Throw Me to the Wolves

by Patrick McGuinness

  For the umpteenth time, I figure that if he’s guilty he’s one of those criminals who will give no ground, confess nothing, surrender no information; someone who will go to prison and beyond without giving up his secrets. And for another umpteenth time I also think that, if he’s innocent, he’s rather more confident of his innocence, and of its being recognised by a jury, than he should be. There are still no other suspects, the press have judged him, the public, too, and whether he’s in a remand centre, in a jail or out on bail and back in his flat, he is in more danger than he knows.

  The worst thing for him now would be to be released.

  His solicitor is not one of the usual on-call this-wanker/that-wankers that Gary and I are familiar with. It is a young woman with dark bobbed hair in a black trouser suit. She introduces herself, but I don’t catch her name the first time. There are people like that, and I’m one of them: who stop listening as soon as someone introduces themselves or gives them directions. It’s as if a screen comes down and the white noise fills the ears. She reminds me of her client’s rights, then tells me that they have been breached, and that she will take this up. Oh – I register that bit. Good. I hope she does. I’ll be backing her all the way from the other side of the lawsuit. From inside the dock, if comes to it. Her card, which she offers me, tells me that she is a partner in one of the Dickensianly named upper-crust law firms near the school. Cashman, Price and Strang. Gary hasn’t come up with a nickname for them because he doesn’t have to: all he would want to say about them is already in the name. CPS – ironically, it’s the same acronym as the Crown Prosecution Service they have so often foiled, outspent or driven to settle out of court.

  Lucy Hall, her card says. I know the firm. They were long-established even when I was at school and walked past their offices every day: two floors of a big treacle-stoned Georgian mansion and a front garden with a fountain surrounded by black Mercs and Lexuses. The garden used to be lawned and landscaped, but now it’s crunch-gravelled for the tyres of private-plated 4×4s. CPS are good: old-school polish and new school technocracy, plus the kind of legal menace only serious money can purchase. It’s like everything Mr Wolphram buys: it’s the best because he’ll only buy it once.

  What I don’t know, though I’ll know it soon – I’ll piece it together a few hours after I’ve left the room – is that it’s not Mr Wolphram paying Lucy Hall but her father, Neil. It’s not pro bono but the effect is the same, because one lawyer who believes in what they’re doing is worth a whole chambers doing it for the money.

  This is for later, when suddenly things have an order and a logic they never had to begin with. In that respect Mr Wolphram was right: It’s not like a novel. For now, Lucy Hall is just a solicitor, and, because Gary hasn’t met her, she doesn’t have a nickname. She just looks clever, thoughtful and kind. What I mean is: she became those things as I knew her better, because, when I first saw her, what I actually noticed was nothing. She was just a solicitor in a hot room with a man who might have strangled someone to death against a wall and then wrapped the body in Pound Shop binbags.

  He would never have bought anything from a Pound Shop, I realise, but you can’t rest a case on the argument that the defendant buys more expensive items than those used in the crime he is accused of.

  ‘Could I ask your client some questions about his time as a teacher – questions that are nothing to do with the case?’

  She looks at him – she is not surprised by this, which means he must have told her about me – and he nods.

  ‘This is a strange request and I advise against it, but my client says it’s fine so I agree to it. But nothing about the case is to be discussed, and I’ll stay here nonetheless to ensure that,’ she replies.

  ‘Finally – some questions that won’t incriminate me,’ he smiles. It’s a kind smile and one I don’t deserve. His solicitor smiles, too, but it is for him and not me.

  Mr Wolphram introduces me: ‘Inspector Widdowson was a pupil of mine, some time ago, quite a good one as I recall, if a little muddle-headed. Vague.’

  Ms Hall: ‘We’re asking for him to be released on bail.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know, but I think asking for his release is a bad idea before he is cleared.’

