At High Holborn Anselm bumped into a nun who wasn’t looking where she was going. Struck by a sensible idea, he turned round and went back to Gray’s Inn. Not knowing quite where to place his enquiry, he went to the library situated on South Square. A short woman behind the main desk, it transpired, was used to helping those who were baffled.
‘The archives of the Inn are extensive,’ she said, ‘and not everything has been stored on computer. We’re working backwards.’
‘Of course,’ replied Anselm. ‘You should never start at the beginning.’
He’d meant to be agreeable, but it came out dreadfully Being wise in small respects, he said nothing more. And she, being perceptive, smiled.
‘The point is,’ she resumed, ‘material on Mrs Glendinning could be anywhere. If you leave me a contact number, I’ll dig around this afternoon. In the meantime, I suggest you have a browse through some back numbers of Graya. ’
This publication covered various happenings in the lives of the Inn’s membership. It was an obvious place to look. Anselm wrote down the Hoxton fax number and then settled himself at a table adjacent to the relevant volumes. For over an hour he chased any reference to Elizabeth. He found a small piece upon her becoming a QC, and a longer biographical item following her appointment as a deputy High Court judge. All the background material coincided precisely with what Sister Dorothy had said: birth in Manchester, schooling in Carlisle, university at Durham.
Anselm, however, was disappointed, for he trusted his unruly intuitions. And they had been ruffled. Something wasn’t quite right. Standing in a phone booth outside the library, he rang the administration section of Elizabeth’s former university. He related the details gleaned from Graya. Almost simultaneous with his speaking, he heard a soft tapping followed by the bang of the return key and then a pause.
‘Sorry,’ said a man evenly ‘No one called Elizabeth Glendinning attended the university between those dates.’ The tapping began again. ‘In fact, we’ve never had a student by that name.
Anselm crossed Gray’s Inn Square as if Father Andrew were by his side. Find the child who grew up to wear a gown that was too heavy f or her shoulders.
Neither of them had considered switched identities, or a burned history.
11
The closer George came to Mitcham, the heavier his body became. He pushed himself along his own street, past the lit windows of Aspen Bank. The televisions were on and the curtains were drawn against evening. Opposite George’s home, across a patch of grass in shadow, was a children’s play area. A low fence and a tiny gate gave it a sense of shape and importance. George sat on a merry-go-round, one leg trailing on the asphalt. He watched Number 37 as though it weren’t really there; as though it might vanish if touched. Emily was upstairs. George could see her shadow, thrown large across the chimney-breast wall. She was moving about quickly.
A quite extraordinary stillness settled upon him. It was a solemn moment – one he would like to have shared with Nino: his life on the street was about to end; he’d walked around the world and made it back to his point of departure. With a shove of one foot, the merry-go-round began to spin, wobbling gently on its axle. George saw his home, the trees, the distant tower blocks, the lights on Aspen Bank and then his home again. Round and round he went, slowly building up the courage to cross the patch of grass and the empty street.
The light upstairs went off.
The light downstairs came on.
George dragged his shoe as a brake and the merry-go-round clinked to a halt.
The front door of Number 37 opened and Emily stepped onto the garden path. She walked a few steps, threading a handbag along one arm. Her hair was different, but the movements of her body its tiny hesitations, were the same.
George stood up and quietly cried, ‘Emily’ He couldn’t get his mouth and lungs to work. He was spent. He could only lift and drop his feet.
Suddenly the light from the open door was blocked. A large man appeared, jangling a set of keys. He angled them to the light, to find the one he was after.
‘Have you got everything?’ he said wryly.
Emily nodded. She was looking up at the stars.
George couldn’t stop his legs. His eyes swam and his hands were joined. He was still in shadow and about to enter the pale orange light.
The door banged shut and the big man placed a heavy arm around Emily His keys jingled again and two headlights flashed. George stepped off the grass but veered aside with a groan. He tripped on a paving stone but kept his balance, heading back along Aspen Bank – the way he’d come, a few minutes earlier, and the way he’d gone a few years before.
