Throw Me to the Wolves

by Patrick McGuinness

  Parktown Again

  I look at Zalie’s flat, a basement bay window in the front, and a bedroom at the back with a window onto the garden. These are the only places from which she could be watched, as the bathroom window is painted shut and frosted with a pattern of ferns. The sash windows of her living room are ‘sited’, as estate agents say, facing west, so on a low dark winter afternoon, if there is sun, it comes in gravel-scrapingly low, splashes the room and blinds you as you stand there looking out. But then it goes almost as quickly, and you’re in the dark again even as the people upstairs are still watching it sprawl across their walls. To peer into Zalie’s you’d have to come in off the street, crossing the front garden for about twenty yards, in full view of the neighbours. At the back, you’d have to sidle through an open wooden door, past bins and bicycles and onto a lawn. You’d also be walking over a crunchy gravel path. Easily heard, even with the windows winter-shut because they aren’t double-glazed. They’re big, too, thin sheets of glass in wooden sash frames and probably listed. We’ve taken samples of the gravel: it’s called Cotswold Shingle (Small-Screen had it tested) and there are pieces all over the flats, in the grips of shoes and the carpets of cars.

  There are no other ways of Peeping-Tomming her without a telescope or binoculars, but they’re out of the question because there are two playing fields opposite the building, and the houses on the other side of them are too far away. Unless the distance, the strange, muffled, approximate nature of the peeping was what you liked; unless the graininess was not a barrier to the pleasure but on the contrary part of what got you going. I’ll check it out, mindful of Gary’s motto: ‘It takes all kinds, especially with perverts.’ The peeper is one species, the stalker is another, and the killer is another still. But they are species who regularly interbreed.

  Zalie mostly looked at the first pages of the help-sites. She rarely clicked on the sub-pages or the links. Maybe a thought occurred to her, and she checked it out. Maybe she was curious, or doing it for someone else. Maybe she thought she was being watched, then just changed her mind. Maybe she was being watched, suspected it, then thought better of her suspicions. She wouldn’t be the first to talk herself out of knowing what she knew.

  There was – there is, there ongoingly is – an internet dating profile created eighteen months ago. It is dormant – no updates, chats, and even when she was on the site she didn’t reply to any contacts. She must have given up, or found someone and let it drop. She looks at messages but doesn’t answer them. That tallies, more or less, with when she met her boyfriend, Tim. We’ll ask him. Does he know she was on a dating site for a while? Is it how they met? No, and anyway it’s irrelevant, as I discover as soon as I’ve asked the question: she had no contact with anyone on the site, and must have thought better of it, or not liked what she saw. Her profile is skeletal; she’s a vegetarian, likes jazz, reading, watching sport and travelling. Drinks: cider and white wine, G and T and cocktails, ‘sometimes on the same night!!!’ On screen she’s a consensual character; her identity modular.

  There’s a profile photo which underplays her attractiveness, as if she didn’t want it to be the main draw. Not that it stopped them. Her face is still there, fresh and happy, on the site: ZD, 31, South East. I’m interested that she doesn’t actually say where, or name the city she lives in. She could be anywhere from the edge of London where the Tube trains start to the tip of the wet sand of Hastings; from Brighton to Margate or Southend. That suggests that she’s unsure about internet dating, about being too easily located. Likes: box sets, sport, modern art, gardening. Music: Manic Street Preachers, Super Furry Animals, seventies disco. There is a chance to say a few words about yourself, a catchphrase or a strapline. Hers is ‘You never know until you try – and I try!’

  She has a hundred and eighty-three unanswered messages, and another two hundred-and-something unopened ones. I’ll ask Small-Screen to go through them, spot anything odd or threatening. I want a list of everyone who has browsed her, who touched her information with their mouse or skimmed it with their eyes. He’ll hate that. He wants a car chase and I’ve got him snorkelling through paperwork. But there are no dating dialogues. No one knew her, no, but her profile had been viewed over a thousand times, cyber-fondled, screen-groped, eyed up and trackpad-fingered, put on lists and bookmarked and favourited. There are hundreds of come-ons and messages, most of which she hasn’t even opened. But Gary says that’s normal. Women have hundreds of visits to their profiles, men a handful. Sometimes none. The most recent looks at her profile were last night: ‘Bruce from Middlesbrough’ and ‘Medway Man’. There’s a bloke describing himself as ‘Husky, dusky and musky’, which Gary says sounds like Snow White’s three sex-offender dwarves.