  ‘That isn’t your call, I’m afraid – it’s up to the client and their solicitor. We will be asking for bail, and since it will be impractical for Mr Wolphram to return home, we will be arranging some accommodation that you’ll be made aware of in due course.’

  ‘I want to return home,’ says Mr Wolphram firmly. ‘I’m innocent and my home is the only place I should be.’

  ‘We’ll discuss it,’ says Lucy Hall, and looking at me to leave the room: ‘between us.’

  ‘You had a question for me?’

  ‘Yes – my friend Danny McAlinden. You remember him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You drove him away. I saw him in your car. Then I never heard from him again.’

  ‘That’s a rather melodramatic way of putting it. I took him to the station. He went home, back to Newcastle, back to his father’s. Initially it was just for the funeral. But he stayed on. A few days extra, a week, two weeks and then term ended and then … well … his mother’s income held things together and his father needed him to work. He gave up his scholarship, became apprenticed to a silversmith for a while. It’s possible that he had no choice, but I got the sense he decided himself.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I don’t know – we stayed in touch for … oh – a good ten years after that. His father retired and Danny was – he used that word – released, and came back here for a while to work at the new Arts Centre in the docks. He took to it. I daresay if you’d gone to see more European films you’d have bumped into him at the box office, that’s where I used to see him …’

  ‘Very amusing … then what?’

  ‘He worked part-time there and did a foundation course in music technology at the art college. Branched out into lighting and sound, acoustics for concerts and festivals. The last I heard he was setting up a studio for radio dramas and documentaries. That was about ten years ago.’

  ‘How long was he here?’

  ‘Five years, maybe six, seven. Long enough to do a degree and get some work experience. For all I know he’s still here.’

  Danny was here, so close all that time, never more than a mile or two from me, from where we are now. I thought I was the one who returned. But as Gary likes to remind me: No, Prof, you never left, and that’s not the same thing.

  ‘No, he isn’t, but I thought you’d like to see this … I know it doesn’t exactly balance things, but it’s out there …’

  I show him Danny’s letter. He reads it – once fast, anxiously, afraid of another betrayal, and then a second time, slowly, for the pleasure and the reassurance. He smiles and is proud and moved, voiceless for a moment, then he whispers:

  ‘Thank you’ and takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes and closes them. ‘Give me a few moments, please.’

  Lucy Hall looks at me with – well, not exactly kindness, but certainly less contemptuous suspicion than before.

  Danny. All that time I could have looked him up – Facebook, LinkedIn, Friends Online … Everyone is findable. And my job is finding people. Other people’s people at any rate. I looked up my old girlfriend, Claire Brett. She’s still here, a few streets away, and though by the law of averages we should have bumped into each other a few times across the decades, I haven’t seen her for twenty-four years. Same with Jonny Kebab. Though I know he lives in St Leonard’s, he’s always around town at openings, usually with a new wife, and always in the ‘High Society’ section of the Evening Post, the cut-price gossip column where Lynne Forester writes about Rotary Club balls and celeb weddings.

  But distance and closeness do not work as we expect them to. In a big city you can see the same person three times in a week and wonder if some odd force is drawing you to the same places in the same slice of clock-time. Yet you can
also live close by someone and never see them. Is there a science that explains it? An algorithm? Or is it more of a hauntology of encounters – like magnetism and counter-magnetism … the way we are drawn to each other but also perhaps repelled. Is there some occult law makes us take the turning that avoids meeting X, or linger in the shop when we might two seconds earlier have met Y, or that makes our train late or prods us into not taking the entrance to the pub or the theatre where we would have bumped into Z? The same occult law that makes things happen stops them happening. The law that governs coincidence is also a law that prevents them; the law that governs no-incidence at all.

  All this time, and we were close by.

  We always think of it the wrong way round – how things happen, never how they don’t; the things that could have happened and nearly did, still clamouring there, ghosts in the maybe, yearning for their lives in counterfact.

