Throw Me to the Wolves

by Patrick McGuinness

It hasn’t stopped the stories. ‘Exclusive: Zalie Accused’s Aunt Is Soup Kitchen Major’, ran the Daily Mail, which has now led with a ‘Comment’ piece about why single men should not be allowed to teach in schools. Another paper has a Readers’ Poll: Gays and Children? Should they mix? No – Phone 0845808080; Yes – Phone 0845818181.

  The papers have a dilemma: they can go down the ‘dead mother’ route, with the ‘brought up by women, loner, pervert and woman killer’, and combine that with overtones of ‘religious cult’ to produce, for the nation, the classic Psycho vibe. Or they can take a different approach, less flashy and harder to laminate into a headline, but more troubling, and certainly likelier to insinuate itself into the culture: ‘Christmas Murderer was much-loved boy, claims auntie’: then respectable Christian upbringing, bible class, charity work, we gave him everything and ending: we made a monster.

  Everyone is speaking up, coming forward, breaking their silence.

  There’s a man selling the Hastings Herald, whose front-page headline – ‘Murder Accused Was Hastings Grammar Pupil. Classmates Speak Out’ – is pinned to the front of the kiosk.

  Inside, there is the smell of polish and detergent. Leaning up against the wall, a dozen or so cases for brass instruments. A sousaphone has been unpacked and takes up a whole corner. Its case, huge and rounded and black, looks like a shadow that has uncoupled itself and is now trying to sneak away from the body that cast it.

  Gary is respectful and a little awed. For no reason other than instinct, because the place is noisy and clanging with pots and pans, he whispers.

  Evelyn Price recognises us immediately. She is not in uniform, and still has her coat and scarf on, though the place is suffused with the thick chugging heat of a dozen fan heaters. She is at the back of the room, holding one of those large institutional teapots with an extra handle on the front. The band she is serving tea to is in uniform. Old men and women and a few adolescents are eating and chatting, their coin buckets and charity boxes by their plates. We take off our coats. Gary is already glazed with sweat.

  ‘I remember the Sally Army from when I was younger,’ he says, ‘the brass bands and the kids at the front rattling the boxes for change. Small change, ’cos that’s all they ever seemed to get, and it’s all we ever had. They had stickers, too, on those little rolls like miniature bog paper. Shield-shaped badges you stuck on and that fell off after about two hours. I always wondered what the children felt like, seeing their mates wandering past with their cigs and their tinnies, outside shopping centres and stations, while they were stuck there looking like toy soldiers having the piss taken out of them.’

  ‘Maybe it didn’t bother them,’ I reply, though I’m not convinced. ‘Most of these people are Salvation Army families, they were kids and now they’re parents and grandparents. Lots of them leave probably, but it doesn’t mean they’re embarrassed or think it’s weird.’

  ‘I dunno, Prof, I’m just making conversation, but it’d be a sick world if we laughed at people for looking after those who’ve got nothing. ’Specially at Christmas. I quite liked some of their songs, about how they were going to kick poverty’s ass … Anyway, let’s get Mother Teresa out of the way and go home.’

  ‘Mother Teresa’ is a nimble, bright-eyed eighty-six-year-old. She is quick on her feet and even quicker of mind. She puts down her teapot and takes us to a back room, a sort of office with papers and calendars and piles of Styrofoam cups and plastic plates in cellophane. There is a large banner above the desk: Salvation Army Hastings Corps. Framed pages of the Army newspaper, War Cry, are unevenly nailed to the walls, as if put up by people of different heights at exactly the same time. There’s a flag with the motto Blood and Fire splayed out square above the door. Evelyn doesn’t exude blood or fire, but she is warm, intransigent and tough.

  ‘That woman is nails,’ Gary says admiringly in the car home, ‘nails wrapped in cotton wool.’

  But first:

  She offers us tea, which we accept. Always accept the hot drink, and always drink it slowly – it magics up a pool of time from a few shallow minutes. It’s also harder for people to tell you to leave if you’re still eating or drinking something they’ve given you.

