Hindsight

by Peter Dickinson

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  Hindsight

  A Crime Novel

  Peter Dickinson

  1

  This is a murder story.

  There is a nasty death, there are clues, and a solution of sorts. In that way it is no different from the type of book I have written before, or from the type of book I thought I was writing when I began.

  But in other ways it couldn’t be more different, because it is true. True, at least, as I have been able to make it. The death of Christopher Wither did take place.

  Or rather, exactly such a death took place, but the dead man had a different name.

  Damn. Try again.

  I began to write a straightforward detective story, using my own prep-school days as a background. In the course of doing this—partly because I was presented with fresh information, but mainly by reviving lost memories and then thinking about them—I came to believe that the actual events in which I had taken part as a child were capable of a much more sinister interpretation than I had realised at the time, or had since thought. Not that I had thought about them much, if at all, during the forty-year interval, despite it having been myself who found the body and who gave evidence at the inquest. The reasons for this blanking-out of memory will become apparent, as they slowly did to me. They are part of what this book has turned out to be about.

  Having decided what the truth probably was, I could not go blandly on with my half-completed fiction. I felt I had to get the truth down on paper as best I could. But much of the evidence for that truth was embedded in what I had already written, details and incidents I had used for decoration or to support my fictional plot. These are often the ‘clues’ to which I referred just now. The only answer seemed to be to incorporate the relevant bits of my manuscript into a new book.

  This is why the book you have in your hands could be said to consist of the first halves of two murder stories, one working forward in time and one backward, meeting and culminating in one death. So the death comes later in the book than is normal in the genre, and I think it might help readers to have this explanatory note at the start.

  I have done my utmost to keep things simple. I am not trying to dazzle the literary world with a bag of tricks, only to tell a story in the way it happened. For simplicity’s sake I have sometimes compromised with truth. Take the matter of names, for example. When I started writing my fiction I gave all the characters, though based on real people, fictional names. So really all the characters and places in this book should have two names apiece, one fictional and one real. To avoid this confusion I have used the fictional names throughout. This wasn’t done to protect the innocent—there were precious few of them about, it turned out. For the sake of consistency, I have also altered my own name. My novel is set in the third person, and experienced by a boy called Paul Rogers, so the non-fictional part now conforms to it and describes the discoveries and self-discoveries of a middle-aged writer also called Paul Rogers, alias ‘I’.

  That is a simple confusion, simply resolved. I myself am much more bewildered by the question how much of what I ‘remember’ is genuine historical fact. This is vital, because on it depends the validity of many of my ‘clues’. To illustrate the problem, and also by way of scene-setting, I will begin with three brief episodes—not in fact part of my half-completed fiction—that took place during the evacuation of St Aidan’s Preparatory School from Sussex to Devon during the summer of the fall of France.

  First comes something that has always for some reason stuck in my mind: the memory consists of the weight and ungraspability of a mattress—black-striped ticking stuffed with horsehair and buttoned with serrated leather roundels. As I type my thumb muscles ache faintly with the remembered effort not to let it slip as I carried it across the Second XI pitch to the removal vans. The Man was there, watching the work. He singled me out and said, ‘Well done, Rogue,’ as I passed. The Man was both headmaster and owner of St Aidan’s. His name was Thomas Smith, M A. We called him ‘Sir’ to his face and ‘The Man’ to each other. The point of his praise was that the gangs clearing the dormitories had been organised to work two to a mattress, but being in an odd-numbered gang I was carrying mine single-handed.

  That, I am absolutely certain, happened. Next comes something which I know must have happened but which I hardly remember at all: my mind-album contains only one blurred snap of a master (Mr Floyd?) coming into our compartment and telling us that the train was about to pass something which he considered to be of interest. All the rest is lost. I can imagine the journey, of course, as it pretty well must have been—the appalling continuum of noise which small boys inhabit as if it were an element necessary to their survival, like air; the excitement shading to tedium as the minutes and miles thudded by; packed lunches, eked or gobbled; the scritch and prickle of railway upholstery, noticed at first against the bare undersides of knees but soon penetrating the grey flannel of shorts and Aertex of pants; at last the colour of the earth in fields changing to red as the train rocked by, and people telling each other we were coming to Devon; Exeter station, the swaying-coach-trip up through winding lanes to Paddery; big gates, a short but grand avenue, a driveway winding through timbered parkland; climbing down, coach-sick and yawning, into the central courtyard of an immense brick house.

