by D. B. Martin
Could it be the same Win? How many Wins were there around with a scar like a ‘V’ under their ear? I didn’t remember him as a thug or a bully then, but he’d been my big brother. Maybe the boys from Jonno’s gang that he’d beaten up would have said differently. Later on I would have debated how to assess him, but still stopped short of thug or bully. Maybe the way life had moved on for him after the children’s home and my betrayal had finally soured him to one. Maybe the teenage and adult worlds I’d not known him in had forged him differently from the last time I’d seen him? Maybe many things, not least of which was the question of how he would react if we were to meet again, and what it would mean to my career and my life. I didn’t answer, but I knew it was one question I couldn’t now avoid if I carried on with the case.
8: The Gutter
I’d thought of myself as alone before, but never as alone as I was with Win gone and Georgie lost in his own world. At least school was one place I could escape. I always had a quick brain and a thirst for knowledge and I filled evey gap and crevice with information in the hope that one day, I would have a plan for what to do with it. I anticipated school for me would probably end at sixteen, when I would be jettisoned from the slipstream of the children’s home into the flotsam of society to find my way, family-less and homeless and rudderless. Tony with the knife in his guts, the entrapment of Win, and Georgie with his lost soul convinced me that I had to do more than let the system discard me. Ironically, Jaggers found me my plan, even though he didn’t know it at the time.
When they took Win away, I worried how Jaggers would treat me afterwards. I’d hoped to be of no further use to him. I was wrong about that. The way he’d initially persuaded me to co-operate was apparently more than a method of coercion, it was a fully-fledged business. Borstal had educated him well in the finer points of pimping as well as priming. As I suspected, he wasn’t gay – far from it if the stories of his antics with some of the local girls were to be believed. He looked much older than fourteen and he had a cocky self-assurance that seemed to open doors even despite his circumstances. However, there again I was wrong. I’d assumed he was an orphan or a lost boy like Win, Georgie and myself. No: Jaggers background was as far from lost as you could imagine. It was, in fact, immensely privileged, but since his mother’s death when he was five, his father had completely lost interest in him – rejected him in other words. An extreme form of grief, in my view – turning your back on the living simply because of the dead – but Jaggers suffered from its effects as much as his father.
His response was to turn juvenile delinquent and by seven had already been caught shoplifting, smoking and drinking underage. At eight he took his father’s car joyriding and wrote it off, at nine he was up on a charge that would have been GBH, apart from his age, and by ten it was said he’d killed a man. I doubted the last claim. I was sure the children’s home wouldn’t be welcoming a murderer with open arms, no matter how generous the financial patronage his father offered as a sweetener, but certainly he was out of control. His father always bailed him out, paying for the most expensive lawyers when necessary, or simply paying off witnesses if not. His way out of trouble always seemed to be charmed, even if his childhood wasn’t. The only requirement of Jaggers was that he stayed away from home and all the while he did, his father was benefactor and patron of the port currently harbouring him.
I found it all out piecemeal until I had a picture of the threat that was considering me for further use; bribing a confidence here and overhearing a useful snippet here. I was smart. I could do the dumb ones’ homework. I was strong, even if I looked puny. I could do the weak or lazy ones’ chores. I was fearless. I would even take on the frightened ones’ initiations for a good enough reward, but not in the cellar. The only other thing that fazed me was finding myself alone in the dorm at lights out and fearing who would come through the door to join me. My reward was information. Whilst I gathered it Jaggers and I circled each other like a pair of pugilists – he testing and considering, me probing and wondering. He had eighteen more months at the home when he finally made his move, but I was ready. I had successfully taken the eleven plus and was in my penultimate year at the local grammar school. For the time being it had earned me yellow dots on the chart and I was basking in the sun, but it had to fade soon as the seasons changed. Winter arrived with Jaggers’ next approach – much like the first had been – but this time I saw the chance of spring beyond it because information and knowledge give you power.
Amongst his other insalubrious activities, he’d been developing contacts amongst the local community – the gay community, and had discovered a useful and profitable line in escort services.
‘You’re enough of a weed to fit the bill,’ he rasped in my ear as he pulled the bag tighter and panic almost overcame me. I nodded, holding in the breath I’d taken when he’d put it over my head. I had done my homework on the technique now. I could survive and I would. He relaxed his grip, taken aback. He must have expected resistance. Now his curiosity was roused. ‘You’ll agree?’ I nodded again and he let the bag go. I gasped in as much air as I could in case he changed his mind and twisted it tight again. ‘You know what you’d have to do?’
‘I know, but I’ll only go with the rich old ones.’ He swung me round to stare at me. My moment of truth hadn’t arrived in the dead of night but in the light of day, and I knew exactly what I planned to do with it. We were in the gun emplacement and a seagull wheeled overhead and screeched at us, ‘maaad, maaad, maaa...’ I wondered if it was right, but I had my plan, gleaned diligently from as many sources as I could muster. They were generally powerful as well as rich, the old queens; afraid of compromising their respectability. If I had to prostitute myself for my future, it might as well be with someone who could make that future a material possibility. He pulled the bag clear of my head and eyed me suspiciously but I faced him out. ‘I want to get out of this shit hole. I’m going to get an education, be somebody, but that takes cash.’ The wind whined around the solid concrete block of the emplacement, scooting clouds across the remaining August sunshine and making the inside of the building darken as if a storm was brewing.
