Remedy is None

by William McIlvanney

  One moment Mr Whitmore was mouthing bitterly at Charlie and the next Charlie had struck him, and that one blow seemed to fuse him to the action so that he couldn’t pull himself off. The restraint that had been on him snapped. Mr Whitmore fell, toppling a chair, and Charlie dropped on his knees astride him. still striking, Mrs Whitmore screamed. Harry dived at Charlie in an effort to stop him, gripping his arm. But he was thrown off violently as if by an electric current. Charlie’s arm seemed to function independently. It rose and fell tirelessly and relentlessly, seemed galvanized to the act of striking, moved by more than muscle. Through Mrs Whitmore’s screams and the cries of Elizabeth and Harry, it beat on, pumping blood from Mr Whitmore’s face, decreasing gradually in momentum until at last it was still. Mrs Whitmore was saying over and over again, ‘That’s enough, that’s enough, that’s enough.’

  ‘Yes,’ Charlie said dazedly. ‘That’s enough now. That’s enough.’

  And suddenly it was as if a wind had dropped in the room. The dark force that had possessed this place a moment ago, that had taken an ordinary scene and forged it into something terrible, that had swept these people into its fierce centre, surrendered them without warning, gave up the room again to quietness, and left its victims stranded derelict in their pathetic humanity. Elizabeth sat huddled in her chair, hiding her eyes. Harry lay transfixed where he had fallen, one leg buckled under him. Charlie’s mother knelt on the floor, her face upraised, made into a ludicrous mask by tears. Charlie was slumped almost protectively across the dead body of Mr Whitmore. Mr Whitmore’s face was wet with Charlie’s tears.

  Part Three

  Chapter 20

  UNDERSTANDING WAS A LONG TIME IN ARRIVING. FOR A while time seemed to be deferred and they were like strangers anonymous in a waiting-room. It was as if normalcy had missed its connection and all the luggage of their lives, everything they knew themselves by, had gone on ahead, where they would have to follow. But no one had the means to reach that destination or knew how they were to get there.

  Charlie, as if orphaned by his own action, was like a foundling, helplessly awaiting whatever was in store for him. What was going to happen loomed before him like a closed door, against which someone else’s hand had knocked. And he could only wait, powerless to turn away from or open that door.

  Everything appeared grotesque and strange to his eyes, much as things must appear to the newly-opened eyes of a child, so that the chair which had fallen with Mr Whitmore had no familiar associations for him, but was a weird symbol in wood. The whole room obtruded terribly on his consciousness, its furnishings palpitating like living things and seeming somehow to grow in stature. The table was not a table, but a vast shining plain from the centre of which rose a tower of glass. The mirror was a massive burnished medallion suspended from the wall. All the familiar fixtures of the room seemed to rebel against him, to deny their ordinariness and invade his mind in fantastic shapes. The others moved before him in dim meaningless charade. His mother knelt, cradling Mr Whitmore in her lap. Would her tears satisfy his lust for grief? Her hands fluttered desperately like limed birds about his face. Her mouth, deformed with grief, spat words at Charlie. But they came to him indistinctly, confused with the sound of Harry’s voice and Elizabeth’s weeping, components of one continuous rush of noise like the roar of water to someone surfacing.

  Then suddenly Charlie was aware of Harry’s voice separately, coming to him unnaturally loud.

  ‘Ah’ll have to phone,’ Harry was saying. ‘Ah’d better phone. An’ get John. Ah’ll get John.’

  ‘Get John. Get John,’ Elizabeth said.

  Harry went out into the hall and came back a moment later. His coat was open and the collar was turned inward.

  ‘Pennies,’ Harry said. ‘Ah’ve only got three pennies.’

  Elizabeth turned like a weathervane, trying to locate her purse in the chaos of her mind.

  ‘Press the emergency button.’

  Charlie listened to his own voice as if it came from a loudspeaker.