  All that is lost, but clearly true. I have even lost what must have been a moment of horror, the realisation that the boys were expected to use a row of latrines specially dug for them behind the house—of Paddery’s one hundred and forty-six rooms only three were water-closets. I have lost supper that night, and going to bed complainingly on mattresses laid on bare boards (did we carry them up? I don’t remember). But curiously I have not lost something which at the time I doubt if I was consciously aware of, an unnoticed change in my own relationship with the world. I had moved into a sphere of greater freedom. I think this may have been true of all the boys at St Aidan’s and similar schools, but I don’t suppose it applies so much outside our own over-protected class; certainly our evacuation was very different from those now sometimes shown on TV, clips from wartime newsreels of labelled children being packed into trains to escape the blitz, leaving home and parents and safe streets for the first time in their lives and heading for the appalling rural unknown; we had been through our own equivalent of that small martyrdom at the start of our first term at St Aidan’s. But for boys of my age and class the war was a good time to be growing up; there were many restrictions, but these bore mainly on the adults, and that somehow created space for us which had not been there in peacetime. At home, for instance, the disappearance of fathers to the war and nursemaids to war-work meant one evening meal for the family, and later bedtimes; but all sorts of less obvious openings in our caste-built boundaries became available as adults occupied themselves with the chores of war. For me, the evacuation of St Aidan’s was the moment when this change took place.

  With these two episodes—carrying the mattress, and the journey—I know where I am. Both are, if in slightly different senses, true. But what about the third one? It is something I had completely forgotten until I sat down to write about Paddery. It ambushed me. It sprang, it seemed, not to my mind but to my fingertips as they hung poised above the keys of this typewriter.

  Waking, stiff with little aches, and opening my eyes to see a boy in pyjamas standing at a tall, curtainless window. The boy heard me stir, put a finger to his lips, beckoned. I craned till I could see the dormitory prefect (the ‘dorm prae’ in the usage of St Aidan’s) because you could get a drill-mark for being out of
bed before the first bell. He was asleep on his mattress by the door. I slithered out of bed and crept to the window.

  It must have been about half-past five on that summer morning—‘all in the early pearly’, as my uncle’s gamekeeper, Fison, used to say when describing his visits to his snares. The dormitory was on the top floor at the front of the house. Below the window was a sweep of gravel and beyond this a downward slope of rough grass, mown for hay a few days ago; the half-dried swathes lay in ridges across it. The slope was flanked by huge, still trees, and beyond it gleamed a lake. On the other side of the water rose a ridge of bracken-mottled turf, its right-hand side screened by a small wood. Mauve rhododendrons were in bloom along the far shore beneath the branches. The whole scene was banded with thin wisps of mist.

  The boy beside me touched my elbow and pointed. Something moved in the mist on the slope below us, acquired a shape, was a deer, walking on delicate stilted legs, lowering its head to nudge the mown grass. Two more followed, with fawns beside them. Then, suddenly, either the mist evaporated or my eyes realised what they were seeing and there was a troop of about thirty deer moving in the dawn silence across the ground between the house and the lake.

  Something stirred close behind me, an indrawing of breath. The prefect had woken and crept up to have the fun of making us jump before dishing out our drill-marks. Then he too had been trapped by the vision.

  ‘Whiz-zoh!’ he breathed.

  The three of us woke the others, making gestures of silence, and we all crowded to the windows to gaze at this Eden-world to which, amazingly, the war had floated us.

  Now, is this true? If so, how could I possibly have forgotten it for forty years? What could have caused me to bury such a treasure and go away? I think I now know the answer.

  Of course, it may only have been a dream; or I may, for reasons still hidden from my conscious mind, have invented it and then persuaded myself of its truth. It had nothing directly to do with the death of Wither—there are no ‘clues’ in it—but I think I can say that if it is true then Wither was murdered in the manner I will describe. Also that another and in some ways more hideous crime took place.

  If I made it up or dreamed it, then this book is fiction after all.

  2

  I began to think about using Paddery as the background for a story because of a chance meeting with the biographer Simon Dobbs. It took place at a joint committee held by two writers’ organisations to agree on an approach to the Minister of Arts about the distribution of certain foreign royalty payments. Historically there had been a good deal of feuding between the two bodies, and their lot still tended to regard us as stick-in-the-muds and we them as wild boys. But the subject was too technical for much controversy and the meeting went well, despite our efforts to demonstrate our fundamental radicalism and theirs to prove their steadiness and responsibility.

  I should, I now see, have realised that Dobbs was a sick man, but I am not very observant about that sort of thing. I looked at him, of course. He belonged to the quite common category of writers who affect a military appearance; short hair, neat moustache, oldish tweedy suit, erect bearing, speech quiet and slightly clipped, big horn-rimmed spectacles. Certainly he looked tired, and the veins on the back of each large pale hand stood out like tree-roots. But he had taken the trouble to go into one specially tiresome technical tangle before the meeting, and now expounded both problem and solution with admirable clarity. I thought him a bit of a stick but, despite that, impressive.

  For my part I felt a silly longing to impress him, one of those fantasies which, but for his subsequent request, would soon have been stacked away with all the other junk in my mental toy-cupboard. I don’t know whether other writers of my type have this absurd yearning to feel that their work is taken seriously by men like Dobbs, men who produce what I cannot help thinking of as ‘real’ books—three years in the writing, six hundred pages (two volumes, even, on Oscar Wilde), index, footnotes, bibliography, nothing invented, page after page of accurately researched facts, all surmises nicely qualified; and then the serialisation of the juicy bits in the major Sunday papers, long reviews by scholars, controversies with other scholars, TV programmes, a film, even, based on the Life, a whole industry. Ah, well.

