Throw Me to the Wolves

by Patrick McGuinness

  A Broken Herat

  The forensic reports come back and tell us everything we knew, only more of it. It’s facts, but not facts that will help us: she had been in Mr Wolphram’s car, he has been in her hallway. She had, he has. It’s hair, mostly, the odd print; no skin, no blood, no signs of violence or sex. Her hair and some scalp grease on the wall of her hallway consistent with her being pushed up against it. There are other traces in both places, other people, but we don’t know whose. We’ve catalogued them while we wait for matches. Gary wants to test everyone on the street, but Deskfish says why bother? We have our man, don’t we?

  She was hit once, very hard, in the throat, and again at the temple where presumably she turned away. Then she was strangled. So far as we can tell, the strangling took place in one action, one consistent pressure, uninterrupted by her fighting back or the murderer’s own hesitation. Most stranglings have the reprise marks, where the killer loses his grip (always his – despite the new seminar on gender-neutral language in report writing), and starts again somewhere different, a little higher or lower up, invisible to him but clear to pathologists, who can see the fatal pressure line and then one or two above or below it.

  You learn a lot about time by studying bruising. Bruising is a study in time, in how the flesh remembers.

  There’s not much you can tell from Zalie’s results, except that the murderer was strong, and that, however hard she fought back, his grip didn’t fluctuate and he didn’t hesitate or change position. It wasn’t quick either. Also, the pressure has been applied downwards, not upwards or level; this means he was taller than her.

  Mr Wolphram is taller, but is he tall enough? We have measured his hands, too. He asked why, but he knew why.

  We’ve been told to concentrate on Mr Wolphram, so there’s no urgency about the neighbours. We’ll get to them eventually, but Deskfish has ordered us to focus on Mr Wolphram as prime suspect and on any possible witnesses to corroborate. The door-to-dooring has thinned out, and the CCTV footage that’s coming in is mostly useless. Later, we will have the family and her boyfriend in for a televised appeal. There will also be a police reconstruction of Zalie’s last known movements – her walk back from the pub, via the supermarket, and back to her flat. I hope I am taken off the case for long enough to miss those, but no longer. They will replay her last hours: the walk across the bridge to the Harcourt Arms where she had two drinks with her friends, her walk back, her stop in the supermarket to buy the ‘Dine in for Two Meal’ she never opened and which sat in the bag she left on the dining table, and is now being checked for prints in the lab.

  They’ve found a WPC from a neighbouring force who matches her in size and build, and they’ve been out to buy the nearest clothes they could find to what she wore that night: grey bobble hat with a fake-fur pompom, green knee-length coat, jeans and white trainers.

  Her computer records are in. They are more interesting than Mr Wolphram’s. They show three searches for ‘Stalking’ and one for ‘Peeping Tom’. She spent only a few minutes on each site, and she didn’t click very widely around them: one is the police site which gives generic information about online safety, caller ID and blocking, and a local women’s safety group; the other is the national helpline website. The last search was on 29 November, three weeks before she died. It looks like what we call a ‘curiosity search’ rather than a ‘help search’. Still, I’ll follow it up. The CCTV at both ends of the bridge and briefly outside the supermarket are all we have. We see her walking fast, unfollowed, over the bridge and then back, in and out of the shop. Apart from that, it’s all just the residences, neighbourhood watch stickers, the high-end cars and the off-street parking of well-heeled suburbia.

  I have taken the walk myself, remade her steps, as if the streets, the pavements, the air itself, might contain traces of what happened. When we ‘retrace’, as the saying goes, her steps, we think we may rewind them, too, and find the moment when, by a different turn, a different street, a different December darkness, she might still be here, doing what she should have been doing: phoning her parents, readying herself for her boyfriend’s return, getting the Christmas food in. Setting up her ‘Out of Office’ email. On Castle Street, halfway between the bridge and her flat, there is some new graffiti. It’s opposite the shop where she bought her last uneaten, unopened meal, and the CCTV is clear on that at least: she walks past number 44, with its tall stone wall and long garden leading to a three-storey Georgian house, two 4×4s parked on the gravel. As she walks those ten or so recorded yards, the wall is bare. But by the next morning, so the CCTV tells us, it has been graffiti’d with huge letters: SALLY YOU BROKE MY HERAT. We don’t know exactly when – the CCTV goes off between midnight and 6 a.m. – but at 11 p.m. it is not there, and by 6 a.m. it is.