  There isn’t much here about her, but there’s enough for the men out there to get on with. The lonely mind can dream a whole life from skeletal information and a couple of photos. That is how the stalker works, too, because the stalker is a storyteller, a dramatist, a lover of detail, an amateur shrink, a detective, a plotter, a maker of plots and a violator of lives.

  She’s dead, but she lives here still: the messages ping in, the adverts are based on her search history and they throb in the top right of the screen, algorithmically produced and tailored to look tailored. There’s a voucher for a tenner off a wine club purchase. There’s an email from her phone provider about her direct debit payments. If you can buy something, you’re still alive; if the money is still being syringed into utility bills, cable TV bundles, wi-fi, you’re still with us.

  You’re not dead until your phone contract says so.

  The undeletability of it all causes me the kind of fretful sadness that I can only explain by saying that I miss the finality of it all. Not that I ever knew finality. Finality would be a start. The world never had an OFF button, no, but you could at least turn it down sometimes. I am also worried that Lynne Forester will track down Zalie’s screen-life and make something of it: dating profiles, shopping, tweets, Instagrams. Because Lynne, too, is a stalker, and she and the tabloids will play up the dating site element, the sniff of sexual availability, the imputation of a secret life. They’ve already found bikini shots of Zalie, holiday snaps of her with a drink, or dancing with a guy in Lanzarote. They put out a call for previous boyfriends to get in touch. ‘Had a relationship with Zalie Dyer? Are you a friend from school or uni? We’d like to hear from you.’ You can phone a special number. In confidence.

  Going after Wolphram is one thing. Going after Zalie is another. It’s chasing the dead into their darkness.

  Vera hasn’t even visited Victor’s grave, let alone put flowers there. As for ordering a headstone, ‘certainly not’. I asked her why. She replied that placing flowers was ‘giving in’, that they would ‘load it down’. I didn’t know what she meant. I do now. Ghosts are light, see-through creatures; we think they are made of memory and that they happen in our heads. So, in the world of things, the one outside of our heads, they need to be weighed down so they don’t float away. Wreaths and flowers are their gravestone-ballast. They stop the dead from getting on with our lives.

  What must Zalie’s family be going through – already caught in the brutality of this, the fat messy fact of her murder, and then dealing with the virtual reality of it all, too, the spreading, fanned-out self that replicates on screens and databases? Maybe things were better when people only had one photograph of someone they loved on their wall or bedside table, a few letters or a handful of snaps in an album.

  Zalie is all information and trace; she is something spilled and still spilling. Her online self is still there, still receiving info about bargains, potential lovers, profile matches and road-closure information. Two energy companies are competing for her heating, and the local MP has sent her his end-of-year newsletter. Her tweets bask in the ether. Occasionally, someone retweets one of her comments and fresh strangers rub against her, take her traces into their own worlds like saliva or hair, or the lipstick-rim on a pub glass that g
oes from drink to drink, kiss by kiss, mouth to mouth. Mouse to mouse.

  Victor Snow had it simpler – at most, he would have had a bank account closed and a newspaper cancelled. The second milk bottle. A hearing aid thrown out. And, further down the line, a quiet ripple in someone else’s life, he would be an address book entry deleted in a handful of homes. Address books beside phones – remember those? They even call them ‘landlines’ now, as if they were trees, sprung from the soil of suburban hallways. Who still has landlines, with those pigtail-coils of flex that used to catch in the fingers and loop itself into knots? Mr Wolphram does. Vera does. Victor did. I do. Gary? Maybe. But not Zalie. She was already mobile. Her flat had no landline. The cord was long cut. She probably didn’t remember a time when phones were attached to anything, though they still come down to earth to feed at a charger for an hour or two, to refuel like planes before flying off again. For Zalie, it was all tweets and emails and passwords and PIN numbers. Not was – is: they’re all still pulsing behind screens and along cables, bits of her, the phantom of her information-self roaming the algorithmic fields, searching for a mate, for a bargain, for news; for news of herself as the news spreads that she’s dead.

