A Life Discarded

by Alexander Masters

  and an invented country called Beano that looks like France and has rivers named after milk products, French intellectuals and abusive words for black people:

  Five of the central pages contain illustrations too faint to reproduce. In almost imperceptible pencil, so delicate that you think for a moment that the real lines are on the other side of the paper, these pictures show a small girl weeping at a piano. She is slumped on her stool, her head sunk in the crook of one arm like one of Charles Dickens’ pathetic orphans. There is no face: just hair, limbs and defeat.

  Did this book belong to Not-Mary, or did it not? Excited by my detective work, I totted up the 148 volumes in the collection and divided them into eight categories:

  The set of seven Max-Val exercise books smelling of Ovaltine that contain the cartoon strip.

  The six red pads with rexine covers, containing the draft of the novel beginning ‘ “What a beautiful morning!” Clarence hummed and sang under his breath.’

  This very early exercise book, dated 1952.

  The books belonging to an early adult phase, in which the writing is tidy, methodical but still outsized and taking up all the space on the page, as if poured in with a watering can.

  A long period with smaller script that uses office notebooks of two types: Collins ‘Red Books’, and an unbranded hardback with a blue marbled cover that looks as though you’re staring down at the sea.

  The lurid-coloured books from the 1990s in which, just by glancing at the pages, not even bothering to read the text, you can tell that something about the author has gone seriously wrong.

  Four tiny day-to-day pocket diaries, of the sort that have syringe-shaped pencils slotted into the spine.

  The empty books. This group is especially touching, or shocking, depending on the mood in which you come across them. There are eleven empty books, all different types: an artists’ watercolour pad; an address book with letters running up one edge like a staircase; the book with the cheese-mould stripes. I imagine these blank volumes piled on Not-Mary’s desk after her death, waiting for a time that would never come. Alternatively, I imagine them scattered all over the room, overlooked in her race to fill up the other volumes.

  I felt pleased with myself. I was narrowing in on my subject, using Scotland Yard methods. My trip to Whiters had exposed her ancestry; the graphology visit had resulted, albeit embarrassingly, in her date of birth. As christening follows birth, I next needed to find her name.

  In my new gold, Swedish-designed notebook I jotted down a tally of my progress.

  Name? Anything but Mary.

  Date of Birth? May 22nd, 1939.

  Siblings? Three sisters.

  Parents (not a particularly interesting question at the best of times)? Unknown.

  Subject of her ‘great project’? Unknown. Unlikely to be scientific – no formulae or technological sketches in the books. When very young and looking for work, refuses a job at a library because ‘only rotten old science books there’. Science makes her yawn. Exception is medicine. Has read numerous medical textbooks.

  Reasons for failure of project? Unknown.

  Name of person who pitched her diaries in the skip or their reasons? Unknown.

  Who E? Unknown.

  I pulled myself up on the pillows of my bed and thought about other things. I wondered if I liked Not-Mary. For all her angry bluster about the world and her situation at the end of her life when she’s locked up with the man called Peter whom she wants to strangle and stab, she seems a mild and gentle woman. She has an endearing mix of timidity and lust for life. I remembered a scene, described in an early book, in which she leaves Whitefield wood to cycle to Cambridge. Pedalling nervously down the hill towards Addenbrooke’s Hospital (it was one of her terrors that cars were poised at all junctions and driveways to shoot out and mow her over), she had a ‘wonderful primitive fantasy’. She imagined escaping into a forest. She would live forever there ‘the natural life, close to the earth, and what is more in the deepest, darkest, windiest depths of the wood’, and ‘lie with some sweet creature in my arms – my lover’.

  She had, she appends primly to this extract, ‘no physical desire for sex’ with this man, ‘just spiritual desire …’

  But then, for the first time in her remarks about sex, she hesitates.

  The night hurtling past her ears, the softness of flesh, the still-felt warmth of that bath she’d just had at Whitefield …

  ‘Imagine sex would be tremendously exciting,’ she adds.

