‘Absolutely not.’
‘Then why the overtime?’
‘We’d like a house to match yours.’
A noble objective that would, however, bring considerable disappointment.’
Suddenly the little man got up and opened the door. He returned and put a plump little hand on her shoulder, ‘Sorry, but the ventilation system is somewhat primitive.’ He looked at her in a funny way as if he were hungry again. ‘One more name, of a sort.’ Nancy closed her eyes. Quietly he asked, ‘Have you ever heard of the Pieman?’
Nancy gripped the sides of her head as though it might fall in two. ‘Never.’
‘Is Mr Riley frightened?’
Frightened? What a thing to have asked. Her man was scared of no one. A flash of heat spread across her chest, face and scalp – that was the menopause, telling her she’d never have a baby that it was too late. So the doctor had said. Strange even to her own hearing, she replied, ‘Yes.’
‘What of?’
Nancy didn’t want to say It sounded daft. If she’d been asked was her man angry, she’d have said, ‘Oh yes,’ and that would have been that. But this question had stirred a new kind of thinking deep inside, somewhere other than her head – it wasn’t really thinking; she didn’t know what it was, but it happened in her lungs, and lower down, in the stomach. ‘Well,’ she said, feeling weak, sheets of fresh sweat unfolding, ‘he was scared by the hunter in Bambi even though you never see him.’
Mr Wyecliffe nodded like the doctor, showing no surprise.
Nancy continued, blinded by salt and mortification, ‘And he doesn’t like the new queen in Snow White.’
Mr Wyecliffe kept nodding, his eyes closed. Then he asked, ‘What does he think of the little princess?’
And that was where Nancy went too far – without understanding why except in her guts. She replied, ‘He hates her.’ She’d never liked the h-word. It was hard and sharp and somehow dark.
The sweating had stopped and a chill had struck her. Nancy sat with her arms folded tight, feeling like she was in the altogether on the ice-rink at Hammersmith. These humiliating flushes could go on for years, apparently So the doctor said. Nancy reached for a hankie.
‘I don’t think we’ll be calling you as a witness.’ Mr Wyecliffe put his pencil down. And Nancy knew – because she wasn’t daft – that he’d never intended to call her in the first place.
The cars struck the bump and swept past Nancy’s door. Blinking uncertainly like she’d just landed, Nancy handled the book on her lap. It fell open naturally in the middle. A spill of coffee or tea had made the ink run and the paper was ribbed and sticky.
… and her hair was pulled back ever so tight. Like all female staff at the Bonnington, she had to wear a black dress with a white frilly pinafore. It made her look like a servant in The Forsyte Saga. I watched her walk down the corridor pushing a trolley of sheets. That was the first time I saw Emily. And I said to myself, ‘I shall marry this woman before the year is out.’ I eventually found the manager’s office. Sister Dorothy said he would be rude and she was right, but she’d also said keep your eye on his smile, which I did. He said, ‘Young man, all you have to do is carry bags, don’t speak unless you’re spoken to, and don’t loiter for a tip. This is London not New York.’ I was what an American businessman once called ‘the bell hop’ – presumably because I came running when I heard a ding from the reception desk.
Unfortunately Emily had no interest in me.
Nancy was forcefully present to herself now Eagerly she turned the page but it was stuck to the next few with something like jam. and there he was lifted high in the air by a nurse. I said, ‘Oh my God, I’m sorry,’ because I thought I’d gone into the wrong theatre. But then I saw Emily on the bed. And then I realised that the baby in the air, on his way to the scales, was my son. I’d missed his birth by seconds. I don’t remember a sound, not a cry.
Nancy slowly closed the book here, at the point that most interested her. This had to be the son who would one day be lost, the boy who’d run along the pier at Southport. Out of respect to Mr Johnson, she would read no further, because in all their many conversations, he’d never told her what had happened.
I’m a dreadful woman, thought Nancy Mr Johnson had his own tragedy and yet she escaped from hers into his, as if his story wasn’t real.
