Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 11

by Maxim Jakubowski

  He begins to remove his clothes and books from the canvas holdall. The clothes will go in the wardrobe. He tries the door to the built-in cupboard but it appears to be locked. Croft wishes the woman, Sandra, had felt able to stay with him in the room for just a few minutes longer.

  Why would she, though? What is he to her, other than the sixty pounds each week she will get from him in rent money?

  Croft wonders what, if anything, she has heard or read or been told about his case.

  The child, Rebecca Riding, lived less than two miles from the place where he is now standing. A decade has passed since she died. In an alternate world, she would now be a young woman. Instead, she went to pick flowers in Manor Park on a certain day, and that was that.

  Abducted and raped, then murdered. Her name had joined the register of the lost.

  Did Croft kill Rebecca Riding? The papers said he had, for a while they did anyway. He has served a ten-year prison sentence for her murder. Even now that the charges have been overturned, the time he has spent living as a guilty man is still a part of reality.

  He is free, but is he truly innocent?

  Croft cannot say yet. There are too many things about that day that he cannot remember.

  His first meeting with Symes consists mainly of Symes cross-examining him on the subject of how things are going.

  “Did you manage to sign on okay?” As if penetrating the offices of the Lewisham DSS was a significant accomplishment, like shooting Niagara Falls in a barrel, or scaling Everest. Perhaps for some it is. Croft thinks of the faces, the closed and hostile faces of free people who through their freedom were unpredictable and therefore threatening. In prison you became used to people doing the same thing, day after day. Even insane actions came to make sense within that context. In the offices of the Lewisham DSS, even getting up to fetch a cup of water from the cooler might turn out to be a prelude to insurrection.

  All the people he encounters make him nervous. He tells Symes everything is fine.

  “It was lucky about the room,” he adds, as a sweetener. “I’m grateful to you.”

  The room at the Old Tiger’s Head was Symes’s idea. He knows Angus McNiece, apparently. Croft dislikes Symes intensely without knowing why. In prison you come to know a man’s crime by the scent he gives off, and to Croft Richard Symes has about him the same moist and fuggy aroma as the pathetically scheming lowlifes who always sat together in the prison canteen because no one else would sit near them, suffering badly from acne and talking with their mouths full.

  Symes wears a lavender-coloured, crew-necked jersey and loose brown corduroys. He looks like an art teacher.

  That Symes has been assigned to him by the probation service to help him “re-orientate” seems to Croft like a joke that isn’t funny.

  Symes is telling Croft about a group he runs, once a week at his home, for newly released offenders.

  “It’s very informal,” Symes says. “I think you’d enjoy it.”

  Offenders, Croft thinks. That’s what we are to people. We offend. The idea of being in Symes’s house is distasteful to him, but he is afraid that if he refuses Symes will see it as a sign of maladjustment and use it against him.

  Croft says yes, he would like to attend, of course, it would be good to meet people.

  “Here’s my address,” Symes says. He writes it down on one of the scraps of paper that litter his desk and hands it across. “It’s in Forest Hill. Can you manage the bus?”

  “I think so,” Croft says. For a moment, he imagines how good it would feel to punch Symes in the face, even though Croft isn’t used to fighting. He hasn’t hit anyone since he was fifteen and had a dust-up in the schoolyard with Roger Burke by name, Burke by nature. Croft has forgotten what it was about now, but everyone had cheered. He imagines the blood spurting from Symes’s nose the way it had from Roger Burke’s nose, the red coating the grooves of his knuckles, the outrage splayed across his face (how fucking dare you, you little turd), the pain and surprise.

  Symes is finally getting ready to dismiss him.

  “Tuesday at eight, then. Are you sure you don’t want me to email you directions?”

  “There’s no need.” Croft isn’t online yet, anyway, but he doesn’t tell Symes that. “I’m sure I can find you.”

  “I’m just popping to Sainsbury’s,” Sandra says. “Can I fetch you anything?”

  The supermarket is only across the road, Croft can see the car park from his window. Sandra knows Croft could easily go himself, if he needed to, but she asks anyway because she’s like that, kind, so different from her husband, McNiece, who hasn’t addressed a single word to Croft since he moved in.