  At Long Road cattery she redoubled her grip on the handlebars, flung out her legs and, her thoughts thrilling, coasted into Cambridge ‘soap-scented’.

  It was in the middle of the night that I got it. That was what was wrong!

  The book from 1952, with the childish doodles inside, was too thin.

  What notebook contains only twenty-three pages?

  I barely had to move my hand to pick the spindly thing up again, and I now felt the front covers slither awkwardly across the pages inside. Flipping the board back, I saw, very close to the spine, that two-thirds of the pages had been removed.

  Hurrying out of my bedroom to my study, I returned with a magnifying glass.

  Removed, I decided with a gasp of excitement, using a razor.

  16 Vince, private detective

  Interview with private detective Vincent Johnson.

  Location: CB2 Café, Cambridge

  Dates: March 12th, 2012; April 14th, 2015

  AM: Sections of this interview are being recorded. Do you mind?

  VJ: No.

  AM: The purpose of the recorder, when I use it, is not to stitch you up. It’s so that I can be sure to keep an accurate record of what you say.

  VJ: I understand.

  AM: As with all people I interview for this book, you can check the copy before it goes in.

  VJ: (Amused) Alexander, I’m not worried. I know where you live.

  AM: Is it all right to call you Vince?

  VJ: Yes.

  AM: Vince, please explain what you do.

  Even in the murky back room of the café, Vince has a look of alarming consequence. He seems to be covered in bark, not skin. When he reaches across the table to shake your hand, it’s as if he’s bringing a large branch around the side of a tree trunk.

  VJ: I am a private investigator and founder director of the Cambridge Detective Agency, which manages surveillance, process serving, tracing, divorce, missing persons and a whole spectrum of criminal defence cases, which range from petty theft to murder. Most of what we do is very mundane. Frequently we do something dangerous, but occasionally we do something bizarre. In the thirty years I have been running the company, we have investigated over twenty thousand cases. Before that, I was the youngest serving CID officer in the Cambridgeshire constabulary.

  AM: How did you become a detective?

  VJ: As a young policeman, I lived above the police station. When I was bored and as I was new to the area I used to go down to the collator’s office, which was the intelligence centre of the station, and memorise the photographs of the villains, and also their address, the postcode, who their associates were, what car they drove, the registration number. I believe I met the subject of your previous biography on several occasions.

  AM: Stuart Shorter?

  VJ: Nice lad.fn1

  [In 2012 Vince was voted ABI Investigator of the Year for his work on a missing persons inquiry. ABI is the Association of British Investigators, the professional regulatory body of British detectives. Its logo of a wavy flag inside a double circle is to detectives what checkatrade.com is to plumbers.]

  AM: Can you explain briefly what that case involved, so that readers can understand its relevance to my missing persons inquiry for ‘I’, aka ‘Not-Mary’, the author of these diaries?

  Private detective Vince Johnson, adviser on how not to discover the writer of anonymous diaries, shortly before his escape from Libya, 2012.

  VJ: It concerned a young man who, for identifica
tion purposes, I will call Jacob. He had escaped from a secure mental-health unit in Belgium and his parents believed that he might have come to Cambridge. It was not the first time he had gone walkabout. On the last occasion it took his family ten months to track him down to a park bench in Lyons, France. He was in a bedraggled state, virtually a ‘vegetable’ and unable to communicate. It was a sad case, about trying to save a disturbed young man’s life.

  AM: I believe you were praised for your ‘unrelenting and tenacious’ pursuit.

  VJ: Interpol told the father that there had been a withdrawal of cash at one of the Market Street cash-points. The family sent me three photographs. He looked like every other young man in Cambridge. Like your Not-Mary, he did not have any friends, did not use his mobile, was very unsociable, used cash so as to be untraceable and had an intellect bordering on genius.

  AM: At least you had a name.

  VJ: He was a ghost.

  How do you find a ghost? ‘It goes without saying,’ wrote Vince in his summary of the case, ‘that I systematically searched the city by car, bicycle and on foot.’ He became ‘totally immersed’.

