I knew why I was. But the notion was so momentous and as yet so unfounded that I hardly dared confront it myself.
Shirley made some ponderously tactful enquiries about my present life and well-being which indicated to me that she’d followed my career, professional and personal, through the years. She knew about Simone and Marigold, she knew I’d remarried. I realized, with a sinking feeling, that she was about to issue a social invitation.
‘… Only a small flat … don’t entertain much. I’ve never cared for cooking … And of course it’s rather far out of town here for people to get home late at night … But a friend who’d be so interested to meet you, she used to work with Melvyn Baines too … Of course I know you must be awfully busy these days …’
I could imagine it so well. The interminable drive there in the dark. The hesitant search for the address, stopping under street lamps, culminating in one of those roads of semi-detached houses where no numbers are displayed, as if no one expected to be visited. The second unattractive, Baines-struck spinster. The plates of rice salad eaten on our knees. Ann doing her valiant and tactful best to keep the conversation going, glancing at me covertly to see if I were getting depressed … The empty reminiscences. The implications: ‘Tom and I are very old friends …’ No.
When I was younger I used to suppose that if I were invited somewhere I ought to go. Not now, as I tell Ann. Life is at once too short and too long for such pointless, exhausting compliance. I grasped cravenly at the excuse Shirley had handed me:
‘… Really am up to my eyes, these days … A book I’m editing … This Government working party … And a trip to Canada pending. I’m not sure of the dates, yet … Not fixing anything up for the moment. I’m sure you’ll understand.’
She did.
‘I might have known,’ she said, with well-rehearsed, facile bitterness, ‘that you’d become far too grand these days to bother with people like me. I was just useful years ago when you needed me, wasn’t I? Thanks, Tom. I get the message.’ And she made sure she rang off first.
Evidently, I thought ruefully, Evan Brown was not the only person whose actions, decades ago, had left him a certain amount to answer for.
The Court Sergeant, a grandfatherly figure with a paunch and glasses, was a friend. Once, when he and I had spent a long day in Court, I had run into him afterwards in a nearby pub, subtly different in his tweed off-duty jacket. He had told me then that his youngest had been knocked off his bicycle the previous month and might be permanently brain-damaged. ‘It changes your whole view of life, this kind of thing,’ he said, looking past me. ‘I’ve been in the force since I was eighteen, including twelve years on the beat. I’ve seen a lot happen. But I can’t feel the same about anything now. Especially drunken driving cases. I just can’t trust my own judgement any more. If you see what I mean.’
I did see what he meant, though I did not tell him why. Perhaps I should have, matching his gesture with my own. I excuse myself with the thought that he probably knew about my life anyway, but I suspect that I was really held back by a mixture of social discrimination (encouraged on the Bench) and a lifetime’s habit of reticence about my own affairs. Instead I took refuge in a continuing concern for him, inquiring solicitously after his boy whenever the opportunity arose. (To which the answer, by and by, was ‘Much better, thank you, Sir. Quite a lot of steady improvement, and the hospital thinks he’ll be able to take up his apprenticeship after all. Wonderful really, when you think of it … The wife and I can still hardly believe it. That he’s been given back to us, I mean.’)
After this satisfactory dialogue, I did not hesitate very long before asking Sergeant Pelham if he could do me an unofficial favour. Could he look up someone’s criminal record for me? No one, I stressed, who was due to appear in our Court or who, as far as I knew, was ever likely to. I supplied the few details I could, adding that in fact the record might be a very old one, all the convictions long spent – but I would like to know them anyway. Of course I would not mention this to anyone else.
Sergeant Pelham put up a decent show of reluctance – ‘Well, it is a bit irregular, Sir’ – but I could tell that he was going to do it. It was, after all, easy for him, in his position, and from someone like me the request must have seemed essentially harmless.
A fortnight later, as I was waiting to manoeuvre my car out of the yard of the adjacent police station, he came out to me and handed me a buff envelope, departing again with a professionally non-committal air. Inside was a photocopied 609 form, so familiar to me from Court sittings. How often on the Bench had I looked, with a world-weariness real or assumed, at an identical form, yet another list of a man’s misdeeds? Yet this time, as I unfolded the sheet, I found my hands shaking.
Pelham had done as I had asked. Normally very old convictions are simply listed as ‘12 before 1970’ or whatever. However this list detailed them back to the beginning. This man had started his career in Cardiff Juvenile Court (‘Theft from a motor vehicle’) at the beginning of the war, and on the third such offence had been sent to a ‘Reformatory’ – the old word, long forgotten, came back to me as I read it, with a musty tang of workhouses and official beatings. The experience had not, it seemed, reformed him. There were a criminal damage and an attempted entry charge in 1943 – his first appearance in the adult Court – then a gap over ’44, ’45 and ’46, which presumably represented his Army service. Then came two charges of handling stolen goods, in Swansea, in 1947. The second of these had earned him a short prison sentence, which seemed to have made him temporarily either more honest or more wary, for nothing else was recorded till 1951, by which time he had apparently moved to London and taken to the more middle-class activity of obtaining money by false pretences.
1951 … It was surely in the following year that I had met him in Paris? Presumably his appearance there dated from just after his release from his second spell inside.