  Her Twitter account is still there, and hundreds of people have already DM’d her to tell her how sorry they are that she’s dead. On her Facebook page, the condolences are mounting up. They’re addressed to her, as if she were checking her social media on the other side. Is that what they think she’s doing? Write to me, her icon winks, text me, message me, Instagram me: where you are, I once was, where I am, there you will be.

  Have we checked Zalie’s answerphone? I cannot any longer keep it in my head – what we’ve done, what we haven’t, precautions taken, untaken. For all I know her voice is still embalmed there, receiving messages, receiving those phone calls people make when they know their friend has died but want to hear the line dead, too. There are people who do that – some who can’t quite believe it and others who want to hear what not being there sounds like, who want to know if being dead makes a different kind of silence. Marieke has probably thought of that.

  The desk sergeant has shown Vera into the room. I am surprised to see her. She looks about her, sits down at my desk which is fenced off by partitions, and finally tells me what she came to say.

  It’s not like her to leave her house. The thought occurs that things can’t be going well with Victor, but, then again, since he’s dead, we would be starting from a low base.

  ‘How are things at home, Vera?’

  ‘Cold,’ she says, and looks like she’s about to cry, ‘cold and lonely. I haven’t had that feeling for a few days now.’

  That feeling, in Vera’s parlance, is the feeling of Victor being nearby, there or on the verge of being there. You can’t be until there’s a place for you to do your being in. That’s the first law of haunting: it’s less about who than where. So she keeps the place warm and cosy. She is reserving his place, but he is late to his haunting.

  ‘It’s like he’s changed his mind, Alexander, like he won’t put in the effort anymore.’

  I put the empty cup to my mouth so I don’t have to look her in the eye. When I’m at her house, I almost believe the fiction of his presence; but outside it, it just feels like the ordinary, desolate madness of grief. She says: ‘It’s all gone …’ she looks down, ‘it’s all gone …’ she can’t find the word, then finds it: ‘slack.’

  Behind me, Gary is at the window. ‘You’ll have to put the seance on hold, Prof – I’m baffled, I’m completely dumbstruck,’ he says, ‘but they’re keeping you on. Orders from Deskfish himself.’

  *

  The Evening Post afternoon edition carries a front page, with three pages of story. THE WEIRD MR WOLPHRAM is the headline. PUPILS COME FORWARD.

  ‘Mad Lynne’s excelled herself,’ says Gary, dropping the paper on my desk. ‘Three fucking pages of the stuff. She’s worked fast – how she got them to come up with the goods I don’t know.’

  She has a by-line in the Daily Mail, as well as the Evening Post. Lynne is their person on the ground, their local guide, and her piece for them is a brief gallop through similar unsolved murders in the city over the last twenty years. ‘Will police reopen cold cases in light of new evidence?’ she asks, and details the cases, each time emphasising the distance between Mr Wolphram’s street and the place where the bodies were found, or the victim was last seen. Lynne evokes crimes all over Kent and Sussex, on the peripheries of London, in Sevenoaks, Tunbridge Wells, Ebbsfleet. She zeroes in on one in particular. Unsolved sexual assaults in the early 2000s around Ashford Eurostar terminal near the Channel Tunnel opening in Cheriton led police to speculate that the perpetrator might be a cross-Channel commuter. Wolphram was a frequent visitor to Europe … writes Lynne: Time to reopen the case?

  I remember the case, because I was one of the officers by whom those crimes were unsolved.

  ‘What goods?’ I ask. ‘What goods has she come up with?’ Gary doesn’t answer, just nods at the paper and stuffs his hands into his pockets, waiting for me to take it in. Pupils come forward: she’s clever. It’s all in the words: ‘come forward’ suggests … what? Fear, hidden outrage, shame, suffering-held-back, trauma and now the freedom to speak. It’s part of the lingo now – now that we are, as Gary says, puking up the decades.

