Weep a While Longer

by Penny Freedman

  ‘Just wait,’ he says. ‘You’ve got armed officers in position?’

  ‘Yes.’

  We all wait. Then the voice is back, stronger this time. Maybe he’s had a drink.

  ‘I’m not doing any more talking,’ he says. ‘Liam goes out of the country with me or that’s it. I’m not losing him again.’

  ‘He’s put the boy somewhere where he can’t hear,’ David mutters. ‘That’s why he put the phone down.’

  Paula is very quiet, very concentrated. ‘You’re in a bad place, Billy,’ she says. ‘You’re in a corner, and that’s not a nice place to be. That’s when people make bad decisions because they can’t think straight. Don’t let that happen to you. Think about Liam. Think about his life. I hear he sings brilliantly. You love him and you feel proud of him, and you can go on doing those things if we can just all keep calm and sort out this bit of trouble you’ve got yourself into.’

  She is good, I have to admit it. She is good.

  The answer when it comes is calmer. ‘And how are we supposed to do that?’ he asks, reluctantly.

  ‘You wanted to see your son and spend some time with him,’ Paula says. ‘That’s not such a terrible thing. Not against the law, that. The problem is the gun, isn’t it? Carry a weapon and you’re in real trouble. So step one is to get rid of the gun, Billy. Open the window and throw it out, and then it’s all easy after that. You come out, Liam comes to no harm, and you get full credit for giving up the gun and behaving like a good father.’

  She is saying nothing about the robbery, I realise. Does she think she can con him that he’s got away with that?

  ‘That sounds easy enough,’ the voice says, and it has an odd ring to it. ‘All hunky dory, eh?’

  ‘Just give us the gun, Billy,’ she says.

  ‘OK.’

  We wait. Then I hear Paula say, ‘The door! He’s coming out. He’s got the gun.’

  David is out of the car and I roll over, keeping low, my eyes just at window level. It takes a moment to orientate myself and then I see them, the man with the boy clasped in one arm, the other hand by his hip, holding a gun. ‘You let us walk away from here,’ he shouts, ‘or I use this.’

  David is walking towards him. My brain seems to freeze. David is walking towards a man with a gun in his hand I tell myself, but the meaning of the words seems lost to me. I get my head up higher, looking for the police marksmen, but I can’t see them. I can see Leanne. She’s on her knees in the mud, howling.

  David keeps walking. ‘Don’t be frightened, Liam,’ he calls. ‘Your dad won’t hurt you. He loves you. He loves you more than anything in the world.’

  I’m not quite sure what happens then because I’ve got tears blurring my vision. I don’t know whether Billy Brody chooses to put his son down or whether he’s distracted and Liam makes a frantic effort to escape, but suddenly the boy’s down and on his feet and running towards his mother. I see Billy Brody raise his gun and then there’s the startling crack of a gunshot, Liam falls to the ground and I can hear myself screaming ‘No!’ into the hubbub around me.

  I scramble out of the car on rubber legs and watch Leanne stumbling across the muddy grass to the little body, but I can’t bear to see the moment when she reaches him so I look instead towards the other area of commotion, where a man lies bleeding on the ground and paramedics are bending over him. It must be David. I start running, but then I see that David’s somewhere else, talking to a couple of uniformed officers, and he waves me away furiously as I approach. The man on the ground with the bloody head, I realise, is Billy Brody. Shot Liam and then shot himself, I suppose. But there was only one shot, surely? Unless I was so stunned by the first I didn’t hear the second one. Slowly, reluctantly, I look back to where I know Leanne will be cradling her son, but some sort of magic has happened there. The paramedics are there too, and Leanne is kneeling in the mud again, but Liam is on his feet, dazed and bewildered, certainly, but completely alive. A paramedic is checking him over, gently, and Leanne is talking to anyone in earshot. ‘Just threw himself to the ground,’ she is saying, ‘when he heard the shot. I thought I’d lost him. I really thought I’d lost him.’

  Well, it doesn’t have the elegance of the breath-catching returns to life in Shakespeare’s late plays but it has its own poetry, I suppose.

