by Toby Litt
He looked at me, jacklighted. His explaining would have to come later – elsewhere.
I was sure the idea of talking to the police, of risking his wonderful life, was what had got him panicked. If I’d been him, I would have panicked, too. But then again, if I’d been him, I wouldn’t have gone round giving free advice on crime and criminals to anyone who came asking.
The police were still talking about football. Not a word of what we’d said had registered, externally. But if possible they were both even more intensely present than before. They seemed the very embodiment of the law: whole long lines of corridors and holding cells and courtrooms and prison cells – all stretching out into the behind-them distance.
We drank up, in silence, untasting, quickly.
Tony was sulking. He was in the weaker position, probably because he was more clearly aware what his position was. I had outsmarted him. (No pun.) This wasn’t something he was used to. As I glowed with beginner’s luck, he glowered with expert’s pique. Or maybe it was something else: this being just another step up for him, further off street-level, less in touch with the necessary instincts.
Perhaps he’d have to make another visit back to Luton, this time without a documentary crew behind his shoulder. Perhaps it was a fitting moment to touch base with a few of the homeboys again, try to descend, try not to look like an ignorant cunt who has lost at least as much as he’s gained.
‘Think I’ll be off,’ I said, then stood up and held out my hand.
Tony took it and shook. He couldn’t leave with me now – he’d have to stay or appear weak.
‘Thanks again,’ I said.
Just before I got to the bottom of the stairs, I snuck a glance at Tony. He was looking, one-eyed, straight down the neck of his bottled beer, as if he expected to see another eye looking back at him.
I saw the black policemen start to stand up.
When I next looked round, half-way down the stairs into Leicester Square underground station, the black man was following me, speaking into his mobile phone.
My stiff legs meant I was a little slow down the stairs and couldn’t risk a move on the escalators. I decided there was no point trying to lose him – plus, he was supposedly there for my protection, anyway.
During the Tube journey, the black man stood opposite me, about ten feet away, beside one of the doors.
He followed me out of Hammersmith station.
It took me ten minutes to get a cab. I almost offered the black man a lift.
Bullet #5
The fifth bullet missed me completely.
53
As the taxi pulled up outside my house I noticed that the front door was glistening strangely, as if it were wet. The Mondeo was already parked in its usual spot, a little further up the road.
After I’d paid off the driver and got out of the cab, I saw what had happened – someone had thrown bright red paint all over the door to my flat.
Walking slowly up to the door, I tried to take in the full falsely bloody image. I wiped the paint off the area around the keyhole with my handkerchief. The paint was very slidy and wet. I glanced across at the Mondeo, wondering.
Closing the door behind me, I checked to see whether any more delights had been posted through the letter-box. There was a single white envelope, long and slim, heavily laid paper. A little of the red paint had seeped under the front door and into the edges of the hall carpet. I took off my shoes to avoid treading it into the rest of the flat. Then I carried the letter through into my kitchen and carefully slit it open with a kitchen knife. It contained a single piece of foolscap, of the same quality as the envelope. The message had been printed out from a laser printer in Times Roman. The words were clear enough:
Leave it alone.
I went to bed strangely excited: I was getting somewhere, annoying someone. I was on to the right ‘it’ because ‘it’ was important enough and secret enough for that someone to want me to leave ‘it’ alone. But there was no chance of that.
Instead of deterring, as they were meant to, these scare tactics served only to encourage me. The closer I was to danger, the nearer I came to the truth. If it were a truth that was important enough to make someone want to kill me, then it was probably the truth that had caused Lily to be killed.
For several hours I lay awake. Outside, I could hear cars driving along roads, jets descending towards Heathrow and cats making whoopee.
When I opened my eyes I could see the curtains glowing lighter and lighter the more I looked at them. (Not morning coming, not that, not yet, just an illusion of the dark.) And when I closed them, my retinas were painted bright blazing blood red.
54
Saturday morning.
Asif was all over the tabloids. Most of them – and I bought them all – carried photographs from the previous night’s hasty press conference, the one I’d seen on the TV in Dorothy and Alun’s apartment. The majority of the picture editors had chosen shots of him lit harshly, from way down below his knees, so that he appeared haggard and ghoulish. But some brighter spark on the Mirror had gone digging, and had managed to excavate a photo from a medical-student revue Asif had taken part in four years previously. Here, he was dressed as a Victorian undertaker – stovepipe hat and long black tails, plastic vampire teeth and wild staring eyes. There was no shortage of puns from the headline and caption writers: Asif was Doctor Death, the Grim Bleeper, a Slab Assistant. The journalists’ actual copy served only to finish him off: Asif’s job was a grisly trade, he was known for making cutting remarks, there was a deathly silence surrounding the case. This wasn’t the man I’d met. This was a media creation, already many-times-spun, a doctored doctor (though he wasn’t really even that) – a man of whom one could believe any heinousness one liked. They’d used all the demonizing tricks on him. Asif had become, almost, a cartoon.
The Mirror also carried a photograph of Asif’s mother. She was much as I’d imagined her: small, sweet-looking, dressed in her best sari, trying to close the front door against an advancing bristle of lenses and microphones.
