating her name – this time aloud – I pulled the blanket off. Underneath was a battered old trunk, probably antique. As I knelt to find the means of opening it – the light was dreadful – I heard, or imagined I heard, a muffled thudding sound from within. The trunk was not padlocked, but the ornate hasp was secured instead with a metal tent peg. Crouching down, I pulled out the peg and pulled the hasp free of the staple. I straightened up to lift the lid. I struggled to do this, tearing the nail on the little finger of my left hand and drawing blood. A vision of myself, wine-glass in hand, complaining about this made me want to giggle. Fortified – or at least distracted – by this flight of whimsy, I lifted the lid.

  Dark eyes found mine, it seemed, immediately. Questioning; imploring. Her mouth had been taped. She was lying on her side, facing front, towards me. Her wrists had been taped behind her back, and her legs, folded, had been similarly bound at the ankles. She was wearing blue jeans and a navy sweatshirt and white trainers.

  I said something like, “Hannah, it’s okay. I'm a police officer. I'm going to pull the tape off your mouth – is that okay?”

  She nodded, and I peeled the tape off her mouth. I did this quite slowly. Despite the notion that snatching it off, as it were, would have spared her discomfort, I thought it would be unpardonably discourteous. When I had successfully removed the tape, I simply dropped it into the trunk. I was not, I must confess, thinking at all about evidence at this juncture.

  “Hannah, I'm going to try and get the tape off your ankles,” I said. I used a keyring penknife to cut or hack at the tape's edge – it had been wrapped around several times – and then tore it with brute force off her socks.

  “Hannah, do you think you can stand up?”

  She nodded shakily, and I thought: How long have you been in there? She was struggling to her feet with my support. Her hair was dark brown with dust and bits of dirt in it, her face red and blotchy from dried tears. We stepped out of the shed into a mizzly rain.

  “Hannah,” I said gently. “If you turn round, I'll cut the tape off your wrists.”

  She turned slowly, shuffling round on the spot. As I was cutting at the edge of the tape, I realized she was trembling; and as I tore the tape free of her wrists, the trembling got worse. I turned her round, intending to hug her, but she backed off and bent forward with her hands on her knees and started to heave like a cat coughing fur-balls. I realized she wanted to throw up, so allowed her space to do so. It came soon enough, mostly liquid – presumably she hadn't eaten in a while – and she hugged her stomach as though to expel more, though it probably had more to do with easing physical discomfort. I produced a clean tissue and offered it to her. She took it – snatched it rather – from my outstretched hand and used it to wipe her mouth and blow her nose. A sharp gust of wind sharpened the rain and rattled the wooden fences on either side of the garden. She shivered and I went to her and took her in my arms. She was still trembling. I heard a distant police siren, and wondered dimly if it had anything to do with us.

  This incident turned out to be rather a mixed blessing for me. In a world where everyone’s desperately trying to get noticed – to the point where, incredibly, they’ll eat maggots, et al, on television – it got me noticed, though I was rather less than comfortable with the attention. I was rescued on the day by a senior officer and advised to go home. McBride was summoned to Superintendent Giles Barker’s office to be personally congratulated. Glancing at McBride’s report, Barker said, “I confess to being curious, Brian. What made you believe her?”

  “She had a hunch, sir,” McBride said. “No reason not to follow it up.”

  “I need hardly say, Brian, we’re all very happy you did.”

  As McBride was leaving the office, Barker said, “Hell of a hunch, Brian.”

  McBride paused in the doorway. “Aye, sir,” he said; “made my day. Don’t imagine she’ll be a PC for very long.”

  It would be a lie to say I wasn’t flattered by all the subsequent attention and talk of a career, though I suffered for a while from what I came to think of as reverse anxiety dreams. Anxiety dreams express a fear of things that could happen – being unable to save a loved one from drowning, or a person you care about dying before you've had a chance to make peace with them. In my dreams, and there were several variations on the theme, I didn't open the piece of paper and we didn't rescue the girl. One ended with the muffled blackness of being trapped forever in the crate, another with a suffocating sense of shame as we walked away from the house. I always woke from these dreams with a rush of relief. Talk of a career was welcome, not least because my mother had expressed astonishment at my decision to join the police. I was, she opined, too sensitive and intelligent for the police force. My father countered this by saying that the police could do with a bit of intelligent sensitivity. I fear my mother rather imagined me an impecunious writer of Gothic prose.

