The Closed Circle

by Jonathan Coe

  The next document Claire found did not answer that question. But it gave her such a shock that, after her first glance at it, she pushed back her seat with a crash that shattered the silence of the library, and rushed outside to stand on the steps for a few minutes, gasping for breath, unmindful of the rain that drizzled thinly on to her hair and began to trickle down her neck in tiny streams.

  It was a letter from Victor Gibbs to Bill Anderton. A letter about Miriam. But it wasn’t the content of the letter that had shocked her. It wasn’t what it said. It was the way it had been typed.

  Claire thought about photocopying the letter; but she didn’t want to have a photocopy. She wanted to have the letter itself. So she stole it. She had no scruple about this at all. If it righfully belonged to anyone, it belonged to her. She folded it and placed it in her handbag and carried it out of the library without anybody noticing. She knew that it was the right thing to do.

  When she arrived home that afternoon, she laid the letter out on the kitchen table and read it again. These were the words that Victor Gibbs had typed to Bill Anderton nearly three decades ago:

  Dear Brother Anderton,

  I am writing to complain to you about the work of Miss Newman in her capacity as Charity Committee Secretary.

  Miss Newman is not a good Secretary. She does not perform her duties well.

  There is a lack of attention on the part of Miss Newman. At meetings of the Charity Committee, you can often see her attention wandering. I sometimes think she has other things on her mind than performing her duties as Secretary. I would prefer not to say what these other things might be.

  I have made many important remarks, and addressed many observations, which have not been recorded in the minutes of the Charity Committee, due to Miss Newman. This is true of other Committee Members, but especially of me. I think she is discharging her duties with total inefficiency.

  I draw this matter to your urgent attention, Brother Anderton, and personally suggest that Miss Newman be removed as Secretary of the Charity Committee forthwith. Whether or not she continues in the Design Typing Pool is of course at the firm’s discretion. But I do not think she is a good typist either.

  Yours fraternally,

  Victor Gibbs.

  After reading it one more time, Claire ran upstairs, and unlocked the desk in the spare bedroom where she kept all her most precious souvenirs of Miriam. She took out the most precious of all—the letter her parents had received early in December, 1974, two weeks after her sister had disappeared—the last news they had ever heard of her—and ran back downstairs with it. She placed it on the kitchen table, next to the letter from Victor Gibbs. It said:

  Dear Mum and Dad,

  This letter is to tell you that I have left home and will not be coming back. I have found a man and I have gone to live with him and I am very happy. I am expecting his baby and will probably have it.

  Please do not try to look for me.

  Your loving daughter.

  It was signed by Miriam herself—or so, until today, Claire had always believed. But hadn’t Victor Gibbs proved himself to be an expert forger of signatures? She could only speculate about that, for now; and in the meantime, there was no need to speculate about the letters themselves. They both had the same typographical oddity—a defective letter “k” that fell slightly above the line. They must have been typed on the same typewriter.

  What did this mean? That Miriam’s final letter was a forgery? Or that she had still been alive, two weeks after she vanished, and had been with Victor Gibbs when she wrote it?

  Either way, Claire was going to have to find him.

  1

  Benjamin’s neighbour, Munir, was a vocal opponent of the war. The war hadn’t started yet, but everybody talked as though it was inevitable, and you were either for it or against it. Actually, almost everybody seemed to be against it, except for the Americans, Tony Blair, most of his cabinet, most of his MPs, and the Conservatives. Everybody else thought that it was a disastrous idea, and could not understand why it was suddenly being talked about as if it was inevitable.