‘I can’t promise you cash – that’ll be up to them, but as long as they pay their cut to me, get whatever you want out of them.’ He stuffed the bag in his pocket and was about to turn away dismissively but I caught his arm.
‘I know who I want you to set me up with too.’ This time he was really surprised.
‘How’d you know who any of them are?’ I was afraid he’d bag me again when his hand travelled instinctively to his pocket. I readied myself but his hand hovered there without withdrawing the bag as he waited for me to answer.
‘Information, that’s all, but I ain’t going to share it.’ It was an unwritten rule that you didn’t grass anyone up. He and I had already broken it together by setting up Win. I knew he was conscious of that – the villain’s honour was impugned. He would play fair with me and I would play fair with him as a kind of recompense.
‘OK, who?’
I told him.
‘Why him?’
I wasn’t going to tell him my plan. I simply said, ‘He’s rolling in it.’ It seemed acceptable as a reason. He looked at me strangely but didn’t object. My future was assured as easily as that.
Of course it was by no means easy in reality. The degradation, the loss of self, the disgust are things I don’t want to dwell on and as soon as I could store them away in my secret box, I did so. It wasn’t all bad either. Whilst I hated the physical act of homosexual sex, it happened less and less often over the years until by the time I was almost sixteen, I hadn’t had to endure it for many months. The one I’d chosen to be set up with was but a step along the way. I’d intended nurturing a number of mugs from the first contact, but it worked quite differently in the end. I groomed him, but at one of his little ‘soirees’, he introduced me to someone far more useful overall and I groomed him too – eventually transferring all my attention to
my one target; someone who kept himself far below the radar of Jaggers and any other source of intrigue, blackmail or adverse publicity.
We talked a lot of the time, and I learned. I extracted every last piece of useful information from my gent like a sponge soaking up moisture until I was sodden with knowledge. I scoured his extensive library, I carefully copied his list of venerable contacts and I steeped myself in the way to success with every discussion, every conversation, every piece of advice he offered. Alongside that I worked assiduously and determinedly at simultaneously achieving success at school and keeping up my liaisons that paid Jaggers his cut so he didn’t become suspicious of how I was really spending my time. I fragmented my lives as Lennox had advised me to. The home remained the place of discontented disappointment and discomfort, school became the route to opportunity and my gent was the stepping stone to success. I knew I would achieve it when he admitted to me he regarded me more as a son than a courtesan. We laughed together at the allusion, even though it was true, but I knew my ultimate goal was in my sights. When he became sickly it was apparent his health was failing. Shortly before my sixteenth birthday in October, I guessed he wouldn’t last out the winter and made my move.
We talked about aspirations and dreams one evening after I wheeled him outside in the bath chair he’d taken to using most of the time. As one of the oldest boys in the home now – and with Jaggers now gone, life had become more relaxed there. Curfew – since I was visiting such an eminent member of the local community – was extended to nine o’clock for me. The night sky was unusually clear and the stars in it pierced its obsidian depths like tiny diamonds lying on black velvet.
‘What’s your bright star of a dream, Kenny?’ he asked. ‘You’ve never really said, but I believe you have one.’
‘The Bar, sir.’
‘Oh.’ He was silent for a while before asking, ‘but how will you get there, with no money to help you through university?’
‘You, sir.’
He didn’t answer, and we remained looking companionably up at the stars for a while. Eventually he asked quietly, ‘Blackmail?’
‘Gratitude.’
‘Yes, I suppose you’re right.’
He died three months later without saying anything more about the conversation, but he left me fifty thousand pounds in his will on the proviso I did what I’d said I told him I wanted to, but never disclosed where I’d got the money from. It was a non-repayable ‘debt’ in gratitude for my intelligent company and care in his ailing years. There were conditions to it, but it was unlikely they’d ever come into play, until now. At the time it was a fortune – and my escape. He was a High Court Judge.
Atticus, my hero, was within my reach, and I had kept that fragmented life to this day – my profession and my respectable wife in the open, and my early years, with all their attendant dishonour and shame safely tucked away only in the depths of my memories. Curse Margaret for somehow finding his name and adding it to her list. Now the complicated other conditions would kick in if his name slipped off the list and into the papers. The ‘debt’ which was not repayable unless his name was dragged through the dirt, along with Jaggers’ little arrangements, would become immediately recoverable – with compound interest over thirty-three years or more. I wondered if Margaret had dug that up too, and if so why she’d so wanted to risk my ruin.
9: Solomon’s Wisdom
‘Sorry. I can’t help after all. Too messy – and I’m not sure we would win, given the facts. He’s better off out of that kind of family background anyway – father a thief and mother a prostitute. He’s probably as guilty as hell too.’
‘I thought you were meant to be impartial – just?’