  I hover about, taking in the scene, because I shall never experience anything like this again, until David appears at my side and propels me towards one of the police cars. ‘What happened?’ I ask.

  ‘Can’t talk about it. You’re a witness. I need you to go straight to the station and make a statement.’

  ‘But I didn’t—’

  ‘Just say what you saw. Don’t embellish, don’t interpret, just say what you saw.’

  He puts me in the car and speaks to the uniformed policeman at the wheel. ‘She’s a witness. We need her evidence untainted. No discussion. Don’t even talk about the weather. Straight to the station and into an interview room.’

  ‘Well I hope they’ll give me a cup of tea,’ I remark as we drive away, but my captors are following orders to the letter and I get no response.

  At the station, however, the kindness of strangers reasserts itself. I am put into one of the vulnerable witness rooms – soft chairs and soothing colours – and I am brought tea with sugar, a plate of biscuits and a blanket to wrap myself in because I’m clammy and shaky by this time. Then Sarah Shepherd turns up, showing no ill-will about having to surrender her place in David’s car, and takes me very gently through the events of the past couple of hours. We arrive at a very respectable sounding explanation for my presence at the scene – material witness in the case of the murders of Karen and Lara Brody, called to London by my mother’s death, being returned to Marlbury for further questioning, caught up in fast-moving events. Then she takes me, quietly and calmly, step by small step through the minutes before Billy Brody was shot. I have good recall in general, and this was a pretty intense experience, so I’m quite confident about my answers, but it isn’t until we get to the bit where Billy Brody raised his gun and Liam fell to the ground that I realise that this – just this – is what it’s really about.

  ‘You’re sure,’ Sarah asks with an extra degree of calmness, ‘that was the sequence. Liam started running, Brody raised his gun, Liam fell, Brody fell?’

  ‘I didn’t see Brody fall. I thought the man on the ground was David. I—’

  ‘OK. OK.’ She holds up a pacifying hand. ‘I only need what you did see. The important thing is the sequence. Brody raised his gun before you heard the shot? You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘And when you saw Brody on the ground, what was happening?’

  ‘There were two paramedics with him.’

  ‘And that was how long after the shot?’

  ‘It felt like immediately after.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She manages a small smile.

  ‘Is he going to be all right?’

  ‘No, he’s not, I’m afraid.’ She prints off the statement she has been typing up as we’ve talked and hands it to me. ‘He was DOA, I’m afraid. Read the statement through, will you, and sign it if it’s all right?’

  ‘I wonder if he’d decided to kill himself when he came out of the van.’

  ‘Oh, he didn’t kill himself. One of the marksmen shot him. There’ll be an inquiry. You seeing him raise his gun as Liam ran away from him is critical. A reliable civilian witness at the scene is just what we need.’

  ‘Glad to be of service,’ I say, and then I start to cry.

  ‘What is it?’ she asks.

  ‘You didn’t ask me about the boy,’ I sob.

  ‘The boy?’

  ‘Christopher. He fell down dead and then he stood up.’

  ‘Christopher?’

  ‘Liam,’ I say. ‘I mean Liam. He fell down dead and then he stood up. His mother … his mother …’

  She passes me tissues and waits for me to pull myself together. ‘I hope you feel
we’ve looked after you all right here,’ she says. ‘I’m sure DCI Sc—, David would want—’

  ‘He’s got other priorities,’ I say, blowing my nose. ‘As have I. I’ve got my daughter’s play to go to this evening. I should have been there this afternoon. It’s about love and sex, treachery and trust, life and death, hope and despair – oh, and the search for identity. It’s just the kind of light entertainment you need after a heavy day.’

  21

  Monday 30th July to Saturday 4th August

  Moanday to Shatterday

  I read a novel once, of which I have only a hazy recollection, though I remember a rich but neurotic and dysfunctional family in which the teenage children had renamed the days of the week: they were, I think, Moanday, Tearsday, Wasteday, Thirstday, Frightday, Shatterday and Sinday. These come to mind as I recount to you the events of my odd week. I shall leave you on Shatterday; there will be very little chance, I fear, that Sinday will live up to its name.

