No One Will Hear

by Joel Hames

  I checked the clock on the oven. Not yet seven. The darkness was shading towards grey; even on a day that promised sunshine, not much of that would reach our particular street, with a London smog blunting any rays that made it past the high-rises. Dr Shapiro and I had agreed on Saturday morning, and we hadn’t specified a time, but whatever Norfolk was like today it couldn’t be much worse than this. Google was telling me two hours thirty for the drive. I took a quick shower and threw on jeans and a sweater that had once been black, but had faded over the years until it resembled the scene outside the bedroom window. Claire wasn’t coming. Claire was hardly speaking. She offered her cheek as I went to kiss her goodbye, murmured “Drive carefully,” and turned back to the television, which was now running trailers for the evening’s big shows. By twenty past seven, I was on the road.

  He was behind me before I’d hit the end of the street, pulling out between two cars and edging closer until he was no more than four feet away. The road was wet – it had rained overnight – and I thought briefly about slamming on the brakes and seeing what happened to that little green bike and the asshole riding it. And then I remembered where I was going and thought it might be better just to waste his time.

  He stuck close for three miles but started to slip back after that. It must have been clear I was heading out of London by then. He gave up after four miles, veering to the side of the road and disappearing from my rear-view mirror as I turned a corner. I supposed he’d figured it out. A bike like that had a tank so small you could fill it with one good piss. Wherever I was going, he’d have to fill up on the way, and I wouldn’t be waiting for him to catch up and follow.

  The Fiat was still in good order, after all the miles and hurt I’d put it through, and the roads were mercifully quiet. London still hadn’t fully woken, its workers sleeping off the excesses of the office Christmas parties or gathering their strength for a Saturday on the High Street. As I hit the heart of the suburbs the light gained in strength, and by the time the first big patches of green began to appear the sun was blinding me every time the road bent east. I wondered how far Hanover’s bike could get on one tank. He’d made it to Mayfair without stopping. He’d made it all the way to Brooks-Powell’s place in Kensington and Lizzy’s flat in Notting Hill. London was probably in range, all of it, within reason. Norfolk would be a whole lot of steps too far.

  Something occurred to me, and then floated out of reach before I could catch it. I was tired. Whatever it was, it would come back later.

  I skirted Cambridge and Ely and slowed as I approached King’s Lynn. Dr Shapiro’s home wasn’t far from here, he’d said, overlooking the Wash. I took a right through villages that still didn’t seem to have woken, even though it was well past nine, and eventually the line of brilliant blue to my left grew and separated itself from the sky until it became the clear and unambiguous sea.

  Dr Shapiro lived in a village called Holme, a few minutes past Hunstanton, which I’d heard of, even if I couldn’t remember when or why. Desolate windswept dunes occupied the few hundred yards between his cottage and the sea. Despite the wind and the cold, I found him sitting in his garden drinking tea, beckoning me on as if it weren’t quarter to ten on a December morning and we weren’t within spitting distance of the North Sea.

  But the garden was sheltered, hedges cleverly set so as to soften the worst of the wind whilst still permitting a decent view. Dr Shapiro had left his French windows open, so I had a clear line of sight into the uncluttered kitchen of what looked like a good-sized fisherman’s cottage built of flint and sandstone. And Dr Shapiro himself was bigger than I’d expected, too, a broad welcoming smile, an ample figure perched carefully on a small garden chair.

  I shook his hand and exchanged pleasantries, and sat down opposite him while he poured tea and asked me how the journey had been. I complimented him on the view, and he thanked me, and then, without much by way of preamble, he said “I suppose you want to talk to me about Edward Trawden.”

  I must have betrayed my surprise, because he smiled broadly again, and explained that Trawden had been his connection to Elizabeth Maurier, “May she rest in peace.”

  I hadn’t known that, but then, Shapiro hadn’t really given me much opportunity to ask when we’d spoken on the phone. As if sensing my thoughts, he shrugged apologetically.

