The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 7

by Maxim Jakubowski

  We took Dorothy to the hospital, but the burns themselves were superficial and there was no real damage from them. However, a ragged black patch of discoloured skin was left behind from the burned edges of the unhealed wounds, and her blood could not coagulate over the scratches my fingernails had left as I tried to dig the leeches from her. The doctor told her she would be left with scars.

  Dorothy hardly spoke to me that day. We returned to Washington as soon as we could get a flight, slinking out of the village like criminals. The villagers watched us go in silence and embarrassment.

  Seven months later my wife became ill and died. To this day I do not believe what the doctor said, and have convinced myself that her death was the result of some kind of blood poisoning, a delayed reaction to what happened that night.

  Just before the year ended, I took early retirement. A new phalanx of eager young recruits was entering politics for the first time, and the thought just made me tired. I know at heart that I am a good man. I have made mistakes in my life, but the worst that night was the speed with which I sought to blame.

  SOMEONE TAKE THESE DREAMS AWAY

  Marc Werner

  WHEN CONTROL OPENED at the Cornerhouse, the nights were getting longer. Most days, it was dark by half past four. Anton Corbijn’s biopic of Ian Curtis was the film of the year; everybody went to see it (apart from me), even Nick. But while the rest of our colleagues from English and Film would have allowed themselves to become immersed in Corbijn’s recreation of late 1970s Manchester, marvelling at Martin Ruhe’s black and white cinematography, Nick would have been sitting there in the dark thinking of another British film with only a handful of scenes shot in black and white, the rest in colour.

  Nick has a thing about black and white. He’s fond of quoting Christopher Walken’s line from Donald Cammell’s Wild Side. “Life is black and white. Have you ever seen grey squares on a chessboard?”

  I’m sitting in front of his computer in the office we’ve shared since I recommended him for a vacant lecturer’s post, and I’m wondering where to look first. I don’t even know how much stuff he keeps on his desktop machine. I hardly use mine at all, preferring my laptop. The office is tiny – the university has a problem with overcrowding – but it’s surprising how sitting at Nick’s desk gives me an entirely different perspective on it. The difference between it and the view from my desk is like the difference between the way to somewhere and the journey back. I spin slowly round to look at Nick’s shelves. Two books by Roy Armes, A Critical History of British Cinema and The Ambiguous Image. Roger Manvell’s New Cinema in Britain. Danny Peary’s Cult Movies. (I have a copy of that somewhere, too.) A few annual-sized hardbacks – Thriller Movies, A Pictorial History of Crime Films, Photoplay Film Yearbook 1976. I was struck by how many of these titles dated back to the 1970s. Among the newer stuff: Chris Darke’s Light Readings, Ali Catterall and Simon Wells’ book about British cult films Your Face Here, and a recent edition of the Time Out Film Guide. An eclectic library.

  It’s very quiet in the office, which it rarely was when Nick was around. He’d either be banging away at his keyboard (“Touch-typing’s for puffs. No offence!”) or complaining loudly into his phone about the standard of the technical equipment in the lecture theatres. Or he’d have a student in for a tutorial. Three people in an office designed for one. Admin, teaching, dealing with students – that’s only half of what we’re supposed to be doing. The rest – our so-called research – is what brings in the real money. But if we want a quiet space in which to write, there’s no point looking anywhere near the university.

  18.8.87 [morning]

  In a TV studio where I’ve been interviewed. The Queen turns up. Then we all go out to a tube station. The Queen looks nervous. On the train a man is smoking a cigarette and a cigar. His fat cigar looks like a knob with the foreskin pulled back. Arriving at Cambridge University (!?) I am shown with one other person (?) to my room, which is room B at school. I am given keys, though the door is of the saloon bar type.

  On the upper shelves behind Nick’s desk, the beautifully tactile, plastic-sheathed cases of DVDs. Elephant, Old Boy, If . . . ., Zéro de Conduite. Beautiful things, DVDs. Simple, full of promise. How many have you bought and never watched? In case you ever needed to see something again, to write about it, you told yourself, but really it was just to possess them. Like a director hoarding prints of his own films. A sense of ownership, a piece of marketing genius. At least half the DVDs in anyone’s collection have never been watched.

