by Gavin Smith
“Yes, Sharon, I do; but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. You’re not outraged by my suggestion. You’re not even surprised. I think that’s because you agree with me. If you didn’t, and your brother was a client, you’d have stonewalled. Instead, you’re helping us. You know something’s wrong and you need to put it right, perhaps even more than we do.”
“I’ve said I’ll help.” Sharon stood, brushed past Harkness and reached for her jacket. “You should get me into your car before I remember who I am.”
Jeremy endured this imperfectly formed and plodding world with an impatience that could barely be contained. His mind had wound itself too tightly and its fantastic confusion of wheels, levers and cogs could not be tinkered with lest they be wholly un-sprung. Fizzing and ticking, kinetic energy drove his flittering mind, his twitching hands, the anxious clamping of his teeth and his stamping and shuffling feet. His intelligence loomed vast yet disorderly, and marshalling it into external order consumed him.
They’d collected Jeremy from the specialist care centre he periodically visited in a leafy village a few miles north of the ring road. Sharon had chivvied him into their car with repeated assurances that not only had his mother planned this trip out for him, but she had also written it into her diary ever so neatly; if he didn’t go, it would have to be erased or scribbled out and then the whole diary would no longer be all neat and tidy.
During the drive back into town, he’d settled into grudging acceptance which flared into head rocking and defiance when they parked in a place entirely new to him. Sharon reminded him that his mother had planned and diarised this appointment, and promised that he’d be taken straight back to the centre once he’d rearranged Mr Slowey’s toy car collection for him.
“I didn’t know you were qualified for the vulnerable witness procedure?” Harkness asked Slowey quietly as the Jennings siblings grappled with the child locks in the rear of the car.
“I’m not. I just traded in a favour. Borrowed the keys. You don’t know you’re alive unless you try to flush your career down the pan at least once a day.”
“Open the can, into the pan,” chimed in Jeremy.
“You see, Sarge? He understands. You might not, though. I’d better show you how the controls in the video suite work.”
While Sharon settled Jeremy into the interview suite, Slowey shared his own imperfect understanding of the recording devices with Harkness.
“You can record onto the hard drive and back up to a DVD later, or you can record directly onto a DVD,” said Slowey. “That would be quicker for us but we’d risk losing the original if we lost it or botched it.”
“That’s a sensible risk to take,” said Harkness, biting the cellophane off a new disc. “I don’t want to leave a recording of this here for other people to scrutinise. How long have we got?”
“Next interview’s due in just over an hour.”
“Right then.” Harkness clicked on ‘record’. “We’d best get started.”
Slowey slumped into his most harmless posture and shuffled into the interview room, avoiding the temptation to stare into the camera as he eased the door closed.
“It’s nosy policeman,” shouted Jeremy, looking up from the motley assortment of toy cars he’d already divided into sub-categories.
“Jeremy, that’s rude. What’s the rule?”
“Mummy said ‘nosy policeman’ and she’s never rude.”
“I am a nosy policeman,” said Slowey, easing himself into an easy chair set at an oblique angle to Jeremy and well out of his natural eye-line. “You’re a clever lad, Jeremy. I’m also a helpful policeman. Do you know what that means?”
“Nosy policeman is talking at me, SJ.”
“Yes, Jeremy,” said Sharon.
“Mummy calls me Jeremy. You call me JJ.”
“Yes, JJ, you’re right. I’m sorry.” Sharon took a deep breath and rolled back her shoulders. “You can talk to the policeman. Mummy said you can. And so do I. But ‘nosy’ is not a polite word.”
“Mummy didn’t say it to me.”
“No. But she said it to me.”
“Mummy didn’t say it to me.”
“Do you trust me, JJ?”
“Always trust my big sister.”
“Then you can talk to this nice man. His name is Ken.”
“Always trust my big sister.”
“Jeremy, I’m Ken,” began Slowey, resolving to look at Sharon or the window but never directly at Jeremy. “Your sister tells me you’re a clever boy who could help me solve crime and do some police work.”
