by Roger Curtis
‘Grimston said he’d started writing in his cell.’
‘Ah, yes. Grimston, his cell-mate. Curious that. Considering the two were so pally it was odd that the change in your brother seemed to start when we announced Grimston’s release. Perhaps Harry did it to take his mind off the prospect of another cell-mate. It gets to some of them that way.’
I thought a new line of attack was needed. ‘Did my brother ever question the verdict that had sent him here?’
Robinson smiled sadly. ‘I once looked through the transcript of the trial. If he hadn’t pleaded guilty my guess is that the conviction would have been unsafe. In my opinion. But the matter was never raised.’
Into my head came an image of Harry pausing to look at me as he stepped from the dock: a little grimace – without malice – that said, don’t worry about it Michael, I’ll be okay. But in the end it wasn’t okay, after it must have seemed I’d abandoned him.
‘I suppose you would like to see where it happened?’
The building seemed deserted and you could tell why from the shrieks from the exercise yard outside. We climbed the three flights of metal stairs to the uppermost corridor.
‘The odd thing,’ Robinson said, ‘was why he was up here in the first place, seeing that his own cell was two floors below.’
I had visions of him being chased, terrified, up those bleak steps and along the corridor. Robinson saw my unease.
‘The puzzle is that there were no witnesses that we know of and as you can imagine no-one’s admitted to the attack.’
‘Is that surprising?’
‘No. But we have the rudiments of an intelligence system and so far that’s drawn a blank.’
He led me along the top corridor, which ended in a blank wall faced with those brown glazed bricks one associates with pre-war public lavatories. He pointed to a spot about four feet from the floor.
‘It must have been a powerful blow as the wall here – and the floor below – was splattered with blood. I can only think that someone felled him with a blow to the head while he was bending down. If you’re up to it I can show you photographs when we get back to the office. The other strange thing is that there’s been no trace of a weapon and I can’t believe a fist alone could have opened up his skull like that. We’ve searched high and low, but found nothing.’
‘Smuggled out?’ I asked.
He gave me a withering glance at having challenged the integrity of prison security. ‘I don’t think so.’ He looked at the ground. ‘Won’t please the prison visitor, though, when we can’t come up with an explanation. Anyway, we ought to get back, before the prisoners return from their exercise.’
Things were beginning to come together in my head.
‘Would you mind if I stayed just a moment,’ I said. ‘By myself, just to reflect. I did love my brother, you know.’ I was about to add, for all his faults, but in those last few minutes something fundamental to my relationship with Harry’s memory had changed. Whatever had been there before had become an amalgam of guilt and remorse.
‘Of course. A minute then? I’ll be waiting on the floor below.’
I watched him walk the length of the corridor, back to the stairs at the far end. I turned my attention to that shiny brown wall, imagining the red blood upon it, dripping to the floor, and poor Harry’s body writhing in its death throes, splattering his blood around. I followed in my mind the pages of the notebook Grimston had given me – the skull-shaped dome at the centre of the calculations and the estimations of speed – of that I was now sure – and the forces that needed to be applied to it through the resilience of the only structure unambiguously available in that hellish place.
I slowly retraced my steps along the corridor, counting the paces; at the head of the stairs leading down I noted their number. It did not surprise me that it matched the figure in Harry’s calculations: the distance in yards that would enable – for a fit and determined runner – to work up sufficient speed…
The governor looked up from the floor below. I smiled at him and waved, concealing as best I could the doubts that had now become certainties. As I did so the shrieks and howls from outside gave way to the banging of doors as the prisoners left the yard. The governor signalled to me to make haste, and then it was as if that malignant body of sound had suddenly been transplanted wholesale into the echoing emptiness of the building. It became a seething mass of raw masculinity, barbarous and threatening, without constraint. Against my will I was transported back to the bar of the Green Lion, and saw Harry’s shocked and innocent face as I thrust the bloodied knife into his hand; and heard myself saying ‘get rid of it for me’ before pushing my way, unnoticed, out of the scrum. Within that crush of bodies no-one had seen, and when the stunned and now silent mass began to disperse, there was Harry, bewildered and still, blood dripping to the floor from the knife held at his side.
Into my head came again the number of paces I’d taken along the corridor – the same figure circled in Harry’s notebook. The meaning of those calculations – of distance, and speed, and the consequences of impact – became icily clear. The governor’s clattering footsteps towards me seemed only seconds ahead of the advancing cohorts behind him. There was no going back. I turned to contemplate for one last time the length of the still empty corridor, and focused on that distant, beckoning brown wall. Then I lowered my head to achieve the greatest speed, and ran…
The Widower
Greville was busy at his workbench when the doorbell rang. Not the usual location for a workbench, in the bow of his drawing room window, but it was here that the light was best, and the view over the Thames was never less than inspirational.
It hadn’t always been like this. When Emma was alive he’d had to observe social norms. But since her death in a boating accident three years previously there had been no such restrictions, and he’d rearranged the house to please himself. So in that part of the room there were now lathes, electric drills, saws and goodness knows what else.