  ‘Must have been in a right state,’ says Gary, ‘so upset he can’t even spell. Bet he didn’t go to your school, Prof.’

  ‘Grief is like that, Gary,’ I tell him, ‘it makes a jumble of our words right there where we feel them.’

  ‘No shit, Prof—’ he replies sarcastically, ‘I’m just a yob who’s a stranger to emotions.’

  Later we will have to visit number 44 Castle Street and speak to Sally, breaker of herats, because if her jilted boyfriend was in the area spray-canning his muddled grief, he may have seen something.

  I drive back to the house where Zalie lived, this time to look outside and not in.

  Danny and Ander

  Because they’re in the top set for English they have Mr Wolphram on his home territory. Some teachers, the senior ones, don’t change classrooms. Their classrooms are their HQ, as personal as their bedrooms – maybe more personal in the case of people like Morbender and the Doc. They put up their own decorations and posters and the rooms have their own auras. Mr Wolphram has cinema posters: Quadrophenia, Blow-Up, Last Year in Marienbad and that one Ander can’t remember the name of where death plays chess with a knight. There are poster-poems and portraits of writers, and posters from art exhibitions in foreign galleries and concerts. There’s a framed poster advertising The Who playing at Knebworth. It’s signed, but so approximately there’s no way of telling who by.

  There’s a painting, by Caravaggio, of the beheading of John the Baptist. Ander keeps looking at it, at the limbs of both beheader and beheaded in the balmy spotlight of the picture’s centre, as the darkness in the background slowly gives up its detail: the distempered wall and the barred window where two prisoners watch the scene. Another thing he notices: the dying man has his left arm pushed up at an angle, the elbow pointing up; the man killing has his right arm up at the same angle, the elbow held in the same way. There is blood on the flagstones, but less than you’d think, and the executioner’s arm is tensed to hold down the Baptist’s head, which is already severed. Or is he picking it up, now that the job is done? Wolphram told them that, when the painting was restored, Caravaggio’s signature was found written in the blood. They can’t see that from the poster, but it’s exciting to think that even a four-hundred-year-old painting is still alive enough to change. The sword lies on the ground, its tip catching some of the painting’s sparse light. It’s silver, while the rest of the light – on the skin, the faces, the dish which a bending woman holds out for the head – is all variations of gold. What is the detail Ander most thinks about? It is the horrified woman looking on, holding her head with both hands, as if it might fall, or to check, thinks Ander, that it’s still attached, still where it should be and not on the floor or in a golden bowl. Ander has read somewhere that the head is heavy, much heavier than you’d expect, given that it’s mostly mush and a bit of bone to give it shape, to hold it all in. The skull is really just a dreamcatcher made of bone.

  Why’s it heavy? He knows the head is heavy from all the time he spends looking over the balustrade of the bridge. The pull of it. It’s ridiculous, he knows, and totally unscientific, but he thinks it’s just because it’s where everything we call ourselves happens and where most of it stays.
Everything has its own weight, its own heft, thinks Ander, and the head is the heaviest because it’s where we keep everything, and everything must weigh something.

  Mr Wolphram’s room is like the inside of someone’s head. Not just someone, but a particular person. Ander imagines that the inside of Wolphram’s head is like this classroom: stuff stored in draws and cabinets, messy in some parts, tidy in others, some things getting used all the time, others packed away and forgotten about but always there – quietly and always still there. And just because there’s stuff in the bin, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

  Mr Wolphram is the only teacher whose shelves contain books that aren’t on the syllabus, and he lends them to boys if they sign them out of his little blue ledger. Ander hasn’t borrowed any yet and is disappointed not to have been asked if he wants one. He’s seen a few he likes the look of, the titles at any rate. Vile Bodies is one, what’s not to like there? Troubles is another. He has his eye on Corruption and Other Stories, too. But he hasn’t dug for the courage to ask for them. The thought that there might be some sex, just a little, even if it is wrapped up in long words, aerates his mind and arouses his body. Mens sana and all that, but in reverse – that’s what he hopes. Danny has already borrowed three books, because Danny asks and, anyway, Danny is good at English, the best of any of them, and has a confidence the others don’t.