  “My wife died last year. I do like a little company. And truly, I find explaining things on the telephone rather trying. I prefer to speak face to face. You can see so much more. You can see when to stop, when to go back, when to go on. On the phone, it’s all silences and missed signals and bad interpretations. I like a face.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. I remembered those silences from our call earlier in the week. “It’s a pleasure to be out of London.” And I meant it.

  “So. Edward Trawden. I did tell Mrs Maurier, you know. All those years ago. And I remember your name, Mr Williams.”

  “Sam. Call me Sam. Only the police call me Mr Williams.”

  “Sam it is,” he replied, smiling. “Quite brilliant, they said you were. Of course by then I was already on my way out. They forced me out, eventually – you know about that, I presume?”

  I nodded. He went on.

  “But even if they hadn’t I don’t think I’d have gone on much longer. I was out of touch. I don’t mean they said I was out of touch, I mean I really was. These things move on. The brain may be ancient but its study is young.”

  “They say much the same about law,” I said, and he smiled at the interruption.

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right. The old order changeth, yielding place to new. There were fishermen living here, once, in this very house. There haven’t been fishermen in this village for decades.” He stopped, turned, gazed at the sea and didn’t stop gazing at it until I cleared my throat, and then he jerked around, remembering, suddenly, that he wasn’t alone. “But where was I?” he asked. “Oh yes. Trawden. Interesting man, that’s for certain. Probably the most fascinating case I had the privilege to work on. Not that any good came of it.”

  “So when did you work on Trawden? I don’t recall your name on the original case files.”

  “No.” He shook his head, emphatically. “No, the trial work was all done by Michael Slater, but he retired soon after, so when it came to parole hearings and the like, they turned to me. I had to examine him, to see if he was fit to be returned to society, but there was never really any prospect of Trawden making parole. Those examinations were a waste of time, in that sense, but they do like to make sure every box is ticked before they say no.”

  I nodded at that. Shapiro went on.

  “And the thing was, he was a fascinating man, quite possibly a genius, and he didn’t mind talking to me, so I made a point of speaking with him whenever I found myself in the same prison.”

  “Belmarsh?”

  “Well, Broadmoor first. The hospital. By their standards he was the very picture of normality. After he was discharged he spent some time in Wakefield before he was transferred to Belmarsh.”

  It sounded like Shapiro had followed Trawden’s prison career closely, and I wondered why his notes had been absent from the appeal papers.

  “And Elizabeth Maurier?”

  “Ah, well, that’s the thing. I’d come across Mrs Maurier once or twice before, and I had enormous respect for her ability. So when I heard she’d taken on the appeal, I thought it would be a good idea to speak with her, to share my findings. I visited her at her house in the Cotswolds.”

  A series of images flashed through my mind again. The house. Elizabeth, welcoming and gracious. Black-coated waiters with canapés and champagne. The gardens on a clear and moonlit night.

  “And I told her everything I knew about the man,” he continued. “I suppose I wondered why I was never called to testify at the trial, but it wouldn’t have made any difference in the end. It was all about the actual evidence, wasn’t it? All about that Evans chap. The hard facts.”

  I nodded. I was the one w
ho’d found those facts. After that, it wouldn’t have mattered if Trawden had confessed right there in the courtroom. He was always walking. I drank the last of my tea and shivered – the wind had grown in strength, cutting through the hedges and my coat and my skin right into my bones. Shapiro noticed the shiver and stood.

  “Let’s go inside,” he said. “The fire’s lit.”

  Behind the kitchen was a snug, furnished with two deep leather armchairs, wood on the floor, a thick red rug on the wood, and the promised fire smouldering gently in a small iron stove. The world was entirely absent; we could have been anywhere; it could have been night time outside.

  Once we were settled and Shapiro had added a little coal to the fire, he continued with his narrative.

