Throw Me to the Wolves

by Patrick McGuinness

  ‘Look on any pub menu: the nearer the food comes from, the more expensive it is.’ Gary has a theory about everything, and at mealtimes it’s usually the theory of global capital that gets aired: ‘First they kill off everything local, close the butcher’s and baker’s, the pub with the beer that tastes of eggs, and then, when it’s all gone, some twit with a beard and a check shirt called Max moves in and starts selling it again. At three times the price. To people like you. People like me are in the supermarkets buying stuff from the other side of the world ’cos that’s all we can afford.’

  There’s a piece of pie crust in the crotch of his trousers, and when he has finished chewing he picks it up and pops it into his mouth. ‘As the man said, everything comes round twice: first time as life, second time as lifestyle.’

  Then he opens the paper and reads one of the headlines.

  ‘Here’s one of his ex-pupils, Prof – could have been in your day,’ says Gary: ‘Jonathan Lansdale, 1980s – is he anything to do with the shop? Does the name ring a bell?’

  ‘Jonny Kebab,’ I tell him, ‘what’s he got to say?’

  ‘Take a guess, Prof …’

  ‘I don’t want to guess – just read it please. All of it, don’t give me a Garified precis, I want the exact words.’

  ‘You want the headline, too? Here’s my time-saving precis: Barmy Bookfucker Behind Bars. Does that give you the gist?’

  ‘Gary – I want the whole lot: headline, caption, paragraph by paragraph. By-line as well. We’ve got the time.’

  Gary clears his throat, takes a swig of his orange sports drink and opens the paper across the steering wheel.

  THE WEIRD MR WOLPHRAM

  Lynne Forester, chief reporter.

  Prime Suspect in binbag murder of Zalie

  Dyer, Mr Wolphram, was a book-loving, dapper loner.

  Asked boys about puberty. Page 3. Strange Eyes.

  Page 6. Strange Hair. Page 7. Strange Clothes.

  Page 8. Strange Hats. Page 8. Strange. Page 10.

  Eccentric Loner – Colleagues remember ‘The

  Oddball Poetry Man’. Page 4. ‘Obsessed with

  David Bowie’. Page 5.

  Watched black and white films. Served alcohol to boys. Page 5.

  ‘Here you go: a fatberg made of words.’ Gary starts reading aloud:

  One of Mr Wolphram’s former pupils, businessman and entrepreneur Jonathan Lansdale, remembers the reclusive teacher as an eccentric with a short fuse. ‘He was creepy,’ said Mr Lansdale, 48, ‘we were all afraid of him because he could be violent. He showed us strange films and asked if we were sexually active.’

  Gary: ‘Did he?’

  ‘No … Entrepreneur for Jonny Kebab is ironic. The only business he started at school was picking up sodden porn magazines from the Downs, drying them on the radiator, and selling them from his “office”, which was the toilets by the Geography department. I still remember his price list. Keep going, Gary.’

  ‘Is that a No, or is it a “I don’t know but he never asked me that”? You sure he just wasn’t interested in you? Things have got so screwed up that not being abused is the new being abused – is that right?’

  ‘It’s a No. To both questions.’

  ‘If you say so, Prof:

  Mr Wolphram was known for his love of poetry, and made us read poems about sex and death. He took boys to his flat after school hours to listen to opera and recordings of poets reading. He had original David Bowie records, played us Pink Floyd, Velvet Underground … quite adult music by groups that took drugs. We listened to Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin’.

  That true, Prof?’

  ‘Yes, that bit is. But he didn’t take boys to his flat, he invited them, and many came.’

  ‘See what they’ve done there – after school hours is a nice touch: makes it sound dodgy, like it’s something a bit secret and naughty. Adult music … Poems about sex and death, eh, Prof? I’m no expert, but aren’t all poems about sex and death, when it comes down to it?’

  ‘Keep going, Gary – we can do the lit. crit. later.’

  One ex-pupil, who asked to remain anonymous – I bet he doesn’t want to be anonymous when he’s cashing the fucking cheque they gave him! – recalls: ‘We’d go to his flat. It was always quite dark. He was obviously rich, and had state-of-the art technology – hi-fi, TV, video recorder … Huge speakers. He’d open a bottle of wine and make us drink before starting the film.

  ‘See what they’ve done there, Prof: always quite dark, make us drink?