  It wasn’t until I became involved in a rather unpleasant piece of office politics that I began to think she might have had a point. I had just become a DS in the Met, which a couple of my male colleagues had failed to do. There was nothing remotely exceptional about this, and I didn’t give it a second thought, though there was some office banter about it, which turned out to be ill-advised. Terry Knight, one of the DCs who had failed to get the promotion, said, “Not everyone has women’s intuition to fall back on, Barbara.” The next day I discovered that a female DC had made a formal complaint about this remark, and I was asked to join DI Linda Stanley in her office. She asked me if the remark had been made, to which I replied, “Yes, ma’am,” because I didn’t want to lie, and there were already several witnesses.

  “Why didn’t you make a complaint?” she asked.

  “Because I didn’t think there was anything to make a complaint about, ma’am.”

  “You don’t think as women officers we should be complaining about sexism, then, Barbara?” She was sitting forward in her chair with her hands flat on the desk’s surface.

  “I didn’t say that, ma’am,” I replied.

  “What are you saying, then, Barbara? That a remark about women’s intuition isn’t sexist?”

  Since I was all at sea, I decided to take refuge in formality. “Ma’am, I’m not sure I should make any further comment on this incident until I’ve taken advice. You seem to be sufficiently exercised by it to have given this interview the air of a formal disciplinary investigation. I haven’t made any complaint – formal or otherwise – and have no intention of doing so. And, as far as I’m aware, no complaint has been made against me. That being the case, I ask to be excused.”

  She considered for a moment, then said, “I think you’re being rather naïve, Barbara. It matters; it matters a great deal. This is how we’re undermined in the workplace.” The hands remained flat on the desktop; a physical attempt to control her emotions. “We never win fair and square. We never win because we’re better. We win because we have nice tits, or flash our thighs, or get by on women’s intuition. Or perhaps we simply put out for the boss.”

  I said, “Ma’am, I don’t understand. Are you asking me to make a formal complaint against DC Knight?”

  She said, “You must do what you think is right, Barbara.”

  It didn’t end there. La
ter that day at lunch, Ruth, my closest colleague, asked me “confidentially” if I’d made a complaint against Terry Knight. She at least had the decency to sound as though she thought the idea improbable. I told her frankly that I hadn’t, but that someone else had, and by so doing had placed me in an invidious position. I related the substance of my interview with DI Stanley, and asked Ruth, as someone presumably less “naïve” than myself, what she made of it.

  Ruth said, “Well, she obviously wants you to make a formal complaint.”

  “I gathered that, Ruth.” I said. “But why? What’s she got against Terry?”

  “Nothing, as far as I know. She’s just big on stamping out sexism and every other ism. I think there’s a bit of history. She’s had a few run-ins with male colleagues in the past, and she’s represented a few female officers in preliminary disciplinary hearings. She’s not afraid to put her head above the parapet. She makes people nervous, particularly her male superiors, who regard her as political.”

  “She made me nervous,” I said. “You sound like you rather admire her.”

  “I do,” she said. “We could do with a few more of her sort. No-one should feel bullied or undermined at work, Barbara. And it’s not always obvious. It’s often done so subtly that the person starts to wonder if maybe they’ve got it wrong, if maybe it’s their fault, if maybe they’re the problem. It can have a negative impact on your health – mental and physical.”

  “Ruth, are you saying I should complain?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Barbara; I wasn’t there. You clearly weren’t bothered or offended by the remark; but how would you have felt if it had been directed at someone else? Me, for instance, or a WPC who’d just passed their Sergeant’s exam? We don’t know who complained, so we don’t know if there’s more too it than an honest belief that the remark was out of order. So what are you going to do?”

  “Nothing. By which I mean I’m not going to complain – for the not very complicated reason that I didn’t see anything to complain about at the time. Presumably they’re free to act on the other person’s complaint.”