  The only person who didn’t seem to have a definite opinion about the war, either for or against, was Paul Trotter. This was ironic, because he was regularly being paid large sums of money, by several of the national newspapers, to express his opinion about it. The first of these pieces, headed “My Grave Doubts over War with Iraq,” had appeared in the Guardian in November. It was followed by similar pieces for the Times, the Telegraph and the Independent, all expressing further doubts, of equal gravity, over the moral justification for the war, its legality, and its political wisdom. These articles would find Paul wrestling with his conscience in language of the most anguished sort, while somehow managing to stop short of actually telling his readers the very thing that they wanted to know, viz., whether he thought that the war was a good idea or not. He was careful not to include any attacks on Tony Blair himself, or to portray him as anything other than a man of principle and a potentially fine war leader. It had also not gone unnoticed, by most commentators (including Doug Anderton) that on the two occasions so far when there had been a vote on this subject in the House of Commons, Paul had done the bidding of the party whips and voted with the government. And yet his doubts, it would seem, remained grave. The reading public was never allowed to forget this fact.

  “Have you seen this?” said Munir, walking through the open doorway into Benjamin’s flat one evening early in December. He waved a copy of that day’s Telegraph, which had called Paul back for a repeat performance. “Your brother is sitting on the fence again. I don’t know how he gets away with it. It’s a joke.”

  “I’m on the phone, Munir,” Benjamin said, covering the mouthpiece. “It’s not a good time.”

  “That’s all right,” said Munir, sitting himself down on the sofa, the cheapest and most uncomfortable in the Ikea range. “I can wait.”

  Benjamin sighed and walked through into his bedroom. He liked his neighbour and didn’t want to antagonize him. A middle-aged Pakistani who worked as an informations officer for the City Council, Munir—like Benjamin—was single, and had got into the habit of coming upstairs from the ground floor flat most evenings to drink tea and to discuss politics, of which he was an avid follower. Sometimes the two of them would also sit and watch television together: Munir didn’t own a set—claiming that British television was corrupting and decadent—which meant that he frequently had to come and watch Benjamin’s for hours at a time. Theirs were the only flats in this small terraced house (where Benjamin had been living now for eight months) and the two men had come to value each other’s company.

  “Sorry about that, Susan,” Benjamin now murmured into the telephone, closing the bedroom door behind him.

  “That’s all right—I’d better go now anyway,” Susan said. “I haven’t given the girls their bath yet and it’s nearly eight. Thanks for listening, anyway, Ben. You must get sick of this sad old cow calling you every night.”

  “You’re not sad, you’re not a cow, and no way are you old,” Benjamin insisted.

  Susan laughed at the other end of the line. “Yeah, I know—it’s just how your brother makes me feel, sometimes.”

  “He’s just busy, Susan. I know you’ve heard that before—from me and everybody else, probably—but I’m sure that’s what it is.”

  He hung up and went back into the living room.

  “Hi, Munir. I was just going out, actually.”

  “Oh. Oh well, never mind. I was just hoping for a little chat. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind if I stayed and watched the news for half an hour?”

  “No problem,” said Benjamin, scooping up his keys and wriggling into his winter coat. “Just don’t go flicking channels. I know how easily shocked you are.”

  This advice failed to elicit a smile. Munir didn’t like being teased. Looking around for the remote control, he asked:

  “Was that Susan on the telephone again?”

  “Yes,” said B
enjamin, buttoning his coat.

  “That’s a bad situation,” said Munir. “Your brother is neglecting her. She’s going to have an affair if he’s not careful.”

  “I don’t think she’s got the time or the inclination, to be honest,” Benjamin answered. “Not with two little kids running around. All she wants is a bit of grown-up conversation every now and again.”

  Munir shook his head disapprovingly and turned on the television. Within a few seconds he was absorbed in the recital of closing headlines on Channel 4 News, and might almost have forgotten that Benjamin was there. Benjamin smiled and made his way downstairs, out into the freezing streets of Moseley to wait for a 50A bus into town.

  Philip was late, but Steve Richards was already waiting for Benjamin at The Glass and Bottle, a pint of lager on the table before him. It was the third time they had all met up since Steve and his family had moved back to Birmingham. The arrangement had quickly become formalized, and they now met on the second Thursday of every month. It was something they all looked forward to.