Nothing appeared for 1952 or 1953, but then I knew where he had been then: out of England for most of the time. However in 1955 there were several more charges of false pretences and fraud, accumulated together into a star appearance – his first at a Crown Court. Evidently the police force who had been looking for him, at the time when Shirley Gilchrist also needed him, had finally caught up with him. The result was a fairly stiff sentence. It looked as if, by this point, he was slipping over the imperceptible boundary between the delinquent young man, who will eventually settle into more-or-less respectable obscurity, and the lifelong professional crook.
I was therefore rather surprised that these Crown Court convictions were the last ones listed. I even felt in the envelope to see if there was a second sheet of paper, but there was none.
Perhaps he had gone to France again, and, this time, had stayed there?
I had, you will have understood by now, formed an idea. Or not so much formed it as found it lying there, indistinct but complete, in the recesses of my mind. I felt that it had probably been there for some time already, obscurely troubling me, before I had identified it.
I did not yet entirely believe my idea. It was far-fetched. I had no good evidence for it at all. But, compelling and revelatory, it now invaded my mind. And took root there.
On the next suitable opportunity, I thanked Sergeant Pelham for his help, and remarked in what I hoped was a casual tone that Evan Brown seemed to have abandoned his criminal career rather suddenly for one so well launched upon it – ‘unless, of course, there were more recent charges under another name?’
‘Well, Sir, we had his prints, and anything serious gets checked for that anyway.’
‘Oh yes, of course.’ I had genuinely forgotten about fingerprints.
‘But since you mention it … As you know, a 609 form only shows registered convictions. But our police files are a bit more extensive than that, they’re all on computer now … Well, I don’t suppose it matters, in the circumstances, if I tell you that this particular individual was further charged with fraud and drug-dealing at the
Crown Court – in ’fifty-nine, I think it was, but he got off. Then, in the early sixties, there was another warrant for his arrest. Quite a big forgery case it was, something to do with the art world. Several defendants. It went to the Bailey in the end, and the others all got sent down. Well that warrant had him down as Evan Brown plus an alias he was known to be using as well. So, you see, he did go on being a busy lad.’
‘And what about that warrant – what happened?’
‘It was never executed.’
‘You mean, the police never caught up with him then?’
‘Looks like it. Of course there may be a clerical error … But it certainly seems, from the records, as if he’s had the sense to make himself scarce ever since.’
‘Early sixties. Twenty years past. Of course he might be anywhere by now?’ I said, wondering if there was anything more to hear.
‘He might indeed. They’ve got a lot of that sort in Latin America, I’m told. Or on the Costa del Crime in Spain. Or anywhere really – he wouldn’t have to go that far: he wouldn’t necessarily get extradited. It wasn’t as if he’d committed murder.’
‘As far as we know,’ I said.
Pelham, a dealer in known facts, looked slightly disapproving.
‘Nothing like that on record, Sir.’
‘I’m extremely obliged to you,’ I said, ‘for all you’ve done. It’s been helpful, and in due course I’ll explain why.’ I hastened on quickly, knowing that no respectable explanation was ever likely to come into my mind: ‘Could I ask you one further thing – just to complete the picture, as it were. Could you tell me the other name, the alias, he was using when that warrant was issued?’
Pelham ‘couldn’t call it to mind’. He said he could look the record up again, but I could tell that this time he really did not want to. I had pushed him far enough – perhaps over the edge of propriety, given both his position of responsibility and mine. It is in fact quite against rules for a police officer to pass on information. I had not let him know that I too knew this, but we avoided each other’s eyes and I felt a little guilty towards him.
I did not see him for a few weeks. I was therefore unprepared when, at the end of a stodgy Saturday morning of enquiries into unpaid fines, the usher put a note in front of me. I expected it to say ‘Mrs Ferrier rang to say she would pick you up’, or ‘Will one of the Bench take a sworn statement before you leave?’ Instead it said, in an elderly policeman’s clerkly hand:
‘Memo from Sgt. Pelham.
The name you were enquiring after was Daffyd Huws.’
For a couple of seconds I looked at the message uncomprehendingly. I needed to adjust my mind to its import, but in any case the name seemed so strange that it conveyed nothing to me: it might as well have been Hungarian or Thai.
Then, suddenly, as if indeed my slow eyes had penetrated a foreign script and made sense of it, I understood it.
I crumpled the paper in my fist before shoving it into my pocket.
‘Will you tell Sergeant Pelham,’ I said, ‘that I’m very much obliged to him?’
Then I believe I made a show of signing each page of the Means Register. God knows if I wrote my own name. I suppose I did, as no one queried it. But it might as well have been Daffyd Huws I signed, for all I know.
‘Tell me,’ I said to Lewis Greenfield, ‘how does someone set about changing their name?’
One of Lewis’s virtues is that he never looks surprised at a question. He did not say ‘Why do you want to know?’ but merely:
‘In this country?’
‘Well, yes. For a start.’
‘OK. Britain, and the United States, are the odd-countries-out in that they make it very easy. We don’t, as you will have noticed, have identity cards, and so we don’t have any formalized notion of unalterable identity. That’s an interesting example, by the way, of people’s concepts following outward signs such as a word or a symbol, rather than the other way round.’
