The Gardens of the Dead fa-2

by William Brodrick

  ‘Someone’s trying to scare me,’ he whimpered.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I received a letter.’

  ‘Saying what?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Riley couldn’t say any more, but he needed help. ‘It was just a photograph.’

  ‘Of whom?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Riley his voice rising. ‘I thought it might have been Prosser, that’s all.’

  ‘Most unlikely’ observed Mr Wyecliffe confidently ‘Someone clever enough to let a photograph speak for itself doesn’t blow their cover by asking stupid questions.’

  Pushed by fear, Riley almost let slip what he’d held back for most of his life. ‘I just want to know if you can stop someone digging around.’

  ‘That rather depends,’ said Mr Wyecliffe. One of his hands covered the glass ball. ‘Who else might be handling the shovel, so to speak?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ barked Riley He’d asked himself day and night. If it wasn’t Prosser, there was no one. John Bradshaw had come with a question and a promise, but he never got an answer. Riley said, ‘There’s no one alive that I can think of.’

  ‘Anyone dead?’ The lawyer shook the globe.

  Riley held his breath, feeling heat descend like a crown.

  ‘Don’t play around with me, Wyecliffe.’

  ‘I’ve never been more serious.’

  Riley’s temples began to throb. ‘The dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Riley couldn’t think straight. Only the living could reach him. He jerked his head, as though to shake off some flies.

  ‘Very well,’ said Mr Wyecliffe, with a long sigh of disappointment. ‘If you don’t have any more names – likely or otherwise – I cannot act. You’ll have to wait and see what they do with what they know.’

  ‘They?’

  A figure of speech,’ replied the lawyer. Hooking his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets, he added, ‘That said, perhaps your correspondent has primed several people to act on his or her behalf.’ He examined Riley with something between pity and wonder. ‘You know, everything always comes down to facts.’

  ‘Facts?’ The change in subject threw Riley off balance.

  ‘Yes. Those known and those not known.’ Mr Wyecliffe waved his palms over the desk as if he were incanting a spell. ‘We lawyers assemble the known ones for the jury. You’d be surprised how many different pictures a clever hand can make out of the same pieces’ – he chuckled at the thought – ‘and if it were a game, I’d say that was value for money But after forty years in the courts, let me tell you something.’ He was no longer merry and the lights seemed to go dim. ‘No one can change the shape of a fact that makes sense on its own. It’s like a photograph.’

  Riley tugged at his top button. Wyecliffe hadn’t changed subject at all.

  ‘Tell me the name of the man in the picture,’ said the lawyer soothingly.

  ‘I never said it was a man.’

  ‘Quite right.’ He nodded a compliment.

  ‘If I tell you, can you help?’

  The scratching began again, high on his hairy cheek. He sighed and whispered, ‘That rather depends.’

  Riley kicked back his chair and yanked at the door. Everything always ‘depended’. Wyecliffe had been like that last time, hinting and sighing and never looking surprised.

  On Cheapside, Riley found his van clamped. In a frenzy he kicked the huge yellow bracket and tore the notice off the windscreen. He nearly cried. Someone was after him, and he couldn’t get away. Then, in a moment of sickening calm, the obvious hit Riley like a backhander: whoever it was already knew what John Bradshaw had wanted to know.

  15

  George wasn’t sure, but he probably followed the exact route back to the river that he’d taken when he’d first left Mitcham. As he walked, Nino’s story about right and wrong came to mind. Elizabeth had loved the ending, but George had never been able to catch the beginning. And now, after she’d gone, it had popped to the surface.

  ‘I’ve had a very odd dream,’ Nino said, while they sat on a bench near Marble Arch. ‘I was standing on a road between heaven and hell writing parking tickets. A reporter came along. “What are this lot waiting for?” I asked. “Nowt,” he replied. “They can’t go to heaven because they didn’t do anything good, and they can’t go to hell because they didn’t do anything bad. Hardly a scoop, but it’s still a good story.” He showed me the headline on his pad: “They lived without praise or blame.”’