  A few of the teachers are kind, in a distracted, erratic way. One or two are focused and professional, but they are the ones who don’t stay on beyond school hours. They have lives of their own, children and wives or husbands, and homes that are not flats or bedsits in the school grounds. Chapelton’s only two women teachers, Mrs Pizzi in Art and Mrs Mason in French, are treated like exotics by the boys, and like a different species by most of the male teachers. Ander notices the hormonal fizz they cause, not just among the adolescents but among their grown-up colleagues. The miasma of frustrated sex, innuendo and masturbatory sulking follows them around like a theme tune in a film. They have their arses looked at and sighed about, their cleavages investigated, their eyes avoided or held too long. The men raise their eyebrows conspiratorially at the boys when the women leave the room and make comments about their clothes and shoes. Sometimes they ask the boys outright what they think of their legs or tits, or what they might be like in bed, whether they got any last night. When the women are there they snigger at the universal in-joke of being male. The boys pick it all up, learn it all, until that mix of sexual threat and sexual fear fills up the classrooms where Mrs Pizzi and Mrs Mason have to teach. They must be tough, thinks Ander. He’s glad they’re tough, because he likes them and doesn’t want them to be unhappy or humiliated. But then he thinks: why should they? Why should they be tough all the time?

  Ander has a head start in French, so Mrs Mason likes him, and he can paint and draw, so Mrs Pizzi spends more time on his efforts – a still-life of a pineapple, a watercolour of a sunset he’s never seen but thinks should definitely exist – than on other people’s. Mrs Pizzi is a potter, and Ander enjoys the lessons when she shows them how to mould the clay and turn it on the wheel. He loves the way the clay can be anything you like until it dries, until it’s fired. Then it stays and won’t be bent or twisted, only broken. It reminds him of the estuary clay he gazes at from the bridge and wants to scoop up with his hands and sculpt.

  But Mrs Mason and Mrs Pizzi are semi-detached from the school, and as they aren’t form teachers they have no spaces which are theirs. Before the end of the day, they go off and pick up their own kids from school, and Ander notices neither of them sends her children here, to Chapelton. He’s glad for them, being able to leave like that, but when he sees them with their children he’s a little jealous. Mrs Mason’s son, about whom she speaks but only in French, as part of the class not from personal confiding, is fifteen and in the local comprehensive, where he has a girlfriend and is getting ready for his O-levels. Ander would trade places with him, even with the O-levels. He’d sit through the exams just to have Mrs Mason to come back to in the afternoon. Since he can’t imagine sex with her, he has so little to go on and his anatomical knowledge is piecemeal – he knows all the bits but can’t place them together in ways that make sense – he imagines instead what her house must be like. That already feels too intimate, too intrusive. He’s a burglar with his mind but he just wants to look. Maybe to touch if he can. He thinks he’s the only one to do this, to piece the world together from scraps of knowledge, overheard things, fragments of the glimpsed, a body that doesn’t obey the mind and a mind that doesn’t want the body to obey it anyway.

  One day, after French, when no one is looking, he runs his mouth around the rim of the cup she drank her tea from; another time, he put his cheek to the seat of her chair, still warm from her. He doesn’t know if it is scraps of motherhood he’s after or scraps of sex.

  One or two of the teachers are in more pain than the boys. More shy, more delicate, certainly more sensitive, a few of them last just a term or two and then disappear. Some are gone in one go, like Mr Willis, the pudgy, sad, gentle and extravagantly bald geography teacher: ‘One big Nagasaki of the head’, Danny called it. Ron Willis turned up one day with no shoes or shirt and smashed up the classroom, put his hand through the window and twisted it until the skin of his arm opened like an envelope, then cried at his desk until an ambulance stretchered him away.

  Other teachers seem to wear away at the edges: they start to stoop, their voices get quieter, they let the insults go, the late work, the no-shows; they miss classes, the supply teacher comes in more often than they do, and then suddenly their names on the noticeboard or mentioned in assembly are the most solid things about them.