An engine coughed and tyres began to turn. A few moments later they drove slowly past him and for an instant George saw his wife. She was straining forward in the passenger seat, her face framed in the wing mirror. But he couldn’t read the expression because the car moved on, gathering speed. He watched the indicator blink at the end of the road and then he was alone.
Where do I go now? he thought. Nino had said nothing about this sort of thing.
12
All those years ago, Mr Wyecliffe had called to tell her the good news.
‘We’ve won,’ he exclaimed, and his beard scratched against the receiver.
Feeling sick, she waited on the doorstep for her man. When he arrived, he wasn’t smiling and he said nothing about how the case against him had fallen to bits. He just pulled her into the sitting room and asked her if she trusted him. Staring back, she said, ‘I do,’ with all her soul and with all her might, and he quickly kissed her on the cheek, as if there were people waiting to clap. Then he drove off.
Riley put Quilling Road on the market. He decorated the bungalow He quit his job. Within the week, Mr Wyecliffe was in the sitting room dishing out advice over a spam fritter: ‘You might give constructive dismissal a run.
Riley did. He took Mr Lawton to court for sacking him. It was another triumph and the company had to pay him thousands. Nancy never got her head around that one, but Mr Wyecliffe knew his onions. No one seemed to realise that this second victory was Nancy’s loss. She could hardly stay on as Mr Lawton’s bookkeeper. She handed in her notice. Mr Wyecliffe deemed it ‘prudent but outside the compass of economic redress’.
With all that money her man bought a shack on a bed of crushed cinders opposite a crummy fish and chip shop.
‘What do you want that for?’ asked Nancy.
‘We’re going into business,’ said Riley as if they were emigrating. He was edgy. It was as though he were destroying everything behind him.., except for Nancy He didn’t even ask her what she wanted. She was part of him, like his hands or feet. They were man and wife.
As for Riley he bought a big van without windows. He lined it with thick plywood – floor, roof and sides – and he put up shelves and straps. He put an advert in the local papers offering to clear houses. And he made good. In fact, two years on he’d had to rent some garages for storage. If you came with a voucher from the Salvation Army you could take what you liked. He was a good man, was Riley in his own way.
So that was where all the pieces landed after her man came back from the Old Bailey Day in, day out, Nancy sat by a gas fire, working her way through a bumper book of puzzles. It was a long way from the banter with Babycham at Lawton’s. That was when she’d started thinking of a house by the sea in Brighton, going back to the place of childhood holidays on the pier, back to the bright lights of the Palace, to the magicians and the rousing bands. But her man wouldn’t hear of it. They had a new life: Riley on the road, and Nancy in the shop. He had to keep moving, and she had to keep still. If this is what it means to win a trial, she often thought, I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose.
A few months later, feeling guilty but resolved, Nancy bought Stallone, her first hamster: guilty because she was satisfying an ache in her heart; resolved because Riley couldn’t heal the injury. He had, after all, caused it. As she stood at the counter, with her new friend,
a cage and a bag of dried corn, she didn’t even feel humiliated. On the contrary, she almost trembled with excitement, because something so small, so unnoticed, was going to receive the simplicity of her affection. The complex stuff would go to her man.
The trouble was, Riley was no fool. He sensed the division of Nancy’s warmth. And he was jealous… jealous of a hamster. Nancy would have enjoyed being the nub of competition if she hadn’t known, deep down, that the situation was pitiful. It was also, in practice, distressing because unfortunately hamsters don’t last that long. (Stallone made it to three, but Mad Max and Bruce dropped tools at two and a half.) And you can’t let on that you’re grieving, not without looking a fool. Pretending she felt nothing, she’d attend to the burial and then pop down to the pet shop for another one. It was unseemly. But there was nothing else to be done.
Riley watched the hamsters come and go without saying anything – except once.
After Nancy found Bruce on his side, she said wistfully ‘Aww. Where’ve you gone?’
‘Nowhere,’ said Riley from a rocking chair in the next room. ‘What do you mean?’ said Nancy sharply She didn’t like this kind of talk.