  Nino didn’t say anything else.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ asked George.

  Nino became resolute, as if he had been quizzed about the value of double yellow lines. ‘Don’t be lukewarm, old friend. That’s the only route to mercy or reward.’

  George had told Elizabeth, and she’d written it down, asking him to repeat every word.

  But to what end? Where was she now? And where was he?

  George crossed Blackfriars Bridge with a glance towards Trespass Place. On the north bank of the Thames he turned east, following the road to Smithfield and Tower Hill – the route to the Isle of Dogs, and a wasteland of padlocks and chicken wire. The river flowed oily and magnificent on his right; traffic swept along to his left. George’s mind tracked back to the night he’d pulled open a wrought-iron gate at three in the morning. He’d given no thought to praise or blame.

  Three made-up girls stood shivering on the other side.

  ‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘I’ve a kettle and a toaster.’

  He followed them down the alley to the door he’d left ajar, looking at their bare legs, the blue veins and the goose pimples. This was late November, the month of biting rain and short days, the month when shop fronts twinkled with the approach of Christmas. George made cocoa. He didn’t tell them that all the beds were taken, that they’d have to leave.

  Let them have the length of a hot drink, he thought, it’s not much. George left them so he could make the usual telephone calls. Every project was full, although the Open Door in Fulham could see them at half eight: that was five hours away; five hours to lose heart. George had learned long ago that with some kids you only got one chance to offer them a hand, and even then they didn’t take it. But some did – that’s what brought him to the gate night after night: some did. While waiting for the toast to pop up, George overheard the first name: Riley and then he caught the second: the Pieman. When he appeared around the corner they stopped talking. He said, ‘After this lot, you’ll have to move on.’ There was no protest.

  He followed them back towards the gate. Their shoes clattered on the flags like dropped marbles and George felt – as he’d often done – like an accomplice to murder. One of them – the youngest – had a tattoo of a dragon above one ear. Her head was shaved. The three girls must have been a good fifty yards up the pavement when George came running after them.

  ‘If you want to fight back, I’ll help you.’

  Two of them stared; the other laughed. They backed away shrouded by rain.

  That should have been the end of it. But a week or so later they’d returned to the gate, again at God knows what hour, wanting to know what he’d meant. George stood on one side, they on the other, separated by bars. There was so much that did not need to be said: about who they were, what they did, even the where, when and how: everything, really except for the why – those impossibly intimate histories that would not be reduced to a common badge.

  George said through the bars, ‘What happened at the Open Door?’

  ‘Getting away is one thing,’ said the one with the dragon, ignoring the question. ‘But you said we could fight.’

  He turned the lock and yanked back the gate.

  George made more cocoa for Anji, Lisa and Beverly.

  ‘I believe you,’ he said.

  About what?’ asked Anji. She spoke for the others; she was the eldest, a kind of leader at nineteen.

  George saw the resentment in their eyes and their obstinate vulnerability. ‘I not only und
erstand,’ he said heavily – for he knew this look; he’d felt the same once – ‘I’ll do something about it.’

  Without invitation they started talking about Riley fighting one another for the right to give details of his appearance and habits. George listened with glazed eyes. This man, when a boy had been a kind of brother to him. In the years since, he’d often wondered if Riley was one of those for whom the helping hand had come too late, or if he’d turned away No doubt it was this heavy reminiscing that made George slow on the uptake. When the three girls stared at George, drained and expectant, he said, ‘I’ll call the police tomorrow.’

  ‘Police?’ Beverly asked, her mouth open, like that of her dragon.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And then George understood what had brought them back. ‘Hang on,’ he said in disbelief, ‘you didn’t think I was offering to whack him over the head?’

  The three conspirators threw glances at one another. Unmasked, they appeared younger still, and more awkward. Lisa stood, putting on her bomber jacket. ‘We fight back by filling in a complaint form?’

  ‘No. By taking Riley to court.’

