by Mark Lawson
As he went to pass her, she blocked him and kissed him on the chest, noticing the bath-salt smell of cleaned clothes.
‘You hear about these … the police are drama queens … it’s probably …’
He was out of the room before she could say nothing.
Emma knew people who were suddenly forced to wipe a birthday or wedding anniversary from the calendar because the day had become twinned with bereavement or catastrophe, and she imagined this happening to Ned who, however long he lived beyond sixty, would be unable to celebrate again a date overshadowed by the death of one of his daughters, as she now assumed the revelation would be, although her pessimism was partly a mental tactic, learned from Ned, in which predicting the worst was insurance against it ever occurring. She had always thought that, if they had been her daughters, she would have been too superstitious to give them such tragically weighted names as Ophelia and Cordelia.
Ophelia, she knew, had drowned. She was less clear on King Lear, never sure exactly which date to fear for Dee or, tending to mix up Edmund and Edgar, for Ned.
Seemingly satisfied by the movement at the window that some response would be forthcoming, the callers had stopped ringing the doorbell for the last few minutes. But, in the early morning quiet, their buzzer would have been audible in the other flats. The neighbours – and the houses around, woken by the revving engines and slamming doors – would soon be peering out, just as Emma and Ned had done when the former cabinet minister who lived in the square was doorstepped for several mornings over his expenses claims.
Fear made her need to pee again. The wet mess on the floor and cistern told her that Ned had been affected in the same way. She cleaned up without complaint; a lesson in priorities. Through the open door of the bathroom came the sounds of scraping and rattling as Ned deactivated the array of bolts and dead-locks that protected these wealthy residents of Kensington, as law-abiding citizens, from burglars, journalists and other potential intruders.
Ned had left the door on the latch. Emma pushed it and went out onto the landing. She could hear the retired teacher in D moving around, doubtless looking for paper to write a letter about being woken by the noise.
Feeling too exposed to face the police with only a post-coital wrap thrown round her, Emma stood on the stairs, just before the bend, listening, like a child in a movie about divorce.
‘Good morning, sir,’ she heard a deep male voice, poshed-up Cockney, say.
‘Can you just tell me what’s happened, please?’ Ned pleaded, throaty, cold.
‘Are you Edmund Horatio Marriott … ?’
Because they had never married, her only exposure to his full name had been from mortgage forms and their will.
‘Please just …’ Ned asked.
‘He nodded,’ the voice of a youngish woman said.
‘Professionally known as Ned Marriott?’
‘Look. What … ?’
‘He nodded again, Guv.’
‘Mr Marriott, I am Detective Inspector Richard Dent of the Metropolitan Police’s Sexual Offences Investigation Unit. And this is my colleague DS Heather Walters.’
Oh my God, Emma thought: one of the girls has been raped. She would go to the station with him.
‘Edmund Horatio Marriott,’ the male policeman began, in the tones of slow solemnity familiar from TV cop series. ‘I am arresting you on suspicion of a sexual offence.’
The Traill Inquiry
Emeritus Professor Padraig Allison was an energetic Ulsterman who had been recruited to UME from the University of Belfast in the late 1960s on the strength of a reputation created by a revelatory biography of de Valera. Allison had dissipated this early promise through a diligent tasting of all available malts and the easy temptation of becoming a television rent-a-gob on the Troubles.
By the Millennium, the professor’s drinking and ubiquitous presence in documentaries about the prospect of peace in Northern Ireland began to concern the Dean at a time when every member of staff was under pressure to prove value for money. Allison’s high visibility on TV usefully accumulated the impact points that had been introduced as a measure of academic performance, but, in teaching situations, both his presences and absences caused different problems and, in 2001, he was persuaded to take his pension, an Emeritus professorship and an office in which to work on his long-delayed ‘big book’ on Ireland, while giving occasional lectures on Bloody Sunday or the hunger strikes. His successor as head of department was Ellie Remgard, a star of the fashionable new discipline of post-imperial independence and conflict resolution.