  We weren’t allowed to drink, it was against school rules, but we didn’t dare say no. If he felt we weren’t paying attention in class, he’d throw books at us and shout. Everyone was afraid of him.

  ‘Did he ever shout?’

  ‘No. Yes. Once. Only once.’

  ‘You afraid of him, Prof?’

  I take my eyes off the blurry middle distance and turn to Gary. I’m glad he has asked, because it helps me put into words something I was never quite sure of.

  ‘I was … not afraid, no. And he had good wine and he never offered more than a glass. I’ve said: I liked him; we all did. I thought we all did anyway. But maybe I just wanted to be liked by him, and that looked like the same thing for a while. I didn’t want to disappoint him, I was maybe afraid of that, scared of disappointing him by not getting something he said, or something he made us read, or not liking stuff he thought was good. He wanted us to like things, it was important to him. But was I afraid? No. Ashamed sometimes maybe – of being slow, or not understanding certain words, not feeling the right things in front of a picture, or some music … that kind of thing.’

  ‘There’s a lot to be said for shame, Prof. There isn’t enough of it these days. Too much shaming but not enough shame …’ Gary is watching a woman and her daughter walking towards the house. They have shopping and carry large clothes-boutique bags. ‘You think that’s them?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sally and her mum. Hello …’ he taps his head, ‘the reason we’re here.’

  Ah yes. They unfasten the catch of the metal gate, close it behind them and walk to the front door. We give them time to put their bags down and flick on the kettle.

  The doorbell is an electronic version of Big Ben, a big brassy chime, and from its echo we can already tell it’s a large hallway. Rich people take ages to answer their doors because they have further to come, and because, somewhere in their embedded class memory, there’s a servant doing it for them.

  The girl who answers is about eighteen. She looks alert but distracted. She is in the middle of texting, a flurry of thumbs. She opens the door, looks at us, shouts, ‘Muuuuuum …’, turns around, and leaves us standing there.

  ‘Maybe we’re meant to use the tradesmen’s entrance,’ snarls Gary, walking in as noisily as possible. He hasn’t wiped his feet – that’s deliberate – and has dragged a sooty line of kerbside drain water onto the marble tiles. ‘You coming in or what, Prof?’ He’s getting wound up already. ‘Or you going to leave your visiting card on a fucking plate while you wait below stairs with the housekeeper?’

  When Mrs Latimer arrives, we tell her it is her daughter we wanted to speak to. She is friendly and unexpectedly polite. Gary is thrown by this. She asks him to sit down, offers him tea, tells him not to worry about the puddle of water in the hallway, and asks how she can help.

  Gary is sullen, even angrier now that she has confounded his expectations by being considerate and pleasant. He looks around, hoping to fault the decor, and finds that its only real fault is that he can’t afford it.

  ‘The graffiti on your wall …’ I begin.

  ‘Yes, you told us to leave it there. I’d very much like it gone, as I think you can imagine.’

  ‘We need to know who wrote it.’

  ‘I don’t want him to get into trouble. It’s just a bit of graffiti, and all it takes is a tin of paint stripper and a wire brush to get it off.’

  ‘It’s not that, Mrs Latimer, it’s
nothing to do with getting him into trouble. It’s to do with another case – the possibility that the graffiti was painted during a time-window that interests us in connection with something else, and that whoever painted it saw something that could help us.’

  Mrs Latimer is not stupid. She works it out. For the second time today I am taken aback by her warmth and decency: she does not get excited, gloat, thrill or pry. Instead she just helps.

  ‘I think I know what you’re saying, and of course I’ll do what I can. His name is Jack, Jack Glass. He’s nice, we all liked him, but Sally moved on when she started at university – how many relationships back home survive freshers’ week? He took it badly, he’s a bit … dramatic. I don’t know his exact address but it’s somewhere in St Leonard’s.’

  ‘Could you ask Sally to give us his address and number?’ asks Gary.

  ‘I could,’ she answers, ‘but the problem there is that she’ll tweet about it, text it, put it on Instagram and milk it for all it’s worth … because it makes her part of the story. It’s what they do. If she finds out it’s connected to what I think it is, then I think your work – and our lives – would get a great deal more difficult.’

  She shows us to the door. ‘Let me know when I can get the wire brush and the white spirit out,’ she smiles, and sees us off.