  ‘I was of the view that I was the only person that was in full control of everything that was happening, and other people didn’t understand and I would get angry and frustrated.’

  VJ: When I had rests I would speak with old police colleagues and serving members of the forces. I even sat down with my old pal George the Greek and asked the view of the man on the street. I wanted to be sure that I was covering every angle. The guy was deteriorating. It was like, ‘Christ, you’ve got X amount of days to save this guy’s life, because deterioration starts as soon as he stops taking his medication.’ I did my best to climb inside his head and began acting like him. My wife is pretty good about things, but I was driving round and round and I thought, ‘Goodness, what’s that smell?’ I hadn’t had a shower for three or four days, and I was smelling like him. Jacob was certainly no mug. He had refined his technique after each escape, leaving virtually no footprints and becoming the invisible man.

  AM: But you still found him within two weeks in a city of 120,000 people?

  VJ: Sometimes you have to become obsessed to get it sorted out, and I suppose I do have an obsessive streak.

  AM: What was your breakthrough?

  VJ: A book, as with your diarist. It was a book of astronomy.

  It is such a pleasure to see a lot come out of a little. For a moment I felt we were united: me and Not-Mary and Vince and Jacob, all taking delight in finding something large hidden inside something small. For Vince, not even knowing the book title, just knowing what it was about, gave him the solution to the most complex investigation of his career (he calls the case ‘the great white shark in a pool of goldfish’). For me, in the minuscule handwriting of an anonymous, ill-tempered, dead old woman, I think, despite all my attempts to mock myself for being pompous and grandiose, that I have found something universal – a common mood that has not been explored before. For Not-Mary, ‘pleasure’ is the wrong word, but she is beset by the resonance of tiny things (her fear of being choked by particles of food; her huge ambition squashed into tiny letters; her hopes compared to ‘the sprinkled oats’ in the farmland next to Whitefield). For mad Jacob, out of equations on a page, the universe.

  AM: I don’t understand. How was the book important?

  VJ I rang Jacob’s mother and asked what was the last thing her son had been reading before he escaped from the asylum. She said it was about astronomy.

  AM: And why did that help?

  VJ: I went to the department of astronomy.

  AM: And?

  VJ: Waited.

  After several days, Jacob showed up at the faculty. He was emaciated, ‘bedraggled’ and ‘close to death’. There followed chases, secret videoing, calls to Belgian psychiatrists, international cooperation between Cambridge and European police forces, a stint for Jacob in the city mental hospital, and finally, with Vince sitting alongside Jacob in the back of an ambulance, entertaining him with a photograph album showing Jacob’s favourite holiday places, a drive back to the asylum in Belgium.

  It wasn’t just his tenacity that won Vince his award, it was his psychological insight and his kindness.

  In the same year that Vince cracked this complex missing persons case, he made local headlines by escaping across the desert from Libya at the start of the civil war against Colonel Gaddafi.

  A week before our meeting I had sent Vince a selection of photocopies from Not-Mary’s diaries. One included the following entry, made in 1974, when Not-Mary was thirty-five:

  Still loving Dame Harriette extremely – wish I could love her less. Seem to have such a crush on her, I feel quite ashamed of myself. And it affects me physically most. My anguish would be awful if I lost her in any way, in fact. Of course worry about my health and ability to cope, in view of being in charge of something so precious. My little love, my little jewel, my little flower. She is 99.

  ‘I did a bit of preliminary research for you before I came out this morning,’ said Vince, extracting some photocopies from a stockbroker’s briefcase that he’d been keeping hidden beside his chair legs. The top sheet, which he quickly turned over, was a photograph of me. Next, something that looked a little like a bank statement – he turned that over hurriedly too – then picked out the extract about Laura’s ‘crush’ on Dame Harriette, above.

  VJ: This person, ‘Dame Harriette’ (tapping the name).

  AM: I don’t know who that is.

  VJ: She’s a chick.

  AM: Not-Mary clearly thinks so.

  VJ: Her name is Chick. Dame Harriette Chick. One of seven sisters. Born in 1875, died 1977. A leading nutritionist. Her papers are in the Wellcome Library in London.

