The Closed Circle
Page 37
When they left and walked to the nearest café she wondered whether to take his arm but decided that would be too forward.
They sat opposite each other at a formica-topped table and ordered two cappuccinos. “Frothy coffees,” Gibbs called them. It was getting on for four o’clock and outside the light was starting to fade. Rain flung itself angrily against the café windows.
Claire had chosen this table herself. It was in a tight corner of the café, and Gibbs was sitting with his back against the wall. To get out, he would have to squeeze past her. If she pushed the table further towards him, he would be boxed in completely. He was trapped, in effect. Which meant that her moment of opportunity was now presenting itself, and the confrontation could not be put off for much longer.
She could tell that Gibbs, too, was getting anxious to move things forward. He looked at his watch and said, “After we’ve had these you should really come back to my flat. We could watch television or something. I’ve a pack of cards.”
Claire nodded, non-commitally.
“What time d’you think you’ll be going to see your sister?”
“Well, actually . . .” She looked him in the eye, and gave a shamefaced sort of smile. “The thing is, Victor—I wasn’t telling the truth about that.”
He stared back at her blankly. “Your sister doesn’t live here?”
“I don’t have a sister,” said Claire, in a quiet voice. “My sister’s dead.”
“Oh.” Clearly, he had no idea what to make of this. “I’m sorry to hear that, Claire.”
“At least . . . I’m pretty sure she’s dead. She disappeared a long time ago. Almost thirty years. I never heard from her again.”
Gibbs was watching her carefully, perhaps beginning to think that she was deranged. “Well then,” he said. “So . . . so what are you doing in Cromer? You told me it was your sister you came to visit.”
“Do you mind if we talk about her for a minute?”
“No, no. Of course not. Whatever you want.” He shifted in his chair— suddenly noticing, at some subconscious level, that he was hemmed in by the table. His whole manner was starting to change.
“Actually, Victor,” she said, “I’ve got a feeling you may have known her.”
“Known her?” He laughed. “What are you on about? You and I only met a couple of hours ago.”
“I’ve got a letter here,” said Claire; and she took a folded piece of paper from her handbag. It was a colour photocopy of the original, the best her local library could provide. “It’s the last letter my sister ever wrote to her parents. Would you like to have a look at it?”
Gibbs took the letter from her and spread it open on the table. He looked down at it, elbows apart, resting his chin on his hands. He stayed that way for a long time. He didn’t move, didn’t look up. Claire waited for him to say something. She was conscious of a murmured conversation at the table behind her, and the periodic noisy spluttering of the cappuccino machine.
Finally Gibbs looked up, and slid the letter back to her. His expression gave nothing away, but his face had lost some of its blood, now, and there was the slightest of tremors in his hand.
“What do you make of that?” Claire asked, when there was even more silence between them.
Gibbs shrugged. “What’s it to do with me? I don’t bother much with other people’s business.”
“This is your business,” said Claire. And added: “I think you wrote that letter.”
After a second or two, Gibbs tried to get up. “I think you must be potty,” he said. But his legs were trapped by the edge of the table. “Let me out, will you?”
“Sit down, Victor. We’re going to talk about this.”
“There’s nothing to bloody talk about!” he said, raising his voice. “I’ve never met you or your bloody sister and I reckon you must be mental or something. I reckon you belong in a mental home.”
“I’ve got another letter,” Claire told him. “A letter you wrote to Bill Anderton.”
For a moment that wrongfooted him, and he sat down again, just long enough for her to say: “You remember that name, don’t you? And I can prove they’re from the same person. They were written on the same typewriter.”
Gibbs tried to get up one more time, pressing with more force than ever against the table’s edge. “I’ve never heard of him,” he hissed. “You’ve got the wrong bloke.”
“Sit down, you lying bastard,” Claire heard herself saying. And all at once, she was the one whose whole body was shaking, whose voice was out of control, who felt her grip on the situation beginning to slip away. She was terrified, now, by the look of levelled hatred on his face. “Please sit down. Please. I’m not going to go to the police or anything like that. I haven’t come here to hunt you down.”
“Then what the fucking hell have you come here for?”
He was pushing the table up against her until it hurt. She could feel the sharp edge of it digging into her belly.
“Stop that!” she shouted. “Stop!” Furious with herself, she realized that tears were welling up in her eyes. “I just want to know, Victor. I just want to know what happened to my sister. I was just a girl. She was twenty-one. I just want to know.”
He glared at her for the last time, the malevolence concentrated, unbending.
“Well you won’t get it from me,” he said, and on the last word he gave the table such a powerful shove that Claire was thrown backwards, spinning off her seat, colliding at first with the woman sitting behind her and then ending up sprawled on the floor. Gibbs pushed his way out from the corner and stepped over her. As he did so a mug flew off the table and lukewarm coffee was thrown into Claire’s face, down the front of her raincoat, on to her hands. Gibbs rushed onwards and was out of the café in an instant. The other customers looked on. Someone came over and pulled Claire to her feet. She was sobbing.
“Did he hurt you, the rotten bastard?” a man was saying.
