The Gardens of the Dead fa-2

by William Brodrick

  And then, without waiting for George to reply, Elizabeth set to work telling him what she required.

  ‘There’ll be two sets of documents – one for each business: that of Riley, and that of Nancy They’re legally separate papers. They’ll be stored separately’

  ‘Right-o.’

  ‘The first is “Riley’s Junk”. The second is “Nancy’s Treasure”.’

  ‘Right-o.’

  ‘Once you’ve found them, we’ll talk again.’

  ‘Right-o. And in the meantime?’

  ‘You introduce yourself to Nancy.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘If I were you I’d sleep on her doorstep.’

  ‘Right-o. But she’ll want to know my name.’

  ‘Quite right. I suggest an alias. Mr Johnson. How does that sound to you?’

  The bantering vanished at the allusion to John’s Christian name. So that’s why Elizabeth had come to this wharf, thought George, on a Saturday, and at might. It was to place John at the heart of her planning. She was at it again: evoking a setting for what she wanted to say like her use of the toast and cocoa. This time it was for what they were going to do. She used these ceremonies to stir up the past and make it present in am unusually active way George couldn’t quite put it into words, but he felt there was something restoring in the revival, even though it summoned his failure. Henceforth, everything they did together occurred among a prickling sense of the closeness of people who’d once been near: the girls whom George had betrayed and the son he had lost.

  ‘Mr Johnson sounds just fine,’ George had said.

  ‘Let’s get going then.’

  A horn beeped three times. It was Elizabeth’s taxi, come to take her home.

  A few days after this conversation another taxi took George and Elizabeth from Trespass Place to the Isle of Dogs. They had agreed that it would be better if he were closer to Nancy’s shop in Bow, which was a short distance from the old docklands.

  ‘Riley comes once a week on a Thursday afternoon,’ said Elizabeth. ‘He stays about an hour to unload furniture or move things around.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I paid to have him watched.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Six weeks.’

  ‘I could have done that.’

  ‘No… I’d only just found you.’

  The taxi idled for an hour while George mooched around the tall abandoned buildings. Barbed wire topped the walls and chicken netting hung across black windows. Planks had been nailed pell-mell across openings, but down am alley, George found a swinging door. It tapped like a mallet, drawing his attention. The room inside was bare like a cell, its walls stained green as if they were soaking up the river. It would do. Elizabeth appeared behind him.

  ‘I can pay you know’ She sounded grief-stricken.

  ‘I’m not ready’ He didn’t understand his own words. Nino did. It was part of the mystery of having lost too much.

  She did not press him. Struggling with her voice, she said, ‘We’ll meet twice a week on Lawton’s Wharf.’

  ‘Right-o.’

  The taxi whipped through the murky lanes towards the orange lights of Bow, five minutes away It dropped George at a fish and chip shop near a bridge. Nancy’s place – a shack of wood and corrugated metal – was on the other side of the road. Through the cab’s open door, Elizabeth pressed twenty pounds into George’s hand. Then she was gone.

  George scouted around for places where the wind would die – Nino taught him that – and beneath the bridge he found some cardboard. He tracked his way back up the grassy slope and set himself up in Nancy Riley’s doorway He built closefitting walls against the cold. Then he wrote down the happenings of the day in book thirty-seven.

  George met Nancy Riley the next morning He’d expected to confront someone flinty and impatient. But her face was soft, and she wore a silly hat, a yellow thing with black spots. She gathered up the cardboard as if it were worth something and brought him inside, out of the freezing cold. She put on a gas fire and went to make him tea in a back room. Thick arms filled out the sleeves of a chunky cardigan. She glanced at him, showing eyes that were large and seemed to smile. The kettle was on top of a grey filing cabinet.

  Through the dark glass of his goggles, George looked around at the wardrobes, the mirrors and the ornaments. It was like a home; there was nothing of Riley here. He quickly left the shop and rushed back to the docklands. Elizabeth came to the wharf that night.

  ‘I can’t do it,’ said George. Nancy was vulnerable in the way he was; tired, like he was; hungry for what might have been, like he was. It was all marked upon her face.

  Elizabeth seemed neither surprised nor interested. ‘You saw a filing cabinet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And everything else was old furniture?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Elizabeth was gratified, like someone ticking a box on a register. ‘I’m glad you left.’

  ‘Why?’ George was stunned. He’d expected anger.

  ‘Because now you know what you’re dealing with. She must be an extraordinary woman to have won Riley’s trust without losing something of herself Perhaps you can help her.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By drawing her into something she’d never countenance if you asked her directly Unfortunately, it requires deceit.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Can you think of another way?’

  George had no answer; he just listened to the river lapping against the wharf. Elizabeth left him with a primus stove and a box full of tins.

  A week later George went back to the shop. Again, Nancy let him warm up by the fire. While she was helping a customer load some chairs into a van, George went into the back room. The drawers on the filing cabinet were clearly marked: one for the JUNK, and one for the TREASURE. Within minutes he’d placed two official booklets in one of his plastic bags.