  So, Moanday. I decide to go into work although there is nothing I have to do and I could very easily take some compassionate leave on a variety of grounds. I’m too edgy to enjoy a day at home, though. I coped yesterday by wearing myself out with a huge clear-out once Annie and her posse had departed for Edinburgh in the terrifyingly ill-maintained Volvo. My efforts went well beyond just putting things to rights: I prowled the house with black bin bags, hurling into them anything broken, ugly or just in the wrong place; I discarded neglected toiletries in the bathroom and unused gadgets in the kitchen; I went through the fridge and freezer throwing out food I’m never going to eat; I rolled up rugs and bagged up cushions and hauled them up to the attic. They could have used me on television for one of those decluttering shows. In the midst of all this, David rang, but I didn’t answer because if it turned out that he wasn’t ringing to see if I was all right, only to bark some more orders at me and criticise my witness statement, I knew I might well have a tantrum and that would be energy wasted when it could be devoted to decluttering.

  So, here I am at nine o’clock in my office, scanning my emails and surveying my in-tray. On the top of the in-tray is the application form for the directorship of the Unit for Specialist English Language and Enhanced Skills Support. I take a deep breath and I fill it in, conscientiously and neatly. Then I print it off, together with my enhanced CV and clip the two together. I address an envelope to HR and before I put the forms into it I read them through again. It is an excellent application, I think, and if there is any justice the job is mine. Why do I feel so miserable then? It is not just because I suspect that in this case there will be no justice, is it? It is actually that I don’t want the job. I don’t want it because the amalgamation is a stupid idea; I don’t want it because managing the remedial bit will distract me from the work I’m good at; I don’t want it because if, by any chance, the VC gets overruled and I am appointed, he will simply start looking for other ways to get rid of me and I am just too tired for the fight. And that’s the most alarming bit, really: Gina Gray – too tired for a fight.

  On the other hand, the alternative is unthinkable: knuckle under? Accept demotion? Watch dreary sandal woman making a hash of my unit? I pick up the phone and I ring HR. Human Resources. Whoever thought that was an improvement on Personnel? Personnel makes it clear that you are dealing with people, individuals – persons. Human Resources works almost like an uncountable noun; it implies an undifferentiated heap of humanity, from which you scoop as much as you want, slicing and dicing as required. Does nobody but me think this sounds perilously like Brave New World?

  When I get an answer from HR, I give my name and say I would like to discuss options regarding voluntary redundancy. I may be paranoid but I get the feeling that they are expecting to hear from me. ‘Why don’t you come over in half an hour?’ the bright young woman on the other end invites me. ‘Derek can take you through it.’

  Derek is neither bright nor young; he is small and grey and possibly lives with an elderly mother. He is a process man. He prepares to take me at length through the procedures. He has used his half-hour’s notice to get up to speed and he knows about the USELESS proposal, though he blenches at my calling it that. ‘How long do you reckon it will take,’ I ask him, ‘for them to change that name? Would you like to take a bet on it?’ He declines my wager. Redundancy, he explains, has to be initiated by the university; employees cannot ask to be made redundant – they can only resign. He can find no record of my being offered voluntary redundancy; is that right?

  ‘Not in so many words,’ I say.

  ‘But in your case,’ he says, ‘I imagine it would not be a problem.’

  ‘Why?’ The question comes out sounding quite aggressive and he shrinks from me a bit.

  ’I-I meant only that with an amalgamation of this kind one of the benefits hoped for is some savings on staffing, so if anyone is willing to—’

  ‘Yes. Well, I might be willing. What sort of a deal would it be?’

  ‘That depends,’ he says. ‘It varies with individual cases and it’s usually a matter for negotiation. If I may say, you don’t put yourself in a strong position by letting it be known that you want redundancy. It gives you nothing to bargain with, you see.’

  Stupid, stupid woman! Of course that’s right. What was I thinking?