  Gary cups his tea with both hands. Evelyn Price lets us begin. She has the same calm manner as her nephew, but none of his chill. I am not looking at the face of an octogenarian, because the eyes are soft and blue, the features barely wrinkled. I would put her age at mid-sixties, not much older to look at than Wolphram himself, though I know she’s nearly twenty years older. She extends a box of fancy cakes with bright yellow and pink icing. They are factory-made, shop-bought and mass-produced. So much for Gary’s fantasy of Olive’s home-baking. The tea burns our tongues, and already has a cracked, hard-water lid of scud settling over it. The office is unheated, so the tea steams, and Gary and I put our coats straight back on, feeling the sweat go cold on our skin.

  ‘You’re here to talk about my nephew,’ she begins, and it’s not a question. ‘But since you’ve charged him and I haven’t been allowed to see him, I’m not sure what you expect me to say. I’ve dealt with the reporters, telephoning at all times of the day and night, and they haven’t got anything out of me. Some of them have even started leaving … the only one I spoke to is the one in the car, the large one who looks like he’s always hungry.’ She looks at Gary, realises that she has described him, too, and looks a little embarrassed. ‘He asked me if I wanted to put “my side” of the story. That’s what he called it: the story. He had a chequebook and a pad of receipts.’

  ‘How much did he offer?’ asks Gary.

  ‘We didn’t reach that point,’ she replies firmly.

  I begin:

  ‘Though we are involved with the case, I should tell you that we are not the ones who decided to charge him—’

  She looks at me, and then at Gary, and there is no sign of any of the reactions we expected: anger, surprise, fear, wariness, distress.

  ‘So why are you here?’

  ‘We’ll be honest – we aren’t sure. They have charged him, yes, but that doesn’t mean our investigation is over, because there are a lot of things to clear up.’

  ‘Can you tell us anything about him that might help?’ asks Gary.

  ‘Help who?’

  ‘All of us – the police, Zalie’s family, maybe him?’

  ‘I can’t imagine what I could say. I haven’t seen him for some months – we see each other four or five times a year and he was due here for Christmas, which won’t happen. When we speak on the telephone he’s exactly the same. And so am I.’

  ‘What sort of things did you talk about?’ asks Gary.

  She looks surprised. ‘What do people talk to elderly relatives about? The weather, house prices, television? Immigration? The things you tell yourselves we worry about.’

  ‘Tell us about what he was like,’ I ask.

  She leans back in her chair and takes off her coat. ‘My nephew was a gentle and unusual boy … who became a gentle and unusual man. He’s not as he appears in those photographs for one thing – he isn’t arrogant or cold – and none of the things the papers say about him are true. None. But I can’t see how you’d expect me to say anything different, can you? He’s just … not like other people.’ She thinks it over. Adds: ‘Most other people. Because a lot of people are not like other people.’

  ‘Can you tell us why you’re so absolutely certain that he’s incapable of doing what they say he did?’ Gary keeps on with the they.

  She sips her tea and thinks it over.

  ‘How much has he told you about his life?’

  ‘Not a great deal, just that he was brought up by you and your sister, here in Hastings, and that he was happy. He seems happy still. Apart from all this,’ I add, stupidly. Apart from being arrested for murder, being disowned by his colleagues and neighbours and having the whole country salivating to string him up. Yes, apart from that it’s all good. ‘Maybe not surrounded by like-minded people and overwhelmed wi
th what they call peer-group friendships, but happy, and that he obviously loves you both very much. And felt loved by you.’

  Evelyn looks down and smiles. It makes her happy to hear this – though she knows it completely and doesn’t need to be told.

  ‘He was always reading, always thinking. He had a tape recorder, an old cassette player, and saved up to buy music from the record shop. It’s gone now. The shop – not the tape recorder. He keeps everything. Some of it is still in his room. He still sleeps there when he comes. It was never really a child’s room, so it’s not like he’s going back in time, to his childhood or anything. He joined one of those music clubs, where they reel you in with a special deal, then send you things you didn’t want and make you pay for them. Unless you returned them within two weeks. That’s how they made their money – they banked on you forgetting or not being bothered. But he never got caught out: if he didn’t like something he’d take it back to the post office, perfectly wrapped, and return it. I remember seeing how excited he was when he got a new tape, but however much he was in a hurry to hear it, he’d unwrap it really carefully. One day – he was about sixteen – he ordered three performances of the same piece of music. We asked him why. He said so he could compare them and choose which one to keep. We couldn’t hear the difference, but he could. He can tell which orchestra is playing a piece, and when. And who’s conducting and where and when it’s being performed. Imagine that.’