  Come forward with what?

  ‘He taught me for five years, Gary. There’s nothing to come forward about, not that sort of stuff anyway.’

  ‘Remember the fatberg, Prof, there’s always something down there. Maybe you’ve just … what … repressed it?’ He says it with a fat Gary-smirk.

  The front page has a photograph of Mr Wolphram with his book bag, the white cuff of his sleeve against the black sleeve of his suit as he tries to pull his hat over his eyes. This is now his signature-image: a cadaverous, manicured noir villain snarling among the flashbulbs.

  The television and internet are replaying the short film of Wolphram from which the image is taken, when he was still just a neighbour among neighbours, one of many vox pops, albeit the most distinctive. Other neighbours were interviewed, too: the young couple in the top flat, Ben Phelps and Chloe whose surname I can’t remember, two dog-walking ladies from nearby streets, the couple three houses away, him a solicitor, her a manager at the pharmacy. Lynne has spoken to them all. Whether excited, gleeful, afraid or depressed, they are all in their different ways making the most of the situation. But not Wolphram – and he makes the mistake of talking a little too long, a little too word-perfectly, and a little rehearsed.

  Towards the end of the segment, Mr Goodship walks into the frame with his terrier. I do the maths: three or four terriers ago he was headmaster and I was a child in his domain. He looks sour and jowly, with that lonely-retirement fastidiousness you see among people who can’t live, in time or place, too far from where they worked. There’s a subtle wind, so Goodship’s combover occasionally lifts off its hinge of lacquer like the lid of a pedal bin. His double chin, once so full and bloated, sags like a bib made of tripe over his check shirt and woollen tie. The extent of his authority is now the length of a dog lead. He passes Mr Wolphram as he speaks, but keeps his head down as he goes. He must be in his eighties.

  My contempt for him is like a fire I left on in a room I know I’ll come back to. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in half an hour or in half a century, because, when it comes to him and people like him, I have my contempt on thermostat.

  In the background, in front of Mr Wolphram’s flat, is his car, now with forensics. It is like all of his belongings: expensive, old, looked after. A 1978 Jaguar which Gary tells me is a classic and maintained so well that, apart from the mileage, it may as well be new. Last used, we know, the day after Zalie disappeared. There are traces of Zalie in the passenger seat, a few hairs on the headrest, prints on the door and dashboard, but nowhere else. Translated into investigationese, this means: not in the boot.

  As I predicted, the fatberg is in the side
bar of the front page, looking squeezed in an indistinct and slightly elongated photo. ‘Fatberg – Page 4.’

  Gary: ‘Yesterday’s ooze.’ He has tried out every available pun, but this has to be the last one in stock.

  The first three pages are essentially a one-man show by Mr Wolphram. I scan the images first, try to track the tale they tell the eyes before the words do their work. Page 2 has a school photograph, a close-up of him in a gown and academic hood. He is younger and wears narrower glasses, and his hair is darker. There’s no date, but I know the date, or at any rate the year and the season. The larger shot it’s taken from, a panorama of the whole school, is against a blue sky on a cricket field, ‘College Green’, opposite the school chapel and the library.

  I can date the picture because I am there, my blanked-out face, three rows from the front, aged fourteen, in my blazer and tie, standing between Danny and Jonny Kebab. I remember myself blanked out back then – blanked and blanking – so it is no great challenge to adjust to being represented thus. The teachers’ faces are all distinct, or as distinct as they can be in a three-decades-old pre-digital photograph. The Doc, Mr Barnett, Trundley, McCloud, Goodship and Morbender. Mr Willis before he cracked up and Mr Lawnder before he faded away, along with Mrs Pizzi and Mrs Mason. And the rest, whose names I can probably recall but can’t be bothered dredging for.

  ‘Recognise anyone?’ asks Gary, and it’s almost caring, almost gentle.

  I point out my shoulders with the biro I’m holding.

  ‘There,’ I say. I was behind Morbender, in the first row of pupils behind the staff. Always better to be behind Morbender than in front. There was dandruff the size of breakfast cereal on the shoulders of his gown. I could smell his trousers.