  Sandra has her boy with her, Alexander. He gazes around Croft’s room with widening eyes.

  “You’re painting,” the boy says.

  White, Sandra bought. A five-litre can of matt emulsion and a can of hi-shine gloss for the woodwork.

  The smell of it: bright, chemical, clean, the scent of new. It reminds Croft of the smell of the fixative in his old darkroom.

  “That’s right,” Croft says. “Do you like it?”

  The boy stares at him, open-mouthed.

  “Don’t bother Mr Croft, Alex,” Sandra says. “He’s busy.”

  “It’s no bother,” Croft says. “And it’s Dennis.” The presence of the boy in his room makes him more than ever certain that Sandra McNiece does not know what Croft was in prison for. If she knew, she would not have brought her son up here. If she knew, she would not have allowed Croft within a mile of the building.

  She will know soon though, because someone will tell her, someone is bound to. Croft is surprised this hasn’t happened already. Once she knows, she will want to throw him out, though Croft has a feeling Angus McNiece won’t let her, he won’t want to lose the extra income.

  “I could do with some teabags,” he says to Sandra. “If it’s really no trouble.”

  * * *

  “Were you really in prison?” the boy says. Alexander. He sits on the edge of Croft’s bed, swinging his legs back and forth as if he were sitting on a tree branch, somewhere high up, in Oxleas Woods perhaps (do kids still go there?) where it is said you can hear the ghosts of hanged highwaymen, galloping along the side of the Dover Road in the autumnal dusk.

  “Yes,” Croft says. “I was. But I’m out now.”

  “What were you in for?”

  “Does your mother know you’re up here?” Croft replies. The idea that she might not know, that the boy is here in his room and that nobody has given their permission, makes Croft feel queasy. Or perhaps it is just the smell of the hardening gloss paint.

  “Yes,” the boy says, though Croft can tell at once that he is lying, that the child has sneaked upstairs to see the prisoner, that in the boy’s mind this is the bravest and most daring feat he has ever performed. Croft wonders if Sandra realizes she has given her son the same name as her. Perhaps she does, perhaps the boy was named after her.

  Alexander the Great.

  Alexander Graham Bell.

  Alexander Pushkin.

  In Russian, the shortened form of Alexander (and Alexandra) is not Alex, but Sasha. Pushkin was shot in a duel. He died two days later in some agony from a ruptured spleen. He was thirty-eight years old.

  “Shouldn’t you be in bed?” Croft says. The boy looks at him with scorn. How old is he, exactly? Six, seven, eight?

  “What did you do before you were in prison?”

  “I took photographs,” Croft says. “That was my job.”

  “Would you take one of me?”

  “I might,” Croft says. “But I don’t have a camera.”

  The boy reminds him of someone, the lad who betrayed him, perhaps. The boy is younger of course, but he has the same bright knowingness, the same hopeful aura of trust as the lad who seemed to become his friend and then called him a murderer. Croft wonders what his Judas – Kip? – is doing now. Has he become a photographer himself, as he intended, or is he cooped up in some
office, serving time?

  Croft never dreamed in prison. The air of the place was sterile, an imagic vacuum. The outside air is different, teeming with live bacteria, primed to blossom into monstrosities as soon as he sleeps. In his dreams of Rebecca Riding, he begins to remember the way her hair felt, under his hand, the soft jersey fabric of her vest and underpants.

  “Will you take me home now?” she says. Croft always says yes, though when he wakes, sweating with horror, he can’t remember if this really happened or if it’s just in his dream. There’s cum on the bedsheet, still tacky. He steps out of bed and goes across to the window. Outside and below him, Lee Green lies hazy in the light of the streetlamps. In the hours between two and four there is little traffic.

  His legs are still shaking.

  If he waits until five o’clock a new day will begin.

  Croft opens the window to let in the air, which is crisp, tinged with frost, the leading edge of autumn, easing itself inside him like a dagger. The orange, rakish light of Lee Green at night reflects itself back at him from the oval mirror on the front of the wardrobe.

  Croft wishes he had a camera.

