by Pat Barker
‘I have.’ She smiled. ‘It’s you or nobody.’
‘Which raises doubts about his motivation.’
She hesitated. ‘He wants to get at the truth, Tom. I’ve no doubt about that.’
He looked at her. ‘You’re very concerned about him, aren’t you?’
‘Over-involved, you mean?’
Tom smiled. ‘How much is over? I don’t know.’ ‘I’m concerned about you, as well. What do you want to do next? What do you want me to tell him?’ ‘I need to see him again. And I’d quite like that to be in your office. You know, establish a fairly formal framework.’
‘All right. Normally I don’t see him there, because… because Ian hasn’t got a record, for one thing.’ ‘I suppose you do know how bad for him that is?’ ‘But there’s no choice, Tom. If the press found him, his life wouldn’t be worth living.’ She picked up her bag. ‘Anyway, I’ll fix something up, and give you a ring. Oh and by the way, if you ever phone the office, you will remember he’s Ian Wilkinson, won’t you?’ He nodded. ‘Thoughhe’s gotto be Danny withme.’ ‘Yes, I know. Well, I think he’ll welcome that.’
Talking to Ian on the phone, half an hour later, she was fully aware of how much he welcomed it. ‘Dr Seymour hasn’t said he’s going to do it,’ she warned.
‘No, I know. But he will.’
She put the phone down, thought about ringing Tom with suggested times, then thought she wouldn’t disturb him yet. The cursor on the computer screen winked at her. She felt slightly sick, a combination of VDU glare and sunshine coming through the window. That day she went to fetch Ian back from the prison it had rained as if it would never stop. A smell of wet clothes, condensation on the windows closing them in, a constant patter of drops on the sunroof, and herself, hunched forward over the wheel, trying to see out through windscreen wipers that seemed only to spread the dirt more evenly across the glass. She leant back in her chair, with her hands over her face, and gradually the hum of the computer was replaced by the rhythmic squeak and whine of the wipers moving to and fro.
It had been late evening by the time she reached the prison. Ian was sitting in the waiting room, looking lost. ‘You don’t half put yourself through it, don’t you?’ she’d said.
He shook his head without speaking. The street lamps were on as she drove away. Rain bounced on the pavements. In the town she would have said it was dark, but out on the moors you realize what darkness is.
Rain, endless rain, and mist. The snow posts by the side of the road flashed past, inducing an almost trance-like state. She would have welcomed conversation, if only to keep her awake, but Ian remained silent. The mist thickened. They were driving along a narrow road with a steep drop on the left. When she cornered, the headlamps swept across a hillside with heather and clumps of gorse and, scattered here and there, huge grey boulders. Erratic blocks they were called, she remembered, dredging up some geography lesson of long ago.
Ian opened the window to throw his cigarette out, and drops of rain blew into her face. She heard the clank of bells on sheep grazing by the side of the road. In this light they looked like lumps of clotted mist, and any one of them could wander out into the middle of the road. As much as the rain and mist they forced her to slow down.
Ian was angry. That curious blocked anger of his. Knowing he wasn’t the victim, knowing he had no right to be angry, and yet seething anyway. She felt his anger in the silence, heard it in the hiss he made drawing on the next cigarette. My God, and she thought she smoked too much. It was making her want one, though. ‘Could you get me one of mine?’ she asked.
She was aware of the rasp and flare of the match. Why not a lighter? she wondered. But no, always matches. She saw his hands, briefly, in the orange glow. Then he put the cigarette into her mouth, his fingers brushing her lips. Watch it, she thought, and hardly knew whether the warning was directed at Ian or herself.
Still silence. It was getting on her nerves, and she needed to concentrate. The road wasn’t just wet – it was greasy from the long hot summer. At that last corner she’d felt the car start to skid. Corrected immediately, but it was a nasty shock.
‘Do you mind if we stop?’ Ian asked abruptly.
‘No, I could do with a break.’