‘We came from nowhere, out of nothing, and we end up nowhere, back to nothing again,’ he replied, like an old-timer whittling wood, ‘and in between we’re alive.’
Nancy glanced at Bruce, wanting him to survive in another place… along with Uncle Bertie, her mum and dad, everyone she loved… even though none of them had been on speaking terms.
‘What’s the point?’ asked Riley quietly.
There was an odd excitement about him, and Nancy wondered what he could do – what anyone might do – if it were true, if you didn’t have any beliefs that made sense of being alive (not necessarily the whole package, of course, but at least the wrapping). But that was Riley He didn’t really mean it. He said one thing and did another. He loved Nancy – though he’d never said it, though he couldn’t show it.
Riley stomped off to work and Nancy went and bought Arnold. Thinking of her man, she said (not for the first time), ‘How did he end up like that?’ But she asked the question mechanically without any real interest in the answer. It wasn’t important to her. If there were a book called The Secret to Graham Riley, she wouldn’t have bought it. The contents would have nothing to do with why she actually loved him.
And why did she love him? There weren’t answers to questions like that. If there’d been a list of ‘reasons’, Riley’s conduct would have torn it up years ago. Lists were for the likes of Mr Wyecliffe. Ultimately nothing could explain why his constant testing of Nancy’s attachment had opened her heart rather than closed it. It was very simple: what she saw she loved. Babycham hadn’t been able to understand her -and she’d said so (she’d always spoken her mind). Sitting in the Admiral on a Friday night, at one of their last gatherings as a group, Nancy had struggled to find the words, fiddling with her glass. She’d blushed and a slot machine went ding. Finally she’d said that to see Riley as Nancy saw him, you needed Nancy’s eyes.
13
Anselm walked from Hoxton to Shoreditch, and to a tower whose hotchpotch of lit windows rose like Braille against the night sky Here and there, laundry dangled across a balcony The lifts were out of order, so Anselm trod cautiously up a concrete stairwell, past confessions of love and hate, persuaded that the whole damp edifice was being sucked into the ground.
Mrs Dixon peered above a door chain. She was stooped and suspicious, squinting through large glasses. ‘Are you from the Council?’
‘No,’ replied Anselm gently ‘I’m a friend of Mrs Glendinning.’
The door closed, and the latch rattled and slid. It opened again, letting loose the sweet and sour of meals on wheels.
‘When’s she coming back?’ said Mrs Dixon anxiously ‘I’ve missed her… The stories, the cakes and all that…’
Mrs Dixon fell back into an armchair before a crowded coffee table. A dinner plate with swirls of gravy lay in the centre. A button nose and pink cheeks suggested a rag doll. Her hair was curled and faintly blue.
Anselm said, ‘I’m here to tell you that Mrs Glendinning won’t be coming any more. I’m very sorry.
Mrs Dixon lined up her knife and fork. ‘She’s dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘Her heart?’
‘Yes.’
Anselm sat on a wicker stool. Unsuccessfully he tried to picture the exchange of confidences. Glancing around, he noticed there were no pictures or clocks, no postcards propped on the mantelpiece. Streaks of Polyfilla split the ceiling like forked lightning dried out. A settee from a missing three-piece stood adjacent to the coffee table. Elizabeth must have sat there, relating what the consultant had said, before going home to gin-and-it with Charles and Nicholas.
While he was half-French, the part of Anselm that was English emerged forcefully in moments of strong emotion. ‘Can I make you a cup of tea?’ he said warmly.
Mrs Dixon shook her head. Her mouth worked and she rearranged a salt cellar, a napkin ring and a side plate. ‘She was my friend, you know’
Her face crimped with emotion, as if there was something she wanted to say. Finally she blurted out, ‘I’d been here for so long on my own and then she came along out of nowhere.’
‘When did you first meet?’ he asked ingenuously.
‘Just over a year ago,’ she replied, finding a hankie in a sleeve. ‘I’d been on to the Council about being lonely you know. But it feels like I’d known her all my life.’ She became fervent. ‘Do you know what I mean?’