  Harry went out. The front door closed. Time held them caught in it and they became no more than nervous tics, like trapped flies. Elizabeth went through and ran water on a cloth and brought it to her mother. Her mother took it and laid it on Mr Whitmore’s forehead and it fell to the floor and she forgot about it. She was rocking back and forth on her haunches, moaning. Elizabeth was repeating Charlie’s name endlessly. Charlie thought of the appointment he was to have kept on Monday. His mind reiterated like a prayer the fact that he was a university student. He watched the scene with stunned concern as if it were taking place in a theatre and he wanted to see what was going to happen next.

  What happened was that John and Harry came in, and to Charlie their entrance was as arbitrary as in a play, in obedience to some unknown script. John was dishevelled and tie-less. Shock had blanched his face and hurry had rouged it erratically, so that he entered like a pierrot. His expression of concern disintegrated as he looked round the room. The meaning of the scene seeped into him slowly like poison gas. He went woodenly and blindly towards Mr Whitmore. He crouched down. His hand went out and touched Mr Whitmore and retracted slowly and covered his own face.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Charlie,’ he said. ‘Oh Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus Christ.’

  Inside the sound of his voice, another sound began and ran slowly to a halt. It seemed to Charlie like an echo of something he had heard before, when his father was dying. That other car had arrived too late as well.

  Harry went out for a moment and then there were three policemen in the room, two in plain clothes. They knew their parts all right. One of them took out a notebook. They went over and started to examine Mr Whitmore’s body. One of them detached himself and came across.

  ‘I want a statement of what happened here,’ he said.

  ‘It was me,’ Charlie said. ‘Ah did it.’

  The policeman’s eyes lit him like headlamps.

  ‘You admit to doing this?’

  ‘That’s whit Ah said.’

  ‘You’re sayin’ nothin’, Charlie.’ John was beside him. ‘He’ll speak when he’s got a lawyer.’

  ‘Easy, son,’ the policeman said. ‘You’ve seen too many pictures. Nobody’s trying to force anybody to say anything. He made a statement of his own volition.’

  There was a knocking at the door and a doctor came in with an ambulance-man. The room was overflowing with people. Charlie couldn’t see the connection between all this and what he had felt when he hit Mr Whitmore. The terrible dark thing that had taken place in him then denied meaning. And now these men were methodically reducing it to conformity. That moment of vast freedom was being manacled with measurements and jotted notes and assessing looks. A trivial chain of reason was being forged link by link around him.

  The policeman who had spoken to him called the other plain-clothes man over. He put his hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Sam, you and Cameron wait here,’ he said. ‘I’m taking this one down to the station.’

  ‘Right now?’

  ‘Right now. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes for this lot. See what the doctor says. And see to the body. And get statements from everybody else here. It’s too big a mogre just now to get anything here, anyway. I’ll send the car back up for ye.’

  ‘Ah’ll come down wi’ ye, Charlie,’ John said.

  ‘You’d better wait here, sir,’ the policeman said. ‘And give your statement to my colleague.’

  ‘Ah’ve got no statement tae give,’ John said. ‘Ah only got in ahead of you. Ah’m his brither.’

  ‘Very well, then. You can come along.’

  Like a somnambulist, Charlie was taken out to the car, where another policeman was sitting in the driver’s seat, and they all drove down through the town that was still asleep. In the police-station, the policeman showed Charlie into an empty room and told John to sit on a bench outside. Charlie was seated in front of a desk. The policeman went to the doorway of the room and shouted a surname. Footsteps ampli
fied quickly in the corridor. Something inaudible to Charlie was said and the footsteps walked back into silence. The policeman came back into the room, leaving the door open, and sat on the edge of his desk. He lit a cigarette and toyed with his lighter, striking and dousing it spasmodically. The room asserted itself all at once on Charlie, was suddenly and over-poweringly there without any sense of having been entered, like places in a dream. The footsteps approached again and materialized into another policeman who had a notebook and a pencil. He closed the door and sat in a chair in a corner.

  ‘Now,’ the first policeman said, switching the other into motion with his eyes. ‘I’m going to warn you, son, that anything you say now is going to be taken down and it could be used as evidence in a court of law. If you prefer not to say anything at all, that’s up to you. I’m not twisting your arm up your back.’

  Charlie’s eyes darted about nervously until they alighted on a paperweight on the desk and fastened there doggedly.