8
George rose, picked up his remaining plastic bag and left Trespass Place. As he passed beneath the arch at the entrance he knew he’d never come back. The waiting was over.
Many people think that the homeless live on the whim of the moment. One minute they are there, in a doorway – as they have been for months – the next, they’re gone. In fact, these movements are decisions. Moving on is a kind of obedience -just like leaving home in the first place.
When George found Trespass Place all those years ago, Nino had said that life on the street is like walking round the world. ‘It’s a turning away; but it can become a turning back.’ George had instantly understood the first part, for his arrival beneath Blackfriars Bridge had been an attempt to flee a single conversation.
After the trial, George hardly left his armchair in the sitting room. He faced the window and the treetops of Mitcham. John was fourteen. Of late, he’d taken to roughing up his hair with gel. His skin was raw, as if he scrubbed his cheeks with a nail-brush. He kept coming into the room. He’d sit on different chairs as if he were trying to get a fresh angle on his father. He reminded George of those lifeguards at the swimming pool. They had a way of staring at people who might be in difficulty. They were always young and athletic and confident. John was a small lad, though, with thin arms and long fingers.
One day John was sitting on the rest of an armchair, knotting his fingers together. He was like a man preparing to jump. Countdown was on the television and a cheery presenter was adding up numbers faster than George could think. He felt John leaning towards him.
‘Dad, I believe everything you said in court.’
The local media had pulled George to pieces. The CPS was considering a prosecution – for some unspecified offence.
‘Thanks.’ It sounded trite, but his heart had banged against his chest with a kind of gladness.
‘You mustn’t blame yourself, Dad,’ said John. He messed his hair up even more, gathering confidence. ‘It doesn’t matter that Riley got off. He was just a dogsbody. The police always get hold of the ones that don’t matter… That’s not your fault.’
George allowed himself to look at his son. It was hard, because of the lad’s earnestness, the passion to save his father.
‘I wonder who the Pieman might be?’ asked John coldly.
The lad had been thinking hard, and he’d come to some conclusions. He’d decided who the real criminal was, the one the police hadn’t arrested. George looked back to the television as the scores were being read out. George, unthinking, said, ‘You’d have to ask Riley’
The remark must have landed like a pip in the mind’s soil, because the boy didn’t do anything for years.
When George had walked out of his own front door, he’d been turning away from that remark during Countdown. He’d also turned away from the ocean of memories that Emily evoked. But no sooner had he met Nino, than the old man set him on course to face them again – and not just in passing, but with all the detail he could summon to the pages of his notebooks. The turning away however, had been essential.
And now, with a similar kind of fortitude, he left Trespass Place, and ‘a royal scheme to bring down the…’ or something like that; Elizabeth had often used towering phrases to describe what they were doing. And he’d known why: she, like George, had never accepted that Riley could not be brought to court for the killing of John. All that – a trial and its aftermath – belonged at a still point on the surface of the earth. George moved on, a plastic bag swishing against his leg.
George must have been walking for about half an hour when he noticed he was heading south, way off his patch. He ne
ver went south. Mitcham lay down there. He wondered where he was going; and he thought again of Nino, and what the old man had said when they’d left the spike, the morning after the Pandora tale. ‘The street is the place of stories,’ he’d intoned, leaning on a wall by Camden Lock. ‘Stories of how you got here, and how you might leave.’ But he’d said something else -and it had frightened George: ‘There are stories of how you might stay’
George didn’t want that. All at once, his pace quickening, he wanted to tell the extraordinary story of a man whose turning away had brought him back to where he’d started from: the tale of a man who’d finally made it home.
9
‘You can leave everything behind,’ the Major said, ‘but it’ll cost you more than you’ve already paid.’
He’d come to the court off his own bat, or so it had seemed. He wore his cap as if he were on parade. For the first time, Riley noticed the old shine on the cloth, and the frayed lapels. The trial was about to begin. The witnesses were lined up. The barristers were dressed in all that black. The Major had drawn him into a tiny conference room. Guilt had been assumed, which cleared the air like disinfectant.
