Throw Me to the Wolves

by Patrick McGuinness

  I phone through an order to have Ben’s computer seized. Chloe’s, too. Mobile phones and tablets. We need to find out where Lynne Forester’s newspaper is keeping him.

  ‘I’ll take care of it,’ says Gary, and leaves me there in the hallway.

  SOCOs are dismantling the washing machine, taking the clothes and shoes out in evidence bags. They’re putting the wireless Wi-Fi hub into a bag. The forensic vacuum cleaner is aspirating the welcome mat and the rugs and the wall-to-wall carpeting. In the kitchen they’re bagging up a pair of used rubber gloves, taking the sink out and swabbing the inside of the pipes. They’ve found masking tape, binbags, bubble wrap. You’d use them to put out the rubbish, wrap a present, carry something fragile. It’s Christmas after all.

  They’re ordinary, quiet, cupboard-things, yes, but right now they look like instruments from hell.

  *

  As I wait for Gary back at the station, I decide to look some of them up.

  For Mrs Pizzi there’s an old funeral notice: Elaine Pizzi, 1940–2008. Funeral at Bartlemas crem. No flowers. Donations to cancer research.

  Angela Mason, 78 Westway Rd. Chair of the French Society, and there she is on their Facebook page.

  Lawnder, Donald, Dr: Professor of Architecture at King’s College London. Beneath his name, a list of his books: one is The Medway City Zoo: A Modernist Masterpiece. ‘Donald Lawnder was instrumental in the listing of one of south-east England’s modern treasures …’ it says on his Wikipedia page. It links to the zoo’s website, which promises a two-year Lottery-funded restoration project overseen by Lawnder and English Heritage.

  I chase them down in a frenzy of Googling: Neil Hall, Rich Nicholson, George Cobbleson, Flynch, Bowden and Tristan; Bosworth, Vaughan, Lewis, McCloud, Goodship and Morbender. Some I can’t find, while others, those with generic names, David Jones, Jonathan Smith, could be any of the similar sounding, similarly employed people in banks and SMEs, Chamber of Commerce types with what Gary calls ‘painted-on suits’. A lot of them have Facebook pages with pictures of themselves in running vests with numbers on. It’s a world of half-marathons and personal bests. Many of them send their kids to Chapelton.

  I wonder how many of them blank it all out, the bad stuff, sieve it and refine it until all that’s left are the good things, connected up by … well, nothing: connected up by holes.

  Morbender died in 1991. A cagey obituary says he was ‘a little ready with punishment’. ‘Old-school values and old-school methods.’ Then, at the end: ‘He leaves a wife, two children and three grandchildren.’

  McCloud is still alive and runs an English-style boarding school in Hong Kong: Modelled on the classic English public school, and staffed by teachers from the UK’s finest universities, Chapel Down College teaches the British curriculum to prepare pupils for the world. The school lives by the ethos Mens sana in corpore sano: a healthy mind in a healthy body. There’s a photograph of McCloud looking well-preserved if a little freeze-dried, but it’s hard to tell how recent it is.

  It’s not because I’m curious – I could have done this anytime in the last quarter-century – it’s more to feel their names at the ends of my fingers, right down to the letters; to explore the traceability of them all. I leave Danny until last.

  I’m about to type in Daniel Patrick McAlinden – I get to the small c in the Mc – but Gary pulls my hand away.

  ‘Stop it, Prof. Leave them alone. Leave him alone. The past may be your local, but he doesn’t drink there anymore. And from what you’ve told me he never did either. Just because you can find people doesn’t mean you should. In real life, outside the films and the stories, the long-lost friend stays long lost, which is usually how he wants it. Anyway, this is what you should be checking out.’

  He takes out a long roll of printed paper. Websites URLs, times, durations. There’s a folder with images from homepages, and bank statements with direct debits and standing orders underlined in red. They’ve worked fast, because there’s a pile of printouts of Phelps’s browsing histories.

  ‘Did she know about this?’ I ask. ‘Chloe, I mean?’