  ‘I hate it when people like her turn out to be okay,’ grumbles Gary as he squeeze-folds himself into the driving seat. ‘People should choose their clichés and stick to them. Like me: overweight, mid-ranking white copper. People look at me and say to each other: See that guy over there? There’s a sixty per cent chance he’s called Gary. Saves everyone time and mental adjustment.’

  Jack Glass is an unhappy-looking seventeen-year-old with thin stubble and a tattoo on his forearm that’s still covered in plastic. An anchor through a heart, he explains, though it looks more like a joint of vacuum-packed meat that’s gone off in its bag.

  ‘Just had it done,’ he says. ‘Cost a bomb, hurt like fuck, and when I get back I’ve been dumped.’

  ‘That’s sort of what we wanted to talk about,’ says Gary. ‘The graffiti on the Latimers’ walls …’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sorry – I was just so pissed off … I felt … I felt sad, that’s all, and angry – so angry I couldn’t even fucking spell and look like even more of a dick. I’ll clean it off. I told them I done it, I said sorry, I said I’d clean it, but Mrs Latimer … she said to leave it.’ Like Gary, he speaks with the local accent, and I can imagine Sally and her friends, with their estuary English mixed with received pronunciation and MTV Euro-American hip, laughing at him. Those curled rs, the round vowels … they’d have enjoyed mocking that. I remember that all the time I was at school, I only ever heard that accent among the kitchen staff or cleaners, on the buses in town or in the shops. At Chapelton we were encouraged to mock it whenever we heard it.

  But at least back then it was everywhere. Now, it is receding. You can find it holed up in the parts of town the media doesn’t care about but the police know too well, or among old people in retirement homes or Bingo halls. It’s rare to find someone as young as Jack speaking such a pristine version of it. Even Gary, who doesn’t care what people think, has planed his down to fit in with the rest of us, our commuter-belt English, the Milton Keynes in our mouths.

  ‘We’re not here about your spelling, Jack,’ says Gary. I notice he turns up his accent for Jack: we’re from the same place, you and I is what it says. Has Gary done it deliberately, to edge something out of Jack, or has he done it subconsciously? ‘We’re here because there was a crime committed nearby, maybe at roughly the same time you were painting, and we want to know exactly when you did it and if you saw anyone or anything. Okay?’

  Jack looks at him suspiciously. I don’t want him to work it out. If he suspects why we’re asking, Lynne Forester’s going to have another story, and Jack might make enough cash to recoup both his tattoo money and the cost of removing it.

  ‘I shouldn’t really be telling you this,’ says Gary, and I am about to stop him when he says, ‘but a burglary was committed a few doors away – a serious break-in – sometime between eleven and six a.m. the next day, and we’re looking for anyone who might have seen anything suspicious – even if, in your case, it was someone else doing something suspicious …’

  Gary is good: ‘As you know, the police are busy with a very serious matter, stuff that’s out of our league, but that doesn’t mean the ordinary grunt-work suddenly stops. The everyday business still needs doing: burglaries, assaults, stolen cars … the boring bits no one notices.’ Gary gives a little snort of off-handedness. ‘So we’d like you to tell us when you got there, how long you stayed, and when you left. And what you saw. So PC Plod here and his commanding officer’, Gary gestures to me mock-deferentially, ‘can get back to the station and fill in some forms. Just like you don’t see on telly. Take it slowly. Don’t leave anything out. There’s some banker missing a few grands’ worth of hi-fi, flat-screen TVs and Jack Vettriano paintings, and we’re the ones getting the hassle.’

  Jack looks disappointed. He scratches his raw inked-and-needled skin.

  ‘Okay … I cycled over at around half past ten, got there round quarter to eleven … sat on the bench opposite and banged out a few texts asking Sally to come out and talk to me. I just wanted to talk. I WhatsApped her, so I could see she’d read the messages and wasn’t answering. That made it worse. I didn’t threaten or anything, just said how fucking sad I was, what a bellend I felt for having a tattoo that meant we had an unbreakable bond, and that she’d dumped me the same day. I sent her a picture of it. I’d saved up for weeks … chose it from the catalogue … looked up what it symbolised and everything …’

  ‘It’s a nice tattoo, it’ll still look good when this is over and you’ve forgotten all about her.’ Gary smiles: ‘At least you didn’t have her name inked in …’ If the angry Gary is discomfiting, the gentle, caring one is properly unnerving.