When he and Emma had started their distribution business out of a garage in Watford they could not have foreseen its takeover by one of the electronics giants and a windfall out of all proportion to its worth. That was what funded their move to a much grander house – Maple Lodge – overlooking the towpath at Strand-on-the-Green in Chiswick. And there, unencumbered by marital constraints, Greville had given free rein to his creative instincts – to be precise the development of miniaturised surveillance equipment that had already found a lucrative market with some of the more disreputable governments and, close on their heels, one or two of the scarcely more reputable multinationals. Above all, though, he enjoyed his work and wanted for little else in life, except that…
Except that his present lifestyle was not conducive to finding a replacement for Emma. Not that, towards the end, they’d enjoyed much of a physical relationship, but it had been enough to fend off temptation. Now, driven by self-determined abstinence, that need had grown.
Strangely, this was the thought foremost in his mind when, that bright autumnal afternoon, the doorbell rang. He’d forgotten the message from his niece Clarice to say she was calling by. She was his late brother Michael’s child, whom he hadn’t seen – nor frankly wanted to see – since Emma’s funeral. He remembered her as a gawky, bespectacled teenager, only dimly aware that – if the TV credits of recent documentaries were anything to go by – she was beginning to make a mark in that industry. So, when he opened the door, he was surprised to see a demure young woman, smartly dressed, with no sign of spectacles. He must have looked confused.
‘Uncle Greville, surely you remember me?’
‘Of course I do. Come on in.’
Greville was savvy enough to know that the visit was no social call. He surmised – wrongly as it turned out – that it had something to do with his business: a documentary perhaps, or a new series along the lines of Tomo
rrow’s World, a programme he’d followed avidly. ‘Now,’ he continued, ‘before we talk I must show you this.’ He held out a metal cylinder about ten centimetres long and slightly fatter than a fountain pen. ‘It’s what’s got people buzzing at the moment. I call it an inquiscope. Look.’
He pointed the object towards a bird sitting on a twig of a distant tree. Clarice saw the magnified image appear on a laptop screen on Greville’s workbench. And then, loud and clear, she heard the throaty warblings of the bird.
‘That’s impressive,’ Clarice said.
‘Then watch this.’ Greville pointed the instrument at an elderly couple walking along the opposite river bank. The expressions on their faces were clear to see and their voices carried around the room.
‘That’s amazing,’ Clarice said.
‘I thought you’d be impressed. Something there for us to talk about? A TV programme, possibly?’
‘Well, perhaps in the future. But you’re right about a television programme. Which is why I wanted to show you this.’ She handed him a neatly handwritten letter, which he began to read. ‘Wayside TV Productions – my company – is making a series where long lost family members are reunited. Not very original, but it will draw in the audiences. When I received this I thought of you.’
The letter was from a young woman – so Greville presumed – called Samantha, now living in the UK but who had been brought up as a foster child in Australia. By chance she’d come across a note from her long-dead mother to a man apparently trying to absolve himself from being her father – and giving his family name. Samantha had seen Clarice’s name – with the same surname – in a list of TV credits and this was her letter to the company. Clarice, dimly aware that an uncle had migrated to Australia as a teenager, had come to the conclusion they might just be related.
‘So where do I fit in?’ Greville asked.
‘We thought you’d like to meet her – for one of our programmes.’
‘Me? Why not you?’
‘Being an employee rules me out. Besides, with all this fascinating stuff’ – she swept her arm across the workbench with an expression of profound admiration – ‘you would be… well… of much more interest to our viewers.’
Greville glimpsed another opportunity for the commercial exposure of his inventions. ‘But what’s she like?’ he asked, foreseeing obstacles.
As if as an afterthought Clarice scrabbled in her handbag and drew out a photograph of a slim young woman with regular features and long, straight black hair.
‘Doesn’t resemble my brother,’ Greville said. ‘Was her mother English?’
‘I wouldn’t know. The question is, would you be happy to meet her?’
‘In front of the cameras?’
‘Of course.’
‘There’s a pub just along the towpath. Why don’t we arrange to meet there? We could go there now to take a look.’
‘How it will work,’ Clarice said over beers in the City Barge, ‘is that you’ll meet for the first time here, before the cameras. We have to do it that way for spontaneity. Then we’ll leave you both in peace for a few days to get to know one another – if that’s what you want – then meet again for a second shoot to see how you’ve got on.’
Greville could see in his mind an image of this attractive young woman holding his surveillance device between finger and thumb alongside a set of gleaming white teeth.
Exactly one week later Greville was positioned at the same table, facing the door.
‘We’ll have a shot of you sitting there,’ Clarice said, ‘then go outside to follow Samantha in. Act normally but please look delighted to see her. After all, you’ve always wondered about your long-deceased brother.’ Then she added, ‘C’mon, cheer up. It won’t be that bad.’