  ‘There’s no evidence she did, Prof. But, then, there’s knowing and there’s knowing, isn’t there? Especially with the wives and the girlfriends of these people. He deletes his browsing history and has a password. Sometimes he uses her laptop for normal things like banking or booking train tickets, but not for this kind of stuff. He has the password to hers, she doesn’t have his. Says it all.’ Gary shows me a list of the sites he visits. They’re violent, abusive, demented places. I can tell that just from the titles.

  ‘Did you take a look at any of them?’ I ask Gary.

  ‘Prof – there’s stuff on there I couldn’t bear to watch even if it was a film and I knew it wasn’t real.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay, that’s the job. But, yes, I did. A bit. Lifted the lid. Caught the stench. Breathed the fumes, as the poet would say. It won’t hold up as evidence – we’ve been through this before, Prof: the looking versus doing stuff, thought versus deed. But in the context of other things, yes: it goes into a case.’

  ‘Other things being DNA, witnesses and a confession, yes?’

  ‘The first one’ll do. That’s why I’ve sent what your man would call a lapidary reminder to that private lab in Cheltenham asking where the hell their results are. I reckon they’ve read the papers, seen the telly and decided they’ve got their man … no hurry anymore. They can get on with doing those paternity tests for the daytime TV circus or whatever they make their bread and butter money from.’

  ‘And the dating site?’ I ask.

  ‘Not much there. He was writing to different women in different ways, a dozen or so on the go. In the old days you needed a magic potion and a lab to be Jekyll and Hyde, now you just need a smartphone. One or two replied, asked for pictures, chatted a bit, but then lost interest. No reason. Just decided against him. I’d like to think their instinct sniffed something amiss even in cyberspace – that would comfort me. A bit. A bad cyber-feeling. But he had no aliases, just different personalities and that one nickname for all sites: Mister B. One message he’d be all romantic and smooth, the next he’d be wanting no-strings one-nighters with strangulation games. “’Til our lips go purple!” he says. No dice on any front.’

  ‘What I don’t understand is why he never messaged Zalie. He’d have recognised her straight away as the woman in the downstairs flat.’

  ‘You answered your question right there, Prof: he didn’t need to, did he? She was right there all the time. Send her a message online? What’s the point when he can talk to her in the hall or on the stairs or while she’s putting her bins out?’

  ‘Hiding in plain sight.’

  ‘Not even hiding, Prof. If anyone was hiding, Zalie was.’

  He must have met her, or approached her, or engineered some kind of encounter outside the house, on the way back from work, getting their bikes, picking up the post from the doormat. He could have watched her without arousing any suspicion – why would he? He was at home. The problem was: so was she.

  Small-screen

  Ben is on the bridge. He’s looking down, but because of the meshed wire barriers he can’t hang his head over. He can’t even do the toying-with-the-possibility-of-jumping, suicidally-meditating-on-the-void routine. That’s health and safety for you – you can’t even choose your own dénouement.

  But this is a symbolic action, contends Gary, not a serious suicide threat: ‘Small-screen ending, Prof.’ Ben knows that bridges are traditionally where things come to their climax. He’s seen enough films and played enough Xboxes to know that bridges are good places to end things. Unfortunately, it’s now much easier to jump from just under the buttresses, to scramble down and find a ledge, then make your leap. He must know that. But, then, no one would see him. You can’t get the TV crews down there and you’d have no scene. There’d be nobody to film him with the blue-strobing police lights crossing his final-act face, no
police negotiators trying to persuade him not to jump. He’s seen it on telly and he wants the lot: loudhailers, helicopters, police negotiators.

  Instead it’s Gary hurling bathos at him: ‘Should’ve brought a ladder, mate!’

  This is Ben Phelps starring in the movie of his own capture. He’s not going to get caught in a newspaper’s rented flat while his girlfriend looks at him and sees a murderer and wonders whether he was always going to be that murderer. Or whether just one of the many versions of what he might become happened to get picked from the crowd of his possible selves. Whether he’d have murdered her. But she hates him, that’s for sure. And now she’s free.

  He could tell from the phone call that we were onto him. He watched as Lynne Forester answered – in the middle of recording his version of events, the version where he didn’t kill Zalie, where he was shocked, horrified, and where he pocketed ten grand – and saw her face alter, heard her voice shake as she listened to Gary. It was good to see her scared finally, that was something. He enjoyed the fear. A small victory. And he’ll miss the money. The money would’ve been really handy. And would it have been so bad after all if that weirdo Wolphram got put away? ‘The Wolf’. He always knew that guy wasn’t right.