She pulled up in the next passing bay and got out. Ian disappeared round a bend in the road, and she walked up and down, smoking and shivering and being rude to the sheep. After a while the darkness, the loneliness, the clunk-clunk of the sheep bells began to get to her, and she looked at the brow of the hill, impatient for Ian’s return.
Then the oddity of it struck her. Here she was, a woman alone and nervous on a dark road at night, looking forward to the reappearance of a convicted murderer. She’d never thought of Ian like that – well, yes, perhaps before she met him. But she’d never felt threatened, and in her job she did feel threatened, now and then. Hell, she didn’t just feel threatened, she was threatened – though she’d learnt how to recognize anger seething below the surface, to spot the signs of impending violence, to know when to back off.
Plenty of anger bubbling now, and nowhere to back off to. Extraordinary – she’d just this moment been thinking how she’d never felt threatened by Ian, and yet here she was – not frightened, nowhere near frightened – but certainly tense. She could have done without the sheep and their bloody bells, and the racket they made cropping the grass. Her footsteps, crunching up and down the gravelled passing bay, were beginning to rattle her. Where was he, for God’s sake?
She stayed still, and listened. Immediately she heard his footsteps coming towards the brow of the hill. A light seemed to be growing in the distance and, seconds later, she heard the sound of an approaching car. Ian appeared, head and shoulders first, climbing steadily, his shadow, cast by the car’s headlights, reaching out towards her, lengthening as he reached the summit. He was nothing, nothing she recognized. A dark figure haloed in light. She waited, and couldn’t speak.
‘Sorry I’ve been so long,’ he said. ‘Just had to get out and walk, you know. I can’t sit still when I’m like this.’
And immediately he was Ian. Except that he wasn’t Ian. As they waited for the car to pass, she was aware that a line had been crossed in her thinking about him. Until tonight, she would have said without hesitation that he had changed, that he was no longer the same person who had killed Lizzie Parks, or rather she believed that he’d changed. Those few minutes alone on the dark hillside taught her something, not about him, but about herself. He might have changed, but she didn’t believe it Not absolutely. Not without doubt.
And almost as though he’d read her thoughts, Ian started to talk about how impossible it was to leave the past behind. Being turned away from the prison like that was the final straw. He was beginning to think – well, not beginning, he’d thought it for a long time, only he kept pushing it to the back of his mind – that he was going to have to confront the past, in some way, try to make sense of it, before he could move on.
‘Perhaps you should see somebody,’ Martha said.
‘You mean a shrink?’
‘Or a psychologist. I don’t think it matters as long as you trust them. I mean, in the end, unless you’re suffering from an actual mental illness, schizophrenia or something like that, it’s the quality of the person that counts. You need to feel safe.’
‘I hate shrinks.’
The car splashed into a puddle by the side of the road, and, for a second, the windscreen was marbled, opaque. Christ, she thought. ‘Why do you?’
‘Dunno. Dad, I suppose. He always used to say you’re all right as long as you stay away from them. You can be drunk every night, shit your pants, doesn’t matter, but the minute you go to one of them, that’s it, you’re finished. After that you’re just a bag of shite.’
Now that’s a helpful instance of father – son bonding, Martha thought. ‘Well, perhaps that was your father’s experience. But –’
‘My own wasn’t marvellous.’
‘I thought you
didn’t see anybody?’
‘I saw Dr Seymour. That was enough.’
‘But that was for an assessment
‘Yes – and his assessment landed me in court. And his evidence landed me in prison. Well done, Dr Seymour.’
They were driving into a valley now. The headlights revealed a huddle of farm buildings, their bricks turned sombre red by the rain.
‘And anyway, I don’t want treatment. I don’t need it. I just want to talk to somebody.’
‘I’ll ask around.’
She felt, rather than saw, him smile. ‘What are you going to ask, Martha? How are you with murderers?’
That word, said flatly, was enough to bring the fear – no, she wouldn’t admit to fear – the anxiety thudding back. ‘I’ll ask around, try to find out who’s leak-proof,’ she said. ‘It should be all of them, but it isn’t.’
