by Graham Swift
He didn’t speak. His brief spoke. “My client has nothing further to add …”
Dyson just looked at me. Now, when I remember it, it seems he was already up there, looking down, watching me fall.
And Gibbs, the new Super, would say he couldn’t help me. No cover-up. In the circumstances, and with the Force getting public flak. The word was “corrupt.” He was going to drop me too. He wanted Dyson banged up as much as I did, but he was going to drop me down a big hole instead.
The smell of police stations—even in a Super’s office. Who’d want to work in one?
And I’d been hoping—it’s true, it’s true—Patel might not pull through.
His brief spoke. Dyson just looked at me. He looked at me as if he might have been waving that knife in my face too. Come on, grab it if you can.
I went back to Number One.
Kenny’s brief said, “Mr. Mills wishes to reinstate his previous statement.”
Beer and fags.
I said, “Think again, Kenny.”
He looked at the table.
“Mr. Mills—”
They say you see red. I can’t remember seeing red. Something came over me. I can’t remember seeing anything but my hands round Kenny’s throat.
I grabbed Kenny, with his brief and Ross as a witness—so his brief had to intervene. I grabbed Kenny, the innocent one. I didn’t even grab Dyson.
31
And it did die a death. Or so I thought. The Freemans moved, in any case, to Bristol, in ’65, the year I joined the Force, so I assumed that was that, even if it hadn’t stopped beforehand. Though there was still the fact of it, the secret of it, lurking.
I watched his face for signs of—I don’t know—sadness, heaviness. Something Mum might notice. What’s up, Frank? And of course, I know now, obstacles, distances (London to Bristol?), they aren’t necessarily the end of anything at all.
But he was always Mr. Smile, Mr. Breezy. “Smile everyone, please.” So how could you tell?
Monday afternoons, once upon a time, with Carol Freeman, never anything serious. Did that make it better or worse?
And then—twenty-one years later—he died. Twenty-one years of the secret lurking and never surfacing and of me becoming a cop, a boy in blue and then a detective, and getting married myself and having a family—Helen—and popping round every so often for Sunday lunch (Rachel’s parents not being part of the picture). And even now and then finding time to play a token round of golf with him, even sitting with him on that bench with that scatter of fag-ends. A secret smokers’ place. Husbands who were supposed to have quit, wives who’d never know.
He died. 1986. He was only just sixty. But I supposed they’d already reached the point where the thought was real between them: one of us one day must go first. And I suppose Mum had reckoned, as I suppose women must reckon, going on the evidence, on widowhood. But not yet.
April ’86. Alongside all the other thoughts, I couldn’t help thinking: well at least she’d be safe now, and I’d be safe—my secret would be safe. Her memories wouldn’t have any scars. Except the scar of seeing him there on that bed, when he should have been good for another twenty years, who knows? Working his way towards death.
We kept watch while his chest heaved up and down, and he slipped away from us then back again—if he knew we were there, we couldn’t tell—sometimes muttering things, sometimes just groaning and wheezing.
And then he said (with only hours to go in fact): “Carol …” His eyes were shut and God knows where he thought he was, but he said it clearly and he said it again and again: “Carol … Carol …”
It’s almost a treat, here on this bench. You can close your eyes, the sun like a gift on your eyelids, lift your face and think it’s spring.
• • •
You couldn’t mistake it, couldn’t ignore it. “Carol …” Couldn’t avoid the meaning.
I thought: Now I’ll have to pretend again, a different kind of pretence. I’ll have to pretend, for her sake, to be shocked, bewildered, like her.
But not heart-broken: that was for just her.
You couldn’t mistake it. Both of us there. I was a witness. And if we hadn’t been there—or if he’d died quicker, if he hadn’t laboured on like that, so that the delirium, or whatever it was, hadn’t set in …
“Carol …”
Of course, I had to say it: he’s delirious, just delirious. But I could read her face. Like hell, George, like hell.
Just delirium. The chestnut tree. The way he scurried through the rain and was let in like a bird swooping into a nest.
Just those few hours. Cheated, right at the end, by a few hours.
I think that became her position: she might never have known. She might never have had to know. If she could trade it all back, not the fact, just the knowing, the having to know, she’d have settled for that. I never said a thing.
And now she’d have to pretend, too. To be the brave grieving widow. To cherish his memory. All those photographs.
But was it such a pretence?
• • •
“He could make me smile, George—my God, he could make me smile.”
It was a few weeks later. Something had shifted in her since the funeral, an adjustment, a decision. We’d stopped talking about, even skirting round, the subject of Carol.
“I’ve got an idea, George. Will you help me?”
She wanted to buy a bench—have a bench made. One of those wooden benches—you see them everywhere—that have little plates or inscriptions: “In Memory of …” She wanted to have a bench made in his memory, and she wanted it put on Chislehurst Common, just up from the High Street. Because, after all, he’d been a public figure in his way, the local photographer.