  ‘George,’ said Elizabeth that night on the wharf, ‘I don’t wish to appear ungrateful, but I’ve already seen this lot. These are the annual returns sent to Companies House.’

  Elizabeth took George’s notebook and wrote down what she was looking for: acquisition and sales records for each business. She described what they would look like.

  ‘Stay away for another week, George.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Since this is love more than deceit, you have to play hard to get.’

  Then she went home in a taxi that was waiting outside the perimeter fence.

  When George next turned up in Bow, Nancy seemed pleased to see him; perhaps, even, relieved. Again, she made tea. They talked of the weather. She kept glancing at his shoes. After ten minutes she got up again and came back with a basin full of warm, soapy water. ‘Soak your feet, Mr Johnson.’

  It was paradise.

  In the days that followed, George didn’t get a chance to nip into the back room, so he met Elizabeth at the agreed times. In due course, though, he turned up with a couple of canvas ledgers:

  Riley’s were red; Nancy’s were blue. George had found them when Nancy went out to get some milk.

  Elizabeth sat on the remainder of a low wall studying the books with George’s torch. She seemed to be checking individual entries, shifting her attention from one ledger to the other.

  ‘Something’s going on,’ she whispered, irritated, a finger tapping the page.

  ‘Is it over now? Can I stop lifting things?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she snapped. ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow.’

  Elizabeth came back at some ungodly hour while it was still dark. He woke in the abandoned warehouse to find her standing over him.

  ‘These only show half the picture.’ She handed back the ledgers. ‘I’ve copied them but I need something else. There should be individual receipts.’ She was speaking quickly out of the darkness, and George was still half asleep. ‘You know the sort of books I mean – small with a blue cover. Each page has a number in one corner. The writing is an imprint f
rom carbon paper. The original is with the purchaser.’

  George sat up, rubbing his eyes. ‘Do I have to, I mean -’

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice was raised. She lost control, ever so slightly; just enough to send him back to Bow ‘You’re not walking away this time, David George Bradshaw’

  5

  Pale morning light described Roderick Kemble QC behind his desk, a revolver in one hand and a document in the other. With savage concentration, he examined the rotation of the chamber while he slowly depressed the trigger. ‘Take a seat,’ he said after the click. As if there’d been no interval between now and the night before, he added, ‘Riley said Bradshaw stood behind the allegations laid against him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you propose to undermine Mr Bradshaw?’

  ‘Frank Wyecliffe’s only thought was that it was odd to use your second name when the first one was ordinary. At the time I thought he’d lost his marbles – so did Elizabeth.’

  Anselm’s mind tracked back to the rest of that conversation with her. They were in the common room. She said, ‘Do you think Riley is innocent?’

  ‘No.’

  She took the last Jaffa cake and ate it with small bites. ‘Would you cross-examine Bradshaw?’

  ‘Of course.’ Ordinarily the QC handles the main witness, not an underling. At the time Anselm had attached no importance to the request.

  A gentle cough brought him back into Roddy’s presence. Anselm spoke softly searching for the meaning of words spoken long ago, ‘Elizabeth said, “This is your chance to do something significant.”’

  Anselm’s problem was that he would have to call Bradshaw a liar – in however polite a fashion – without any justification. There was no evidence whatsoever that he had conspired with the girls to frame Riley When Anselm rose to his feet, all he had was an intuitive awareness that Wyecliffe had been right: the use of one’s middle name was unusual.

  Roddy once joked that decisive cross-examinations fell into one of three categories. First, where counsel prevails in a clean argument over facts that will bear more than one interpretation. Second, where counsel is armed with devastating information, which need only be revealed at the right moment to clinch the day But there was a third: where counsel doesn’t know what he is talking about. Anselm put his encounter with Mr Bradshaw into this last category. Elizabeth might have thought the change of name worthless, but Anselm was the one at the wheel. He moved forward tentatively, following the implications of each answer. Most of Bradshaw’s replies had been ‘Yes.’ It had been an entirely civilised exchange.

  ‘You call yourself George, is that right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But your first name is David?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you come to call yourself by your second name?’

  ‘I didn’t like the first one.’

  Most barristers develop a keen sense of intuition – because they have failed to see the obvious time and again. It’s a kind of hunting instinct, a sniffing for a scent. And the dislike of an ordinary first name struck Anselm as unconvincing. Without instructions or vindicating facts, Anselm decided to follow his nose.

  ‘People change their names for all sorts of reasons?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘More often than not it is to turn over a new leaf.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘One life ends, so to speak, and another begins?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that what you did?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Anselm paused, letting his imagination loose.

  ‘It meant, I suppose, David slipped quietly away?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And George stepped forward?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Anselm didn’t make the mistake of asking ‘Why?’ Instead he shifted ground completely, still feeling his way.

  ‘You are the manager of the Bridges night shelter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where you have worked for twenty-three years.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are there to serve the needs of a highly vulnerable client group, are you not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Indeed, as I understand it, you’ve had people in your care as young as nine?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I expect an employee in your position must be of the very highest character?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Anselm paused, watching every inflection on the face of the witness.