Then, arm-twisted, during Professor Remgard’s breast cancer treatment in 2012, into taking over her module on the peace process, Allison had been accused of forcing his hand between the legs and buttock cleft of a twenty-year-old female student as she stretched for a book he had asked her to retrieve from the top of the shelves in his office. Although (a fact that caused great discomfort to the university when it emerged during the trial) Allison had been barred from individual tuition of women after a series of complaints in the 1980s, it had been the misfortune of this second-year to arrive early and first for the seminar.
UME People (previously Human Resources and, before that, Personnel) had tried to resolve the case with an apology and Allison’s forced final retirement, but reports in the campus newspapers, Fume and Um … er, encouraged other current woman students to raise complaints of being made to feel uneasy by the teacher’s vocabulary and body-language in classes. A small story sold by the editor of Fume to a Sunday newspaper (You’re History, Girls Tell Grope Prof) caused two of the women involved in the hushed-up cases three decades earlier to go to the police with complaints of rape. During a six-day trial at Birmingham Crown Court, the prosecution alleged that Allison had operated a sort of droit de seigneur over female History undergraduates for several decades. Defence counsel argued that consensual sex between staff and students had been possible and even commonplace on campus at the time of the most serious cases, implying a lesser offence of abusing a position of power, but the judge’s summing up warned that counsel could not rewrite the charge sheet.
The jury of six women and five men (one male had been dismissed for trying to contact a plaintiff through Facebook) took eleven hours to find him guilty of one historic allegation of rape and six historic and one contemporary charges of sexual assault. The seventy-four-year-old Allison was given a six-year prison sentence.
The local Conservative MP argued in a speech that the campus had become a ‘taxpayer-funded sexual sewer’, and multiple compensation claims were received from victims for failure of duty of care. As a result, the Dean (now re-titled the Executive Dean, as part of the reorganization of the institution on corporate lines) and the Director of History submitted to a series of press conferences and media interviews in which they resorted frequently to what, Professor Ned Marriott told TV producers during a break from filming, were the institution’s two default responses when caught in grievous error: ‘The University is learning hard lessons from this’ and ‘I can see why you would think that.’
More practically, UME removed Allison’s books from the Ireland 1916–93 section of the library and formulated rules of teacher conduct so strict that Tom Pimm, the faculty wag, suggested that it would be safest in future to lecture from behind the sort of protective screen used by the witnesses in the Allison trial. And, after a meeting with a delegation from the National Union of Students, Kevan Neades, Director of History, also set up an inquiry into the ‘conduct and culture of staff in the History department (now Directorate), both retrospectively and contemporaneously’.
Neades asked (‘tasked’, as his e-mail to staff put it) Dr Andrea Traill, an Urban Development specialist in the Geography department, to lead the investigation (UME guidelines now advised that potentially disciplinary inquiries should be conducted by an outsider).
On the top floor of the abandoned Faith (previously Theology) faculty, Traill set up an office, in which, over the course of several
weeks, she spoke to staff and students who had either offered themselves in response to a global e-mail announcing the investigation or, in some cases, were summoned to her now godless premises, presumably as a result of being mentioned in someone else’s evidence. All had been warned not to discuss their evidence with anyone else, although Tom felt safe talking to Ned, who said that he had been in the room for less than ten minutes under questioning that seemed friendly enough.
Corinthians
Ned noticed, with the sharpened senses crises trigger, that the rising sun had cast on the floor a bright half-moon reflection of the door’s curved top panel. As the charge was read, he briefly feared he would vomit over the officers. An instant of relief that his daughters were safe was crushed by an understanding of the trouble he was in.
‘Could we talk about this upstairs?’ he managed to say. It was a hopeless instinct, from concern about prying neighbours and lurking photographers, to keep the ignominy hidden for a few more moments.