  “I did something really stupid a couple of weeks ago,” Steve said, returning from the bar with a Guinness for Benjamin. “I saw Valerie again.”

  “Valerie?” said Benjamin. “Wow. That’s going back a bit, isn’t it? How did you find her?”

  “FriendsReunited, of course.”

  They touched glasses, and Benjamin drank deeply of the black, creamy liquid.

  “I don’t know . . .” Steve began. “It was one of those things where you know you shouldn’t be doing it, but you can’t stop yourself. Each step seems innocent enough at the time, but it takes you further down the path. The worst thing, when I look back at it, is how many times I lied to Kate. Lied to her for no reason at all, really. Just think about it: I was upstairs on the computer one evening, looking at FriendsReunited, when I’d told her that I’d got lots of work to do—that was lie number one. Then I got an email from Val a couple of days later, and I was reading it when Kate came into the room, so I deleted it straight away and told her it was spam—lie number two. Then I told Kate I was going out for a meal with some of the new guys from work— lie number three. Then, when I got home, she was asking me questions about them, and I had to make everything up: their names, their life histories, all the things we were supposed to have talked about—lies number four to twenty-seven. And what was the point? Me and Valerie just sat in a pub for an hour and a half and told each other how happily married we were and how much we loved our partners. And for that, I had to deceive my wife? Crazy. Crazy. A complete waste of time.”

  “You’re not going to see her again?”

  “I shouldn’t think so.”

  Benjamin sipped his Guinness, and thought about those secret meetings with Malvina which had started three years ago, and which had spelled the beginning of the end of his marriage. But he knew that Steve’s situation was different.

  “Look,” he said, “I wouldn’t beat yourself up about this. I know what Valerie meant to you. She was the first one, wasn’t she? Stuff like that never goes away, it never leaves you. So if you get the chance—or you can give yourself the chance—to revisit that place, and take a look at it, and realize that you don’t belong there any more, no one’s going to blame you for doing that. You need closure. Everybody needs closure. That’s what it’s all about, I reckon.”

  “What about you and Cicely? Have you got closure on that one?”

  Benjamin thought long and hard before answering. “Put it this way,” he said at last. “I don’t think about it any more.”

  “That’s not quite the same thing.”

  But Benjamin wasn’t to be drawn any further on that subject. Instead, he started asking Steve about his move to Birmingham: how the family were settling into their new home, whether Kate was starting to feel comfortable yet in this unfamiliar city, whether the girls liked their new school. He asked how it felt to return to the city of his birth, and Steve said: “You know what, Ben? It feels so good to be back in Birmingham. That’s all I can say. Don’t ask me why, but it feels so . . . damn . . . good.” They touched glasses again, and Steve started telling him how sad it had been to leave behind that little outfit in Telford, whose bosses had given him so much leeway to pursue his research. But he didn’t regret the decision. You had to move onwards and upwards. The firm he had now joined, Meniscus Plastics, had a large and thriving R&D department, with excellent lab facilities, housed in premises just outside Solihull. And it also had a new, dynamic CEO, appointed only last year, who promised to take the company on to even bigger and better things. All in all, the future had never looked brighter.

  Philip arrived just after half past nine, straight off the London train, his face flushed with excitement. He had his briefcase with him, and insisted on sitting with it perched on his lap, as if the contents were unusually precious and he was afraid that somebody would steal it if he laid it on the floor.

  “There was something I wanted to ask you, Steve,” he said, having downed most of his first pint of lager in one thirsty draught. “Do you still have that St. Christopher’s medal? The one that Valerie gave you.”

  Benjamin and Steve exchanged surprised, rather conspiratorial glances.

  “We were talking about her before you arrived,” Benjamin explained. “We’ve been going back in time a bit this evening.”

  “Sure, I’ve still got it,” said Steve. “Stashed away in a drawer somewhere. It’s not the kind of thing you parade in front of your wife and kids. Why do you ask?”