  ‘He didn’t get any of that from you?’ I ask.

  ‘No. Not really. And not from his parents. It seemed to be there already. It’s hard to know, isn’t it, whether people are shaped by their upbringings or whether they can invent themselves from scratch?’

  ‘I suppose the truth is that it’s half and half,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe, but who wants a truth that sounds like it comes from a cookbook?’ Gary snaps at me. ‘Did he learn to play music with you?’ He asks his question so softly that he needs to repeat it before she hears.

  ‘Yes,’ she has no idea either how any of this is relevant, and she’s right, because it isn’t. It’s just that Gary wants to know, because wanting to know things like this is a sign that he doesn’t think Wolphram is guilty. ‘His mother wasn’t an Army girl. The family was never Army. Not like most of the people here,’ she gestures at the open door and beyond it into the hall, ‘a lot of them have been for generations. We’re new really. One generation. I joined in the late forties, and then Ida – my sister – came in about two years later. When Michael was a boy, when his mother died, we took him out with us and he asked if he could learn the trumpet. It was a bit late really – ten or eleven – but he took to it straight off. Less than a year and he was as good as any of them. Better. Then he wanted to play the guitar, didn’t like the music we played, found it all, I don’t know, a little basic. But also he didn’t much like playing with others, the whole band bit. I bought him a guitar. It took him six months to get good enough to start doing the exams. My sister said that it wasn’t like he was learning to play, but rather that he was remembering it from a past life. That’s not the sort of thing we say in the Salvation Army, stuff about past lives, and I remember her being embarrassed about it and changing the subject. He was skilled all right, but, make no mistake, he worked at it so hard it was as if nothing else existed. Hours and hours of it, he could go for half a day without even looking up from his guitar or his books.’

  ‘Can’t have been easy,’ says Gary, trying to reach something, some sense of trauma or unhappiness or hidden suffering.

  ‘Not easy, maybe, but it wasn’t the way you think. He had friends, he laughed at jokes and made them, too. I used to watch him chuckling while he was reading and ask him what was so funny, and he’d tell me what it was and I didn’t find it funny. He found people who were like him – you know, studious types, musical types. They do exist you know, everywhere, even in places like this. Gentle, thoughtful people who don’t fit in and aren’t bothered by it, and who find each other somehow, in the places only they seem to know. They grew their hair long and went to concerts, not just classical stuff. Pop or rock or whatever it’s called. Those boys who dressed really smartly and had mopeds – Mods – he was part of that, so he wasn’t some kind of oddball. He just did that and liked Mozart at the same time.’

  She refills our tea, offers us more bright cakes from the packet.

  ‘It’s not like what the papers say, all that business about being a loner or a hermit. He wasn’t at all. You want those explanations because he’s different, but when people who are different find each other, they’re less different. Like here, like the Salvation Army – out there we’re strange and we look odd and people laugh, but when we’re here we’re the same.’

  She stops for a moment and takes a mouthful of her fluorescently iced pink cake; reaches out for her tea, then puts it aside without tasting it.

  ‘He wasn’t bullied. A couple of teachers found him hard going because he probably knew more than they did. One in particular had a problem with him – used to stand him up in front of the class and invite everyone to say what they hated about him. Like some kind of tribunal. We complained to the school and something must have got done about it because we never heard about it again. Anyway, he was doing well there, stayed away from people who didn’t like what he liked, and they stayed away from him. Most of the time. There’s no mystery, nothing hidden down below.’

  ‘Sex,’ says Gary, louder and more abruptly than he intended. I’m not sure it’s a question or a statement, but either way she isn’t fazed. She isn’t smiling, but there’s satisfaction in her eyes, because we have become predictable.

