Throw Me to the Wolves

by Patrick McGuinness

  He has developed a twitch; shakes his head every few seconds. He’s already protesting, denying, fending off imaginary accusations. As for real accusations, they’re starting up, too.

  Sleepless, he has bitten his fingernails and chewed his cuticles. His food is untouched, though he has drunk the water and the tea they’ve left him. The fatberg drilling has kept him awake, he says. If he has no complaints about how we’ve treated him, that’s because he doesn’t dare complain: he knows that Gary is about to arrive for what he calls ‘Round Two – the round without a ref’. I know Gary would never physically harm him, but Mr Wolphram doesn’t, and this is how Gary wants it. He has also left the Evening Post there for Mr Wolphram to read, and is now watching for a reaction behind the glass.

  Wolphram doesn’t move, except to sparrow-jerk his head sideways and chew his nails. His lips move. He practises his answers, tries out the questions. He’s dividing up, splitting off from himself: he asks a question, tries to reply, asks it again. He looks crazed. They’ve taken away his hat, his tie and his reading glasses and his eyes are wide open and staring. But there’s nothing to see except sweaty walls and a mirror, old tea and chipped Formica, so they skim around with nothing to fix on.

  One shot of him in the papers with those horror-film eyes and those pale, long-fingered hands in their black shirtsleeves, and the whole country will march here for the lynching. I can see them already, walking with torches and laying siege to us until we give him up. It’s like a Western, like life stripped down to a Western – a crowd, some hate, and a rope.

  He hasn’t asked for a lawyer, and this is because he still hopes he’ll be released. Released where? Into what? There’s no back. It’s like catching an animal, torching its habitat, then letting it go into the wasted nothing that’s left. Whether innocent or guilty, it’s all just a scorched aftermath for him now. You can tell that just by the graffiti on the walls around his house, the death threats in the comment sections below the newspaper articles.

  Lynne Forester has been clever. She got in ahead of all the nationals. She has the angles and the contacts. She’s persuading his neighbours to talk about how ‘weird’ he was, how they ‘always thought there was something off about him’, how he ‘looked at you strangely’.

  The way he looked at you – it was like he was trying to see through your clothes …

  He never looked at you when he spoke … eyes always avoiding you …

  Long fingers … that’s what I remember … suspiciously dirty fingernails …

  He was very smart and neat, long nails always suspiciously clean and manicured …

  Always at his window, watching …

  ‘We called him The Wolf’ – Tomorrow: ex-pupils come forward …

  Lynne will be selling versions of the story to the tabloids – in pieces, of course, to spin it out, the way the zookeeper feeds the tigers and the bears: in morsels, kilos of meat cut into strips and slung in pieces to be caught in the maw.

  We’ve had to give Lynne a ‘soft launch’. It’s where we promise to make one journalist our conduit for news, in exchange for them keeping the write-ups as close to our version as possible. They chose Mad Lynne because she’s local, ruthless and close. She’d have got there anyway. So we try to keep her on our side, though really there’s only one side she’s on.

  We’ve been told to work with her, and Deskfish has scheduled a visit. In fact, he’s the one who shows her in: first to his office where they speak and he nods and laughs anxiously at her jokes, and then into ours, where she sits at our conference table.

  I’ve never met Lynne. Gary has, and he hates her with the kind of cautious admiration we reserve for people who do bad things well.

  Firstly, I’m surprised by her – she isn’t the lowbrow purveyor of clichés she appears to be on the page. She speaks like someone who sees through what they do, who you will never wrongfoot, hurt or offend because whatever you say to them, whatever you say about them, they’ve said it to and about themselves long before you got there. Nor is she a slick media woman in a power-dress suit. She has spiky black hair, styled gothically; she wears white foundation and thick eyeliner that deepens her eyes, and her mouth is lipsticked in the shade of heavy red you find in stately home dining rooms. She looks like an eighties punk singer, feral but delicate. She’s all in black except for a cobalt mohair pullover, which, when she takes off her coat, gives her body a blue gas-flame shimmer.