  ‘That’s easily said. We’d pay and it would cost you nothing.’ Anji followed Lisa to the door while Beverly still slouching, looked George right in the eye. ‘They’d tear us to pieces.’

  If precision matters, this was the moment when George lost his senses, when two teenagers stood at the door and a third was about to pull away ‘Yes. But they can’t do that to me.’

  ‘What’s it got to do with you?’

  George wasn’t going to answer that question. ‘If I support what you say’ he persisted, ‘Riley will be convicted. There’s nothing they can throw at me. Nothing.’

  ‘What will it cost you, then?’

  ‘If it goes wrong, my job.’

  ‘Why do it?’

  Again, he sidestepped the question. ‘It can’t go wrong.’

  The next day George woke up profoundly grateful that Beverly had joined her pals at the door. But a week later – again at three or so in the morning – the buzzer had torn George out of a deep slumber. It had been a bad night, with a punch-up over queue-jumping He stumbled angrily to the gate with such a weight upon his eyes that he could barely see. He heard Anji’s voice:

  ‘We’ll risk it, if you will.’

  In a stupor, George leaned his head on the bars. The wisdom of these kids, he thought. They trust only the person whose outlay matches theirs. The gate swung open for the last time; and George made more cocoa and toast.

  ‘If I do this,’ he said cautiously ‘will you go to the Open Door?’ They all shook on it while George’s gaze rested upon a tiger’s head that snarled behind Beverly’s other ear. It hadn’t been there last time.

  Funnily enough, it was the tiger and the dragon who fled on the day of the trial. Anji and Lisa kept their side of the bargain. And then George was called. If he’d even sensed what might be waiting for him in the courtroom, he’d have joined Beverly on the pavement. In the corridor, Jennifer Cartwright grabbed his arm. ‘Where the hell are you going?’

  ‘Home.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Back home.’

  ‘Why?’

  He didn’t reply.

  ‘Two girls have just had their heads kicked in.’ She was seething. ‘You can’t go home.’

  George took the bus to Mitcham knowing that Anji, Lisa and Beverly wouldn’t be going to an open door in Fulham. That was George’s fault. In the long run, she’d been right, that policewoman.

  Much later George had written in his notebook, ‘Who’d have thought that a question about my grandfather would have set Riley free?’ And it was only then that George realised that his downfall hadn’t begun at the night shelter’s gate, when he was a man, but with a secret, discovered when he was a boy.

  And now, walking by the Thames, George asked himself where lay the praise and blame? That was a tricky one, because things couldn’t have been any different. Mercy or reward? Well, that was trickier still.

  George followed the cobbled lane that ran between the warehouses and the hoists. He ducked through the mesh wiring onto a quilt of broken brick. A bitter wind swung off the Thames, pulling at his hair and stinging his nose. He stood upon Lawton’s Wharf, his long walk ended. He’d been homeless without knowing where he was going, but now he’d arrived – at the place he’d visited more frequently than any other. He spied a ladder built into the dock wall. He took off the bright new trainers he’d been given on Old Paradise Street and laid them to one side. Slowly he lowered himself into the river. His clothes gathered weight, and the cold clasped his legs and stomach. A painful thought passed across his mind: for Emily he was already dead.

  16

  Anselm went to bed with the accounts and receipts that had been sent to Inspector Cartwright. Even with his glasses on, he couldn’t make head or tail of a single column (at the Bar, he’d steered clear of cases that had numbers in them), so he put the documents on the floor and gave his attention to something more promising: a cornucopia of intractable problems. A lawyer’s habits made him divide them into two groups.

  First, why had Elizabeth sent him to see Mrs Dixon without any clue as to what she might say? What was the point of leaving him powerless, and her powerful – in the sense that she could refuse to talk, which is precisely what happened? Why take another risk that could only harm her prospects of success – for just as George Bradshaw (predictably) had gone missing, so Mrs Dixon (not surprisingly) had refused to talk about her missing son. The only answer Anselm could muster was this: at the heart of Elizabeth’s bid to make good the past was a complete respect for the free choices of the other actors. There would be no cajoling, no forced outcomes.