  I notice the line from Wild Side written on a yellow sticky note stuck to the side of Nick’s inkjet printer. Also, on another note alongside: “When do we live? That’s what I want to know.” I knew the quote. It was a line spoken by Mick Travis, the Malcolm McDowell character in If . . . ., near the beginning of the film. I might not have known it had it not been for Nick’s interest in the film. His obsession with the film.

  I’ve been covering for him for a week now. Delivering a lecture to undergraduates, running a workshop with his MA students. His absence has been noticed, but has not yet become a serious problem. It will, though. The conference he’s organized – Run in the Corridor: the Politics of School Shootings on Film, which he’s been working towards for several months – is only a week away.

  A couple of times in the last few days I’ve been convinced things have switched around on his desk and have wondered if he’s been in during the night. I know he has a good relationship with Byron, the dreadlocked security guard who wanders in from Moss Side towards the end of the afternoon. I’ve seen the two of them sharing a roll-up, huddled against the autumnal chill and standing a cautious distance from the main entrance to the building. One of them sources the gear and supplies the other. My guess is Byron is the supplier, if only because Nick, for all his strengths, is not very streetwise. But he can turn on the charm. One afternoon while he was waiting for a female student to turn up for a tutorial, he told me she was dyslexic. Listen to this, he said, reading from the student’s Learning Support Document, “‘Linzi has difficulty with planning work, prioritizing tasks and concentrating when there is background noise. She has poor short-term memory and may lose flow when interrupted.’” He looked up at me. “For fuck’s sake,” he said, “Do you think I’m dyslexic, then.”

  “Sounds like we all are,” I said.

  When Linzi came in and sat down across the desk from Nick, he held up a print-out and said to her, “This is your Learning Support Document.” He immediately crumpled it into a ball and threw it at the bin. When she looked shocked, he said, “It’s bollocks. I don’t care how you spell encyclopaedia – consensus – liaison. Whatever. I’m interested in the content of what you write, not its appearance.” She looked uncertain. “Don’t worry,” he said with a resigned smile. “I can always print off another copy.”

  In the quiet of the early afternoon, the phone rings on Nick’s desk. I look at it, wondering whether to pick it up. I don’t look at it for very long.

  “Hello? Nick’s phone,” I say, strongly hoping the caller will not respond by saying, “Hello, Nick’s phone.”

  “I’m looking for Nick,” says a female voice.

  You and me both.

  “He’s not at his desk at the moment, I’m afraid,” I say. “Would you like to leave a message?”

  “That’s OK,” she says, and before I know it she is gone.

  I press 1471.

  We are sorry. We do not have the caller’s number.

  I remember my own student days. One of my lecturers, Roger Huss – one of the few I really liked – had invited me to call him by his first name, and maybe I did a couple of times, but it never felt right somehow. Excuse me, Roger. Thank you, Roger. Now it’s different. It’s Hey Nick and Laters dude. Student reps sit on staff committees and complain bitterly if they think they’re not getting their money’s worth.

  7.1.96

  At school, a gang of lads gathers round. I bristle but say nothing. Another lad comes in
and tells us what we have to do – look back over all the films of the year and see which one God would have made differently(!).

  In my mind, as I hang up the phone, is a picture of Helena Swan, one of Nick’s postgraduate students, a well-built and undeniably attractive woman in her early fifties. I’ve noticed her hanging around at the end of Nick’s seminars, laughing at his jokes during a staff-students social event. I’ve had to start leaving the room when she comes for tutorials. It was her voice on the phone, I’m sure of it.

  I switch his computer on. I know Nick’s log-in because he dictated it to me over the phone one day when a system error was blocking mine and I couldn’t use the photocopier. I enter it and the prompt asks for a password. I have a few weak guesses – anderson, mcdowell, oldboy, elephant (if . . . . doesn’t have enough characters, even with the four-dot ellipsis) – but don’t get lucky.