The girl from behind the counter sat Claire down in a chair and began cleaning up her coat with kitchen towel.
“Don’t cry,” she repeated, over and over. “Don’t cry. A little sod like that isn’t worth it.”
The town was cloaked in darkness. Claire sat hunched on the seafront, her limbs aching with the cold, her body numbed from sitting on the same concrete bench for more than an hour. Behind her, on the main road, occasional cars swished past wetly. Ahead of her, a few yards away across the beach, the ocean rolled in as it always would, a regular, monotonous whisper of waves against shingle. There was a bruise on Claire’s cheek, just beneath her left eye, where she had caught it against a chair as she fell to the ground. She touched it now, exploring it with her fingers, and winced at the raw tenderness. A wilder than usual gust of wind blew in from the sea and set her shivering again: she would need to drink something hot before she went back to the car. Another five-hour drive lay ahead of her, in the darkness this time. And she was so tired. Maybe she should find a hotel to check into: but the prospect was too depressing. She knew what it would be like: tea bags and sachets of instant coffee on a bedside tray, a battered old portable TV, the ghosts of a thousand previous guests. She should drive home. The long journey would do her good, take her mind off things.
But she didn’t move. Something held her to this bench, in spite of the cold, in spite of the loathing for this town that had been building up inside her. She continued to sit there, no longer crying, no longer thinking, no longer even hearing the changeless background noise of the waves and the cars. Far out to sea, deep in the cloudy blackness, mysterious lights were winking. And meanwhile, Claire was paralysed. Freezing cold and soaked to the skin, she couldn’t imagine what it would take to make her leave this spot.
Some minutes later—she couldn’t have said when, the passing of time had become unmeasurable, meaningless—she heard footsteps approaching, and then the voice of a man addressing her. He said: “You’ll catch your death, sitting there.”
Claire glanced up. It was Victor G
ibbs. The mist and the rain made him look scrawny and bedraggled. She turned away again.
Uninvited, he sat down beside her. He leaned forward and was silent at first.
“You’ve got some of the look of her,” Gibbs said, finally. “I should have noticed that, the first time I saw you.”
Without moving, her voice almost toneless, Claire said: “You remember what my sister looked like?”
“Oh, yes. I remember her, well enough.”
Claire shifted on the bench, moving an inch or two further away from him. She pulled her raincoat up around her throat.
“I don’t know much,” Gibbs said hoarsely, after a long pause. “What I know, I’ll tell you.”
To all outward appearances, Claire made no response. But she had stiffened. Her whole body was rigid with expectation.
“There was a guy in the factory,” Gibbs began. “A kind of a friend of mine. Name of Roy Slater. We didn’t work together or anything. I was in the accounts department, he was on the shop floor. But we got to know each other, I forget how. I think it may have been at some kind of political meeting. We had a few things in common like that. We saw eye-to-eye, politically.”
“I read about him in Bill Anderton’s files,” said Claire, flatly, distantly. “He was a fascist, wasn’t he?”
“Times were different then,” said Gibbs. “You had more freedom to say what you thought. Anyway. I won’t deny that Slater was a villain. So was I, in those days. I stole some money out of a charity committee account—forged some signatures, I was pretty good at it, still am as a matter of fact—and ended up getting the push. Got caught doing the same thing with another firm a few years later and did some time for it, then. That pulled me up sharp. I was pretty straight after that.”
He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and offered Claire one. She shook her head.
“I don’t think Slater had anything against your sister. I don’t know if he even knew who she was. She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She got caught up in events.
“This was how it went. You remember the Birmingham pub bombings? When the IRA blew up those two pubs in the middle of town and there were loads of people killed? Well, there was a bad atmosphere after that. All over the city, but in the factory as well. A lot of anti-Irish feeling. A hell of a lot. Not just things being said, but . . . things being done. There were Micks being beaten up all over the place. There’d been anti-Irish stuff going on in the factory before, but this was in a different league. And Slater was always prepared to go one better than anyone else. He hated the Micks. Fucking hated them. I suppose it was only a matter of time before he did something about it.
“Well, it could only have been a week or so after the bombings, when they picked on someone. There was this block where the blokes used to shower off after the shift, and they took this lad there—he was only a young lad, mid-twenties maybe—and three or four of them dragged him off to this block, with Slater in tow, and they gave him a hell of a going-over. They never meant just to rough him up, those guys, that was never the plan. They meant to kill him. And that’s what they did. Cracked him over the head with a hammer or something and finished the poor fucker off. It was a professional piece of work. They did a good job of making it look like an accident. That was how it was reported in the papers a few days later.”
“Jim Corrigan,” said Claire suddenly—as a name slipped back into her consciousness after an absence of more than twenty-five years.
“What?”
“I read about it. That was his name. It was in our school magazine.” She remembered the day clearly now. She had been in the old Ikon Gallery in John Bright Street, looking through back issues of The Bill Board, when she had come across this story. While she was reading it, she had spied on Phil’s mother as she enjoyed a surreptitious date with Miles Plumb the art teacher. “I remember thinking at the time what a terrible story it was. He had a wife and a kid. They said that a big piece of machinery had fallen on him.”