  She must be a couple of years older than me. Like Gary she’s local, has the accent, but more varnished than his. In the time it takes me to parse it Lynne has come in, been shown across the room, and sat down in front of us. Gary has greeted her with some profanities and she hasn’t even noticed them, they are as bland to her now as how do you do?

  ‘I know what you think of me,’ she says. But she’s looking at Gary, because I don’t know what I think of Mad Lynne Forester. But already I know this: one thing she isn’t is mad.

  ‘How do you do it, Lynne?’ says Gary disgustedly. He points at the pile of headlines, some hers, some modelled on hers. He lifts the Evening Post and holds it away from him like a shitty nappy or a slice of fatberg. ‘You make it look so easy …’

  ‘Get me a cup of tea or coffee – don’t care which, can’t tell the difference any more – and I’ll let you in on some of my trade secrets.’

  Gary returns with tea and more disgust. But he is interested.

  ‘This is how it works:

  ‘You need information? You just ask. Usually you get it. People just want to be part of the story. You’re giving them a chance. The bystander. The distant cousin. The neighbour five doors down. The childhood friend who never suspected a thing … But for the right amount of cash … well, they can bloody well start suspecting retrospectively, can’t they? They’re always ready to talk. Oh – hang on … you need more than information? Innuendo? Something they don’t know and don’t think but you need them to say they do so you can print it? Ah well, that’s a bit different. Not that different, though.

  ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ she asks, mimicking the storyteller in a children’s bedtime programme, ‘Then I’ll begin:

  ‘First, take them to one of those caffs full of air-kissing milf and cappuccino-sipping yummy mummies, you know the type, mwa mwa, babyccino for the kids and some biscotti. Remember National Milk Bars? Loved them. All closed now. Now we’ve got national milf bars, smoothies and power shakes and soft-play areas and floor-jigsaws. The dads think they’re in a Tony Parsons novel, the mums think they’re the kind of women dads in Tony Parsons novels fantasise about.

  ‘A wine bar’s good, too, a gastropub, a craft beer place. Anywhere middle class basically. Somewhere with artisan breads, beers and beards. Main thing is to make them feel classy, because they’re about to go low, to scrape the bottom of all that’s decent. So you surround them with nice things – aspirational things. You got to make them feel like classy people, like it’s you forcing the money onto them. Expensive lunch. Hotels with chocolate on the pillows. Make them feel they’re important, that they’re starring in the film of themselves. If they want to get a bit conflicted, a bit tortured, let them: don’t cut them off too soon and flash the cash, because feeling a bit bad about what they’re doing is a way they tell themselves they’re good people. So take it slow. It’s like fishing. Don’t yank. Go with their movement and then take it over yourself.’

  ‘Here it comes,’ says Gary, ‘there’s always a fishing metaphor …’

  Lynne ignores him: ‘It’s the middle classes who’re the worst. The proles aren’t as greedy as you think.’

  ‘Don’t patronise me, Lynne. I’ll always despise what you do, but depending on what you’re going to say I might just – just – find it interesting.’

  ‘No pressure then … okay, I take them there. I’d size up the place, ’cos I know they’re the type to like a bit of retro, so long as they knew it was retro and not just old. Sounds better, doesn’t it, nicer label? It’s all in the w
ords. Listen: There’s an old café on the corner, let’s go there. And: There’s this really great retro coffee bar, let’s pop in there. Cappuccino or milky coffee?

  ‘First you let them pretend they’re not doing it for the money. They need that, it loosens them up. We all fool ourselves anyway, but sometimes we need a bit of extra help. You know, as the man said, Let us deceive ourselves together. That’s Jacques Lacan by the way … Anyway, they’re already wealthy, they’re doing fine. Then you go for it, because, well, you know: having money is just another way of wanting it.’

  ‘Deep …’ says Gary sourly. But this is the kind of thing he says. He recognises it as his own Garified idiom, and he doesn’t like it coming from someone else.

  ‘Five minutes, you give them – then you take out the cheque book and whack it on the counter.’ She slaps her hand on the table. ‘They jump, like they’ve been shot. Exclusive, you say, and offer them a price. No one uses chequebooks these days, but I do because it’s a great prop: they see it hit the table and watch you fill it out by hand. Bank transfers don’t feel real, and pure cash looks dirty. Chequebook? A bit archaic, old-school, sure, but it’s just right.’

