Throw Me to the Wolves

by Patrick McGuinness

  ‘Thanks, Jack – we might ask you to come in and do a photofit – anything you remember – of the men you saw. Don’t worry if you can’t remember now, people’s memories improve when they’ve got the images in front of them. We never really know what we know, do we? what we’ve taken in … Write down your mobile number here, please …’

  Back in the car I congratulate Gary.

  ‘Thanks, Prof … He’s a decent kid. Local school, left at sixteen, going out with a girl from the posh ladies’ college who’s dumped him in her first term at uni. Like me, but without the girlfriend … Poor sod with his broken herat …’ Gary has told me nothing about his upbringing, his love life, his schooldays. All I know is that they didn’t involve red wine, Georgian houses and Swedish films. Not Swedish arthouse films anyway.

  ‘I’m not sure how useful any of it was, Prof – all that scenario established was that she was there around half past eleven and headed home. But we knew that anyway.’

  ‘Not really – there’s different ways of knowing the same thing, and this is one of them: we’ve established she wasn’t followed – probably – and that whatever happened to her happened somewhere between the Latimers’ house and hers. That’s clear now. We’ve narrowed down the when and the where. We’re talking about a window of about twelve minutes and a distance of less than five hundred yards.’

  ‘That just leaves the why and the fucking who,’ says Gary sourly, ‘and I don’t really give a shit about the why.’

  ‘I thought we had the who …’

  ‘I said probably, Prof, probably, and to be absolutely honest with you, I’m not feeling very probable about it.’

  ‘You’ve changed your tune, Gary. This is what you wanted, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know any more, Prof. I mean, look – let’s step back a bit, not that you need to step back – it’s all you ever do: Zalie was almost six foot, played hockey and tennis. He’s … what? Six-one, six-two max, thin as a rake and all he plays is the guitar and the medieval banjo—’

  ‘Lute.’

  ‘Whatever … I mean: how’s he a) going to strangle her without her screaming or fighting back, and b) going to sling her over his shoulder or drag her out, bundle her into his car, drive her across the bridge, down that wet soggy muddy path, dump her and then come back. All without leaving mud, dogshit, bits of crap on his clothes or in his car or in his hallway. Not to mention scratches or bruises on him? Remember that, too, Prof: he’s been swabbed, examined, poked about. Clothes checked, washing-machine drum analysed, toilet lifted off and drains checked. Nothing.’

  ‘I don’t know, Gary – maybe you could have asked those questions before.’

  ‘That’s a low blow, Prof … You’re the one leading the investigation. You’re the organ grinder … I’m just the monkey. If you hadn’t spent so much of your time dreaming about your schooldays and trying to find pictures of yourself in shorts, you might have actually taken the lead. You know – used your brain for something other than dreaming.’

  ‘You seemed pretty certain he was guilty, Gary—’

  ‘I was, yes, because I go with what’s obvious ’til it stops being obvious. That’s what people like me do. That’s our job – in homes and offices across the land, in films and novels, that’s what we’re here for. But you … you’re officer class, you are, Prof … it’s people like you who tell us plebs what to do. In World War One you’d be sending me over to check for snipers, then if I survived I’d be bringing tea and newspapers to your bunk and calling you Sir. You’re the one with the school blazer and the dictionary up your arse and the college degree …’

  He’s right. I shouldn’t have let myself be carried off by Gary’s rush to box things up: teacher to weirdo to pervert to murderer in three moves. Gary was being Gary. I was being … indecisive, unprofessional, weak and unfocused. Blurred inside. I was being me.

  I phone Mrs Latimer to tell her we’ve spoken to Jack, and that she can scrub off his graffiti. We won’t need to talk to her or Sally again.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ she says, loudly over the radio news. She turns the volume down: ‘At least you’ve got your man now.’

  *

  The announcement comes just in time for the hour-long news and comment on Radio 4. In traffic jams, on trains, in pubs and at tea-time dining tables across the country, they learn that we’ve arrested Mr Wolphram and charged him with murder and with perverting the course of justice. Perverting the corpse of justice is how Gary puts it.