  The next group of problems was, for Anselm, the most intriguing. How did this second mission connect with the first?

  What was the link between the missing boy and the bid to bring Riley back to court? While listening to Mrs Dixon, Anselm had noted the vowels resistant to life in the South; the northern intonation in the word ‘cake’ had survived completely intact. It had shone like a tanner in a heap of decimal currency. Who, then, was the missing lad? He’d been a good boy a good son. Reviewing the cornucopia as a whole, Anselm came to a sensible though uncomfortable conclusion: both of the matters that had been entrusted to him by Elizabeth were now well on the way to monumental failure.

  Success, however, had come Anselm’s way earlier that evening, albeit from another direction. He had, of course, begun looking into Elizabeth’s past, while she had only expected him to move forward on her behalf. And initial results were interesting.

  After leaving Mrs Dixon, Anselm paid a visit to Trespass Place, hoping that George Bradshaw had returned to his patch, but it was silent and bare; so, discouraged, he went back to Hoxton, where he found a bundle of faxed documents from Gray’s Inn. He leafed through them while his shepherd’s pie revolved in the microwave. The librarian had organised, in reverse order, various notices covering legal responsibilities assumed by Elizabeth. It was only when Anselm reached the final sheet that he appreciated his earlier, decisive mistake. It was obvious why this particular Glendinning hadn’t gone to Durham University. Looking down, he read again the list of names. It was a register of those called to the Bar by the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn on the fifteenth day of October nineteen hundred and fifty. The librarian had marked the relevant entry: Elizabeth Steadman.

  Glendinning was, of course, her married name. Anselm had never known her as anything else. On marrying, most women barristers kept the names under which they began their careers because they carried their reputations. Elizabeth, however, had dropped hers and started all over again. Anselm sat down, suddenly excited because someone else had made the same gaffe as himself, only she didn’t have the excuse of not knowing any better. His thoughts becoming tangled, he picked up the telephone and called the Prior.

  ‘Sister Dorothy re
eled off the history of Mr G, the frustrated inventor, and Mrs G, his uncomplaining wife.’ Anselm paused. ‘But she got the name wrong. It should have been Mr and Mrs Steadman.’

  ‘Teachers follow the fortunes of their pupils,’ replied Father Andrew confidently ‘Perhaps she learned of Elizabeth’s marriage and switched the names by accident.’

  A monk can always contradict his prior. But it has a taste all of its own. ‘My first thought too,’ said Anselm warmly ‘However, she hadn’t had word or sight of Elizabeth in forty years. She shouldn’t even know the Glendinning surname.’

  It was hardly caviar, but the hiatus was delicious. Anselm said, ‘But why would Sister Dorothy lie?’

  ‘Perhaps, like you, she’d given her word,’ said Father Andrew distantly as though he’d turned to the fire. ‘And perhaps,’ he added, ‘that was the first of the many promises that have been sought and obtained.’

  17

  Riley took the bus home because the fascists who’d clamped him weren’t answering the phone. He came in the back way pausing to glance at Nancy’s bricks: she’d been collecting them all her married life. She rummaged in the grass by Limehouse.

  Cut and brought them home one by one. Exhausted by the bout with Wyecliffe, defeated by the Council, and cold to his bones, he felt suddenly weak: affection stirred inside him like a shot of Bertie’s poison.

  There was an irony about Riley and Nancy: prior to the trial, he’d pushed Nancy back, but she’d kept returning; after the trial, he’d wanted her to linger, but she kept away So when Riley told her what had happened to his van, she was very understanding; she said all the right things; but she was far off. She didn’t even ask what he was doing in Cheapside. Later, Riley lounged in his rocker, listening to a very different kind of chat. As Nancy cleared away the plates, she asked Arnold how he was getting on, whether he was tired of his wheel, whether he got lonely in his cage. Riley’s chair creaked as he moved more quickly as his envy grew.