  Dame Harriette Chick and her six sisters. Harriette is at the centre, in the white hat. She went on to become one of the leading microbiologists of her time, instrumental in finding a cure for rickets. Portrait photographs in her early career show a pugnacious young woman wearing a collar and tie, with frizzy hair gathered at the sides in flat bunches, about the size of oven mitts. Her attractive, strong head looks like someone taking a loaf of bread out of the range.

  VJ: Does this reference back to the severed pages you mention?

  AM: How would that be possible? That book was written in 1952, when Not-Mary was thirteen. The entry about Dame Harriette is a quarter of a century later.

  VJ: (Tilting his head as if no combination of events is too peculiar for this world.) Perhaps she uses an old book. Hides her thoughts there? Now she wants to eradicate that particular part of her life. I’ve had cases like that. She wouldn’t want her diaries contaminated by this person. A lot of people, to save their sanity, will take out every reference to that person. Take it out of your life, then it won’t hurt you. I can’t imagine any other reason why a person wants to cut out huge pieces of text when, at that stage, she still has aspirations of being published.

  Vince picked up another photocopy I’d sent him, and compared the early large handwriting with the late cramped script. ‘Did you buy a finite number of books, all at the start?’ he asked, addressing not me, but Not-Mary. For the next few minutes as he studied the pages he muddled his tenses and subjects as though he were testing combinations on a safe to find a way in – sometimes he spoke as Not-Mary; sometimes to her; sometimes he addressed, a little coldly, me or himself. ‘Maybe she knew something about herself. It seems strange to start writing in one size and then going to a size that is about half. She is running out of space, time, the end is coming.

  Only a certain amount of time left, then she will try and get everything in those exercise books and hence write small. There isn’t any tremor in this writing. It’s very precise … punctuation better than in the earlier books … almost too small. Why is it too small? She’s obviously got very good eyesight. Yes … she acknowledges to herself that she isn’t going to get published and so why bother? Why make it legible? No, make it as small as my own p
rivate life. In the end, the diaries are the only place she has left …’

  I was interested in Vince’s psychological metaphors of enclosure and location. ‘I’s diary is the emblem of her oppressive life, her handwriting the measure of her sense of unimportance; as she writes in her pages, so she sits, diminished, a frightened and lonely middle-aged woman in her room. When Vince was chasing Jacob, he interpreted the man’s behaviour in a similar way. It turned out there was a good reason why Vince hadn’t been able to find Jacob on the streets or in any of the hostels or hotels around the city. After spotting him in the astronomy department, he followed him secretly, ‘dodging behind trees to keep up’.

  VJ: I was obviously expecting Jacob to lead me to a guest house or student digs, and was quite excited because I had him in my sights and it was dark. He walked to where I had parked my car and – I wasn’t expecting this at all – he jumped into a bloody hire car. I had to dive over the bonnet out of sight and into my car. I had to drive over a grassy bank, smack down on the other side, to follow him. He came to a stop in Storey’s Way, got out, took his laptop out of the back, then got back into the car and started studying. The car was his classroom. His face was illuminated by the glow of his laptop. Then he got into a sleeping bag and the car was his hotel. In his mind, the car was these different rooms.

  Hello, I don’t like the look of this …

  During the time Vince was telling me about Jacob he had been glancing through the photocopies I’d sent him of the severed notebook, and was now studying the drawing of the psychotic woman (see p.100).

  VJ: There’s something wrong here. The eyes of the baby: it looks like an alien. That baby is not human-looking. It’s almost like the mother is cross. Why is the mother angry? The mouth is like these modern-day dollybirds with the pouting look. It doesn’t go with the cross expression. No, that is not a pleasant face … I love my mother, but because Mum is angry with me, I have got to have relationships with older women? When she refers to her health in that note about Dame Harriette, maybe she’s referring to her mental health. You are looking at a woman in her mid-thirties, perhaps mentally unwell and has a crush on her employer who is ninety-nine who died three years later … How did she die? Maybe we do have a crime?