Riley played the fish. ‘Why should I do that?’
‘For yourself,’ he said, as if that were something worthwhile. And so that you can stop hurting everyone around you.’
Riley glanced over his shoulder. The conference room had large, misty windows from floor to ceiling. On the other side he could see Wyecliffe. He was like a man at prayer.
‘You can still turn around,’ the Major continued, full of entreaty. Anything else is an illusion. If you do, I’ll help you. I doubt if anyone else has the inclination.’
Riley laughed in a way that embarrassed him, because his voice squeaked. He saw the lips of the Major harden; the red indentation of a cornet mouthpiece blanched and vanished. He said, ‘I needed saving then, not now’
That was meant to strike a nerve, but it didn’t. The Major was more switched on than Riley had supposed.
‘We always need saving now,’ he said. ‘Just stop running.’
Riley shrank more from the repelling compassion than the idea. ‘I did. And I turned. Now I do the chasing.’
That hit the spot. The sight of the Major’s loathing thrilled him. But the man in uniform still wouldn’t give up – Riley could see it in his eyes – he was holding out for redeeming features; what Wyecliffe called ‘mitigating circumstances’ for why Riley did what he did. And Riley thought, There weren’t any But the Major wouldn’t have it. He refused to believe that anyone could be rotten at the core – that a man might even want it. But who else was to blame? Riley’s mother? Walter? None of them. Riley was sick to the back teeth of sympathy that gobbled up his identity. The making of allowances – it was daylight robbery. Of course, the family stuff could be used to his advantage in a court, if he’d only plead, if he’d only grovel. But hold it there -Riley felt pride burn the lining of some canal in his guts – I have self-respect. I’m me. In the end, I’m pretty much self-made. He suffered a spasm of sour excitement: this was the one thing no one could harm or take away: the core of himself, the inedible part. A bitter fruit had grown from the dirt of his choices. No one – and he meant no one – was going to give that back to his mother.
‘If you plead guilty,’ the Major said mechanically ‘I might be able to say something on your behalf.’
Riley glanced at his cap-badge motto, ‘Blood and Fire’, as he’d done when they’d first met. Back then, the Major’s compassion had made Riley panic. What had happened? He felt nothing now He simply observed the man’s hopes and intentions. On the face of it, he’d come to wangle a confession out of Riley urged on, no doubt, by Wyecliffe, who was standing outside, biting his nails. But the Major had his own reasons. He believed in the Lord of how things ought to be, of how they might yet turn out. Riley stood, bringing the interview to a close. He looked down from on high, with a remote, godless pity. The old soldier didn’t seem to hear the tune of his own march: you couldn’t save a man against his will.
Riley walked out of that tiny room and never saw the Major again. Within minutes, he was in the dock. It was only then, sitting in that box, flanked by guards, that he realised he’d made another choice; that he could still have put his hands up without blaming anyone but himself. It was an example of his actions being one step ahead of his thinking. He hadn’t given a second thought to pleading guilty because, in a feverish way he was looking forward to the trial, to what might happen. No one could possibly know it, but Riley had set up a reunion, and he didn’t want to miss it, even though for him, personally the court process was an unimaginable ordeal. He wanted to see what George would do when he saw Riley’s advocate.
Riley was not disappointed. The trial ended exactly as he had expected, but not in the way he’d foreseen. That David/George trick had been baffling.’ If Riley had been the Major, he’d have thanked God.
On the day of the acquittal, Riley pulled Nancy into the sitting room. He’d sobered up, so to speak. The fever had passed, and he saw with terrible clarity that Nancy had been an observer for years. And when it had been spelled out, she’d fled from the courtroom, just like George.
‘Do you trust me?’ He stood in front of her, holding her arms, as if she might slap him.
‘I do.’
Nancy’s eyes revealed a hard decision. Their light was gone, as if a screen had fallen to stop a smash-and-grab. She seemed older and cut off from him – giving away to Riley that they’d never really been attached.