  I stand up and go over to the window. Looking out at the windswept junction of side roads, I am reminded for some reason of another time I stood in exactly the same position and looked out to see Nick sauntering towards the building and talking on his mobile. He was smiling. I didn’t often see him smile. As he approached the barrier, which was lowered to keep out unauthorized vehicles, he ended the call and dropped the phone into his jeans pocket. In front of him, the barrier suddenly rose as if, grandly, permitting him to enter. Nick looked up and gave a great guffawing laugh, which was even rarer than a smile and made him look a lot younger than his forty-five years. I could hear it, two floors up and through double-glazing. I laughed as well and felt momentarily light-headed as well as light-hearted. It felt like the first time we’d really connected in years, perhaps since school, though of course he hadn’t seen me watching, and by the time he’d reached our office, his face had settled into its semi-permanent grimace of disapproval.

  I go to the department admin office on the third floor. On the left as you go in is a series of filing cabinets. I open the one labelled S–Z and flick through until I find what I want. I leaf through a file, make some notes, and leave.

  I stop by our office to pick up my bag and am about to leave when I have a thought. I walk over to Nick’s shelves and take down the DVD of If . . . . and a couple of books and slip them into my bag.

  22.1.96 [morning]

  Attending hospital. Very soon it’s become our old school – it’s assembly time. We’re all in uniform. There’s a boy in a wheelchair near me. He’s got a glass of Coca-Cola with ice. Another boy comes along and sits in another wheelchair, sliding a big brown suitcase underneath the chair. I know the suitcase contains weapons.

  The bus is full of students. I stare out of the window and find myself thinking about Iain Constable’s recent lecture on research methods. He was coming across as rather pedantic with his insistence on correct presentation. Footnotes, quotations, bibliographies. Everything had to be just so, or the student would lose marks. “Right down to the number of dots in an ellipsis,” he said, and Nick spoke up, saying, “What about If . . . .? What if you need to mention the title of Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film If . . . ., which famously has four dots in its ellipsis? What then?” Iain laughed and Nick said he wasn’t joking, it was a serious point. Taking Nick’s interruption as a challenge, Iain entrenched and said an ellipsis with four dots was a mistake and would be marked as such in any work he came across. “Good job I’m not your student, then,” Nick said, as he got up and walked out of the lecture theatre.

  I found him later in our office, in tears.

  “What is it?” I asked, shocked.

  “Nothing. Leave me alone,” he snapped, then softened slightly. “Just give us a minute, Mike.”

  I went to see the head of department about a timetabling issue. When I came back, Nick had dried his eyes, but his face was red as it jutted towards his computer screen.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong or shall I mind my own business?” I asked.

  “Something I read in here,” Nick said, picking up Ali Catterall and Simon Wells’ Your Face Here, which I knew had a chapter on If . . . . He opened the book and flicked through the pages. “Page sixty-four,” he said and chucked the book across the office.

  I caught it and turned to the right page.

  “Last para,” Nick said. “‘There were plans for a school reunion’.”

  Writing about Anderson’s idea for a proper sequel to If . . . . (as distinct from the fluff that was O Lucky Man!), the authors caught the reader up on what had happened to key cast members. Christine Noonan (the Girl) had left the profession and gone into teaching, David Wood had become a children’s writer and McDowell, of course, had moved to Hollywood. Two, however, were dead. Richard Warwick (Wallace) had died from an AIDS-related condition in 1997, and Rupert Webster (Bobby Phillips) had been knifed to death on the New York subway in the 1980s.