‘No, well, wives get told. Secretaries. Girlfriends.’ He was smiling again. ‘Better not do it at all.’
‘No, I think it’s a good idea.’
They were behind a long vehicle that was sending up arcs of spray and grit on either side, and trailing a white rag from a girder sticking out at the rear. Martha pulled out to overtake. The spray hit the windscreen, and for a few seconds she drove blind, until they pulled clear and the lorry dwindled in the rear-view mirror.
‘Decisive driving,’ Ian said. He hadn’t moved.
The rush of adrenalin loosened Martha’s tongue. ‘It’s not fair, blaming Dr Seymour for your conviction.’
‘Who else should I blame?’
‘How about the police who collected the evidence? The pathologist who examined it, the judge who summed up, or the jury who brought in the verdict?’
‘No, no, no, no, no, no. Dr Seymour. I’d have been acquitted if it hadn’t been for him.’
No point arguing. It was insane.
‘You think I’m mad, don’t you?’ Almost crooning the words, he went on, ‘But they believed me, Martha. They did. I know they did.’ His tone hardened. ‘I trusted him.’
Martha wanted to ask, Are you saying you didn’t do it? She kept quiet, distrusting her motives for doing so. If they’d been somewhere else, somewhere less isolated, would she have challenged him?
Ian brooded. ‘It was a disgraceful performance.’
It was bad for him to slip into thinking of himself as the victim, and yet she’d never met anybody who thought the Lizzie Parks murder trial had been handled well. It was difficult for him not to feel victimized.
‘These aren’t your memories, are they, Ian?’
He glanced sideways. ‘Ian hasn’t got any memories.’
‘It doesn’t help to say things like that.’
‘No, they’re not memories. I got the transcripts through my solicitor.’
Now, hot and nauseous in the sunlit office, Martha sifted through her memories of that night. Events had moved on. He had something to thank Tom for now, after the coincidence of Tom’s being the one to rescue him from the river.
Martha twisted from side to side. Her chair might as well have had spikes in the seat. Coincidences do happen, she told herself. People travel to the other side of the world, and find themselves standing in a queue next to somebody who lives in the same street. It happens all the time. Well, obviously, not all the time, or nobody would exclaim over it, but it does happen. No point saying you don’t believe in coincidence. But she’d have found it easier to believe in this one if she hadn’t heard the hatred in Ian’s voice in the car.
Hatred? No, wrong word. Something more painful than that. Betrayed trust. A sense of something good gone disastrously wrong. Whatever it was, she’d been left in no doubt that Tom was the last person Ian would go to for help. And yet, less than a month later, he’d become the only person. And she didn’t know why.
EIGHT
Tom arrived at the probation office ten minutes early, to find that Martha had had to dash out to see another client. He spent the time till Danny arrived pacing up and down the small waiting room. It turned out that Martha shared her office, and both interview rooms were occupied, so he was going to have to see Danny here.
The room reeked of sweat: the accumulated total of the perspiring and anxious humanity that had squeezed into it. Polystyrene cups with grey coffee dregs, and holes burnt in the sides where illicit cigarettes had been stubbed out. A ‘No Smoking’ sign hung on the wall above the blocked-up fireplace, but the regular visitors to this room were not known for abiding by the rules.
He heard footsteps in the corridor. A young woman’s voice – the receptionist’s – and then a murmur, without distinguishable words: Danny. He came into the room quickly, smiling and holding out his hand.
Tom waited until he was settled in his chair. ‘Well, I’ve spoken to Martha, and we thought it would be a good idea if you and I met and had another chat, and then you could decide if you wanted to go ahead, or not.’
‘I’ve decided. I thought this was to help you.’
Tom let that pass. ‘I’ve been thinking back to when I was ten, trying to work out what I remember. And the thing that strikes me is that I probably don’t remember… You know, the important things, the kind of things my parents would remember. The memories are quite vivid, I was surprised at how much I remembered, but they’re… memories of a child’s world. And I’ve been wondering how much you remember.’