  He wasn’t going to wait for the police.

  So Phelps is going to get caught on the bridge, for no reason other than the dramatic decor, which is an excellent reason in a world which to him is no more than a TV screen. He’s going to hold out until the TV crews get here, until Lynne and Ellie Nash and all the country’s news channels are here to film it.

  The cars have stopped, and the commuters – ignoring the loudhailers telling them to stay where they are – are getting out and snapping him with their phones. The flashes seep like slow fireworks into the fog. It’s muffled and Christmassy. Festive, even, like tinsel flaring in treelights. They’ll be live-tweeting it. Hashtag Medway Bridge. Hashtag Jumper. Every thirty seconds, every ten seconds, every five, and there’s another dozen, another twenty, another fifty pictures, tweets, updates …

  Gary and I are walking slowly towards him. Each time Ben turns or looks down or back at the massing crowd, we step a little closer.

  I wonder if they’ve announced that Wolphram’s being released, that we have another suspect. If the people on the bridge have heard the news, whether the headlines have cut in across the 5 p.m. drivetime shows, the Christmas singles, the last-minute ads for last-minute presents. The ribbons of BREAKING NEWS under the quiz shows and the soaps. Gary is scrolling down traffic update sites, the bridge hashtag, Zalie’s name, Xmas rush hour, Wolphram … and he’s swearing: ‘Why the fuck do I have to look at my phone to find out what’s happening in my own life? In front of my fucking eyes?’ All we can hear from the police cars is the switchboard asking for situation reports from all the cars in the area.

  What’s our report? We’re here and it’s now.

  We start to walk towards Ben. He’s less than a quarter of the way across the bridge, eighty metres or so along its span. He knows that the closer he is to us, the better it is for filming, because the TV vans don’t have to go the long way around. Gary says Ben won’t do it. I’m not sure. And not just because he hasn’t got a ladder. It’s because he’s waiting; nothing’s going to happen until the press get here.

  He shouts at us and tells us to stay where we are. He grips the mesh and looks like he’ll try to climb it. We stop. He lets go.

  Never underestimate inconvenience as a deterrent for site-specific suicide: for some reason I remember verbatim a sentence from a report I read on bridges. When I was a young policeman the area force was consulted on measures for suicide-reduction here. We suggested what we suggest best: barriers. The experts agreed, and a sort of caging with finger-fine mesh that turns back inwards at the top was fastened to the barriers in the nineties. Same as they used in the zoo. There were objections by the City Conservation Society, who wrote letters to the newspapers strafed with the adjective unsightly. But the number of deaths halved after that. Did it mean that suicides just took their desperation or their resolve elsewhere?

  You certainly don’t see, as you once did, the hovering, fretful depressives who used to haunt the bridge and who sometimes jumped. Or the decisive ones, with their faces on automatic, walking purposefully to the exact spot they’d planned. The bridge stopped being a place to think about suicide in the way it used to be, a place to contemplate it, even if you’d never do it, or to mull over the physics of falling or gauge what it would take to make you want it. The way I used to go and hang my arms off and calculate just how much misery I’d need to tip me over. I imagined it as the kitchen scales at home when my grandmother baked: me on one side and on the other a black flour being slowly sifted until … until it drops down and up I go and my weight in shadow takes my body’s place.

  If you saw someone standing there now, you could bet they were admiring the view or enjoying the cut of the wind, the smell of the estuary or the thrill of such pure height that the tonnes of iron and steel holding them up feel like a platform of air. They weren’t in the hell of themselves and wanting to end.

  For a while people used the buttresses. The buttresses are different; they’re built into rock and concrete and rubbly grass, and have the incremental, graded fall where the body, having leapt from a place with no clear vantage point and far from any photogenic chasm, falls and breaks itself against a rugged slope, its bones crunching and chipping and dislocating in their sockets as it half bounces, half rolls, until, skin flayed, flesh ripped and twenty or thirty feet down, it finds a sheer edge and drops over. It’s a lot to take in, even when you want to die, and it doesn’t have the perfect end-note of a clean fall through the void.