  After the meeting, while we were having biscuits and tea in the half-hour won from the day by our efficiency, Dobbs made his way towards me and said, ‘Weren’t you at St Aidan’s?’

  His voice was even softer than it had been in the committee, but hardly less formal.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said.

  ‘I thought I recognised you,’ he said.

  I blinked inwardly, though this has happened before. Judging by snapshots I was an ordinary-looking child, with no feature strong enough to suggest that my face would become what I now see in the mirror—still ordinary, but different. Apparently something has persisted that is able to call forth recognition across four decades.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re Dobbs ma,’ I said.

  ‘I was a couple of years ahead of you,’ he said, not apparently put out that I was unable to repeat the trick he had performed.

  ‘What’s happened to your minor?’ I asked, with that twinge of self-consciousness one feels on using ancient school slang, in this case our normal term for a younger brother.

  ‘David?’ said Dobbs. ‘Dead, I fear. Cancer of the spleen. Three or four years back.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

  ‘In Bolivia. He was a mining engineer. Lived out there. I hadn’t seen him for twenty years. We sent each other Christmas cards.’

  Now, here is a strange thing. The perfectly inoffensive Dobbs minor—could there have been something about him that attracted that kind of relationship, or non-relationship? He and I had been Freshers (St Aidan’s for ‘new boys’) together, and had almost at once fallen into a dumb antipathy, soon ritualised in a convention of never speaking directly to each other; our coevals joined in to the extent of trying to set up situations in which one of us would be forced to break the long silence, but never succeeded. We kept it up for several terms until The Man noticed and simply ordered us to stop. It was by this odd closeness to Dobbs minor that I had been able to recall that a Dobbs major must have existed.

  ‘Presumably you were among those evacuated to Paddery,’ said Dobbs.

  ‘Yes indeed. Weren’t you?’

  ‘It would by hindsight have been a convenience,’ he began, but at this point one of his colleagues, a stout and dynamic woman who specialised in gritty TV scripts about the drug-culture, pushed between us and began to harangue him about some monstrosity perpetrated by the legal department of the BBC. Dobbs of course did quite a bit of work for TV, spin-off from his researches. It was natural that the woman should want somebody of his calibre on her side, and natural that he should regard the matter as of more importance than chat about our prep school. He nodded apologetically to me and bent his long frame to listen.

  In my bath that night I thought briefly about Dobbs minor and his spleen. I had had an idea that that was an organ which could be removed without loss to the system. Not in Bolivia, perhaps. Now Dobbs minor had been removed, and I sensed no loss.

  Two days later I received a letter from Simon Dobbs.

  Dear Rogers,

  I was interested to meet you last Tuesday and would have liked to talk longer. You may not be aware that I am at the moment engaged on a biography of Steen. It was intended for the centenary, but such a mass of new material has come my way that I am beginning to doubt whether I shall make it. When I went to see Mary Benison a few months before her death she was barely prepared to admit that she had even known Steen, but not long ago I received from her executors, apparently on her instructions, four large trunks of her papers, absolutely unsorted. I cannot yet tell how long it will take me to work through them or whether it will be worth the effort.

  Be that as it may, even now I foresee
a need to attempt to encapsulate this extraordinary woman, if only to make sure that she does not ‘run away’ with my book. I seem to remember my brother David telling me that the boys at St Aidan’s used to call her ‘Mad Molly’. This soubriquet from some of the few dispassionate observers who ever crossed her path might be a nicely ironic way of summing up her career, but before I begin selecting material with that in mind I would prefer to make sure. Would you please confirm or deny?

  I cannot imagine that MB would have thought it in her interest to have direct dealings with the type of second-rater old Smith employed to teach the boys, let alone with the boys themselves, but I suppose somebody must have seen her if only to christen her as they did. Did you? If so, would you let me have a three-line pen-portrait? And if you happen to know for sure why the boys called her ‘Mad Molly’, that might also be useful.

  Yours sincerely,

  Simon Dobbs

  I guessed that Dobbs had had an instinct to underline the words ‘for sure’, but had decided it wouldn’t quite do. Of course I knew the answers to his questions, I thought. I would bash something out that evening.

  It was only when I settled down to do so that I realised how elusive all my memories were. A picture of Molly as a person was clear enough in my mind, a bright and life-enhancing image, but the actual events of the year in which I knew her were strangely vague, a kind of personal Dark Ages, though I was aware of having been happy enough throughout it. I wanted to impress Dobbs with vivid and significant detail. It was there, I felt, but refused to come out.

  After a couple of evenings of this the frustration began to get in the way of the novel I was supposed to be writing. When I settled to work at it next morning I found myself quite unable to concentrate. The obvious thing was to get what I did remember off my chest, put it in an envelope to Dobbs and hope to forget about it. He had asked why we called her Mad Molly, and at least I knew the answer to that. I would start there. No, I’d better explain what the girls were doing in the garden. I …