  I felt a lump in my throat as I instantly recalled one of their scenes from the film, shot in black and white, in which they slept side by side in Wallace’s bed. Although Malcolm McDowell’s scene with the Girl at the Packhorse Cafe, in which they had ended up play-fighting naked on the floor, again in black and white, had been remarkably effective in its insistence that fantasy was very much a part of the film’s reality, it was clear where the director believed the emotional heart of the film was to be found. The camera’s slow glide across the dorm, showing first Bobby Phillips and then revealing Wallace lying next to him, had made that very clear. Earlier, Phillips had watched admiringly as Wallace, after flashing a smile at the younger boy, performed slow-motion acrobatics on the high bar.

  Although the scene in the Packhorse Cafe was sexually explicit, even allowing a glimpse of pubic hair, the film’s erotic peak was to be found later, Nick had once patiently explained to me, in another black and white sequence. The one in which the blonde Mrs Kemp, housemaster Arthur Lowe’s wife, played by Mary McLeod, walks naked down an empty corridor towards the camera, and then, away from the camera, through a boys’ dormitory, trailing a hand along a line of washbasins and turning, finally, to look back over her shoulder at the viewer, her stance recalling that of the Girl in the café as she looked round from under a curtain of thick, dark hair while making coffee for Mick and Johnny. Mrs Kemp looked over her right shoulder, the Girl over her left. One of these shots looked as if it was meant to be erotic, but was merely a tease, a stock pose, a nod to the classic black-and-whites; the other, exploiting the full-figured vulnerability of the childless and lonely Mrs Kemp, actually was and powerfully so.

  “If only Mary McLeod knew how many adolescent boys’ wanks she was responsible for,” Nick said.

  This comment comes back to me as I get off the bus in West Didsbury. The anonymous Edwardian conversion across the road, once home to Factory Records, reveals no trace of its cultural significance. I cross Lapwing Lane and keep walking. The address I’m looking for is located within a grid of quiet residential streets to the west of Palatine Road. Helena Swan is not quite another generation, as Mrs Kemp had been to Mick, Johnny and the other boys (“Do you need this, Mrs Kemp,” Mick had asked, in one of the refectory scenes, with a provocative thrust of the sauce bottle), but she is an apparently available woman some ten years older than Nick, of a similar build to Mary McLeod in 1968. She could easily be a stand-in, a body double.

  Dusk is turning the lit front rooms of these imposing three-storey Victorian terraced houses into sound-stages, sets dressed and waiting for actors. A narrow footpath runs down the side of Helena Swan’s property. Barely wide enough for two people to squeeze past each other, it offers a convenient spot from which to observe the back of the house. Some lights are burning; no noise can be heard. There must be a better way to go about what I’m trying to achieve. Do I really expect to see Nick suddenly appear silhouetted in a bedroom window? To knock on the front door and explain my quest would embroider unnecessary complications on to an already elaborate tapestry. I decide to wait for a while.

  Wednesday, 15 January 1997

  At a swimmi
ng baths, there are three pools but they’re short and narrow, barely bigger than normal bathroom baths. The one in the middle has two people in it: someone on the left who remains still, and a young black man who is swimming lengths. There would just be room for me to swim to his right. I’m perched on the rim about to dive in but I worry that my arms or legs might disturb other diners because now it’s a restaurant as well. Also the black lad has just smiled at me and he’s naked and I’m worried there isn’t enough room.

  My thoughts turn to the DVD in my bag. Assuming a lack of success in my current endeavour, I will play the film when I get home. I’ve seen it a number of times and my familiarity with it has been enhanced by Nick’s frequent allusions and references, but to watch it again under these particular conditions might just throw up an idea or two. I could never forget the grey echoing corridors down which Mick, Johnny and Wallace confidently stride, three abreast, to meet their punishment at the hands of the Whips. Vicious lashes of the cane in the school gymnasium, the wooden floor pounding with the lengthy run-up of the sadistic Rowntree. How similar that gym was to our own, in the grammar school. How different were the relationships of abuse, yet how familiar, really.

  I take out my notebook, then my mobile, and key in a number. I hear a faint ringing, then another light comes on in the kitchen window and Helena Swan appears. She picks up the phone.

  “Hello?” she says. “Hello?”

  I hold my breath.