  ‘So perhaps you could forget that we had this conversation?’ I ask, smiling winningly, ‘and tell the vice-chancellor that I am determined to hold onto my job at all costs?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t speak directly to the vice-chancellor,’ he says.

  ‘That’s all right.’ I say. ‘I do. So, let’s put it another way. Given my current salary and assuming I am not made head of the new unit, how much is the university likely to pay me to go away?’

  After a bit of havering, he names some minimum and maximum figures which sound to me pretty generous.

  ‘All right,’ I say. ‘It’s an option. Thank you for your help. I can take it from here.’

  I get up to go but he stops me.

  ‘Just one thing,’ he says. ‘You would be required to sign a non-disclosure agreement.’

  ‘Non-disclosure of what?’ I ask, sitting down again.

  ‘Of the amount of the redundancy payment, and in some cases, the reasons for the redundancy, as well as an undertaking not to take any action against the university in the future.’

  ‘And you think mine would be such a case?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘Because I might take the money and then sue the university for constructive dismissal or some such?’

  ‘That sort of thing, yes.’

  ‘A gagging order! I would be the subject of a gagging order. Doesn’t life get exciting round here?’ I say as I get up and leave.

  I almost run back to my office, where I take my application, rip it through and stuff it in the bin. Then I sit down to write a letter.

  Dear Vice-Chancellor,

  Though tempted by the challenge of running the aptly named USELESS, I have decided that it is time for me to seek wider horizons in a place of learning less parochial, less temporising and less academically compromised than Marlbury University.

  If required, I am prepared to work out my period of notice until the end of October but, given the proposed reorganisation of my unit, I assume that the university will prefer an earlier departure date.

  I wish the university well. You yourself will, I am sure, go from strength to strength in moulding it in your own image. I shall watch with some interest the progress both of the university and of the new unit, should you decide to press ahead with the reorganisation in the light of my departure.

  Yours sincerely,

  Virginia Gray

  I am not altogether satisfied with this but you can go on polishing this sort of thing forever, so I don’t. Without pausing to reread, I bundle the letter into an envelope, run down to the office and drop it into the internal mail. Then I take myself out for lunch.

  I lunch in the bar of the Aphra Behn
Theatre, a pleasant space with walls adorned by signed photographs of minor actors, mainly known for their roles in television soaps. I order a smoked salmon sandwich and a glass of Prosecco because I am determined to be upbeat about my new freedom, and then I feel acutely self-conscious as I work my way, without much pleasure, through this solitary celebration. I almost persuade myself that a second glass of Prosecco will do the trick but in the end I don’t linger. I return to my office and trawl for the website I need.

  The site is a gov.uk one, labelled helpfully What to do after Someone Dies and it is, in fact, remarkably helpful. It tells me exactly what I need to do and I learn that I have already failed to do the crucial thing, which is to get hold of the death certificate. This, I assume, was issued by the hospital. You will need this for the undertaker and to arrange the funeral, I am informed. I ring Margaret.

  ‘Ah, Gina,’ she says. ‘I was going to ring you later – after work, you know. How are you doing?’

  ‘Oh fine,’ I say, as one does. ‘I realise, though, you can’t do anything about the undertaker until I get the death certificate, can you?’

  ‘Well, no. I have booked them provisionally for Friday but they can’t – you know – collect her until you show them the certificate.’

  ‘I was thinking of coming up on Wednesday to do everything – the register office and so on. Is that soon enough?’

  ‘Oh yes, I think so. But they do want to know what sort of coffin.’

  What sort of coffin? ‘Well, the usual, I suppose,’ I say vaguely. ‘Can you just tell them whatever they think?’

  There is a pause. ‘I think,’ she says, ‘that you ought to speak to them yourself, dear.’

  So I do. I ring them and they address me with professional sympathy nicely calibrated for a woman who has lost an eighty-nine-year-old mother. They run me through the coffin choices and I opt for the ecological credentials of wicker, though this would hardly have been a concern of my mother’s. She belonged to a generation for whom the harnessing of the natural world to the human will was nothing but positive; I don’t think the idea that we were wearing the world out ever really impinged on her.