“You can answer, JJ,” prompted Sharon.
“I can talk to the police man because I trust my big sister,” proclaimed Jeremy, sorting toy trucks by function and number of axles.
“Jeremy, if I say there are three people in this room, is that the truth?” began Slowey, hoping to quickly dispense with the ‘truth and lies’ exercise.
“I’m not allowed to say because I might not know what the truth is and I might not know why people are asking.” He arranged the trucks into an orderly sequence, their driver’s cabs neatly aligned.
“If your mummy says you can speak to me and your sister says so too, doesn’t that mean you’re allowed to tell me the truth?”
“Not sure.” Jeremy gently rocked, as his hands sought out saloons and hatchbacks.
“What did mummy always tell you about policeman, JJ?” urged Sharon.
“If I’m in trouble I must always talk to a policeman and tell him the truth. But I’m not in trouble.”
“But you might be in trouble if you don’t tell me the truth, Jeremy.” Slowey ignored Sharon’s glare and glanced at his watch. “About the fire next door, where that nice lady and her kiddies died. So, when I say there are three people in this room….”
“Truth,” said Jeremy, grouping family hatchbacks together and moving on to saloons.
“And when I say that Spiderman just swung into this room and stuck himself to the ceiling, is that the truth?”
“Not the truth. Just silly. Not possible.”
“You’re doing ever so well, Jeremy. Is it alright if I call you Jeremy?”
“Truth.”
“Good lad. Now then, do you know what fingerprints are?”
“Truth.”
“Tell me then.”
“Marks left by fingers. Unique patterns. I watch TV. I read.”
“Is it the truth that you left your fingerprints on Suzanne Murphy’s living room window in the early hours of 3rd August?”
“Jesus, Slowey, slow down,” hissed Sharon.
“Not truth,” said Jeremy, frowning with concentration as he examined a beach buggy which didn’t quite match any other toy car. “Didn’t touch that window. Must keep away from hot, burning flames.”
“I’m sorry, Jeremy. Did I get it wrong?”
“Yes,” he said, tossing the beach buggy back into the toy barrel with irritation. “I touched the upstairs window with my fingerprints. Trying to help. Like my mummy said I should.”
“Did you help, Jeremy?”
“I did help. Truth.” Jeremy had saved his favourite vehicles until last. He marshalled the panda cars first, in order of the number of blue lights on their roofs. “But the silly woman wouldn’t come out. Just screamed and bashed her hands instead. Wouldn’t open the window like I showed her.”
“Why did you help, Jeremy?”
“Like I said. My mummy told me to.”
“Did you start the fire, Jeremy?” said Slowey, straining to maintain his bored monotone while Sharon looked on, appalled and speechless.
“Not truth.”
“Did you see any strangers near Suzanne’s house?”
“Not truth.”
“Did you…”
“No strangers. Only mummy.”
“What was mummy doing?”
“Starting a fire, silly.” Jeremy deployed his ambulances, some with their rear doors open and ready for casualties.
“Yes, Jeremy, we
are silly,” said Slowey, allowing himself a glance into the camera. “You see, I thought a strange man came along and started the fire and maybe you saw him. Are you the clever chap who can tell me the truth and correct my silliness?”
“I am that clever chap,” said Jeremy, allowing himself to touch his favourite vehicles, the ones he always saved until last. “I heard a noise and was frightened of stranger danger and burglars on the prowl so I looked for mummy and she was gone and not with daddy in the sick room then the front door was open and I……” Jeremy twitched and began to rock again.
“Calm down, JJ, it’s alright, we can stop…” began Sharon as Jeremy sneezed a gobbet of snot and spittle onto the carpet.
“….went downstairs and looked outside and found my mummy who was next door lighting a match and then she threw the match and the fire came and she fell over and got up and took a big can and scrunched the gravel and ran to me and it’s not true that there was a strange man.”
“I think your mummy told me she was tucked up in bed when the fire started. Was I wrong?”