  It’s no longer ‘a spot of monstering’. This is the shredding of his life, the murder of all he is.

  They’ve had forty-eight hours to work up their stories, assemble their ‘witnesses’, their ‘friends-and-colleagues-came-forwards’, their ‘asked-not-to-be-nameds’, their ‘pupils-break-their-silences’ and their ‘neighbours-always-suspecteds’. What Gary read to me earlier from the Evening Post was just the vapour off the sewage of their ‘news’ compared with what’s happening now. I see Lynne has syndicated much of her information, and is named as a co-reporter in the Daily Mail. She’ll be getting paid serious bonus money from her usual paper, plus one-off fees for every piece she writes for the nationals, all the syndicated articles she sells. Every paper and TV channel has someone camped outside his flat, outside the station, around the school. They’re stopping random people, current teachers, sniffing out the pupils. In the Fleet Street offices they’re combing through electoral registers and databases for addresses and phone numbers, racing each other to find ex-pupils, ex-colleagues … anyone who can give them a story. The foreign press is here, their correspondents translating third-hand headlines and pumping out the factoids.

  ‘Got to keep telling ourselves he’s guilty,’ says Gary, ‘or we’ll go under.’

  ‘When you have to keep telling yourself something, it means you don’t believe it, Gary. It’s like whistling in a haunted house to show you’re not scared. It’s because you’re scared.’

  Gary looks miserable. Even the tight fatness of his face has gone slack, and the skin seems to hang suddenly, liposucted by disappointment and self-doubt.

  Deskfish is about to make a statement on the police station steps, we hear on the car radio. Neither of us can face heading back to work straight away. Gary doesn’t need to tell me, but I know: he thinks Mr Wolphram is not our man. That realisation has been settling on Gary so slowly that I hadn’t seen it until it was there.

  I have parked a few streets from the station to avoid the crowds of reporters and rubbernecking gawpers. Gary has turned the radio up, and Deskfish is talking: ‘We have this afternoon charged a sixty-eight-year-old neighbour in connection with the murder of Zalie Dyer. We can confirm that he was a teacher at a local school and lived on the same street. We would like to thank the public for their patience and all those who have come forward with information. Most of all we would like to thank Zalie’s parents for their bravery in this tragic time …’

  It’s a cold, dry, clear-skied evening. The fatberg remains there, the workmen are still at it, miners at a blubber coalface. But there are no spectators. It looks like an abandoned Leviathan made of lard, yesterday’s attraction being packed up into trucks as the circus leaves town. The selfie sticks and camera flashes have moved on. They’re outside the station now, front and back, and Gary and I have to pick our way through.

  Inside, it’s a chaos of ringing phones and pinging screens. Deskfish is talking on both of his landlines – one on speaker and the other receiver to ear. ‘Same shit, different phones,’ says Gary, barging past Thicko and Small-Screen, who are standing proudly at their desks, enjoying the attention. In their heads, they are in a mini-series and they’re congratulating each other just as the credits start to roll and the theme tune kicks in. The incident room’s three TV monitors are tuned to different stations – one radio; one twenty-four-hour news, where different photographs of Mr Wolphram and Zalie come on, spliced with on-scene reporting from the street, the school, outside the zoo; and anothe
r showing the last ten minutes of Pointless before the six o’clock news. A quiz show that involves getting the fewest points possible, the banter and the jackpot are puny but somehow reassuring: despite the killing, the violence, the famines and the wars, on magnolia sofas all over the country, middlebrow life goes on.

  The Headmaster

  Doc Monk has moved up in the world, or in his version of it: he’s the headmaster of Chapelton College, and here he now stands, with the school looking like a film set behind him: the sports fields and the cricket pavilion, the Victorian gothic library with its flying buttresses, the dining hall and the quad, the statues of generals and brigadiers. The kinds of people Gary thinks of when he imagines people like me sending people like him to war. It is a postcard-perfect view, an advert for the English upper classes: imposing enough to intimidate, but not so remote that it can’t be reassuringly purchased. The roofs are finialed at each end, and topped with cockscomb ridging, so that, silhouetted against a deep blue sky, the buildings look cut out of black cardboard. Their windows glow Christmas-card red and gold.