‘Yes.’ He looked across at Mrs Dixon, remote behind her table, eyes tightly closed with a tissue at her mouth. Her hand dropped and a lip twitched. She coughed. ‘Did Elizabeth tell you about me?’
‘No,’ admitted Anselm. ‘She simply asked me to come here if she died.’
‘Wasn’t there any other message?’
One of her legs began to bounce on its toes. Anselm watched it, and he frowned.
‘Didn’t she… say anything about my lad?’ Her eyes fixed on him.
‘Who?’ asked Anselm gently.
‘My son.’ Mrs Dixon began to shuffle forward, her hands fidgeting. ‘He went missing years ago, as a boy and Elizabeth said she might be able to find him, what with all her contacts and all that… I’ve never known what became of him… He was a good boy you know…’ The desperation had changed her face. She was someone entirely different. Her voice became metallic. ‘Did she leave a message for me?’
Anselm moved to the sofa, within reach of this frightened, vulnerable mother. ‘In a way yes.’ He spoke quietly ‘Elizabeth asked me to listen to you.’
‘What?’
‘Elizabeth thought you might like to talk to me,’ he replied gently.
‘But I don’t have anything else to say’ said Mrs Dixon, shrinking back in her chair. Confusion and caution changed her features once more. ‘Has she told you anything?’
Anselm didn’t reply He searched her face, willing her to release what she was holding back.
‘Did she tell you?’ Mrs Dixon’s voice quaked and rose.
The lawyer in Anselm would have done anything to discover what Elizabeth might have told him, but something like mercy made him say ‘I know nothing. But you can tell me anything in complete confidence.’
Mrs Dixon looked as if she had been manacled. With sudden dignity, she said, ‘Would you go now, please, I’m all upset. I never thought she’d not come back and I’m too old for this… Look, just go, go…’
Anselm explained that she had nothing to fear; that he would leave immediately and never come back; that he’d write his telephone number down, in case she changed her mind.
‘After I’ve gone, please remember, I was sent by a friend – yours and mine.’
In the hallway Anselm paused before a creased picture in a frame painted gold. It was one of those nineteenth-century images found in sacristies and second-hand shops: a man with beautifully sculpted muscles bearing the cross of Ch
rist, his head raised high, to something dark and wonderful in the watching clouds.
‘Simon of Cyrene,’ said Mrs Dixon. Her composure was still fragile. ‘It was my mother’s.’ As Anselm stepped away she said, ‘Ask the Council to send someone else, will you?’
14
Riley sped along Commercial Road, up Houndsditch and into the City. He parked in a loading bay on Cheapside, near Wyecliffe and Co.
‘How very nice to see you,’ said the solicitor, stretching a moist hand over columns of paper. His face was dark and grey and hairy; his eyes glittered. It had been years since Riley had entered this room, but Mr Wyecliffe seemed to be expecting him. ‘Do take a seat. How can I help you?’ He was a silhouette against a jammed sash window Like the Four Lodges, nothing had changed. Not even the air. It was like a warm tomb, but Riley was shivering.
‘Someone’s after me,’ he blurted out.
‘I often have the very same sensation.’ He picked up a glass ball with a log cabin and some reindeer inside. He shook it and snow began to fall.
‘I’m serious,’ snapped Riley.
‘So am I,’ Wyecliffe intoned, leaning forward, his chin resting on stubby fingers. ‘Tell me what brought you back to this worrisome place.’
That was Wyecliffe. He referred to things but never said them. Riley had last come here when Cartwright was trying to pin the death of John Bradshaw on him. He’d been sick with fear.
A guy called Prosser keeps hanging round Nancy asking questions.’
‘First name?’
‘Guy.’
Mr Wyecliffe scraped his moustache along one finger. ‘So what?’
‘So what?’ breathed Riley ‘He wants to know where I get my stuff from, as if the business wasn’t clean.’
‘Is it?’
‘Completely.’
‘Well then,’ said Mr Wyecliffe reassuringly ‘there’s nothing to worry about.’ He paused. ‘Mr Riley we’ve known each other a very long time. Just hand over the other pieces, I’ll look after the larger picture.’
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