“Wrong. Not truth. Mummy was outside with me then she made me go back inside our house and she was crying and shaking.” Jeremy manoeuvred his fire engines into a line and rotated the turntable ladder of the largest one to face his chair. “Then I wanted to go to bed but she wouldn’t let me and she went back outside and told me nobody was coming out but all I wanted was to go back to bed because it was after midnight and I can’t stay up that late ‘cause I need my eight hours exactly. Exactly eight hours and my alarm was set and my second alarm was set too.”
“I think you went straight to bed then, Jeremy.”
“Not the truth. Mummy made us go to the kitchen and then out into our back garden and look at next door but the flame made my face hot and the smoke tickled my nose and hurt my eyes and mummy kept crying and saying things, saying that she only wanted them to go away with their noise and their fighting but they wouldn’t and they needed a lesson but why wasn’t anyone coming out, they had to come out, the fire was so fast.” Jeremy rocked gently and he spoke as if he were tunelessly reciting pop lyrics.
“What did your mummy want you to do?”
“She said they had to come out and she likes it when I do things for her so I needed to tell them and I climbed over the fence and climbed onto their conservatory through the smoke and heat and knocked on the window and told the woman that she should come out but she wouldn’t so I went home and my mummy told me not to tell anyone about the fire because I might get in trouble for not getting the woman out of the house and it should be a secret.”
“Were you frightened, Jeremy?”
Jeremy cocked his head, as if he’d been asked an incomprehensible question.
“What did you think about what happened, Jeremy?”
“Mummy wouldn’t let me look at the fire engines,” he said, flicking over a miniature one. “And I didn’t get my eight hours. Need my eight hours. And I had to sit in hospital with mess and noise and unclean people.”
Slowey glanced again at his watch and wished he could turn it back by about three weeks. He should have seen more clearly and trusted his instincts. Most murderers could be found either in the victim’s home - or close to it. He knew that the enormity of what he’d nearly missed, and the consequences for Firth and others, would later swell in him like vertigo. He couldn’t vouch for how Harkness would take this revelation; he could only hope that his premature mid-life crisis had run its course.
“Thank you, Jeremy. I think it’s time we got you back to the centre, don’t you?” said Slowey, grinning his most toothsome grin.
“Truth!” said Jeremy, offering his imitation of a laugh, thinking that it was expected of him without feeling anything as obscure and impractical as mirth. Just when he thought he understood how so-called normal people thought and felt and acted, they just found new ways to perplex and panic him. They simply shouldn’t die or kill or grieve as these things made no sense, had no purpose and most of all upset the perfect pattern of his life.
‘Oh! Chintzy, chintzy cheeriness, half dead and half alive.’
Marjorie rolled John Betjeman’s line around her mind as the plump and cheerful manageress guided her around the hospice. She took in the floral print curtains, the mint-green and sunflower-yellow décor and the motivational posters backlit and framed in chrome. She sniffed for any hint of ammonia and decay beneath the thick smell of fresh paint and new linoleum. Once just another bleak and knowing slice of verse from her ‘A’ level syllabus, so many decades and a heartbeat ago, Betjeman’s words had afforded her a glimpse of a world she would never have to tolerate in her bright, young future. Now it had become a pungent and mocking prophesy.
‘What do they think has happened, the old fools, to make them like this?’ Larkin had written. ‘Why aren’t they screaming?’ She had forsaken the humanities for nursing, trading the chance of a degree and a career in teaching or academia for a caring profession, a vocation for the heart as well as the mind. She had spent the whole of her working life and too much of her personal life caring for others; sopping up blood, mopping up faeces and urine and bile, cajoling the unwilling and the unable into one more pill, one more sip or one more bite, staving off Death for as long as He would humour her. She had given all of herself away, eroding piece by piece until only the calcified husk of her heart remained to leave her a griping, sniping old fool.
“It’s been lovely to meet you, Marjorie,” said the plump woman whose name she’d forgotten already. “I’m really looking forward to getting to know Anthony.’
She’s too familiar, thought Marjorie. We’re not friends and she’s not my mother or my superior. I am Mrs Jennings and Anthony should be referred to as Mr Jennings or my husband.