“Most probably, yeah. That was the one.”
Gibbs fell silent. In the distance came the sudden boom of a ship’s foghorn.
“I don’t get it,” Claire said at last. “Where does Miriam fit into this story?”
“Like I said,” Gibbs continued, “she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was there, when they did it, you see. She was there in the shower block. She saw the whole bloody thing.” He drew on his cigarette, and tapped ash on to the pavement. “God knows what she was doing there. That I never did understand.”
Claire knew. “She would have gone there to meet Bill,” she said. “It was one of the places they used to meet.” She sat back and closed her eyes, trying to remember every detail, everything that might turn out to be a clue. Had her sister’s relationship with Bill reached a crisis by then? She thought it probably had. “So what happened next?”
“That,” said Gibbs, “I don’t know. I think Slater must have had a word with her and told her to keep her mouth shut. But that wasn’t good enough for him. She was a witness to what they’d done, so somebody had to get rid of her. Slater told me afterwards that he’d done it himself. He was always a boastful little swine, but I think he was telling the truth. I believe she tried to go straight home and he followed her but . . . well, I don’t know where he did it, exactly. He told me he’d left her by a reservoir. Then later that night he came back and tied weights to the body and chucked her in.”
“And then,” said Claire, her voice shaking, “then he asked you to write that letter? And you did it?”
Gibbs stubbed out his cigarette and sat for what seemed like an age, staring impassively out to sea. At last he said, very slowly, slurring the words: “I wished your sister ill. Don’t ask me why. But I did.”
He had no more to say. And Claire had nothing more to ask him. After a few more minutes he rose to his feet stiffly.
“There. Now I’ve told you. Go to the police if you want, I don’t care any more.”
He turned and walked away. Claire heard his footsteps receding. She did not watch him go.
Twenty minutes later, when she had slowly absorbed everything that Victor Gibbs had told her, Claire realized that there was another question she wanted to ask: what had happened to Roy Slater? Was he still alive? She hurried round to Gibbs’s flat, half-running, with a premonition, already, that she was going to be too late. When she arrived, she found the front door open and his neighbour from the ground-floor flat standing in the hallway.
“I don’t know what you said to him,” the woman said. “But he’s gone. Drove off a few minutes ago, with two suitcases. He’s taken everything he owns.” She started sorting through a pile of free newspapers on the hall table, throwing most of them into a black bin liner. “No great loss,” she added, sourly. “He hadn’t paid his rent for months anyway.”
5
One evening, many years later, when Philip was paying a visit to Claire and Stefano in Lucca, she told him about the events of that day, and said: “And then, when I was driving home, I started to think about the pub bombings and how they’d messed up Lois’s life, of course, because of what happened to her when she was in The Tavern in the Town with Malcolm that night, but not just hers, how they’d messed up Miriam’s, as well, indirectly, because of what she saw happening at Longbridge and what that made them do to her, and how that means that they also messed up my life, because for years I couldn’t really think straight or get on with anything because of wondering what had happened to Miriam, and in a way how they’d also messed up Patrick’s, because he ended up obsessing over Miriam too, to compensate for something, to compensate for the pain we’d put him through by splitting up when he was little. And I started thinking of all the other families, all the other people, whose lives must have been touched by that event, and how you could go mad trying to trace the thing back to its source, trying to point the finger of blame at someone, you know, going right back to the beginnings of the Irish problem until you end u
p saying something like, Is Oliver Cromwell to blame for the fact that Lois had to spend so many years in hospital? Or is he to blame for the fact that Miriam was killed? And in a way, you know, although it’s a terrible thing to say, the Birmingham bombing was a small atrocity if you look at it statistically, compared to Lockerbie, or compared to the Bali bombings, or compared to September the eleventh, or compared to the number of civilians who died in the 2003 Iraq war. So what would happen if you tried to explain all those deaths, all those messed-up lives, tried to trace those events back to the source? Would you go mad? I mean, is it a mad thing to try and do, or is it really the only sane thing to try and do, to face up to the fact that in big ways and small ways perfectly ordinary, perfectly innocent people continually have their lives fucked up by forces outside their control, whether they’re historical events or just the shitty luck of stepping outside your house on the day a drunk driver goes past at seventy miles an hour, but even then you can start blaming the culture, the culture that’s told him it’s cool to drive at seventy miles an hour or the culture that’s turned him into an alcoholic, and like I said maybe that’s the sane thing to try and do, to stop shrugging our shoulders and just saying ‘Life is random’ or ‘These things happen,’ because when you get right down to it everything has a cause. Everything that one human being does to another is the result of a human decision that’s been taken some time in the past, either by that person or by somebody else, twenty or thirty or two hundred or two thousand years ago or maybe just last Wednesday.”
And Philip said: “Are you pissed, or something, Claire? Because I’ve never heard you talk so much rubbish.”
To which Claire said: “I have drunk about two-thirds of this very excellent bottle of Bardolino in the last half hour, that’s true.”