  He was here for five years after school and I never saw him: he at the tech college on the other side of the bridge, I at the uni on the campus at the posh end of town. We were probably two or three streets away from each other a lot of the time. I probably walked into pubs he’d just left, shops he’d just paid at. We must have been constantly skirting each other, defying the law of averages which decrees that at some point, somewhere in our overlapping orbits, we’d meet. I probably handled a coin or a note that had passed through his hands, been in his pocket. He might have drunk from a glass I had used in the same pub a few days before. The city is the great ramifying map of our non-meetings, our flight paths crisscrossing over and over. But did I see him? Never.

  ‘Why didn’t he let me know?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I thought he would, but since he never mentioned it I supposed he and you had fallen out. No, not fallen out … fallen away. The way children do. Chapelton was not a place, or indeed a place in his memory, he wanted to return to. Can you blame him? When he did come back, he looked different. Not surprising, I suppose: he was nineteen – he’d lived and worked away from books and classrooms, he’d been through things that most people go through much later, and when he came back here it was as if he was arriving for the first time. Slate cleaned. All wiped. Opposite end of town, different circles. Almost a different city. He didn’t want to talk about people he’d known before – that goes for you, too, I’m afraid, beyond once asking, soon after he returned, if I knew how you were, and I didn’t – and he’d changed physically as well: broader-shouldered, crew-cut hair, a harder, more angular face. Leather coat and boots … he looked like a busker. Actually, I think he did busk, too, up on Cowbridge Road and down Park End Street and near the docks and the ferries. When the new Arts Centre was built there was money to be made.’

  The thought that Danny might actually look different throws me. I’d probably not have noticed him even if I had been in the same room. I’d probably heard him busk, but no one looks at buskers and anyway …

  ‘What instrument did he play?’ I ask, realising I knew of no instrument, no aptitude for music of any sort, with Danny.

  ‘The usual,’ says Mr Wolphram warmly, thinking back to a time before murders and murder charges, monsterings and interrogations, ‘a dirty-looking guitar, surprisingly well-tuned from the little I heard. And it wasn’t classical. There was no Villa-Lobos on the streets in those days.’

  In my head Danny has always been as he was when I last saw him: slim and sad and desolate – and always going away. He had that air of someone made for leaving, so the thought that he was here provokes a sort of jealousy. Jealous at what? Not him, no, it’s more a police-jealousy rather than an erotic or emotional one: jealousy that I went on without being in full possession of the facts.

  ‘What about that last day?

  ‘That was very simple and very sad. They’d given him a few days off, I think, maybe a week, but he knew he wasn’t coming back. I certainly knew and he didn’t need to tell me. I knew from the moment I came in on that ghastly trial. Boys didn’t have many possessions in those days, did they? School uniform, weekend clothes for those who didn’t get taken out by family, a couple of books, a family photo or two.’

  ‘Nothing you’d come back for,’ I say.

  ‘Nothing, no.’

  ‘And no one.’

  ‘It’s different with people, isn’t it? They don’t stay still or switch off or get tidied away when you’re not with them. You got on with your own life, he with his, we with all of ours.’

  ‘I suppose I’d have liked to hear from him, that’s all. We were close—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And inseparable.’

  ‘No one is inseparable.’

  ‘We went to see Evelyn in Hastings.’

  ‘I thought you might. I expect she was making tea in vast teapots and organising hundreds of Christmas lunches. If you hadn’t brought me here and accused me of things I’d never do or consider doing, I’d be helping her, instead of sitting here raking over the ashes of your schooldays.’

  ‘You didn’t tell your aunts you ended up in the same school as Goodship, did you?’

  ‘No. Why would I? They’d only have worried. And I didn’t know he was there when I applied. I only found out when I crossed him in the corridor. Even then he didn’t recognise me until we were introduced in the staffroom. We left each other alone. A few years later he became headmaster. He took the management route. That was how it worked in the eighties.’

  ‘Not before passing on his fondness for classroom justice to his protégé, though, by the looks of it.’