  She pauses. Looks at us. We say what she wants us to say: ‘Go on.’

  ‘Then sit back and watch them computing the cash, seeing the zeros filling out their bank statements – funny thing with zeros: the more nothings there are, the more cash there is – and they’re off. For some it’s a holiday, for others it’s a conservatory, an extension, some school fees or a nudge closer to early retirement … I’ve seen them all, gone through the whole gamut: from the life-changing amount of money to the merely weekend-improving. But they’ve all got one thing in common.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asks Gary too quickly. He’s fascinated. She has him on her hook.

  ‘You’re not going to like it …’ she says teasingly, tilting her head to the side, ‘I find these people not because they’re evil or weak or stupid or plain greedy – doesn’t matter if they’re rich or poor or in-between … I find them because they’re there. Because they’re everywhere.’

  Gary is silent. Furious, too. And depressed. Lynne is speaking a language he thought he’d invented.

  She goes on:

  ‘But listen: there’s one mental operation they make, though, and it’s this: they get angry with the person they’re about to shaft and lie about and fuck over – angry because that person’s putting them in that position, they’re the ones forcing them to shaft them, fuck them over and lie. Disgusting, they think. The anger flashes in their eyes: How dare that bastard/bitch put me – me! – their friend, in the position of betraying them? Then away they go. Spilling it out.

  ‘It’s always the same. I just wait and let them go through the objections, ticking them off in their heads like a kid with OCD checking all the switches before going to bed. Then …’ she shapes her fingers into a gun, a starting pistol, ‘Bang! They’re off. Hard to stop them after that. It’s like the money is compensation to them, compensation for being turned into liars … the chequebook bandage over their wounded pride.’

  ‘You don’t give a shit about people’s lives.’

  ‘They start with the truth, and I play along, pretending that’s what I want and they’re pretending that’s all they want to tell me … Then we move into the kind of speculation based on truth that’s a step in the right direction (I never actually heard him/her say that but …) and then the outright lie. Because when you’re taking money, truth and lies aren’t opposites, they’re just points on a continuum … as far or as close to each other as you want to make them.’

  ‘That’s a fucking atrocious philosophy.’

  ‘It’s not a philosophy, Gary,’ replies Lynne with seminar-room triumphalism, ‘because philosophy is just stuff you have theories about but can’t prove. This is stuff you can prove so totally you don’t even need the theory. What’s the point in trying to prove it?’

  She gets up to leave. But first, she reaches into her bag. She pulls out this afternoon’s edition of the Evening Post.

  First, she has published a picture of Mr Wolphram, befuddled and answering the question – badly – that got him into this mess. He stood outside his house and said he’d seen her and a friend leave. But he’s lying or he’s confused. This is where it all started.

  Lynne has put the video on the Post’s website. It’s already on YouTube. Three thousand views since last night. Her article also contains four stills from the film, chosen for drama and menace. Wolphram in front of the cameras with his book bag, giving a word-perfect but chronologically incoherent comment on his neighbour’s disappearance. Practised liar or just a practised speaker getting something wrong?

  His face seems to explode a little behind the eyes each time a camera flash catches it, like a horror-film house in the obligatory lightning storm.

  A detail from the main image has a picture to itself, inset underneath, the way art catalogues scope in on particular squares of the canvas: thin white hands and long nails (guitarist’s nails, but who cares? From now on they’re pervert-fingers), all the more visibly sinister for the shortness of the jacket sleeves and the way he defensively touches the brim of his hat. The thin wrists. Fat black hairs on the backs of the hands. He has the damp, grey flesh of fish in a freezer. The eyes of an eel. They’ve photoshopped out the street, the houses, anything that might give him context and normality, and replaced it with a black silhouette of the school buildings so he looks like a ghoul in a cheap horror film.

  He’s been Boris Karloffed, says Gary.

  He says he saw Zalie leave the house with two friends the night before last, but this is impossible since she’s been missing four days now and dead for only a little less than that. He can’t make the chronologies meet, the before and the after; the two broken bits of time don’t match.