  ‘Well. You’d better give us the run-down on yourself. Name. Address. Age. Occupation. And the like.’

  Charlie gave them like a robot.

  ‘College boy,’ the policeman said neutrally, watching him. ‘Well. Suppose you tell us in your own words just what happened.’

  Charlie pared weeks to minutes, put the incomprehensible in a paragraph, and told them.

  ‘And this Mr Whitmore is what – your stepfather?’

  ‘He’s married to my mother.’

  ‘Your stepfather, aye. She married him after yer father died?’

  ‘Ma father divorced her.’

  ‘I see. When would that be?’

  ‘Look. Ah don’t see what any of this has to do with it. Ah did it. Right?’

  ‘Look, son. I’m not trying to cause you more pain than you’ve got. But there’s not much to go on here. Ye don’t seem to have any reason why. Now for your own sake as much as anything else, Ah would like to establish what it was that made you do it . . . Well?’

  Charlie extended his arms helplessly, palms up, begging the question.

  ‘Did you have an argument? A quarrel? Had he done something before this?’

  Charlie’s head moved evasively, as if the questions were punches.

  ‘Did he at any time make to hit you?’

  Charlie watched the cloth of the policeman’s trousers where the crease had been blunted by his knees, seeing it as if through a microscope.

  ‘Look, son. You’ve done something damned serious. You’ve killed a man. Now we’d better try to find out why it happened.’

  ‘That’s for you to decide, isn’t it?’ Charlie said.

  ‘Aye. And your neck hangs on the answer.’ The unintentional pun embarrassed his anger. His voice dropped gear. ‘Look, lad. Tell us why you did it. Eh?’

  Charlie stared sullenly into his question.

  ‘For God’s sake, now. You don’t kill people for no reason. There’s got to be a reason. Now what was it? What did he do or say? Or what happened? Why? Why? Why did ye do it?’

  ‘Damn it, how do I know? He was there an’ Ah hit him! Maybe Ah didn’t like his clothes or something.’

  A sudden silence followed Charlie’s words as if the room was holding its breath with shock.

  ‘Don’t go funny on me, son,’ the policeman said, using so little breath he wouldn’t have misted a mirror. ‘That’s the kind of sense of humour that gets people hanged.’ His voice suddenly exploded. ‘Damn your guts, boy! Damn them! Ah’m trying to help you. Though God knows why Ah should.’

  There was a tap at the door and the other plain-clothes policeman who had been at the house looked in and nodded. The man who was questioning Charlie went out, closing the door behind him. Charlie looked across at the one with the notebook and caught him watching him quizzically. It was a look Charlie was to get used to. It seemed to assume that he couldn’t look back, as if he was being seen through one-way glass. The door opened again and the two policemen came in. The one who had been questioning Charlie walked over and stood in front of him. The man with the notebook stood up and Charlie got up too.

  ‘Well, lad,’ the policeman facing Charlie said, ‘that would seem to be it. You can do your talking to a lawyer.’ He paused, donning his official capacity. ‘All I have said, of course, has only been to determine the exact circumstances of the man’s death, and how you were concerned in it. But now it is my duty to charge you with the murder of Peter Graham Whitmore. I have already cautioned you as to any statement you might make. That caution still applies.’

  ‘Murder?’ Charlie’s voice seemed to dirl in the distance. The word broke through the anaesthetic of shock. The pain of that taboo word. It rang in his mind like the leper’s bell.

  The man who had given him the word motioned the others out of the room. Crossing to the door, he signalled in John from the corridor.

  ‘I’ll give you two or three minutes,’ he said. ‘And you can –’ his hand spiralled doubtfully — ‘talk.’

  He went out and closed the door. They had two or three minutes too much. John bit on his words as if they were a rag.

  ‘Try to take it as easy as ye can, Charlie,’ he said. ‘Ah mean that sounds pretty stupid. But whit Ah mean is . . . try not to brood on it too much. Ach, Ah mean . . .’

  John’s hands moved helplessly, trying to conjure solace out of nothing.

  ‘Ah’ll get a lawyer, Charlie. Maybe it’s not as bad as it looks. Ah’ll get a lawyer.’

