by Tom Bradby
‘I’ll leave you alone,’ she said.
‘No. It’s okay you being here.’
‘Is there anything I can do?’
He shook his head.
Julia stood about a yard from him. All the strength and optimism, the ease of manner that defined him, had gone. She edged closer. Tentatively, she put an arm on his shoulder, wanting to show her comprehension and love, but he did not respond and she did not know what to do. She massaged his neck gently, in the way he did to himself, then withdrew her hand.
‘He can’t come back and live here,’ she said, eventually.
‘No.’ He nodded. ‘No, of course not.’
‘Everyone will feel that, I’m sure.’
He nodded again, pursing his lips.
‘Perhaps he’s just coming back to collect what’s left of his belongings,’ she suggested.
Alan’s face was white.
She began to step back. ‘I’ll be at home. Just – just call if you need anything.’
He looked at her, confused. ‘Did you want something?’
‘No. It was nothing.’
*
At home, Caroline sat with both palms resting flat on the table. In the few minutes Julia had been out, she had arrived home and, as Julia came in, she looked up and slowly pulled her hands towards her.
‘I’ve heard,’ Julia said.
Caroline was staring at the table. ‘They say on the radio his confession was altered to make it appear more conclusive. Since it was altered, his conviction is unsound, so he has been released.’
‘Have you spoken to Alan?’ Julia asked.
‘Yes, the police called him this morning and he telephoned me at the gallery. He said he was coming home.’
‘What will he do?’
‘I don’t know. He has only a week to go until Ireland. He could lodge on the base until then, but he won’t want to be driven away by …’ Caroline’s face was ravaged by anger at this new injustice.
They heard a commotion. It sounded like chanting. Caroline stood up and they walked out. The noise was coming from the direction of the pub and Julia looked back to see if her mother was following as she crossed the lawn, but Caroline remained on the terrace.
There were perhaps twenty people gathered at the entrance to Pascoe’s lane, shouting. Some held placards with big posters of Alice – the same ones that had been used at the time of her disappearance – and Julia realized they must have had some warning. She recognized a few faces – Travers and his wife were there – but most were strangers. There were cars parked alongside the pub and two television cameras filmed the protest.
Pascoe was encircled, trapped with his back to the wall of the pub, and Julia couldn’t tell if he had been caught leaving his house or trying to get back into it. He had a bicycle behind him, which he was still holding with one hand.
‘Where’s the body?’ Travers shouted. He was a big man with curly light brown hair. There were three other men around him, who looked like some of his workers. One had a shaved head and a bullet face, another a black woollen hat and a small earring. The last was smaller, with a narrow face and a black moustache. All were unshaven and dressed in workmen’s clothes.
‘What did you do with her, you bloody pervert?’ Travers shouted. He stepped forward and spat.
Pascoe had close-cropped hair and sunken eyes, and looked much worse than Julia remembered. He appeared bewildered and lost. He wiped the spittle from his face.
This was a monster, set loose and cornered, but he did not look like one. Julia thought of the shy, almost childlike way in which Pascoe had smiled at her as she wandered around this village. And then again, she saw in her mind’s eye little Alice running, legs flailing as her shoes slipped in the mud, her face stricken with terror, her lungs constricting …
‘Get out of here,’ Travers shouted at him. ‘Go on, get out.’ He edged closer, but, as he did so, with his men behind him, Julia launched herself forward, shoving through the bodies until she, too, was in the middle of the little crowd.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ She was standing next to him. She could feel her heart thumping hard from the sudden rush of adrenalin. The skinhead and the man in the black woollen hat behind Travers had moved closer. ‘For Christ’s sake, back off,’ she said.
There was a stunned silence.
‘What are you doing?’ Travers asked. He looked both confused and furious.
‘You didn’t live here at the time. You came afterwards. You know nothing.’
Anger gave way to confusion. He had never seen her like this. She saw the incomprehension in other faces too – all those who had been friendly before as smiles were exchanged by the green or on the common or in church or in the post office. Julia could feel herself becoming an outcast so vividly it seemed almost to be happening in slow motion.
No one knew what to say.
She watched the skinhead, his face still a mask of aggression.
‘What are you doing?’ Travers asked again.
‘He’s been proven innocent.’
‘But that doesn’t mean he is.’
‘Pascoe has been freed by the Court of Appeal.’
‘The law is an ass,’ Travers said. ‘And we don’t want him here.’
‘It’s not your right—’
‘Where’s the body?’ someone shouted. ‘What did you do with her?’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Travers said, stepping further forward.
Julia took Pascoe’s arm. He wouldn’t let go of the bike. He was in shock, so she gently released his fingers from the handlebars and tried to pull him towards the door of his house, but he wouldn’t move and the crowd wouldn’t part.
‘He didn’t do it, Travers,’ she said quietly.
‘And what makes you so bloody sure?’
‘Everyone knows he didn’t do it.’
Julia pushed forward, still holding Pascoe’s arm, but Travers resisted, physically backed by his men. She tried to go on, but Pascoe was holding her back and Travers refusing to budge. Julia felt her temper flare, pushed again, was repulsed, then stamped hard on Travers’s foot. He let out a yelp and snapped forward, his head next to hers. ‘Get out of the way,’ she hissed.