‘Under certain conditions, yes.’
He led the detectives up. Just before they turned the curve in the stairway, he heard a whimpering he knew was Emma and now they found her standing in front of the flat’s open door, hugging herself in a gesture that lifted her sarong and exposed her thighs and higher. Ned looked away and sensed that Dent had just made the same swivel.
Inside, Emma reached round the bedroom door and found her dressing gown. The senior detective repeated that Edmund Horatio Marriott was being arrested under suspicion of sexual assault. He need not be handcuffed at this stage if he agreed to accompany them to the police station selected for interrogation and as long as he showed no sign of resistance or flight. He could request that a solicitor of his own choice be present during the questioning, or representation could be arranged for him. Did he understand?
‘I’ve just got up,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose I’d be allowed to shower, shave and change?’
He heard the pitch of wryly reasonable educated politeness that he employed with traffic wardens.
The cops moved to a corner of the corridor and muttered at each other.
‘We’re allowing that,’ the male detective said, turning round. ‘But I’m afraid you’ll have to keep the bathroom door open. At least more than half ajar. Due to your gender, I will be the one standing outside.’
The sentinel, he assumed, would listen for noises suggestive of suicide or escape through a window, while also watching him pissing or shitting in case he tried surreptitiously to flush away his VIP key-card to a boys’ home.
‘DS Walters,’ explained the detective, ‘will stay with your wife, is it?’ Rather than explain their status, Ned nodded. ‘Are there any other people in the house?’
‘No, we have a son but he’s at our …’
His intended ending of the sentence – at our main house with the nanny – would probably guarantee, in these inequalityconscious times, execution without trial.
‘He’s staying with someone,’ Ned revised his explanation.
‘Which room would you like to be in, madam?’ the female officer asked.
Emma gestured towards the main bedroom. She was pale and shaking. Ned pulled her towards him. Their escorts didn’t intervene but, like boxing referees, scrutinized the clinch from side on, alert for words or items being exchanged.
‘It’s all gone mad since Savile,’ he whispered. ‘I haven’t done anything.’
‘Ring me as soon as …’
Sobbing into the usefully absorbent shoulder of his running shirt, she was unable to complete the sentence.
Ned turned towards the man and asked quietly: ‘Where should my solicitor come to?’
‘We’re taking …’ The detective’s voice was loud and Ned gestured at the floor and ceiling with a finger he then put to his lips. Though visibly irritated at the admonition, the DI breathspoke: ‘We’re taking you to Paddington Green, tell him.’
‘Her.’
Ned relished the power of this second correction. He embraced Emma again and said gently: ‘Can you ring and tell Claire what’s happened and, er, Paddington Green?’
The station was familiar from news reports as the one at which terrorists, suspected terrorists, were questioned.
Emma’s head trembled a yes against his neck. He asked the woman: ‘Do I need to bring anything?’
‘Just any medications you may need in the course of the day.’
He was cheered by the apparent confirmation that he would be back that night. The DS said, ‘Madam, show me where you want to go to make that call,’ and, when Ned eased Emma away from him, after a final squeeze of bewildered mutual support, she led the woman cop into the bedroom.
Ned pulled the bathroom door almost latched, but Dent pushed it until it filled only half the frame. Although his bowels were groaning with rich party food, now agitated by panic, he restricted himself to a quick piss, conscious of being watched. Washing his hands, he was startled, in the shaving mirror, to see his face as a plaster death-mask.
Moving behind the door, Ned pulled off his shorts and top, which had stuck slightly to his belly hair, and threw them backwards into the strip of light from the half-open door, like a satirical striptease.
Noticing, in the shower, that he was washing away peels of dried semen from his groin and stomach, Ned understood what the cops had been discussing downstairs; someone arrested at home might still be carrying evidence. But, unless the world had become even madder than recent events suggested, it could not have been Emma who reported him.