  If he cannot have a camera, he wishes he could sleep.

  The bus to Forest Hill is the 122. They run every fifteen minutes, approximately. There’s a stop more or less opposite the pub, at the bottom end of Lee High Road. It’s the early part of the evening, after the main rush hour but still fairly busy. When Croft gets on, the bus is half empty, but after the stop at Lewisham Station it’s almost full again.

  Croft moves upstairs, to the top deck. He does not mind the bus being packed, as Symes seemed to think he would. The crush of people, the sheer weight of them, makes him feel less observed. None of them knows who he is, or where he is going. Friends of his from before, police officers and journalists living north of the river (Queen’s Park and Kilburn, Ealing and Hammersmith, Camden Town), liked to joke about southeast London as a badlands, a no-man’s-land of scabby takeaways and boarded-up squats. Croft looks out at the criss-crossing streets, the lit-up intersections and slow-moving traffic queues. Curry houses and fish-and-chip shops and eight-till-late supermarkets, people returning from work, plonking themselves down in front of a cop show, cooking supper. All the things that, once you are removed from them, take on an aspect of the marvellous. He feels southeast London enfold him in the darkness like a tatty anorak, like an old army blanket. Khaki-coloured, smelling of spilled beer and anti-freeze, benzene and tar, ripped in several places but still warm enough to save your life on a freezing night.

  The sky is mauve, shading to indigo, shading to black, and as they pass through Honor Oak Park Croft thinks of Steven Jepsom, who once lived not far from here, in a grubby basement flat on the Brownhill Road. It was Jepsom they arrested first, but a lack of real evidence meant they had to let him go again.

  Whereas in Croft’s case, there were the photographs. It was the photographs, much more than Kip, which had testified against him.

  Now, it seemed, Steven Jepsom had been Rebecca Riding’s killer, all along.

  Croft remembered Symes’s first visit to the prison, Symes telling him about Jepsom being rearrested, almost a year before he, Croft, had been set free.

  “It won’t be long now,” Symes had said. He gave Croft a look, and Croft thought it was almost as if he were trying to send him a signal of some kind, to claim the credit for Croft’s good luck.

  “Is there new evidence, then?” Croft asked.

  “Plenty. A new witness has come forward, apparently. It’s strange how often that happens. There’s no time limit on the truth, Dennis.”

  Croft dislikes Symes’s insistence on using his first name. Using a first name implies familiarity, or liking, and for Symes he feels neither. He has always tried not to call Symes anything.

  He tries not to think of Steven Jepsom, who is now in prison instead of him.

  A guilty man for an innocent one. Straight swap.

  Richard Symes lives on Sydenham Park Road, a residential street leading off Dartmouth Road, where the station is, ten minutes’ walk from the bus stop at most. The house is unremarkable, a 1950s semi with an ancient Morris Minor parked in the drive. The porch lights are on. As he approaches the door, Croft thinks about turning around and heading back to the bus stop. There is no law that says he has to be here – the group is voluntary. But Symes won’t like it if he doesn’t attend. He will like it even less if he finds out that Croft turned up at his house and then went away again. He will see it as a mark against him, a sign of instability perhaps, an unwillingness to reintegrate himself into normal society. Could Symes report him for that? Perhaps.

  That would mean more meetings, more reports, more conversations.

  More time until he’s off Symes’s hook.

  Croft decides it is better just to go through with it. It is an hour of his time, that is all, and he’s here now, anyway. It’s almost more trouble to leave than it is to stay.

  He rings the bell. Someone comes to the door almost at once, a balding, fortyish man in a purple tank top and bottle-glass spectacles.

  “You’re exactly on time,” he says. He steps aside to let Croft enter the hallway. Croft notices that in spite of it being November and chilly the man is wearing leather sandals, the kind Croft used to wear for school in the summer term and that used to be called Jesus sandals. Croft feels surprise that you can still buy them.

  The Jesus man has a front tooth missing. The light of the hallway is sharp, bright orange. Croft follows the Jesus man along the corridor and through a door at the end. By contrast with the garish hallway, the room beyond is dim. The only illumination, such that it is, appears to be coming from a selection of low-wattage table lamps and alcove lights, making it difficult for Croft to find his bearings. He estimates that there are eight, perhaps ten people in the room, sitting in armchairs and on sofas. They fall silent as he enters. He looks around for Symes, but cannot see him.