  “Stays fairly trivial if you don’t complain, though,” Ruth said, “as I’m sure you know.”

  I said, “It was directed at me, Ruth. He addressed me by name. It referenced an incident in my past. Possibly it was gauche, but I don’t believe it was malicious.”

  Ruth said, “Don’t be the right sort of girl, Barbara.”

  “Sorry?” I must have sounded defensive.

  “The right sort of girl, Barbara,” Ruth repeated. “The right sort of girl knows when a chap’s just kidding, when nothing’s meant by it – it being anything from a suggestive remark in the canteen to a pat on the rear in the stationery cupboard or a full-on grope at the office party. The right sort of girl is discreet and doesn’t go making a fuss about things; the right sort of girl understands that she shouldn’t take things too seriously, or go telling tales out of school. Linda Stanley’s very much the wrong sort of girl. All the boys are afraid of Linda Stanley. There’s lots of room for manoeuvre in between, but don’t ever be the right sort of girl.” I must have looked sick because she added, “You can tell me to fuck off if you like, Barbara. Actually, it occurs to me I’ve never heard you swear.”

  I said, “Fuck off, Ruth.”

  She grinned. “Well done.”

  It rumbled on. Terry Knight sought me out for a word that afternoon. I hurried him into a small interview room and asked him what he wanted. He looked a bit shell-shocked. There had obviously been words. “I think I’m in trouble, Barbara. Someone’s made a formal complaint against me.”

  “Well, you made an asinine remark in a roomful of people, one of whom complained. Well done: a lesson learned the hard way.” He looked at me dolefully. “Oh, you want to know if it was me, Terry, don’t you? You’re simply trying to establish precisely how much hot water you’re in. Gosh, and for a moment I thought you might be concerned that you’d caused me offence. Silly me.”

  “Barbara?” he pleaded.

  “Don’t’ ever place me in a position like this again, Terry. If you do, I’ll pursue the complaints procedure to the buffers and beyond. I don’t know who complained, and I wouldn’t tell you if I did.” I opened the door. “I don’t want to talk to you about this again.”

  The following day, I found out who had made the complaint, because she announced herself to me and requested a private word. Her name was Tania Clifford, and she was/is the type of person for whom manners oblige me to disguise my distaste. I think she was attractive, but she was so well-groomed it was difficult to tell. Nothing was left to chance. I thought she looked false and over-groomed. She even power dressed, and comported herself as though every moment of her time were filled with something vital. She was obviously and unashamedly ambitious. She said, “I’d like to discuss my complaint against DC Knight. Do you mind?”

  “I’d really rather not,” I said. I think I must have sounded pained.

  “I understand you don’t support it,” she said.

  “Do you?” I said. “I can’t imagine where you’d have got such an understanding.”

  “I gather you won’t be filing a complaint of your own,” she persisted.

  “Gathering as well as understanding.” I felt myself slipping towards sarcasm, so I asked a direct question. “Tania, what is it you want?”

  “I’d like to know why you don’t support my complaint,” she said.

  “I wasn’t aware that complaints were something for which you canvassed support, Tania. If you have a grievance, make a complaint; if you have a serious grievance, make it a formal complaint. Your complaint – formal or otherwise – actually has nothing to do with me.”

  She said, “Don’t you think you’re being rather naïve?” Ah, that word again. “You’re de facto indicating that you think there’s nothing to complain about. Since the remark was directed at you, they are unlikely to proceed if you don’t at least indicate support for doing so. It’s not just your own position you have to consider here, Barbara, but the position of every woman who comes into the police force.”

  I said, “Tania, your complaint is your prerogative. Where I stand is nothing to the point, and is, frankly, none of your business. I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t want you or anyone else telling me how I should think or act. In the interests of seemliness, can we leave the subject there?”

  Tania said, “Think about it, Barbara. I’m not the only one who thinks this complaint should proceed.” I took this to be a reference to DI Stanley.

  I didn’t complain, nor did I support Tania’s complaint, and was thereafter troubled by the notion that I might have made the wrong decision. Perhaps I was being naïve.