  But only to me, it turns out, because it works on Jack, who looks at him gratefully. ‘You reckon?’

  ‘And when you’ve learned to spell.’

  Jack nods, laughs. Gary has him exactly where we want him.

  ‘I waited about an hour. Bought some fags from the corner shop across the green. A couple of tinnies. They were about to close. I didn’t see anyone, just the guy at the counter. I sat there and drank the first tin, had a couple of smokes. Maybe a spliff, actually, if I’m honest …’

  ‘A spliff or two never hurt anyone,’ says Gary steadily, ‘keep going.’

  ‘I heard the rattle of the shutters as the shop locked up. A few cars. None of them parking up or going into the houses, just driving by on their way somewhere else.’

  ‘That’s good, Jack, all good. Anyone slowing down by the houses?’

  ‘No, I’d have noticed that – ’cos I was watching out for a chance to, you know, make my move … so I’m sure no one stopped or slowed.’ Jack is pleased with that answer because it’s clear. All witnesses get a buzz from giving one definite answer in the swamp of hypotheticals. Even the innocent need a clean truth to hide behind.

  Gary puts on a look of disappointment. He is certainly better practised at that than smiling. ‘What sort of time are we talking about?’

  ‘I dunno, maybe half past eleven.’

  ‘Any people?’

  Jack thinks about it. Chews the inside of his lip.

  ‘A few people coming off from the bridge, a few people going across it. Dribs and drabs, though. Around midnight there’s a group of blokes, a bit pissed, on their way back from the pub. A girl, but I can’t really see as she’s got a woolly hat on, with a shopping bag. She’s on the phone but I can’t hear what she’s saying. She’s not talking loudly but she’s got that thing about her voice when you can tell someone’s talking and smiling at the same time. I noticed that. All low and warm. Whispery. It was nice.’

  Gary gives nothing away, but I can feel it: something important there, behi
nd what Jack thinks is just a detail.

  ‘I remember thinking lucky guy on the end of the line. Then two or three blokes. Sports tops, maybe trackies, jeans, laughing, joking, couple of them lighting up as they went – was it them?’

  Jack doesn’t know it but he has identified Zalie on her last walk home. She was on the phone to her boyfriend in Saint-Omer at 11.18, for eleven minutes. She had a shopping bag. Gary needs to circle around the information he wants without letting on that this is what he’s after. He doesn’t even look at me, afraid to show how, now, amid the decoy information he has elicited, the real information is within reach.

  ‘Describe them – anything you spotted.’

  ‘Tall, one with a hoodie, one with a sort of tracksuit top, all walking a bit unsteady, I just thought they were back from the pub – Harcourt Arms stays open ’til midnight – chatting, having a laugh. It’s their beer and burger night, too, so it gets full.’ He sniffs, looks down. ‘We were going to go, me and Sally, they don’t ask for ID and she looks a lot older plus she’s pretty and that gets anyone in … You reckon it was them?’ he asks again.

  ‘It may have been them, yes,’ says Gary. ‘What about the woman? Did you get a look at her?’

  Jack frowns. ‘Why you asking about her?’

  Gary, quickly: ‘She might be able to give us a better description … if we can get hold of her. Did she overtake them, or did they overtake her?’

  Jack thinks about it. ‘She was walking faster than them, they kept stopping to light up or roll fags, so … yeah, I guess she did. I s’pose she might have got a look at them as she passed.’

  ‘Where did she go?’

  ‘She turned off before they did – down Elms Road, I think, or the next one, Hythe Street. Round where the posh school is. Heading that way. She was walking downhill, towards the playing fields. They definitely went on right to the end of the street, and past where I could see them.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘When they’d all gone I got my spray can out and walked over to Sally’s. Did a quick double-check, and that was it. Said what I had to say. Took a long time to spray – much longer than I thought, the stone’s really crumbly … absorbed the paint so fast I had to keep going over it. I kept looking around, then I threw the can over the wall and biked off. That’s why I spelled it wrong. I was so stressed I couldn’t think. The only thing I saw was a fox sniffing around the bins by the bench. If it was those blokes then they must’ve doubled back when I’d gone.’