Danny cleared his throat. ‘Quite a bit.’
‘For instance, the time I came to see you in the remand centre. What do you remember about that?’
‘You wanted me to play with dolls. I thought, Christ, if this gets out, I’m dead.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘I remember you. And of course one or two things I said were quoted in court.’
A slight edge to his voice. ‘Did that surprise you?’
‘Yes. Because I thought it was confidential.’
‘But an assessment can’t be confidential. It’s designed to be produced in court.’
‘I know. But I was ten, and nobody told me that.’
‘So you felt –’
Danny was groping for his cigarettes, but then he saw the notice over the fireplace and put the packet back.
‘What did you feel, Danny? Betrayed?’
A deep breath, caught and held. ‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Danny spread his hands.
‘Did you know why I was there?’
‘I knew you were meant to find out whether I was… mental? I don’t know. Round the twist? Bonkers? Crazy? I don’t know what word I’d have used. But, yeah, I knew why you were there, only of course in my mind it was a pretty pointless exercise because I hadn’t done it anyway.’
‘Are you saying you didn’t do it?’
‘No, I’m saying I believed I hadn’t. I believed my own story. I had to.’
‘And at the trial?’
‘I still believed it. I went to the house to see a litter of kittens, I found Lizzie dead on the floor, and there was a man walking about upstairs. I ran like hell, and didn’t tell anybody because I was too frightened. That was it. That was what happened.’
‘What else do you remember? About the trial.’
‘Just being bored. I was so bored my mind ached. I used to look at the clock, and the minute-hand jerked, you know, it didn’t move smoothly, and I used to wait for the next jerk. I wasn’t allowed to play with anything, because, I think, if they’d given me toys to play with, they’d have been admitting a whole lot of things. I was always being told to sit up straight, listen, look at the person who’s speaking, and half the time I didn’t understand a word.’
‘So what do you remember?’
He took a moment to think. ‘The judge, because of his robes and his wig. Do you know, I still… if there’s something in a room that’s bright red, I sit with my back to it, or put it somewhere I can’t see it? And that comes from the trial.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Playing squiggles with one of
the warders. This was in the lunch hour. You know, one person draws a squiggle, and the other has to try to turn it into something. I took the paper into court with me, and the social worker scrumpled it up and threw it away. What else? I remember my father sneaking out for a fag, because his shoes squeaked, and he sort of tiptoed out, and the more he tiptoed the more they squeaked. I used to hate that.’
‘Anything else?’
‘I remember you. I used to look at you. And I remember you saying all that about the chicken. If you wring a chicken’s neck, you don’t expect to see it running round the yard next day, do you? And everybody went…’ A sudden, audible intake of breath. ‘That was the moment. They didn’t believe I’d done it till then.’
‘And you really think they convicted you on that?’
‘Yes.’
Tom smiled, patiently. ‘I don’t think it was as simple as that, Danny. There was a lot of forensic evidence.’
‘Yes, but they didn’t believe it. They believed me.’
The defence had put Danny into the witness box. God knows how they’d summoned up the courage to do it, but they had. He was superb. He began well, by being good-looking, but he also stood up straight, spoke clearly, didn’t fidget, made eye contact, appeared confident (but never cocky), and remembered to address the judge as ‘My Lord’ and counsel as ‘Sir’. He gave the impression he was telling the truth, and indeed he was – 98 per cent of the time: Altogether, he came over as the sort of boy you’d be proud to introduce as your nephew.
Tom had looked at him across the courtroom, and thought, How can so many things be right?
The jury had been impressed. But to say that they’d believed his story was ridiculous. Of course they hadn’t. There’d been too much hard evidence to contradict it. ‘No, you’re not remembering it accurately, Danny. It wasn’t like that.’
Danny shrugged. ‘It was, you know. But don’t let’s argue about it. I’m not blaming you. You did the best you could in the circumstances.’
Tom remembered the courtroom, the stillness as he stepped into the box. ‘I think by that time I just wanted it to be over. I wanted to get you out of there and into treatment.’