  “Edward Trawden, as I mentioned, was a truly fascinating case. Putting aside his innocence of the crime for which he was convicted, Trawden is a master of control. He can filter noise and create it, he can manipulate the cleverest of people, people who think their actions are entirely their own, people who think their thoughts are entirely their own. And he’s a chameleon, too. He can be whatever you want him to be, whatever works at the time.”

  I thought back to the Reform Club, to his awkwardness after Blennard had left, and the sense I’d had, later, that the awkwardness might not have been his after all. Shapiro went on.

  “To him, the world is divided into useful idiots and enablers and victims – those were his terms, by the way,” he added, noticing my sceptical frown, “and by ‘victims’ I refer not to the poor Grimshaw girl, who was of course murdered by Evans, but to those individuals who may actually see what Trawden is doing but are powerless to prevent it.”

  “But how would he do that? I understand what you’re saying about manipulation, but how could he force people to do what he wants when they’re aware of it?”

  Shapiro shrugged. “Allies help, of course. The useful idiots and the enablers. Information, too.”

  I pondered that for a moment, before I realised what he meant.

  “Blackmail?”

  “Not that I have anything concrete, you understand. Not that he ever actually said it, in so many words. But that was certainly the impression I got from the man.”

  I sat back in my chair and Shapiro followed suit, each of us looking into nothing, thinking and remembering. None of this mattered, of course. Trawden was a conspiracy theorist’s dream, at first the darling of those, like Blennard and Elizabeth Maurier, who were always looking for the innocent abused; subsequently an obsession of those who claimed he had been the murderer all along and sought to redeem Evans from the charge. Evans was dead by then, though, and they were wrong. I’d seen the evidence. There were no shades of grey. Evans had been there, Evans had killed Maxine Grimshaw, and nothing Shapiro could tell me about Trawden would change that.

  “He was, I suppose, a megalomaniac,” he said, softly, still gazing straight ahead. “Better than everyone else. Above them. Do you recall his background?”

  He’d turned to face me, and I shook my head. I’d never delved into Trawden’s past; Elizabeth had insisted it was irrelevant, and she’d been right.

  “Grammar school, then Oxford,” he said, and I found myself raising an eyebrow. My own path from childhood. A very different outcome. “But he didn’t last long at Oxford. Too clever to do any actual work, so they kicked him out after the first year. So sure of himself, so sure he knew what everyone else was thinking. And curiously, that was his weakness. He could not, for the life of him, comprehend the notion of a breaking point; that the individual human being, in situations of extreme emotion or danger, happiness, fear or grief, might not act in the way the rational human being is supposed to act. I admit I was fascinated by this. I even created games to play with him, to explore it further. Games of if and if and if, and then what. And he never managed to get beyond the input. Never allowed anything to derail the logical progression, however extreme the circumstances.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you,” I said, because Shapiro seemed to have wandered into abstract thought, and I was floundering in a sea of concepts and semi-meaningful words.

  “I’ll give you an example, then. I posited a kidnapping. A child is taken, the parent is warned to say nothing, or the child will be harmed. ‘What will the parent do?’ I asked Trawden, and his response, once he’d made it clear that he was not a kidnapper and that anything he had to say on the matter was purely theoretical, was to ask me ‘Does the parent like the child?’ I assured him that yes, the parent did like the child, and he informed me with some certainty that the parent would remain silent.”

  “That doesn’t sound unreasonable,” I pointed out.

  Shapiro smiled grimly and nodded. “And it isn’t,” he replied. “But that was just the starting point. The silence. After the silence there are the deeds. Money, to begin with: the parent has to pay a large sum to the kidnapper, and Trawden asks the same question, ‘Does the parent like the child?’, and I give him the same answer, ‘Yes’, and the parent, of course, does precisely what the kidnapper asks. Again, not unreasonable. And then the parent has to steal the money from a stranger. Same question, same answer, same conclusion. The parent has to steal the money from a friend, a relation, a spouse. Same question, same answer, same conclusion. The parent has to hurt an adult stranger. The parent has to hurt a child. The parent has to kill. On it goes. ‘Does the parent like the child?’ ‘The parent likes the child.’ ‘The parent will do as the kidnapper requests.’ No doubt in his mind, no hesitation. At the final stage the parent has to abduct and murder another child, not a stranger, the son or daughter of a friend or a loved one, and the questions and answers come like clockwork.”