I was sorry to see this happen to them, but I was more worried that Asif would think it was me who had tipped everyone off. Of course, my name wouldn’t appear as a byline to any of the stories. But then, even whilst I was playing a journalist, I’d been careful not to give Asif even a false name to check.
I thought about calling his mother to commiserate, but I doubted the family were taking any calls. Any denial on my part at this point was likely to be taken as further confirmation of my guilt. Trusting journalists was not something Asif was likely to do again.
As far as I was concerned all this press attention would have one important result: the police would be forced to explain what they had been doing recently and why there seemed to have been so little progress. The press weren’t looking for the same thing I was: I wanted the person who hired the hitman – the person who originally wanted Lily dead. All they were after was a quick trial of the hitman – and hopefully more revelations about Brandy. The police’s attitude of wait-and-see immediately suggested to the press that there would be more to see. That was likely to be the story for tomorrow, though. Saturday’s story was hospital incompetence, health-service cuts, greater regulation and phone polls: Should Asif be Sacked?
I had to decide what to do myself. A couple of calls from journalists came through to the phone in my flat. I had no idea how they got the number. When I asked, they wouldn’t tell me. After a couple more calls, I got fed up of being coy. I wasn’t putting any more pressure on Asif if I could help it. But I was going to try and focus more attention on the police. I spoke to about twenty journalists, some from as far away as Australia and Texas.
The average interview went something like:
‘Mr Redman, what was your reaction to the news that Asif Prakash had used your girlfriend’s mobile phone after she died?’
‘I was deeply distressed,’ I said, putting the inverted commas round deeply distressed even before they did. Eve
n though it was almost the truth.
‘Do you think Asif should be sacked?’
‘Certainly not. I’m sure his kind of work is done under a great deal of pressure. It was a mistake – an error of judgement. Asif’s paying for it simply by being the focus of all this attention. His life’s probably been ruined. Leave him alone.’
‘But surely you don’t condone this sort of behaviour?’
‘It was the wrong thing to do. But I’m sure Asif regrets it at least as much as I do.’
‘Do you blame cuts in the health service?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think the Health Minister should resign?’
‘Oh, yes. Her position is no longer tenable.’
‘What do you think Lily would have thought about Asif using her phone?’
‘I don’t think she’d have minded very much. But I’m sure she’d have wanted the Health Minister to resign.’
‘Do you have anything else you want to say?’
‘Yes – I think the investigation of Lily’s murder has been incompetently handled, in every aspect, from the moment it began. The police seem to have put it on the back burner. My own insights into the case have been completely ignored. Make no mistake – the man in prison isn’t the only guilty person in this case. Someone wanted Lily dead. Someone hired that hitman to kill her. The police should be trying to find that someone a lot harder than they are. Lily may only have been my ex-girlfriend, but I still loved her deeply. I cannot let this matter rest until it has been settled to my own personal satisfaction.’
55
It was the last but one journalist, a woman from the Mirror, who started the real trouble:
‘Is it true that you went to UCH and met Asif?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘He tells us that someone very closely fitting your description did.’
‘He does…’
‘He’s told us quite a lot.’
‘Really?’
I put the phone down and didn’t pick up when instantly it rang again.
From that brief conversation I guessed that the Mirror had signed some sort of exclusivity deal with Asif and had whisked him (and his mother, too, probably) off somewhere the other papers couldn’t get at them – some Caribbean island paradise. In tomorrow’s Sunday Mirror, Asif would probably be pictured sitting in a beach bar, sipping a pina colada, and quoted as saying, I blame health-service cuts. Junior doctors are put under so much pressure. Sometimes they crack. I suppose I cracked.
I wondered whether he’d tell them about Lily’s pregnancy, and if he did whether they’d be able to print it – or whether that was currently sub judice. For the moment, however, Asif had been satisfied with merely dumping me in the shit.
Within half an hour, I’d had two more calls asking the same questions: Had I met Asif? Why had I met Asif? How had I found out about Asif?
Foolishly, I’d arranged to have a handyman come round and clean the red paint off the door. He had just started working on it when the journalist from the Mirror arrived. A photographer had come with her in the same car, and he started taking shots immediately. I could hear his camera whirring on and on – on to the front page of tomorrow’s Mirror. The handyman was working with the front door half open. After the photographer had got what he needed (not much), with and without the handyman in view, the journalist started asking him questions about what he was doing. Why was there blood-red paint on my door? When had the paint appeared? Was the paint still wet? Was Mr Redman at home?
‘Yes, he is,’ I said, and pulled the handyman inside.
I locked the front door behind us.
‘Into the living room,’ I said.
Cocky, he walked through.
‘Right, please go home now. I’ll pay you for the full job if you don’t say another word to that journalist. I’ll probably want you to come back and finish the thing once she’s gone away. But if you talk to her, I’ll use someone else.’
‘Okay,’ he said. I knew he was lying but there wasn’t much else I could do. I gave him the money and let him out the front door again.