She was required to leave the bedroom, with her guard, before Ned could enter it to dress, hearing Dent’s breathing beyond the angled door. In the corridor, the DI checked the items in the small shoulder-bag that Ned had packed. Choosing a book for in-cell entertainment had been tricky. The Jeremy Thorpe biography that he was actually reading might be incriminating and so he chose the life of Roy Jenkins that was next on the pile by the bed.
Dent lifted out the book and shook the pages, then shuffled the packets of Atorvastatin, Ramipril, and baby aspirin with a rapidity that suggested he was familiar with the chemical support systems of late-middle-aged men. Finding the can of hairspray, he lifted it out and examined it for long enough to make Ned embarrassed of his vanity.
The detectives allowed the couple another policed cuddle in the hall. Ned noticed that Emma had put on the sky blue cashmere roll neck he had bought her for Christmas, even though it was too warm for this weather. He took it as a gesture of comfort and was touched. But, as he held her, the collar was already damp from crying.
‘This is all just rubbish,’ he whispered. ‘I love you.’
But she was too upset to reply.
‘Don’t ring the girls yet,’ he said. ‘It might still all blow over quite quickly. And obviously not Tobes.’
When the entry phone sizzled, Ned’s first thought was: the press. Already at home in someone else’s house, Walters answered and exchanged grunts and uh-huhs, then latched the door open again. A plump Asian man entered, leading in a group of younger people, who were carrying white boxes and bags.
Literate enough in TV cop shows to know what this meant, Ned thought of the stories of the Mafia sending hearses to the doors of people who weren’t dead yet; this was like the removers arriving when you hadn’t put your house on the market.
‘We have a warrant to search these premises,’ said Walters. ‘And others of interest.’
That new investigative ritual: the removal of the computers. In the way that penitents examine their souls for sin, the arrested now mentally checked their hard drive for stain. Ned could not immediately think of any files that could trigger suspicion.
A small woman in a blouse and skirt combo of dark and light blue – giving an effect somewhere between uniform and plain clothes – came and stood at the edge of the group. She was young or unlucky enough still to have serious acne.
‘DC Pearson will stay with you while the search is done, Mrs Marriott,’ Dent said, again marr
ying them. ‘You okay with that?’
Emma mutely moved her head up and down, sending a wetdog-shake of tears into the air.
‘Stay here till I call you,’ Ned told her. ‘Maddy’s doing both pick-ups today, anyway?’
A shudder of Emma’s torso gave confirmation.
Leaving the house between the two detectives – what Americans called the ‘perp walk’ – Ned tried to look as if he had booked a minicab from a firm whose drivers worked in pairs. But there were no flashing snappers or gawking dog-walkers.
Dent drove, with Walters in the back seat beside Ned. He speculated that, if he had been a proper dangerous criminal, the roles would have been reversed or there would have been more officers. This felt like a genteel sort of arrest.
‘Okay,’ said the female detective. ‘I’ve got to do this now. Rules.’ She had taken a pair of cuffs from her pocket. ‘Even though we’ve seen you on the telly.’
She gave the final word a sardonic wobble. He was unsure if it was flattery or an attempt to put him down; he would mention it to Claire in case it indicated victimization.
He endured the cuffing by thinking of it as a sort of dental procedure, closing his eyes as he always did in Dr Rashid’s chair.
Each of them looked out of the window on their side. As they turned out of the square, Walters said, ‘So someone’s died?’
He turned to her. ‘What?’
Although he had read The Trial, they surely couldn’t just introduce a murder charge in this way.
‘All the flowers there.’
‘Oh. No, not recently. That’s where Freddie Mercury lived. People still lay flowers. Even more on his birthday, the anniversary.’
He was surprised by how normal his voice sounded; a benefit of the presenter’s experience in dissembling pressure.
‘Right, wow,’ the DS said. ‘That’s fame for you.’
He wasn’t sure if she was being sympathetic or belittling to him.