  ‘I was wondering when you’d come to that. I’m amazed that you held off so long …’ She has some of that superiority we saw in him, though it is softer, less sarcastic. She pours Gary another cup of tea, mostly to distract him from his own embarrassment. It’s the first time I’ve seen Gary embarrassed by the word sex. ‘The answer is, I don’t know. Some, none, a lot, and who with … I don’t know. I’m not the sort of person one talks about that to, and he’s not the sort to talk about it. He was a loved and loving boy, and he was happy. That may not be what you want to hear, but that is how it was.’

  What is it that we want to hear? She doesn’t know and nor, I realise, do we. We have come to slake our curiosity, and to make some kind of amends.

  Amends for what? He may still be guilty.

  ‘Out of interest, what was the name of the teacher who gave him a hard time?’ I ask.

  ‘That I can tell you – I remember the name very well. Mr Goodship. I recall Ida and I laughing at his funny name. To start with, that is – before we realised that the things he did were not in the slightest bit funny. He got a job somewhere else and that was the last we heard of him.’

  Gary and I try hard not to look at each other. We are solving something, but it isn’t the murder of Zalie Dyer.

  ‘He was just himself. He didn’t need protecting, no one hurt him or made him suffer. I don’t think he was bullied by the other boys, because, though he wasn’t very open and forthcoming about feelings, he didn’t hide them either … I’m not sure I can say it better: there wasn’t much on show with him, but it didn’t mean there was anything hidden either. He … he just wasn’t exactly like other people, but, then, who is?’

  ‘Any toys?’ asks Gary.

  She looks at him, surprised. And then she is not at all surprised, and smiles. ‘Well, as he probably told you, he wasn’t much of a child even when he was a child. But there were toys, it’s just that he didn’t really use them for playing.’

  Gary laughs. He probably wishes she was his aunt. I know I do. The stray thought comes in that I know nothing about Gary’s family, except that he is single, his parents live in council housing to the west of the city, and he has a sister whose name he hasn’t even told me. Then it occurs to me that he has told me and I’ve just forgotten. Not forgotten; I just wasn’t listening.

  ‘There are children l
ike that.’ She finishes her tea. ‘I expect you’ll be wanting to see his room now. It’s what policemen do, isn’t it?’

  ‘That won’t …’ I say

  ‘Yes we’d …’ says Gary

  ‘ … be necessary.’

  ‘ … like to.’

  Interview

  ‘Okay, so you know me.’ We are back in the interview room, and I am back on the case. ‘But how much do you actually remember? I’ve always wanted to know what it was like for you—’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Not you specifically – teachers: they get older but the kids stay the same age. Don’t they all merge into one?’

  ‘No!’ he says, offended. I didn’t mean to offend him, and I’m surprised by my own harshness. ‘I remember a great deal, it’s just that the order it happened in tends to change. It’s the opposite of a novel in that way, isn’t it?’

  This isn’t really a question, so I leave it. I don’t want Gary coming in and finding us talking about nineteenth-century fiction.

  ‘So, they’ve let you back in have they, Ander?’ He uses my name for the first time and I feel both unmasked and somehow affirmed. ‘Though it’s Alexander now, your lanyard tells me.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, fingering the managerial harness around my neck, ‘for now, yes they have, but mainly because they can’t decide what to do.’

  ‘There’s a statute of limitation for crimes, isn’t there, so there must be one for investigating crimes, too,’ he answers.

  He no longer looks frightened. He sits up straight and holds his head just high enough to look a little downwards at you. Like he used to. They have returned his glasses to him, and he is reading some classical music magazine his solicitor has brought. He has been truculent, sarcastic, confused, bewildered, terrified, incredulous, broken and dignified. Now that it has happened, now that he has been charged, he seems more relieved than afraid.

  Some people fall apart as soon as we charge them; some clam up. Mr Wolphram looks as if he’s been released, which is the opposite of what he is supposed to feel. You charge people, especially people like him, against whom the evidence is circumstantial, so that they’ll feel the walls close in, so they’ll start telling the truth, or telling the kind of lies from which a truth can be deduced: that it was an accident, that he never meant this, never planned that, that it was a mistake, that she fell, that he didn’t intend to kill anyone …