  “Because I’ve been thinking about what happened at school. When we all thought Culpepper must have pinched it, to put you off your stroke on sports day.”

  “Well, he probably did. He was a nasty piece of work, wasn’t he?”

  The three of them drank in silence for a moment. Both Steve and Benjamin were waiting to see where this was leading. Eventually, Philip said:

  “Do you remember what happened the year after that?”

  “When do you mean?”

  “When we were doing our A-levels.”

  “Of course I do. The bastard drugged me. Made me drink something just before my physics exam.”

  “That’s right. We were all locked in a room together. Me, you . . . Doug . . . Anyone else that you can remember?”

  Steve shook his head. “It was years ago, wasn’t it? I can’t even remember the names of half of those kids.” He made for his glass, but then paused in mid-sip. “Oh yeah—Sean was there, I remember that. Sean Harding.”

  “Exactly.” Philip leaned forward. “Now think about this, Steve. Remember what happened. Culpepper found your medal in the lost property box, and we all crowded round to have a look at it. And we always assumed he’d done that on purpose, to create a diversion, so he could spike your drink. Right? But think about what happened after that.”

  Steve’s expression was blank. “No. It’s gone.”

  “Sean played one of his jokes. Remember? He got one of the little kids to throw a piece of paper through the window. You and Culpepper both thought it was the exam paper for that afternoon, and you had a fight over it. A real scuffle on the floor. And of course it wasn’t. Sean had set up the whole thing, and while you were scrapping about it he just sat there, with this big grin on his face. Tapping away on the side of his tea cup, with—”

  “With that ring of his! The signet ring. Yeah, I remember now.” But he didn’t smile at the recollection of it. He had fallen out of love with Harding’s mischief-making long before most of the other pupils at King William’s. He had never really forgiven him for playing the part of a National Front spokesman, even as a joke. “What about it, anyway?”

  “Well,” said Philip, “supposing that was the real diversion? Supposing Culpepper had nothing to do with it?”

  “What—and Sean was the one who doped me up? Why would he want to do that?”

  “OK.” Philip clicked open his briefcase, and took out a manila envelope, A4 size. He put it on the table between them. “I�
�m going to show you something now. It’s to do with the CD you gave me.”

  He took two black and white photographs out of the envelope, and pushed the first one forward for Steve’s inspection—without revealing the second, which lay hidden beneath it.

  “There’s a magazine down in London that keeps tabs on the activities of the far right. When I was thinking of doing that book, they gave me a lot of help. Offered to let me have copies of all these pictures. I never took them up on it, but then Benjamin found this thing down in Dorset—did he tell you about that?”

  Steve shook his head.

  “Well, he can explain later . . . Anyway, it set me thinking. I thought I’d go down and have another look. That’s where I’ve been today. Now: what do you make of this?”

  The picture showed four skinheads, standing around a desk in some anonymous, sparsely furnished office, staring at the camera with dead eyes, as if they were challenging it to a fight. At the desk sat an overweight man in T-shirt and bomber jacket, leering cheesily and brandishing a pen.

  “Who are these guys?” Steve asked.

  “These are the four talented musicians in question. Unrepentant—the original line-up, now sadly defunct. And this is Andy Watson, one-time owner of the fine independent record label, Albion Resurgens—currently putting himself up for election as a BNP councillor, somewhere in the East End, I believe. The question is: who’s the sixth man?”

  Steve looked more closely at the picture. “There isn’t anybody else.”

  “Look again.”

  He picked up the photograph and held it just an inch or two from his eyes.

  “I suppose this could be somebody’s arm.”

  “You’ve got it.” Philip took the photograph back, and showed it to Benjamin. “See? Just here. There’s someone else standing on the edge of the picture. He’s leaning against the desk.”

  Philip paused, theatrically, relishing their state of suspense.

  “Who is it?” Steve asked at last.