  They like the young English teacher Mr Lawnder, but he is too delicate for teaching. He is gentle and distracted, his voice is soft and he hesitates, takes time to think before he answers their questions. Most of them have never seen that before and take it as weakness. Lawnder gives off a faint woundedness. He has a way of looking at the ground when what he loves isn’t appreciated that ignites your pity and makes you want to take him somewhere safe. He is freshly out of university and he seems always absorbed in his imaginary life, the life beside this one where he is an acclaimed poet among sensitive readers. He lasted two terms, but they were good terms, and some of the boys, Ander and Danny among them, miss him still. He was less strict that Mr Wolphram, and there was more scope for wandering off the syllabus. But Mr Wolphram liked him, and the two teachers got on well and shared the group harmoniously. Sometimes they arranged trips to the cinema for Mr Wolphram’s Culture Club, or a visit to the National Gallery in London. You saw them chatting in the corridor sometimes, laughing at some learnèd jokes or literary puns, or enthusing about books and recommending things to each other. Mr Wolphram once called Mr Lawnder free range, like he was a chicken or a pig or something, in front of the class, and Mr Lawnder beamed because he knew it was a compliment. But he didn’t have Mr Wolphram’s steel, Wolphram’s ability to be in the school but not, somehow, of it. The poems he read affected him – he blushed or went pale as he read, shook and sometimes wiped tears from the sides of his eyes. He wasn’t like Wolphram, who was so forensic it was like he was operating on the poem; with Lawnder it was as if the poem was part of him. He flinched when you said something stupid or thuggish. Wolphram just ignored you, let your stupidity hang in the air and accuse you.

  Lawnder takes the boys on tours of the zoo. He knows the architecture by heart, all the materials, the specifications, the time the various buildings took to erect. He is so innocent he actually uses erect and looks puzzled when the teenagers snigger. He loves the zoo, is always taking photographs of it. He thinks the animals spoil it by shitting everywhere and leaving bones and feathers and moultings lying around. ‘Probably thinks people spoil houses by living in them too,’ says McCloud, and he’s probably right. Lawnder hates to see the wheelbarrows full of dung and the art deco bins overflowing with crisp packets and soggy wrappers and chip-paper. />
  Mr Lawnder involved the boys in discussions and asked them their opinions and let them speak. Most boys didn’t like this because they thought his job was to tell them stuff, not ask them. So Mr Lawnder’s classes are often rowdy and mutinous, and there are rumours of complaints about him for lacking discipline, or any of those words Ander has learned to suspect and fear: authority, leadership, respect. Shit words, he thinks, in English, because now he has started to think in English, it’s easier, he doesn’t have to translate himself as he speaks, bastards’ words. He’s the one who’s been translated now.

  One day Mr Lawnder was visited by Doc Monk and hauled out of the classroom for a chat because the class had become unruly and could be heard two corridors away, in the headmaster’s office. The Doc took over the rest of the double lesson: eighty minutes of dictation from a coursebook with covers the colour of gravy.

  Lawnder didn’t last. His real passion was gardening. One day the summer term arrived and he didn’t. They still see him sometimes working in the city parks, where he rolls cigarettes and rakes dreamily among the flowerbeds. Ander tried to talk to him once, in the public gardens by the bridge. Mr Lawnder was cleaning graffiti off the buttress wall, where it had seeped into the porous stone. Starve Irish Scum. Someone seems to refresh it every month or so: each time it’s a more vibrant colour, a louder red, a deadlier black. Lawnder didn’t recognise him. Ander tried to jog his memory with a few episodes from school life, talked about one of the books Mr Lawnder taught them, but it was like trying to remind someone of a dream they’d long ago forgotten.

  Mr Lawnder, Mr Willis: both of them breaking, but differently: one exploding, scattering pieces of himself all over his life, the other imploding so quietly, remaining so firm of outline that you only knew it when you got up close and saw the empty-house eyes, the vacated premises he had become. Two ways to go, thought Ander for years afterwards – thinks Ander still – now that he’s seen dozens of people go one of those two ways: the centripetal or the centrifugal breakdown.