  If it’s finality you’re after, and ease of identification at the other end, you’d be shortlisting other locations.

  The last thing the suicide-to-be wants is a demeaning struggle with the banalities of their chosen spot: with the undergrowth and the rocks, the bits of fencing, the dogshit and cans and used condoms. All to finish up broken on a B-road as the commuters jam on the brakes or near some fly-tipped oven wedged on the slope.

  ‘He won’t do it, Prof. He’s only standing there because he’s seen it in action films and video games … those things always end with edges and ledges: cliff tops, railway tracks, windowsills, skyscraper roofs, you name it … But this isn’t an action film and this guy doesn’t have the guts to jump. Or the time.’

  ‘I don’t want him jumping and I don’t want him getting any famous last words in before he goes.’

  ‘You and me both, Prof. You ready?’

  ‘I’m ready!’

  I realise I have no idea what I’m ready for, let alone if it’s the same thing Gary is ready for.

  We walk slowly towards the middle of the bridge’s span. Gary stops occasionally to look at the view, though there is no view, there’s just a cold, thin wind and darkness below. The headlamps and taillights of the cars, bumper to bumper, make it impossible for us not to be seen, but the bridge lights have been turned off, as we asked. That will make it harder for the rubberneckers to film on their smartphones.

  Gary is walking deliberately slowly, dawdling like a tourist. As we get closer, Phelps calls out with threats to jump but Gary ignores him and wanders on. He’s cooler than I am – I’m sure Phelps will jump. He keeps gripping the bar and the wire and trying to get a foothold on the mesh. We’re about twenty metres away now.

  Gary shows me his phone: ‘Look, there’s even an app – YourBridge, or you can scan the QR code on the signs and get a spoken-word tour in a choice of voices …’ Gary scrolls down and starts walking again. Phelps is still shouting that he’ll jump, but there’s less and less will to do it.

  Ten metres. Phelps has taken out his phone and is trying to make a call. That buys us time. He’s trying to get through. Someone answers. Phelps starts to speak. Pauses and listens, then turns his back to us to check if the TV crews are here. They’re not. But Gary is and he cuffs
him wordlessly and takes the phone out of his hand. He puts it to his ear.

  ‘Ah, Lynne, Gary here … I think you already know what’s going on and where we are. But, anyway, great timing – saves us calling you later. You’ll be at the station first thing tomorrow morning with all you’ve got on Phelps. Tapes, transcripts, the lot. I hope you don’t turn up so I can drive over myself with a warrant and a police car and pick you up at your place of so-called work …’

  He puts the phone in an evidence bag and hands it to one of the police officers who have suddenly materialised around us. He turns to me. ‘Imagine being such a loser that your last words were going to be for Mad Lynne Forester.’

  *

  ‘Let me tell you a story about that bridge, Prof.’

  Gary has calmed down but I’m still shaking. His phone is beside his drink and it vibrates with ignored calls, crossing the tabletop in spasms. We’re in the Harcourt Arms. They haven’t taken down the MISSING poster for Zalie that’s behind the bar, except now there’s a tea light under it, shining up at her chin. There are bouquets and candles outside the pub, while inside the drinkers look solemn as they tweet photos under the tables from the place Lynne Forester called Zalie’s favourite watering hole.

  ‘When we were teenagers, me and my mates used to hang around the bridge after school. There or the zoo. The animals had gone but for some reason all their shit was still there, bits of fur everywhere, and it was a great place for skateboarding and smoking until they locked it all up and put CCTV everywhere. We did what teenagers did, even you probably … That corner shop Zalie shopped in – back then the owner sold cigarettes and booze to underage kids. We’d go and drink our cans and cough our way through Marlboro Reds at the top of the hill and check out the traffic and the ferries … if there were lorries we’d look underneath them to see if there were migrants hiding there. The papers were full of that stuff, and we all dreamed of being the schoolkid hero who caught one of those poor sods from some Calais camp or the tunnel. But no luck, thank God, and all we saw was the posh kids in their Chapelton trackies coming back from games, and we made wanker signs and gave them the finger.’