‘Only in court. Privately my opinions are my own. I don’t have to like the people I defend – or their way of life, I just have to do my job well, but I also have the luxury of being able to choose what job I do.’ We squared up to a fight across the graffitied interview room table, exhortations to ‘kill the pigs’ and ‘screw you’ carved laboriously into its battered top. Danny was outside in the charge of the WPC allocated to assist.
‘So much for the knight of the people the papers are calling you,’ she threw back angrily. ‘It’s all show isn’t it – Lawrence Juste – just planning on getting to the top, regardless of who he treads on to get there. You saw there was something not right there too – didn’t you? What was it? Was it the name? You recognised it, didn’t you? And you know what you’ve just said isn’t true. He’s not as guilty as hell. Someone else is though and you think you know who.’
‘That’s not true. There are plenty of reasons why I can’t continue – my recent widowhood being one of them, since you so kindly keep reminding me of it.’ She ignored the dig and continued her own attack.
‘You promised him you’d get him off.’
‘Well, sometimes promises have to be broken if they are beyond one’s reach.’ I shuffled the papers together and prepared to leave. The safest option given the way things were going – as far removed as possible from this disturbingly challenging woman, the memories the boy raked up and the dangerous link to a less salubrious family tree he’d just implied. She leant across the table and grabbed my arm. It was so sudden I almost lost my balance. My head swam before I steadied myself. Win and Margaret and Kat became a mêlée of disjointed emotions as disorientating as the sudden dizziness, heat, exhaustion and Kat’s proximity caused. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to kiss her – and the worst. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t respond either. I drew away, unsure what to do next.
‘Just because I’m black, it doesn’t mean I’m cheap,’ she said.
‘I never implied I thought so, did I?’
‘No. But you think you can take advantage of me because Danny said I fancy you.’
‘Kat ...’ I stumbled over what to say, unsure what happened in situations like this. I’d never been here before – wasn’t even sure what or where here was. With Margaret it had been a transaction – profitable on both sides. This was far more ambiguous and probably very unwise. I never took risks like this.
‘Jasmine to you.’ Unexpectedly she kissed me back and I wanted to consume her, suck her into me and devour her like a carnivorous plant would suck the juices from the curious insect landing unwittingly on its trip wire. My stomach flipped and my chest followed, leaving my head pounding with the blood-beat of desire – so completely different to the clinically neat ten minute pump and thrust routine of marriage and the feeling I’d missed something important I should know about. I felt exposed by my raw reaction. If this was lust in its purest form, what would it feel like to be in love as well as in lust? The possibility was electrifying. When we finally drew apart I knew from the opaque film of bewilderment across her eyes that she wondered if it might be more than mere lust too. Then reality caught up with me. I cursed myself for the moment of weakness.
‘That was stupid of me. I’m sorry. I have a reputation to uphold. I shouldn’t have done that.’
‘Thanks.’ She pulled away angrily. ‘I wouldn’t want to compromise your respectability with a little black slut.’
‘Kat, I didn’t mean it like that – for God’s sake, don’t be ridiculous. I was representing Danny and you’re his social worker. The papers would have a field day. This isn’t the time to become embroiled in an affair.’
‘Oh, thanks again – I’d only be worthy of an affair then?’
‘No, that wasn’t what I meant either, but anything more serious would require commitment and for me to make important decisions about my future.’
‘It would for me too. What makes you think you are so perfect? You’re twenty years older than me – an old man.’ Margaret had been younger than me too, but we’d never provoked each other to insults – or passion. I let her pace and rage at me until the storm wore itself out and she sat down miserably on the other side of the room to me.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that – you’re not old at all, just olde
r than me. I was angry.’ The apology both clarified and complicated the situation for me. I wanted to burst out laughing but knew it would merely re-ignite the argument so I kept the wildly ridiculous realisation to myself but asked her the crux of it.
‘If I’m such an arrogant self-serving bastard and you’re so angry with me, why are you still here?’
‘I need to persuade you to defend Danny. It’s my job. I have to do it.’
‘Not in this room, right at this moment, you don’t.’
‘Are you telling me to leave?’
‘No, I’m asking you the same question I asked Danny. Why are you so angry?’ She considered, tracing the insults scrawled onto the table top.
‘Seems like we both have a chip on our shoulder.’ She laughed ruefully, looking boldly back at me.
‘I guess you’re right.’
She moved away from the table and stood by the door. ‘And a past.’
I looked quizzically at her. ‘Meaning?’
She studied me from her position by the door, almost leaving, but yet not quite able to. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me. I’m not usually so volatile. Shall we start again?’
‘Are chips repairable?’
‘Sometimes – fillable – or can be sandpapered smooth, I suppose.’
She brushed an imaginary something from her shoulder, and laughed – a staccato burst of self-deprecation.
‘Then shall we declare a truce before we rough each other up too much and try smoothing things down?’
‘I’m not sure I understand.’
‘We’re different sides of the same problem at the moment – and Danny is the epicentre. You’re right. There is probably more to this than meets the eye, but at the moment my world is so topsy-turvy I don’t know if I can function upside down or back to front. Really, Danny may be better off with someone else defending him, regardless of what you think. My guess is this case isn’t going to be solved quickly – or cleanly. We’ll both be fodder for the press – but me particularly, and therefore we have to be professional about this.’