I do. It was like getting married all over again. It was a second chance.
On the strength of that vow Riley put Quilling Road up for sale. Then he drove to a place he hadn’t seen since the age of eleven: Hornchurch Marshes. He walked down a path of flattened grass until he reached four rectangular ponds, laid out neatly like a window, with a frame made of bricks. It was known as the Four Lodges. His breath grew tight, hurting his chest. Nothing had changed. He wept uncontrollably looking at the men on stools and the clouds of midges.
10
Anselm passed through the ornamental gates of Gray’s Inn Gardens. Here, as a young man, he’d dreamed of standing in the Bailey of being an old hand, a grumpy legend in a tattered gown. Lying on the grass, he’d cross-examined imaginary foes, breaking them with imperial courtesy Phantom judges had looked on, mystified by such talent in one so young. Not much later, he’d found himself walking the same gravelled lanes, with their unexpected turns, thinking of a flickering space above a nave, and an attentive silence.
‘Good afternoon, Father,’ said Inspector Cartwright pleasantly.
Anselm looked to his right, quickly as if he’d been caught. She was sitting legs crossed on a bench eating crisps. On her lap was a manila envelope. Her ears still carried the weight of a child’s affection.
‘Have a look at these,’ she said. ‘Mrs Glendinning is either playing a game or she’s being very careful.’
Anselm sat beside her, one hand searching an upper pocket for his glasses. Relieved by the unaccustomed sharpness of things, he withdrew a bundle of papers from the packet. To leave him undisturbed, Inspector Cartwright wandered a short distance away.
In fact there were four bundles, each stapled into a kind of booklet. The first was entitled ‘Nancy’s Treasure’, the second ‘Riley’s Junk’. Both of them comprised annual returns, covering three successive years, as submitted to Companies House. Nothing had been flagged or underlined. Anselm flicked through the other two enclosures. Each was made up of photocopied receipts. Again they were labelled with the different business names; again the pages unmarked. He glanced at the dates, noting that each pamphlet spanned the same period framed by the formal accounts. Puzzled, he checked the envelope again and then said, ‘Isn’t there a covering letter?’
Inspector Cartwright licked salt off two fingers and said curtly ‘No.’ She dropped the crisps packet in a bin and came back to the bench. She modified her answer. ‘Well, there was a
signed compliments slip. The explanation of the figures must be with George Bradshaw’
‘But why separate the evidence from its meaning?’ mused Anselm.
‘My guess is that Mrs Glendinning didn’t trust the person she asked to send it.’
‘Then why approach whoever it was in the first place?’
‘Maybe he or she – like you and I – was involved in the original trial.’
Anselm took off his glasses and returned to a universe that was faintly and agreeably blurred. ‘But why send the packet at all? Why not give the lot to George Bradshaw?’
Inspector Cartwright replied instantly: ‘Maybe she foresaw that a man with half a memory might get lost before he was found.’
That sounded rather biblical, a thought that might have slowed Anselm down, but he was suddenly close upon Elizabeth’s heels and his mind lurched forward. ‘Which means that the figures you’ve received should speak for themselves.’
‘I agree, but they don’t – at least not to me. I’ve seen the Companies House stuff already so I assume the trick is in the receipts.
Anselm turned the pages with an air of deep concentration. In fact, without his glasses, he couldn’t quite make out the numbers. He grimaced significantly.
‘Would you examine them?’ asked Inspector Cartwright, checking her watch. ‘You might have one of those visions.’
After she’d gone, Anselm wondered why he hadn’t told Inspector Cartwright about the letter he’d received himself. There had been nothing to suggest that the visit to Mrs Dixon should be confidential. But he knew that he should say nothing. Why? He took a pleasant path between the Georgian buildings where, as a student, he’d dreamed of greatness, and he came to the strange conclusion that he was entering Elizabeth’s mind; that he was beginning to sense her will, if not the reason for her calculations.
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