The whole episode so far had made Greville nervous. For a start he had vague feelings that his life as a recluse – with all the advantages it offered – was about to be compromised. Having met this woman what was he supposed to do with her? Forget her? Send her Christmas cards – or money? She was, after all, only a niece, like Clarice – and he’d managed to push her almost completely out of his mind. But then, he thought, besides Clarice she was probably his only remaining blood relative.
The cameraman squirmed though the door ahead of Samantha, then moved several paces backwards to include Greville in the same frame.
Greville rose and stepped towards her. As she threw her arms around his neck the hand that was rising to shake hers unexpectedly found its way around her waist. ‘I’m so pleased to meet you,’ he whispered into her ear.
They sat opposite one another. Greville realised that the photograph Clarice had given him did not do Samantha justice. Perhaps that had been deliberate, so as not to build up his expectations. The face was more perfect, the eyes more dreamy, the long black hair glossier. He looked at the bare arms extended on the table before him and noted the pallor of his hands in comparison.
‘If my brother Edmund was your father, who was your mother?’ he asked.
‘An oriental princess,’ she replied, teasing him. ‘Actually, my mother was Anglo-Indian.’
‘Was?’
‘My mother was… it was an honour killing, you see.’
‘And my…’
‘… which is partly why your brother committed suicide soon after.’
‘Did he? I didn’t know that. I thought he’d had a fall – an accident.’
‘It was a fall, but we think it was deliberate.’
The cameraman having left, Clarice approached the table. ‘I’ll leave you two alone, but there is one last formality. I would like to take swabs from you both for DNA analysis – just to be absolutely sure. Our viewers are suspicious people, you see. There was a brisk scouring of each of their mouths with swabs, which she put into her bag. Then she was gone.
‘I expect you’d like to see where I live,’ Greville said.
Samantha looked at her watch and smiled apologetically. ‘Maybe another time. I have an appointment in an hour. Perhaps the next camera shoot can be in your house.’ She kissed his cheek perfunctorily and left the pub.
That evening Clarice telephoned to ask if all went well.
‘Well, no,’ Greville replied. ‘She left soon after you did.’
‘Oh, dear. I was hoping you’d hit it off. But she is rather shy. Why don’t you give her a ring?’ She reminded him of Samantha’s telephone number.
That night he slept fitfully. Something was telling him to be careful, something that might upset the life-style he had painstakingly created for himself. He tried to analyse the situation. Why had she left so abruptly, having gone through the circuitous exercise of seeking out relatives in the first place? For sure something was not quite right. Yet… The following morning he dialled her number.
A male voice said, ‘I’ll get her.’
‘I think it would be a good idea if we were to meet before they film us together. Are you free anytime this week?’
‘No, but I could make next Tuesday.’
They met in the rotunda of Chiswick House – that gloomy icing cake of a Palladian villa – and sat in the cafeteria.
‘I must seem an awful intrusion into your life,’ Samantha said. ‘I’m sure when the television people have got what they want…’
‘No, not at all. Sitting at my workbench day in day out can get quite monotonous. A small diversion is exactly what I need.’
‘You miss your wife?’
‘I miss having someone around – someone I can relate to. I’m not sure that’s the same thing. She liked our new-found affluence, you see, but lacked the dedication to the cause.’
‘If it’s not too bold a question, what happened to her?’
‘A boating accident in the Mediterranean, near Cannes, one holiday. Swimming from the boat. It’s believed
she was stung by a jellyfish. Allergic to the toxin, apparently. It happened so quickly.’ He looked carefully for her reaction, but saw none.
They wandered away from the house and found themselves in the stone grotto beside the lake.
‘You don’t look old enough to be my uncle,’ she said.
‘Is that a compliment?’
‘Well, no.’
‘Your father, my eldest brother, was fourteen years my senior. I was an unexpected late addition to the family. He must have been still a teenager when he emigrated.’
‘And I think he sowed his wild oats very early on.’ For the first time he saw the hint of a smile. ‘So there’s not much difference between us after all.’
‘I suppose not.’
Whether it was this deduction that caused her to rest her hand on his knee – perhaps not even being aware of it – he could not be sure. But he placed his own hand over hers. She turned her head away but did not withdraw the hand. The black hair over her slender body seemed to become even more lustrous. ‘It’s not far to walk back to my house – if you’d like to,’ he said.
And that is what they did. They parted the following morning, having agreed – for the camera – to appear interested but otherwise cool towards one another.
That afternoon Clarice rang to say that the DNA tests had shown the expected match. ‘Have you seen anything of her?’ she asked casually. ‘We met briefly for tea,’ he replied, as calmly as he could, adding, ‘I quite like her.’ ‘Well, don’t get too involved,’ she said. ‘Remember you are related.’
That last remark set him thinking. He went to his computer and googled ‘incest.’ But legal restrictions seemed to stop at full siblings, parents and offspring. He grunted approvingly, failing to see the footnote advising that the law was about to change in favour of wider inclusivity.