The skinhead lunged for her.
Julia let go of Pascoe, dropped back, took the man’s arm and went with his momentum, taking him over her leg and putting him flat on his back close to the wall of the pub, so that he groaned with pain.
The other two men around Travers had moved forward, but hesitated. There was another shocked, confused, hostile silence. Julia pushed through, dragging Pascoe. He wasn’t able to look for his keys, so she had to rifle his pockets. It was impossible to avoid the smell of him, which caught in her nostrils. Eventually, she found them and opened the door, without looking back.
Behind her a voice shouted, ‘We’ll get you. We’ll fucking get you.’
She slammed the door.
‘You can’t hide in there for ever,’ someone yelled.
Inside, it was dark, the curtains still drawn, and it smelt of decay. Julia stepped through to the kitchen and switched on the light.
The kitchen opened on to the living area, where she took Pascoe. There was little furniture in here, the room stark. Julia could not believe this was how it had been when Pascoe’s mother was alive and she wondered where the rest of their possessions had gone. There was an ugly coffee-table next to the tattered armchair into which Pascoe slumped. She pushed it to one side and sat down opposite him, reaching for the phone. ‘Did the police bring you back here?’
He nodded.
‘But they went again?’
He didn’t respond.
‘I’m going to call them.’
He looked up with an expression of frightened resignation. Julia saw that Pascoe was still the backward young man who had shared his sweets with her sitting on a grassy bank at the de la Rues’ house, overlooking the village fête. She had not changed her perspective at all, had never begun, despite his convi
ction, to connect him to the crimes.
He was a child, looking to her for help.
Or perhaps he was just defeated and unable any longer to ask for it.
Julia felt angry again. His destruction was also a crime.
She picked up the receiver, but there was no dialling tone, so she replaced it and took her mobile from her pocket, beginning with Directory Enquiries because she did not wish to dial 999. Then she called Cranbrooke police station and asked for the duty officer.
All the time she was talking, Julia was watching Pascoe’s face. He kept his eyes down, a thirty-five-year-old man who looked closer to fifty, and she found herself recalling the day they had lost Socrates on the common and her father had gone to ask Pascoe to help in the search. The three of them had been out there until nightfall and it had been Pascoe who had found him, carrying the puppy towards her, delight in his face. He was unnaturally thin now and his skin was in terrible condition, riven with acne.
She thought about what prison must have been like for a child-murderer and felt an overwhelming sense of guilt and responsibility. The young man jogging around the village with a pack on his back had been her father’s protégé.
‘Are you all right, Pascoe?’
He looked up, nodded with a half-smile, then returned his eyes to his lap. He had seemed younger than her, more vulnerable even when she had been a child.
The questions she wanted to ask did not seem appropriate. He reminded her of a source – pale and frightened – and she thought of the colonel in China and of the Polaroid picture of the son he wanted to educate at Cambridge. She realized how effectively she had blocked him from her mind.
‘Is there anything I can do?’ she asked, forcing herself back to the present. ‘Anything I can get you?’
Pascoe didn’t respond, so Julia rolled up her sleeves and moved to the sink in the kitchen. There was no cleaning equipment visible, so she went out into the hall and found some in the downstairs lavatory. She began trying to scrub off some of the dust and ingrained dirt. Pascoe didn’t move.
She tried to ignore the crowd, still visible through the net curtains. Occasionally there was a burst of shouting, which would peter out.
When she had finished, Julia walked back into the room, drying her hands. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing else I can do for you?’ He looked up and smiled. Julia thought again of the two of them sitting on the bank at the village fête, then found herself recalling how she had seen him later hanging around Sarah, watching her.
She leant against the doorframe. ‘If it wasn’t you, Pascoe, why did you say it was?’
There was no response.
‘I think you’re innocent,’ she said, ‘and I don’t understand why you haven’t helped yourself.’
‘It could have been me,’ Pascoe said, staring at his shoes.
‘But it wasn’t?’
‘Everyone wanted the woman.’
‘Did you …’
‘Everyone could have her, but no one could possess her.’ He looked up, shaking his head, his eyes burning with anger, his personality metamorphosing in an instant, so that she could see that the previous meekness was nothing more than a carefully polished act.
Involuntarily, she took a step back, looking at his ugly, cropped skull. ‘You’ve spent a long time in jail.’
He stood, eyes fixed upon her, taking a step forward. ‘Yes.’ He took another step. ‘Yes.’ Julia edged away. ‘You look like her,’ he said. ‘Do you fuck as well, is that what you do?’
‘I’ve never harmed you, Pascoe.’
‘Your father was with her. Always around her.’
Julia did not answer.
‘Do you fuck as well, is that it? Long hair and body, I bet if you lie on your back …’ He was staring at her. ‘Spunk on your face.’
‘Be careful, Pascoe.’
‘Be careful, is that it?’
He lunged forward, his face rigid with aggression as he stopped directly in front of her. ‘Do you know what they do to child-murderers in prison? Do you know that?’