  Shapiro sat back and watched me as I took it all in. A hideous, inevitable progression, a trail from silence to murder, with Trawden apparently unaware of the gulf that separated them. He waited a moment, but I had nothing to say. An interesting insight into an unusual mind. Nothing more. He continued.

  “He simply could not conceive of that breaking point. It was all just switches, just circuits, logic gates at each decision point, no doubt in his mind that the current would keep on flowing, that the fuses would never blow. And that’s ironic, in a way. Because Trawden himself does have that fuse. His own circuit isn’t quite so straightforward.”

  I sat forward, suddenly intrigued, and Shapiro smiled at my belated show of interest.

  “The way I analysed it, Trawden was – is, no doubt, because it’s not like these things are likely to fade away – a sociopath. An extremely clever sociopath. To his way of thinking, he is so far above the rest of mankind that we are little more than insects. It’s a mania. And when the mania is at its strongest, he reacts in ways that even he might later regret. For instance. In the kidnapper game, he would answer as the parent, as I’ve described. But from time to time he would switch. He would play the part of the kidnapper. He would describe unimaginable things, the torments he would inflict on his victims, and he would do it with a smile. And then he would stop, suddenly, and the smile would fade, he would bury his face in his hands for a moment, and when he came back up the smile would be back, and he’d be telling me it was all nonsense, and he’d been merely teasing me. But he hadn’t been. He’d gone too far. He’d trusted too much in his own invulnerability, and realised it too late.”

  “That’s definitely interesting,” I told him, and it was, but only academically. I wondered now whether that had been Elizabeth’s interest, an abstract, theoretical one, nothing to do with the reality of crime and prison and exoneration. And Shapiro was no fool. He knew precisely what I was thinking.

  “You’re right, Mr Williams. It’s fascinating, but that’s as far as it goes. Back then, of course, he was a convicted murderer, and I assumed that his mania had played a part in that murder. He’d killed the girl because he could, because it didn’t matter, she didn’t matter, he could do whatever he wanted and never face the consequences. A calculated action, not a random crime of passion, bu
t calculated on assumptions based within his mania. And later, of course, he’d realised he’d gone too far, possibly he’d even regretted it, but it was too late. That’s what I thought, and I was wrong, because it was Evans, and you proved it.”

  I opened my mouth to object, although there was little to object with, but he held up a hand to forestall me.

  “It’s perfectly fine, Mr Williams. I was wrong. Even the most brilliant can be wrong, and I can assure you, I’ve never made the mistake of considering myself brilliant. And Mrs Maurier knew. She listened to me, with that same look you’re wearing now, and told me my ideas were certainly fascinating and that there might even be an element of truth in them, but that the mind and the law were two very different things and as sure as I might be that Trawden was mad, she was equally sure he was innocent. And in the end, she was right.”

  He stopped, finally, eyes still fixed on me as they had been throughout his long speech. And then he smiled, again, and apologised for dragging me all the way from London to listen to an old man’s reminiscences, and offered me more tea, or perhaps something a little stiffer, but I was about to start on a long drive and suddenly anxious to be home and see Claire. I bade him farewell, and ten minutes later I was on the road.

  I’d wasted my time, and the clouds had begun to mass while we were inside. Dr Shapiro might have been brilliant once, for all he said he wasn’t. But now he was an old man with nothing to do but dwell on the past. The sun seemed to burn through the clouds every time the road veered towards it, the mirror image of my drive earlier that morning, and I stopped in a layby a few miles north of Ely to rest my eyes.

  I pulled out my phone to check for voicemails, but there was no signal. Instead, there was something else, something in my head. An idea, that notion that had come to me earlier and faded before I could get hold of it.