  “Our mentor is in the kitchen,” says the man in the sandals. “He’s making more drinks.” He has an odd way of speaking, not a lisp exactly, but something like it. Perhaps it’s his adenoids. Each time he opens his mouth, Croft finds himself focusing on the missing front tooth. Its absence makes the man look grotesquely young. Our mentor? Does he mean Symes? He guesses it’s just the man’s attempt at a joke.

  A moment later Symes himself appears. He is carrying a plastic tray, stacked with an assortment of mugs and glasses. Croft can smell blackcurrant juice, Ribena. For some reason this cloying scent, so reminiscent of children’s birthday parties, disturbs him.

  “Dennis, good to see you,” Symes says. “Take this for me, would you please, Bryan?” He eases the tray into the hands of the Jesus man, who seems about to overbalance. “What are you drinking?”

  “Do you have a beer?” Croft says. His eyes are on the Jesus man, who has recovered himself enough to place the laden tray on a low wooden bench. The thought of the Ribena or even coffee in this place fills him with an empty dread he cannot explain. A beer would at least be tolerable. It might even help.

  “Coming right up,” Symes says. The baggy cords are gone and he is wearing jeans, teamed with a hooded sweatshirt, which has some sort of band logo on the front. His wrists protrude awkwardly from the too-short arms.

  He’s dressed himself up as a kid, Croft thinks, and the idea, like the thought of the Ribena, is for some reason awful. Symes tells him to find himself a seat, but all the sofas and armchairs appear to be taken. In the end he finds an upright dining chair close to the door. The chair’s single cushion slides about uncomfortably on the hard wooden seat. Croft looks around. He sees there are more people in the room than he thought at first, fifteen or twenty of them at least, many of them now talking quietly amongst themselves. Immediately opposite him an obese woman in a brightly coloured smock dress lolls in a chintz-covered armchair. She has shoulder-length, lank-looking hair. Her forehead is shiny with grease, or perhaps it is sweat.

  Her smal
l hands lie crossed in her lap. The hands, which are surprisingly pretty, are adorned with rings. The woman smiles at him nervously. Quite unexpectedly, Croft feels a rush of pity for her, a sensation more intense than any he has experienced since leaving the prison. He had not expected to see women here.

  “Hi,” Croft says. He wonders if the woman can understand him, even. There is a blankness in her eyes, and Croft wonders if she’s on drugs, not street drugs but prescription medicine, Valium or Prozac or Ativan. There was a guy Croft knew in prison who was always on about how the prescription meds – the bennies, as he called them – were deadlier than heroin.

  “They eat your fucking mind, man.” Fourboys, his name was, Douglas Fourboys, eight years for arson. Croft had liked him better than anyone, mainly because of the books he read, which he didn’t mind lending to Croft, once he had finished them. He had an enthusiasm for Russian literature, Dostoevsky especially. Douglas Fourboys was a lifelong Marxist, but at some point during the six months leading up to Croft’s release, he had found God. He claimed he’d been sent the gift of prophecy, though Croft suspected this probably had more to do with the dope Fourboys’s girlfriend occasionally managed to smuggle past security than with any genuine aptitude for seeing the future.

  “You’ve got to be careful, man,” Fourboys had said to him, just a couple of days before his release. “They’re waiting for you out there, I can see them, circling like sharks.”

  Fourboys had definitely been stoned when he said that. He’d reached out and clutched Croft’s hand, then tilted to one side and fallen asleep. Croft misses Fourboys, he is the only person from inside that he does miss. He supposes he should visit him.

  “We know who you are,” the woman says suddenly. “You’re going to help us speak with the master. We’ve seen your pictures.” She smiles, her thin lips slick with spittle. Her words send a chill through Croft, though there is no real meaning to them that he can fathom. The woman is obviously vulnerable, mentally challenged. Clearly she needs protection. Croft feels anger at Symes for allowing her to be here unsupervised.