  Silence seemed to grow in every fissure of the room, like a fungus.

  ‘We’ll get ye a fair hearin’ anyway, Charlie. We’ll get the lawyer on to it.’

  The door opened and the policeman came back in.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but that’s it. You’ll have to go now, I’m afraid.’

  With nothing to say, John was still reluctant to leave, as if searching for more profound banalities. His hand grasped Charlie’s arm, tight as a tourniquet, and they stood locked for a moment in each other’s presence, like a masonic handshake.

  ‘You’ll see, Charlie,’ John said. ‘It can’t be as bad as it looks.’

  Before he let go Charlie’s arm, he winked, and that closing eyelid was a forlorn ludicrous gesture in the bleakness of his face, belying itself like the death-twitch of an insect.

  ‘Your brother will be in the cells here until Monday,’ the policeman said as John slowly crossed to the door. ‘If you want to, you’ll be able to visit him there tomorrow. He’ll be formally charged with murder on Monday morning at the Sheriff Court before he’s taken to Barlinnie.’

  ‘Murder!’John stopped in his tracks. ‘Wait a minute. How can it be murder? It was nothin’ planned. It was a fight, for God’s sake. He didny try to kill him. You can’t charge him with murder. You can’t.’

  ‘That’s for a court to decide, sir. Pm afraid that’s the charge we’re pressing for the moment. Which is not to say that’s the charge that’ll stand. Charges have been reduced before. Say, to culpable homicide. Mind you, Pm not saying that’s going to happen here, either. But this is the way we have to work. A charge can be reduced, you see, but it can’t be raised. If we started off with a charge of culpable homicide, say, and then found out we had enough evidence for a murder conviction, we’d be in the soup. We’d catch it then – from upstairs,’ indicating a vague celestial hierarchy. ‘We’re only protecting ourselves. Because the charge couldn’t be raised then. We’ve got to do it that way, you see.’

  John just stood there, impassive and desolate, his pathetic little insurrection crushed by the policeman’s self-convinced logic. His hand made as if to wave to Charlie and wilted to his side. He went out.

  As his back receded, the situation caved in on Charlie completely. His thoughts numbed his senses so that the things that were happening to him barely impinged on him. They took him into another room. He was finger-printed. They took away everything with which he could do himself harm, shoelaces, tie, belt. His pockets were emptied, his watch taken, and everything was pu
t in a large envelope and filed away. At the end of it he found himself in a cell upstairs, left to the mercy of thoughts and fears and recriminations that filled his head like a forum.

  Broken images flashed on his mind. He teemed with voices that railed at him, demanding attention. The night’s events revolved like a carousel, whirling dizzily at times and slowing to a halt at others, filled with figures in grotesque poses and painted in the primary colours of fear, all taking place in the single location of his mind. Mr Whitmore sitting nonchalantly on a chair, his smile a subtle mockery. Elizabeth clasping her hands to her ears, shutting out her own screams. Gowdie watching. His mother holding up her hands, warding off the truth. Jim dancing, suavity in caricature. People swaying dully in a bus. Harry lying like a statue on the floor. People loomed out at him horribly and receded, to a soundless cacophony of words and voices.

  While his body prowled endlessly in the cell, pacing from wall to wall, sitting down, rising, stopping, moving, his mind stayed staked to its guilt. The cell did not exist separately for him, was not a distinct physical entity, having its location in a building in a street in a town. It merely partook of him, was no more than an extension of himself, a shell. It was no more than the limit to which he had driven himself. Its nature was his nature. Its edges were his edges, beyond which he could not go. It was not place, but fact, the action he had done, the action by which all other people and places in his life were denied, by which everything that had been himself was refuted. He had created this point to which nothing in his life could be related. He had impaled himself on this naked action. He had immured himself in this place outside of place, where he existed as the contradiction of himself, where everything he had been turned against what he now was. The loneliness of the cell dwindled into the vast isolation that was himself, was lost in that dark chaos that no place could impinge upon, where he was irrevocably alone against himself, where every memory had teeth and his own thoughts devoured him.