The Mirror reporter shouted in a question at me. (‘Asif might be fired. What do you think of that?’) Then she turned her attention to the handyman. Despite having my money in his pocket, he merely beckoned her a few steps down the road before starting to tell her all he knew. As I stood behind the front door listening, I could hear him saying, ‘You’ll be using the photos with me in ‘em, won’t you?’ And the Mirror reporter was reassuring him and giving him a load of flannel about Yes, it’s better to have a photo with someone in than no-one at all so we’ll probably end up using the ones with you in unless we can get some of Mr Redman himself.
The journalist found out what she could. When had I called about the paint? Had I sounded distressed? Had I given any indication as to who might have done such a thing? (Here the handyman lied outright and said I’d mentioned having ‘enemies’!) Who did he think had done it? (As if his opinion counted for shit.)
After the handyman left, I heard the journalist knocking at my next-door neighbours’. They answered without hesitation – their only decorum so far having been to peer out at proceedings through their net curtains rather than standing blatant on their doorsteps. These people were lower-middle, not working class.
At this point, I knew what was going to happen. I was about to become ‘a loner who keeps himself to himself. Maybe if I’d invited the whole street in for crumpets and cocoa every evening for a year, I could have avoided this fate. But as it was, I was on my way to becoming a creature capable of any indecency. The tabloids, care of my next-door neighbours, were setting me up. By tomorrow evening they’d probably know that I’d once picked my nose during biology class – and by the following evening their readers would know as well.
(‘A bit of a loner, is he? Keeps himself to himself, you say?’)
I felt: annoyance, anger, rage, fury.
It wasn’t my fault that someone had leaked the story of the morgue phonecalls to the press. That had probably been a policeman, wanting a bit of easy cash to help re-Tarmac his drive. But how had they made the connection between Asif’s anonymous journalist visitor and myself?
Most likely Asif was far more forthcoming with the Mirror – over his pina colada – than he’d been standing beside Doctor Calcutt on the hospital steps. At the mention of a mysterious visitor asking questions – and claiming to be a journalist – the real journalists would have set off immediately to find out who it had been. I imagined photos being faxed down to a small sub-post-office in the Caribbean. Pina coladas were by now pouring like pink waterfalls. Asif raises his drunken head and points an unsteady finger. ‘Thassim. Thah-one vere.’ Thunk – down the head crashes again. Off scurries the still-very-sober journalist. They’d worked pretty fast, if that was how it had been.
Once she’d finished with my neighbours, the journalist came back to my front door and started ringing on the bell. This kind of press attention had only happened to me once before. There had been a ludicrous (or so I thought at the time) story in one of the tabloids about how Brandy and Cyril were having a torrid on-screen off-screen affair. The doorstepping had gone on for a couple of days before something more important came along – someone slightly more famous was discovered to have been having a torrid on-screen off-screen affair. But that experience hadn’t really taught me anything about how to deal with door-stepping. If people really want to bother you, then they can. Unless you can afford bouncers and getaway limos, there isn’t much you can do.
The phone rang again and I waited until the answerphone picked up. It was the Mirror journalist phoning from outside, even as she rang the doorbell. I could hear the doorbell coming down the phone with a few milliseconds delay on it – synthesized, digitized and de-digitized. The journalist shouted into the phone as she shouted through the letter-box. This was becoming unbearable.
I did what I could: I pulled the nicotine-brown plastic box off the doorbell and unscr
ewed the bell.
The moment she heard the bell go dead, the journalist started knocking instead.
I turned the volume all the way down on the answerphone. I put on a Nirvana CD very loud. I lay on the sofa with a cushion over both ears and yelled blah-blah-blah.
My next-door neighbours – both of them – started to bang on the walls. Perhaps I was no longer a suspiciously quiet loner who keeps himself to himself. Perhaps I was becoming a bloody nuisance with all that racket.
I watched – engulfed in noise – as the message-counter on my answerphone went up and up.
The album came to an end. I put it on again and made a cup of tea.
Then I went and did something I hadn’t done before – sat in the garden. It was rankly overgrown with thigh-high grass and neck-high weeds. Through this green sea I waded to the far end, where I found something I’d forgotten: a shed.
When I opened it up, it wasn’t too bad inside – dry and dusty and completely empty apart from a bucket and mop, some coils of rope and a defunct lawnmower. After first removing the mop, I turned the bucket over and sat down on it.
For one long moment I felt a sort of deep mischievous calm coming over me. I sat there like a just-crowned king – mop in one hand and cup of tea in the other – reigning over the garden shed, and with the fourth estate pleading for admittance at the outer walls of my castle.
The only shame was, I didn’t have a crown. But maybe I did. I took out my handkerchief, knotted it at the four corners and put it on my head. Now the picture was complete – except I’d drunk half the tea.
Quite clearly, regally, I watched as a decision was made in my head: I would go to the theatre that night, and the following night, whatever happened, whatever intervened. This would draw some attention to Alun and Dorothy – attention which I doubted they’d appreciate. (If the journalists managed to get in to one of the performances, it would merely be an added disturbance on top of my Cough Campaign.) I might be able to use this intrusive attention somewhat to my own ends after all.