‘Don’t take it out on me …’
‘There will be payment…’
He had raised one finger towards her, his body tensed, but as he did so, they both caught sight of the movement of figures in the garden.
Julia walked to the window, then flung open the back door. The skinhead had jumped down into the long grass and the man in the black woollen hat was on top of the wall.
‘You fucking prats,’ she said, stepping on to the cracked paving-stones at the back. The skinhead stopped and stared at her. The man in the hat did not jump.
There was the sound of a police siren, so Julia turned her back on them, went in and slammed the door shut. Pascoe was sitting back in the chair, head down again. For a moment, she looked at him, then forced both her hands into her pockets to prevent them shaking.
CHAPTER SIX
SHE WAITED UNTIL the police had cleared away the crowd, then went home, got into the Golf and drove down to Professor Malcolm’s house near Chichester, trying to calm her nerves as she went.
Professor Malcolm did not seem surprised to see her.
‘If you’ve said yes,’ she said, looking beyond him to the pieces of carpet tile stretching across the floor and the lonely, eccentric life they spoke of, ‘then I’d like to help.’
‘Come in.’
By the time she was inside, he was heading down the corridor to the stairs at the end. ‘Follow me,’ he added.
On the landing above, a ladder led up to the attic. She hesitated.
‘Come on, it won’t kill you.’
Julia followed him up and was surprised by how much space there was. It had been half converted, with wooden floorboards and a Velux window, which made it seem like her father’s den, except that it was the polar reverse. There was a desk at one end, but everything else spoke of a man whose life had known no serious attempt to impose bureaucratic order. Boxes and files were piled five deep, in places spilling over each other. In one area, the contents of several had fallen on to the floor. This was the corner in which he was inauspiciously fumbling.
‘Got it.’ He straightened, clutching a long, bulky green box, which he placed on another pile and opened. ‘Bugger, wrong one.’
He resumed his search, moving the boxes ahead of him and restacking them. Julia glanced through the window at the sea stretching out to the horizon. The sunlight was reflected off its surface towards them.
‘What are you looking for?’ she asked.
‘I keep,’ he said, grunting as he moved a particularly heavy box, ‘records of all the cases I have worked on.’
‘What sort of records?’
‘Witness statements … everything. The police copy it all for me after the case is concluded. It is part of our quid pro quo. I also keep my own notes, which may be useful. Anything we’re missing we can get the police to chase up.’
He turned away and bent again. ‘Ah. Here,’ he said, lifting a long, thin green box with what looked like a drawer in it. He pulled it open and dusted off the edges. Julia could see the words ‘Welham Common’ written on the top.
‘It will be difficult,’ he said. ‘There’s a construct and they will resist any attempt to dismantle it.’
‘Which means?’
‘It means that your friends and neighbours, even your family, have spent fifteen years learning to live with this version of events and rebuilding their lives. Pascoe being released is one thing. They’ll hope he will leave, or be driven away. Pascoe being innocent is quite another. If he is innocent … well, you can imagine. Then, someone else is guilty.’
‘You said it was a review.’
He stopped and looked at her. ‘Yes, but I can’t rule out a certain robustness at times.’
‘I suppose I would expect nothing less.’
‘Unfortunately, yes.’
‘Why unfortunately?’
He shrugged. ‘For your sake, we shall be circumspect,’ he continued.
Julia looked at him. His face was fleshy, his skin rough, as if weathered by the sea, his eyes beady. He did not invite affection.
Professor Malcolm was still stacking the other boxes, so she stepped over and closed the drawer. She dusted off the top until the words ‘Welham Common’ were as clear as the day they had been written.
They drove to West Welham in Julia’s Golf, Professor Malcolm asking her about China and she trying to give him the details in a manner that did not spare her own reputation. Then, after a long period of silence, Julia asked, ‘Can you be sure Pascoe was innocent?’
‘No.’
‘But …’
‘I said the methodology was wrong, so we don’t know that he was guilty. That leaves the investigation roughly where it was on the first day.’ He turned so that his back was to the door. ‘Why?’
Julia shrugged.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘He came back to the village … this morning.’
‘And there was a mob.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you helped.’
Julia hesitated. ‘After a fashion … yes.’
‘Then what?’
‘Then … well, then we were sitting inside and he seemed … he reminded me of the boy I remembered, shy, defeated, but when I asked him about the murders – I said he was innocent, so why did he confess, then he transformed and the shyness dropped away – I realized it was an act – and he became very aggressive, talking in abusive, sexual language, saying I reminded him of Sarah and how everyone could have her, but no one could possess her.’
‘He must have known you could protect yourself.’
‘I don’t know. He certainly didn’t …’
‘That kind of confidence is clear, even to someone with an unbalanced mind.’
‘We were interrupted.’
Professor Malcolm frowned at her.
‘One of the men from the village had some of his workers with him and they were getting a bit out of hand, so I had to deal with them and that was when the police arrived.’
Professor Malcolm turned, looking out of the window at the passing hedgerows and the fields beyond.
‘He asked me if I knew what it was like being a convicted child-murderer,’ Julia said quietly, ‘and said “There will be payment’’.’