  And yet, I don’t think he is lying. Lying is to push a large thing through a small hole in the language, and he’s not doing that. It is more that he’s caught up in the momentum of his misremembering. If he goes back on what he told us, we will ask him why he told us things that were untrue; if he goes forward with the untruths they will unspool and entangle him and we will catch him out. He can only try to stay still, but no one can stay still in a police station. Not with Gary standing over them, the press turning up the volume of their innuendo, and Deskfish/Ironside/Unmanned being hassled by his superiors for a result before New Year. Ideally before Christmas. The man with a gun to my head has a gun to his head, and so on in an endless recession of barrels at temples. The country – the nation as the BBC now calls it at every opportunity – needs a resolution before the presents hit the floor under the Christmas tree, before the choir of Westminster Abbey clear their throats, before the Queen’s Christmas message.

  ‘He could be mistaken,’ I tell Gary, ‘it’s stressful up there in front of the cameras.’

  ‘He could also be lying,’ says Gary. ‘How many times have we seen it? UTP, remember? We learned that in college, Prof. Classic UTP. Man, poor distraught man, appeals for missing wife last seen heading to airport or station. Public appeal, TV face, flowers outside and B-i-i-i-i-i-g Sympathy. Hankies. Community pulls together to offer support. Oh, but hang on, what’s all this? Husband’s killed her. Weeping, broken, my-life-will-never-be-the-same husband. Yeah, that one. The very same. The one who helps in the searches and made an emotional appeal to the public … She never left, never took that plane to Alicante. She never went off to Sussex to get a bit of time to herself. Never went on that City Break to recharge her batteries. She’s Under The Patio.’

  Gary is right. All the statistics say so. UTP: Usually The Partner. Gary’s version, Under The Patio, is essentially the same, but it’s been Garified, and what it’s lost in academic precision it’s gained in immediacy. That’s what Garification does.

  ‘He’s not the husband, though, is he? He’s not anyone’s partner either, let alone hers.’

  ‘He’s the neighbour, Prof. It’s
his patio. Figuratively speaking. We know he went in – he told us. We know he’s lying about when he last saw her. They were never more than a few metres away from each other. He could hear her toilet flushing, he could hear when she went in and out. Maybe that’s not all he heard …’

  I look down at the desk and fiddle with an old lanyard left over from a training day the Drone sent us on in April: Workplace Synergies.

  ‘Look, Prof,’ says Gary: ‘in films and thrillers, when a guy wakes up in the morning and there’s a dead woman covered in blood beside him, it means he didn’t kill her. In real life when a guy wakes up and there’s a dead woman covered in blood beside him it means he killed her.’

  Gary is right. The whole detective-thriller-police-procedural genre, with its twists-in-the-tales and courtroom exonerations … that’s just a place in the culture where we’ve put the world’s missing complexity.

  So we clocked Mr Wolphram, as did the shrinks and the speech analysts and the body-language specialists, and we brought him in.

  Mr Wolphram said he knew her ‘a little’, that he helped her put the bins out, gave her lifts. Then he says, defensively, puzzlingly, that he has never had any trouble with her, though ‘we weren’t friends; no, one couldn’t say that’. He simply means they didn’t know each other, but he puts it in such a way as to suggest that they got on badly. Motive? Maybe it is, but why did they get on badly? What’s the motive for the motive?

  He has nothing more to say but, nervously, he keeps adding until it becomes a confusion of detail, an impasto of unnecessary information. ‘All trees and no wood,’ says Gary as we replay the tapes later. But the police shrinks agree there’s something there. The liar always over-answers.

  ‘He might be guilty of something,’ I say, ‘just not this.’ They ignore me.

  One thing at a time: this thing, now.

  I am not even sure he is the same person we interviewed yesterday: session one, he was helpful, yes, but contorted, indirect and – how can I say it? – twisty in his answers; always replying at an angle – not lying as such, more parallel answering. Politicians can get away with it – they do it all the time, deny things they were never accused of to stop us looking where we should – but not suspects. Session two: he was sly and almost mocking us with the childhood and personal life stuff; mocking our own obviousness, like we were all small-screen Daves and he was analysing us;