  There is even musical accompaniment – if you listen carefully you can hear the choir singing in the chapel, whose huge rose window glitters from inside, burns like a brazier behind its leaded glass. It’s not a concert, because the organ keeps reprising the notes and the choir keeps starting again mid-hymn, but a rehearsal for the Christmas carol service tomorrow. Always full of visiting dignitaries, the occasional minor royal, it’s one of the big days in the school calendar. This year it’s being recorded live for Classic FM, so the school must find Zalie’s murder ill-timed as well as embarrassing.

  The Doc isn’t taller, but he has cleverly stage-managed his appearance so that he speaks from the top step of the parapet. From here the reporters must film him from below, where they cluster on the grass of the playing fields. He has learned from the statues behind him: everyone looks bigger and better on a plinth. He has on his Old Chapeltonian tie, and somewhere along the decades he has swapped the three-piece tweed suits of an old-world Oxbridge intellectual for the navy pinstripe of modern management. Today’s school might keep a few teachers dressed as teachers around the place for folkloric purposes, but this is the uniform that reassures the money men and the education boards.

  The place used to be dead between terms or at weekends, peopled only by those students whose parents lived too far away for them to return home and by the bachelor teachers coming in for their free meals. Now it’s a year-round buzz of seminars, office awaydays and conferences. There is even some confetti mashed into the quadrangle’s flagstones where someone was recently married. Who the hell would get married in their old school, Gary wants to know.

  Gary is now looking at the Doc: ‘That’s a lot of chins for one face,’ he says, and Gary knows better than most of us how many chins a face can accommodate. ‘Was he around in your day?’ he nudges me with his elbow.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I whisper, ‘I’ll tell you all about the Doc later.’ But for now, our eyes are on the TV.

  The murder is the first item on the national news: ‘There have been rapid developments in the investigation into the murder of Zalie Dyer. Following the arrest of Michael Wolphram earlier today, we’ve been informed that the school’s headmaster, Dr Martin Monk, is about to make a statement on behalf of Chapelton College. We’re going live to our East of England correspondent, Ellie Nash …’

  Ellie Nash – I recognise the name from a string of answerphone messages we never answered – is not what you would expect from a regional reporter catching a twenty-four-carat national news story. She has big, US-TV-News-anchor hair, and wears black trousers, a bright red jacket with shoulder pads and a chunky necklace made of heavy squares of jade. She has the air of someone reporting live from the 1980s, some faraway place down the decades where everything is raucous and overlit, and where everyone looks microwaved.

  Slightly apart from the crowd, she speaks into the microphone more loudly and more breathlessly than she needs to, but this is part of the vibe she’s after – the sense of a world where things are happening faster than they can be told:

  ‘I’ll be reporting live from Chapelton College, the prestigious school now in the limelight for all the wrong reasons,’ she begins: ‘Its alumni number politicians, actors, foreign presidents and prime ministers. These playing fields have been trodden by military heroes, elite sportsmen and Olympic champions in the course of the school’s two hundred years of history. But now it’s the centre of attention for very different reasons, because this is where Mr Wolphram worked, the man today charged with the murder of Zalie Dyer. Dr Monk, the current headmaster, was a colleague of Mr Wolphram’s, and worked with him until he retired when the school began accepting female pupils …’

  ‘What’s that you said about correlation and causation, Prof?’

  There’s no time to answer because Doc Monk begins:

  ‘Chapelton College deeply regrets the death of Zalie Dyer, and extends its sympathies to her family and loved ones. On behalf of the board of governors I would like to make clear that Mr Wolphram retired over a decade ago and has had nothing to do with the school since. No current pupils were taught by him, and very few of the teachers remember him.’

  ‘Did you and Mr Wolphram work together? Can you tell us about him?’ It’s Ellie Nash’s voice, though we can’t see her.