  ‘Tell me, Mr Bradshaw, whom did the night shelter employ:

  David or George?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘What name did you give on the application form?’

  ‘George.’

  The next amateur question would have been another ‘Why?’ Anselm avoided that temptation: the important point to appreciate at this stage was that everything Bradshaw had said might go in one of two directions: innocent or compromising. Roddy often said that with an honest witness, the wider the question the better, because they are disposed to impose relevance upon it -their consciences take them to the crucial, unknown detail. Anselm needed to find out if there was a link between Bradshaw’s dropping his first name and his taking employment under the second.

  ‘Mr Bradshaw, have you ever done anything that came to the attention of the police?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now, would that have been as David or George?’

  ‘David.’

  Now Anselm had to make his final move. There was no other territory to explore. Bradshaw was either going to exonerate himself completely by revealing an unpaid parking fine, or he just might divulge something that could be used against his integrity. He said: ‘What did David do that George wanted to forget?’

  The courtroom makes everyone a voyeur. The witness is often stripped bare, way beyond what clothing can conceal. It is darkly fascinating and can leave the viewer stained with pleasure. These things Anselm had learned long ago. But as he spoke to Roddy the electricity of this particular spectacle surged through him as if this were the first, forbidden time. Bradshaw stared across the well of the court, his face pale. The jury watched him – as did the lawyers, the ushers, the reporters and the bystanders. Looking down on this exhibition, a judge held his pen above a page. Not a shred of detail would be lost to the official record. Then, as if someone had called his name, David George Bradshaw stepped out of the witness box and walked out of the court. Half an hour later Riley went through the same door, a free man.

  Roddy kept his papers and court dress in a tartan suitcase on wheels. It bounced and ratted after him as he pulled it through chambers and onto the stairs that led to Gray’s Inn Square. Anselm followed, convinced that Roddy’s close examination of the revolver – an exhibit taken out of court with permission -had served some useful purpose, but that the true reason was the commotion that would shortly erupt when he tried to take it back in. Anselm, though, had other concerns. ‘Something shot over my head in that trial.’

  ‘Isn’t it always thus?’ He waddled along the pavement as if he were on the way to Corfu.

  ‘This time it was different. I’ve been wondering why Elizabeth kept the brief in the first place.’

  Roddy bounced his valise over a kerb. ‘Sorry, old son. The question never entered my head.’ He became studious. ‘Forgive me, I must now dwell upon triggers and safety catches. Do you know, in certain circumstances, it’s rather difficult to press one without putting pressure on the other? That ought to kick up some doubt.’

  They parted and Anselm watched Roddy nod greetings to left and right as he trundled down Holborn towards the Bailey The rogue never asked the question, thought Anselm, because he’d always known the answer.

  6

  The memory of Mr Wyecliffe ruined Nick’s cornflakes. It was like sour milk. He had never quite appreciated the twilight world of compromise that his mother had inhabited. Nick had woken troubled by three questions. He would deal with two of them over breakfas
t. His father sat opposite him, examining a boiled egg.

  ‘I wonder what Mum was doing with those spoons?’

  ‘Spoons?’ Charles tapped the egg as if it were the door to the MD’s office.

  ‘The ones that were found on the passenger seat.’

  ‘Bought them in a shop, I suppose.

  Not on a Sunday, thought Nick. He didn’t want to disturb any of the conclusions his father might have framed about Elizabeth’s behaviour prior to her death. But the spoons seemed innocuous and important at the same time. She had obtained them, in all likelihood, shortly before her death. There was another incidental detail that remained unexplained, which prompted the second question.

  ‘What was she doing in the East End anyway?’

  Charles began dropping the egg on a plate. ‘She said it was work. A site visit.’

  Nick had in mind the autopsy photographs on his mother’s desk. They were part of the last case she’d worked on. The victim had been killed in Bristol, not London. Nick had checked the instructions to every case in the Green Room before they’d been collected. None had referred to the East End.

  Charles picked at the battered egg with a nail, his face reddening. ‘What are you doing with yourself when you’re out of doors?’ He laughed weakly ‘Going here, heading there. You’re getting like your mother.’

  ‘Oh, just friends and unfinished business.’

  Charles picked up a knife, eyes narrowed. He looked bullish.

  ‘That’s what she said.’

  After breakfast Nick went to the Royal Brompton Hospital in Kensington to deal with the third question: a heart condition that had killed his mother. Its presence and gravity had been unknown to him. ‘She didn’t want to worry you,’ Charles had said the night before the funeral. He’d tweaked his tie. ‘I’d no idea that she might collapse without warning… that the end could come like a bus mounting the pavement.’

  There was no point in pressing his father for details. The anatomy of a butterfly he could grasp, but that of a human being left him dazed. Too many pipes. So Nick contacted his mother’s consultant cardiologist. He didn’t mention it to his father.