‘Very interesting, Lewis. You know I like these intellectual excursions too. But let’s have the facts first, shall we, then the dialectic?’
‘There aren’t many facts, I told you. You want to be called by another name? So, you call yourself by it. You have a basic right to. It really is as simple as that.’ Triumphantly unhelpful.
‘Isn’t there something called changing your name by Deed Poll?’ I suggested, conciliatory now.
‘There is – mainly resorted to by long-term lady friends wanting respectability and by people hoping to inherit the family fortune from childless uncles. It’s a bit old-fashioned, and it doesn’t make any essential difference anyway. Your name, in Britain, is the one by which you are commonly known. That doesn’t mean you can decide from one week to another that you’re called something different. But it means that, if you live in a community and people get to know you under the name you use there, you can, for instance, establish identity sufficient to open a bank account in that name. Of course, earning the money to put in it may be more tricky.’
‘You mean, with National Insurance contributions?’
‘And tax, yes. Oh, you can still do it, of course, but you’d have to explain to the DHSS and the Inland Revenue what you were up to. You couldn’t do it clandestinely.’
‘What would happen if you tried?’
‘Well unless you confined yourself to cash-in-hand labouring jobs or illegal street trading anyone who employed you would want your card. And even if you managed to get a new one, the DHSS would say, ‘‘Very funny thing, this man of forty-two, or whatever, never seems to have worked before. In fact, he doesn’t seem to have existed before. Can we have a few more facts about you, dear Sir, and where is your birth certificate?’’’
‘Suppose you went abroad. Could they check your employment record abroad?’
‘Probably not. But how would you get abroad without a passport?’
‘You’d get one in your new name,’ I said promptly, as if this had become a contest between us.
‘Oh, you are a sharp one, Sir … And how would you do that without a birth certificate?’
‘Ah, hum, yes, you may have a point … So it keeps coming back to the birth certificate, doesn’t it?’
‘It does indeed. In other words, your hypothetical character will get on peacefully under his new name provided he confines himself entirely to the black economy and never tries to go out of the UK. Bit of a limited life, I’d say … Of course, he might get on better if he was a woman. It’s easier for a woman to explain away great gulfs in her employment record, and she’ll probably find some punter to keep her and call herself by his name anyway … But she still can’t get on his passport without a birth certificate. At least, I don’t think so.’
‘I see.’ This last bit of information didn’t interest me, but I had let Lewis talk on, not wanting my concern to seem specific. ‘And what about other countries?’ I said, though I felt I already knew the answer. Countries like France that run on formal identity papers would make the adoption of a new name far more difficult. I myself had had to carry a carte de sejour in the days when I had lived there. I remembered being interviewed for it at a Parisian police station and subsequently queueing at the Town Hall of the Eighth Arrondissement.
I tried to remember what its issue had depended on, apart from a signed note from my Sorbonne tutor. My passport, certainly.
‘– No, don’t bother to answer that,’ I said, as I saw Lewis marshalling his forces to give me a comprehensive lecture. ‘I see the problems.’
‘Quite. In most European countries your hypothetical man will have to take to forgery in order to have the required papers.’
‘Well, there’s always that, I suppose.’ I thought of Jacquou’s tales of the home-industry of forged IDs, passes and food cards that had been run in Resistance circles. Because of these associations, forgery had previously seemed to me a pursuit more ingenious than intrinsically wicked, a minor art form. I also thought of the warrant from the 1960s the police had never been able to e
xecute. That had been on a charge of forgery.
‘Yes, but for documents forgery isn’t all that satisfactory except to cover a random check,’ said Lewis.
‘Why?’
‘Because, numbskull, the forgery doesn’t correlate to anything in a register. So if a central check is made it is obvious at once that it’s false. In other words, it isn’t really a clever thing to do. Not for someone who’s hoping to develop a solid second identity for himself without much danger of being rumbled … Is he clever, your chap?’
What, if anything, did Lewis mean by the remark? Nothing much, probably – but, as in Court when Sergeant Pelham’s note was handed to me, I felt my heart beginning to beat perceptibly. As if it had a life and an idea of its own. I answered as casually as I could:
‘I’m not sure yet. I haven’t decided.’
‘Thinking of writing a best-selling detective story, are we?’
‘Something like that.’
‘But you don’t read detective stories. I remember that you don’t. I’m the one with low tastes who devours crime novels in the middle of the night.’
‘Well I’m thinking of trying it.’ (Blast Lewis, he was being deviously inquisitive, after all.)
‘Because I was going to say, if you did read detective stories like I do, you might know the answer to the next question, which is how do you begin to establish a solid second identity?’
‘As I’ve understood it from you,’ I said, ‘it all comes back to a birth certificate.’
‘Yes. Do you want to know how to get one in a name not your own that will still be a real one? As I say, nothing like fiction, I’ve found, for teaching me what Law School didn’t teach.’
‘You tell me,’ I said, imitating Lewis’s own manner. ‘I know you’re longing to.’
Give Them All My Love Page 19