“And you….Jean,” she replied through a smile that almost cracked her lips. The hospice positively throbbed with kindness and boasted motivated and expert staff, a quiet and attractive location, new equipment and a vast store of palliative drugs. It did however lack any way of masking its role as a place of dying for those whose loved ones could not confront or ease that process at home; or for those prepared to reject the care offered by their loved ones, to spend their dwindling days in solitude.
“Please do come as often as you need to. We’d all love to see you and it will really help Anthony.” The woman’s smile sprang from her heart and set her whole face aglow. She would learn, thought Marjorie, almost choking on her own bitter taste. She should laugh at herself; or perhaps cry. She could just make out the echo of the idealistic, open-minded, literate girl she’d once been protesting at what she’d become.
She no longer quite knew what she’d become or how precisely she’d fallen from the edge of reason. In her twenties and thirties, she’d learned to deal capably with the drunks, hooligans and perverts who cluttered her A&E department, never allowing herself to be terrorised, never losing sight of the simple fact that she could endure and she would always know she’d done more good then harm in her life. They all became one face, those problem patients, the face of a sneering, leering bully who spat blood in her face, clutched at her breasts, threatened her with a hypodermic and demanded, always demanded that she solve their problems right now. Like all of her colleagues, she rarely reported anything to the police. These days, she supposed there would be enquiries when such things happened, with time off and counselling besides.
She always bricked up the fear. It seemed not to interfere with home life only because the smart, new semi-detached had to be a refuge, the keep that protected those she treasured, its garden gate a drawbridge. She realised now, too late, that she had let it define her, let her sufferance exceed its bounds and shape her life. She might have outgrown it or at least outlived it, if only her life hadn’t followed its arc. Sharon arrived strong and struggling, always coping and always her successor. Yet Jeremy’s otherness would always test her love as surely as it justified it, and Tony’s defining illness convinced her that life had chosen caring and
no other purpose for her.
“I said, would you care for another cup of tea, Marjorie?” said the plump woman, giggling indulgently as though she’d had to repeat it. “You look as though you need it, my love. A nice brew and a sit down, eh?”
“No, no thank you.” She should leave, get back to Jeremy before she unravelled completely. If she did let it all flood out, Tony would know, Tony would worry and suffer, and that just wouldn’t do at all. “Would you call me a taxi please, Mrs….erm….Jean? I should collect Jeremy now.”
“Of course, Marjorie. I’ll be back in two ticks.”
While she waited, she drew the newspaper cutting from her handbag and examined it once more. In the journalist’s supposition that the Braxtons had started the fire at number thirteen, she wanted to see a glimmer of redemption but couldn’t. Instead, she knew it condemned her to carry another burden; silent guilt for the murder of a young woman and her children.
She had not intended their deaths, but she had presented them with a choice between accepting death and fleeing their home. She couldn’t have known they’d been locked in, unable to escape the demon she’d conjured out of a can of lawnmower petrol and a matchbox. Yet hers was still the hand that lit the flame so she’d murdered them as surely as if she’d put a gun to their heads.
They’d had to go. Dale Murphy brought violence and noise to her hearth, drilling his music and his rages and his beatings through the thin wall that partitioned his pile of bricks from hers. He’d smirked and swaggered in silent defiance and slammed the door in her face whenever she dredged up the courage to complain about the noise or the cigarette smoke or the barbecue stench that amplified Tony’s suffering and her own powerlessness to prevent it.
She’d repeatedly contacted the agencies that the law abiding citizen should have recourse to, all to no avail. Once or twice, a police car had made a perfunctory visit, prompting the noise levels to peak for a day or two by way of reprisal but effecting no other change. Local authority clerks and social workers had prevaricated at length on the phone and no doubt wrote up her phone calls in a highly effective manner. She could have moved. Sharon had suggested all manner of sound and sensible reasons why she should and had even offered to bankroll her. She had declined; after all, the protector must stand her ground and be beholden to no-one.