  Wolphram looks down. ‘Yes, well, these schools are all about passing things on – traditions, legacies …’ He looks up again: ‘Isn’t that what your parents pay for?’

  Lucy Hall cuts in: ‘Sorry to interrupt your trip down memory lane, but we need to discuss, my client and I, how to get him out of here, so I suggest you take all this up later, when he’s been freed, when you’ve apologised, and when he’s discussing what sort of compensation he’s entitled to.’

  ‘I didn’t say I wanted compensation,’ he tells her gently and with the air of someone who has been misjudged.

  ‘You will when you’ve seen these.’ She nods at the newspapers piled up in front of him.

  ‘I know what’s in them,’ he tells her, reaching defensively for Classical Music Today.

  ‘You don’t,’ I say. ‘You really don’t.’

  *

  Tonight Marieke is playing me a car parking on gravel. It’s the gravel outside my neighbours’ house. She tells me it sounds like the sea, and she is right – like the sea in shallow coves. She makes me listen to some sea-rinsed shingle she has found on the computer, some archipelagic reef in Cornwall as it gargles spume and pebbles. The two are almost indistinguishable.

  Her other favourite: the sound of the cars on the ring road, recorded from the brownfield dogging half-place near the bridge. It sounds, she says, like a waterfall. She is right again – she loves things that sound similar but are completely different, so different they are almost opposites of each other, she says. This is where we found Zalie’s body, this urban interzone and its nameless road where, if you close your eyes, you could imagine yourself in the Dales or in the Highlands.

  That interests Marieke, too: how a road can have no name, and how it can stay nameless though surrounded by places that have been mapped, Apped and put on postcards. Places, she says, that have been recorded. The bridge or the viaduct or the zoo, seen by thousands of people every day, and then this weedy, muddy bankside, strewn with faded sweet wrappers and empty cans, consumer detritus and the going-going-gones of everyday life.

  Marieke has a dozen memory sticks crammed with her recordings. She has labelled them and dated them: record player, doorbell, watch, pylons humming, sinkhole gurgling, engine running, man coughing, keyboard tapping …

  She pieces the world together like a detective.

  Sigrid comes back alone from a Soulmates internet date. It was a short evening – so short she hasn’t even eaten. ‘That b
ad?’ I ask, but she doesn’t answer, just slings her bag on the sofa and pours herself a glass of whatever wine I have, and which I bought without paying attention to. Marieke is watching a documentary about Rock ’n’ Roll, from which she is learning that the equipment contained in her pen-sized recording device used to be the size of a car. She is taking notes for her school project, which is a history of computers. ‘Memory doesn’t have a size, but the place you put it in has to have one’ is how it begins. It’s hard to argue with Marieke when she’s on her special subject.

  ‘Tell me about these sites,’ I ask Sigrid as she prods my leftover chicken with a fork. She smells of hours-old perfume and beer-garden smoke. ‘Another dud,’ she says, and means the man and the occasion.

  ‘I think you should go on one,’ she tells me. ‘Having someone to cook for, or at least learn to cook for, might change your life.’

  It changed hers, I know that: from an easy-going, happy twenty-nine-year-old to a trembling, fearful indoor-wife with captivity-bred eyes, whose husband checked her whereabouts, decided on her clothes and locked her in when he went out with his mates. He even loaded an app onto her mobile that told him where she was all the time. Not that she was ever where she wasn’t supposed to be, but that made no difference: it’s hard to know what the controlling man wants – something to control, or nothing.

  It happened slowly: small increments, some of them so small that even looking back, it was hard to pick them out. In the days when Sigrid and I still discussed it, I would date it to the moment he told her to shut her face and that she’d drunk too much – after only two glasses – at a wedding reception in front of everyone she knew; she dates it later, to the moment she found him throwing out all the books an ex-boyfriend had given her. I date it from the evening he called her a slut for dressing up to go out with her friends; she dates it from the day he called her a frump for not dressing up to stay in with him.