It would be a gesture. A public bench, for everyone. But of course she could go there and sit on it too whenever she wanted—if it was free. “Hello, Frank.”
She didn’t know how you went about it, nor did I. There must be some procedure. Of course I said I’d see to it.
“Thank you, George. And will you do something else for me?” she said.
She looked at me for a while. “When—I go, will you make sure that my name goes on the bench too? So it says ‘Frank and Jane’?”
Of course, I said, of course I would.
I saw to it. You have to apply through the Parks Department. A solid wooden bench, the best teak, a silky deep-brown then—grey and weathered now. There was a simple unceremonious moment when it was put in its designated place and she went along to be the first to sit.
I go there still, myself, when the mood takes me, just to sit. Wimbledon to Chislehurst. The points on your map, the poles of your world.
It’s good to sit there. It was a good thing to do, the right thing to do.
On the far side of the Common is St. Mary’s Church where the Emperor Napoleon—Napoleon III—was first laid to rest, when he died in 1873. Then his wife Eugénie lived on for almost fifty years.
But Mum didn’t have a long stint of being ex–Mrs. Webb. No second life. It surprised me: I thought she would simply go on, the resigned, enduring, steady type. And, by the law of averages, since my dad went early … But she died only three years later, only months, as it happens, before I was kicked out the Force.
And whether if she’d never known—about Carol—she’d have lived on longer, whether it was like a sentence for her and so better made short, I don’t know. I don’t know about these things.
But she never knew I knew. I’m proud of that. And I carried out her wish to the letter, of course.
“Frank and Jane.”
If there’s someone else sitting there, I’m miffed, I’m even a little affronted, for a while. Then I relax, I’m strangely pleased. They don’t know who I am—how could they? I watch them not knowing who I am. I walk around, I take my turn.
It’s good to sit there. It’s a good thing to do. Never mind all the other things that happen with public benches. Dogs come and cock their legs—and as f
or some of the human users. Public benches, golf courses. What’s civilization for?
And whenever I sit there (I can’t help it), I know I’m glad they’re dead. I’m glad they died when they did. So they never knew, neither of them, about my scandal and disgrace. Their boy, getting on in the police—a good job, for all the mud that got slung at coppers nowadays. For all the talk of corruption.
They never knew, they’d never know. Nor about Rachel and me. About Rachel and me not being Rachel and me any more. About my life falling apart.
And as for me now: this—visitor. This man on his way to prison, resting on a bench: what would they have made of that?
32
I went to the Fulham flat. A dry run, just to check it out. To see what the parking and the sight-lines were like.
A first-floor flat, bay-windowed. Below: an arched porch, steps leading up over a basement.
As if she could have known it, a girl in Dubrovnik. The points on our map.
A small front garden. Dead roses. A laurel bush, a privet hedge. A front path and gate, a little bunker, draped with ivy, for dustbins, just inside. The house number on the gate: forty-one.
I was there again the next Monday, at four o’clock. November 20th. The earliest they would leave would be around five. But you have to be in position, ready. Detective work is fifty per cent waiting.
And the black Saab was already parked outside.
A dank raw afternoon. Almost dark even at four. A light already on, behind the curtains, on the first floor.
A concession, Sarah had said, and now, perhaps, in the gloom of a November afternoon, the concession was running out.
Well, let them have their last eked-out moments, let them use up their concession. Then leave each other for good. If that is how it was.
Or let them disappear, the pair of them together, into the night.
How can you tell—from a lit-up window? All the windows, saying nothing, lights on, lights off. All the houses that stare at each other across streets. Read my face, guess what I’ve got inside.
The street lamps changed colour, pink-eyed then amber.
At five-fifteen (I note these things exactly) the front door opened and Bob Nash appeared. He was manhandling two suitcases, one large, one small, moving with concentration. He looked like a man carrying out some dangerous task, as if the cases might be full of explosives. I remembered what Sarah had said: how he’d carried up the boxes while Kristina had sat in the kitchen, about to burst into tears.
He was wearing a suit, no tie. The flop of dark hair that, with his hands gripping the suitcases, he couldn’t smooth back. The cases looked new. He shut the door behind him and carried the cases to the car. I couldn’t tell, from where I watched, if there was already luggage (his own) inside the car. He re-locked the car, walked back to the front door. He seemed to pause and breathe hard for a moment, standing in the porch—but then he’d been lugging suitcases. He let himself in with a key.
Five minutes passed, maybe more.
You look around, take it in: take a last mental photograph. Home, and not home, something different from home.
The light went out upstairs. Then they both emerged below. He had a tie on now. She was dressed—as if to make an impression, as if she had some appointment, some role to perform—in a simple elegant dark suit, a pale round-necked top beneath.
It was the first sight of her I’d had, not counting that photograph. Different people you might have said. A transformation had taken place.
My first sight. There was only that brief moment when the light from the open door caught them, I could hardly see her face. I looked for some dizzying, devastating factor that might, in a instant, explain everything.
But didn’t I know, by then, there’s no telling how it strikes?