  The Doc looks unsure. With a slight tilt of the head he turns to someone to the left of the screen, away from the crest of microphones in front of him. The cameras pull back a little, drawing the first row of journalists into the frame, and several worried looking Chapelton College governors. He’s looking for help from a man in a suit much like his, who has the air of a lawyer or a PR professional, and the self-conscious grooming of a man who makes a living from damage-limitation. Definitely the kind of person who, in Gary’s nomenclature, would be This Wanker or That. ‘Lanyard-swinging corporate twonks’, he calls them. The wanker gives a tight little nod that means Go ahead but if you don’t stick to the script you’re on your own, and then, in freeze-dried English, the Doc begins:

  ‘We worked together, yes, for a number of years. I had very little to do with him. He was always a bit of a loner, very private and very particular and precise in everything he did … many of the teachers, like me, kept our distance from him …’

  ‘They’re cutting him loose,’ Gary whispers, ‘the fuckers are cutting him loose …’

  ‘Can you blame them? They can’t say he was always a weirdo or they’ll be done for letting him go on working, but they can’t say they never noticed anything because it’ll make them look like they were failing in their duty of so-called care …’

  ‘Plus they’ve got all those parents paying ten thousand a year – they don’t want to frighten them off …’ says Gary, underestimating Chapelton’s school fees with an innocence I find endearing: ‘Hear that ? It’s the sound of chequebooks snapping shut.’ He thinks for a moment, then remarks with jaded triumph: ‘Funny isn’t it – it doesn’t matter how upper crust they are … how rich or powerful … when things get difficult they all tell the same story: it’s got nothing to do with us, Guv … like some chav in a trackie who’s just got caught with a wrap or a stolen iPad … Suddenly no one knew him, no one liked him, it was all a long time ago and the past is another country …’

  As Gary speaks, the Doc proves him right: ‘Mr Wolphram was here long before most of the staff now teaching. He was always rather aloof and – I repeat – had very little to do with the day-to-day running of the school, he wasn’t involved in the sporting activities of the school, and he wasn’t ever on the duty rotas of the boarding houses. The only parts of school life he was involved in – apart from teaching – were the musical and theatrical aspects …’

  ‘What about you personally? You’re an old boy of the school, you were a pupil here and then came back to teach after university …’ It’s Ellie again, and she’s done her homework. She knows the Doc was here as a pupil, and came ba
ck. She has compared the dates and knows that he and Mr Wolphram overlapped by over twenty years.

  ‘Me personally?’ The Doc takes a deep breath: ‘I personally found him inscrutable, distant and arrogant, but he also had a temper, and several of us were concerned even back in those days when there were no proper channels for these things to be …’ he stops for a moment, ‘discussed …’

  ‘Why did nobody raise their concerns? Why didn’t you?’ asks Ellie. The Doc has walked – no, not walked: danced – into her trap. It’s not a sophisticated trap, but clever people are always so alert to the complicated catch that they miss the simpleton’s ambush. The dogshit in the burning bag, the brick behind the football … Not that Ellie is a simpleton – on the contrary, she’s clever, and certainly clever enough to know how easy it is to catch clever people out.

  ‘Because …’ The Doc searches for the PR man, but he has pulled away and is texting furtively behind two photographers, ‘because many of these things only become clear much later on and you must remember that Mr Wolphram may not have been much liked, or played a large role in school life, but there was never any specific allegation about him while he was employed by Chapelton College. If there had been, the school would of course have acted.’ The Doc sweats and his neck looks red and swollen in its tight collar. ‘Our procedures are watertight and have been in place for years – we have an excellent record of pupil welfare and we work hard to ensure we maintain it.’

  ‘The man with the wooden tongue,’ says Gary.

  Ellie isn’t going to let go: ‘Given what we know, now that several ex-pupils have come forward with claims about Mr Wolphram’s … unusual and suspicious conduct as a teacher, how can the school justify employing him for so long – regardless of today’s revelations and the police charges against him for the murder of Zalie Dyer?’