A scarf, deep red, hung loosely from her shoulders. Glossy black hair. Something foreign, yes, and intense. Italian, yes, your first guess.
They both had coats over their arms, for the few steps to the car. She had a bag, of the compact boxy sort you might carry on to a plane, another small bag hooked over her shoulder.
The door shut behind them. No meaningful pause.
A professional couple you might have said—in whatever sense—with matters to attend to, some schedule ahead. Married, or not married, or just professionally linked. Two people about to set off on some business trip—a trip that might have been entirely for legitimate purposes or entirely not, or something embracing both.
You can’t tell.
They descended the steps. She seemed the surer and quicker of the two. One of those man-woman partnerships where it’s the man who is the anchor maybe, but the woman who takes the physical lead.
He would have bought her the suit, I suppose. A “going-away” suit? She flicked the scarf round her chin like a mask. The scissory, clipping steps of a woman-about-town. A refugee.
He opened the car door for her, took her coat and bag to lay on the back seat. I lost sight of her after the quick inward swing of her legs. Good sleek legs. In four hours’ time he’d be dead and she wouldn’t know. He walked round to his driver’s door and before getting in, and with an odd quick wrench of his head, looked up, looked round, looked back.
33
Gone twelve. Enough. I get up from the bench. I’ve given it time enough. Time enough for respect, time enough to say I didn’t hurry it. Time for all those messages, if they were going to come, from the dead.
No, sweetheart, nothing. (I wouldn’t lie.) The dead don’t say anything. They don’t forgive.
There’s just one name on this bench: “John Winters 1911–1989.” But it’s made of good, weathered teak.
And my life got put back together again.
I walk back to the car. I shiver a little, now I’m on my feet. Sitting around—in November. John Winters. The day’s still brilliant, the sky an almost burning blue, but, even at just past noon, it has that urgent feeling that even still and brilliant days in November have. It’s waning already, it can’t last.
34
Marsh said, “To her? Something terrible’s happened to her?”
She was along the corridor. Nothing would ever be the same for her again.
He looked at me, reading my face.
“Something good had happened to her, hadn’t it? Her husband had come back. This girl had gone. Everything she wanted.”
“Yes.”
“So—why?”
“That’s not my business.”
“No?” He looked at me. “I could say it’s not mine either. When Mrs. Nash came to you—to hire you—did she seem like a woman intent on revenge?”
“No, not at all. She wanted her husband back.”
“You’re sure?”
“I see lots of women—clients—intent on revenge. You can tell.”
Sometimes as soon as they step through the door.
“Still, it’s an explanation. It could persuade a jury. Why—at that point? Because she was going to do it all along. She waits till he gets back, till he thinks he’s in the clear—”
“She’d cooked him a meal. His favourite meal. She’d laid the table. You saw—”
“Exactly. Revenge. A ritual element. People do weirder things. Did it ever cross your mind she might be off her trolley?”
He didn’t believe what he was saying—I could tell. Cock-and-bull. He was testing me in some way.
“A jury won’t come into it,” I said.
“Maybe not. It depends. You knew it was his favourite meal—she told you that?”
He looked at me.
“You saw her,” I said. “She didn’t look like she’d planned it. She didn’t look like she’d meant to do it.”
(She’d looked—as much as anyone can look who’s saying, over and over, “I did it, I did it”—like she didn’t know what she’d done.)
He looked at me and let a silence pass.
Not like she’d planned it, he might have said.
Your last case. What do you do? Go to
town, follow the wildest goose-chase, break all the rules?
And if it could have been made to fit the facts I might have said at that point: Okay, all right, I planned it. I conspired with Mrs. Nash to kill Mr. Nash. I put her up to it. I followed him, reported in—so she’d know. Then followed him all the way back, just to be sure …
A false statement (my real one was on the table waiting for me to sign): I really did it, it was me.
Cock-and-bull. But people do the weirdest things. They walk into police stations (every nick has stories) and confess to crimes they never did.
He fingered his tie. He might have been thinking: and if she’s mad, he could be too.
But they can’t arrest you for what’s only in your head.
“Yes, I saw her,” he said.
Interview rooms. Two DIs. How strange to be on the other side of the law.
And wasn’t it why we’d both of us joined—back then, back in those simple, certain days—to be on the right side of the law?
(Yes, he’d say, later—when we met up to play golf.)
A good thing to do, the right thing to do. A kind of insurance: get on the right side from the start. A sound choice anyway for us good-on-our-feet types who were never much cop at school. (Problems at home as well.)
Schoolboy misfits (Marsh too, I’d guess). Not much good on paper, but good enough underneath. Good enough to serve the law.
And now look at Marsh—coming up to retirement: he looks like a teacher, a weary teacher (a touch of strict flint). And look at me, back in a police station. All because of a teacher. Because even teachers now and then go and land in trouble with the law.
Those simple days, before the police became the pigs, the fuzz, the filth.
I think he read my thoughts.
“Can I see her? Please can I see her?”
