The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  ‘Any idea where?’

  ‘She was quite a wanderer before I met her. She’d lived in some real dumps with a lot of lowlifes – one of her flatmates turned out to have been a bomber with the IRA.’

  ‘Any names, addresses?’

  ‘A few names but not where she lived.’ Grlscz looked at Healey directly. ‘I’d like to ask you something.’

  ‘Of course,’ Healey said gently.

  ‘Why have you gone to so much trouble over one missing person? I didn’t think the police were generally interested unless there was real reason to suspect something.’

  Healey felt sorry for Grlscz because his question made it clear that their interest was more worrying than their indifference. It made it seem more likely that something had happened to her. It was impossible to answer his question without revealing information that would only make things worse and that in any case he was not in a position to reveal. The explanation that would be reassuring, namely that her father was a policeman and well connected, was not the kind of information it was wise to reveal to the general public who might reasonably feel that this was an improper basis on which to pursue an investigation. Still, given that the first reason for their investigation was, in Healey’s view, a lot of balls, and that Grlscz was obviously not going to complain about privileged treatment, given that his missing girlfriend was the one receiving it, he decided to take a risk. ‘Do you know much about Miss Vaughan’s background?’

  Grlscz sighed. ‘Some. She was pretty evasive about her past. It depended.’

  ‘Did she say much about her parents?’

  ‘They were a pretty sore topic. Why?’ Grlscz could see that Healey was trying to lead him somewhere.

  ‘Did you know that her father was a senior police officer?’

  Grlscz did not answer. Healey turned slightly towards the door. ‘Thank you, Mr Grlscz. We’ll call you in a couple of days, unless we hear anything. Perhaps you could write down any names that might be useful.’ He looked at Roache, who produced a business card. ‘If she contacts you, or you . . .’

  Grlscz nodded.

  The two policemen walked to the door. As he was just about to leave, Healey turned to Grlscz. ‘One more thing. Did she ever mention someone called George Winnicott?’

  ‘Yes. She talked about him often – for her, anyway. He was her godfather. They got on well. He seemed to be the one adult she had a decent relationship with when she was a child.’

  ‘Did they meet often?’

  ‘I don’t think often, but she was secretive about that kind of thing so it’s hard to know. They certainly kept in touch. She told me they met a few weeks ago.’

  ‘I understand she lived with his family for a while as a kind of unofficial nanny.’

  Grlscz smiled. ‘Yes, she mentioned it once. She was funny about how bad she was at the job.’

  Healey nodded. ‘But it all finished quite amicably?’

  Instantly Healey saw that it had not, and that Grlscz realised there was a point to the question and that his answer might lead to an unpleasant experience for someone else. Healey’s was not a job that was likely to lead to a generous view of human nature, but over and over again, even among otherwise profoundly vicious people, he had seen a similar look on the face of a witness: the look of someone who suspected they might be about to get someone else into trouble. ‘I remember her hinting that there was bad blood between her and Winnicott’s wife.’ He added softly, ‘But I don’t know what it was.’

  ‘Well, thank you,’ Healey said, ‘we’ll let you know if we find anything.’ He opened the door. ‘There was one other thing. Your name. We put everything on computers these days and it didn’t bring up a National Insurance number.’ He paused, waiting for Grlscz to offer it. ‘Could you give it to us?’

  Grlscz seemed nonplussed, as if he’d been asked a question he didn’t understand, but then he walked over to his desk and took out a diary.

  ‘YX207616/2.’

  Roache copied it down in his notebook.

  ‘Perhaps you’d better get in touch with the DSS, Mr Grlscz,’ said Healey. ‘You wouldn’t want any problems with your pension.’

  As Healey and Roache waited for the lift, a woman and a girl of about six joined them. The child was dressed in a striped school uniform, clearly that of a private school. He smiled at her. She stared back at him as if he were the kind of man she’d been warned about. The lift arrived and they followed the pair into the grimy cubicle. By now the little girl was in a world of her own, talking earnestly to herself. But this was no fantasy of secret friends, speaking to voices no one else could hear. She was rehearsing her times table. ‘One times three is three,’ she whispered. ‘Two times three is six. Three times three is . . .’

  But she was not the only one whose mind was in another place. Geoffrey Healey had returned to 1963.

  One times seven is seven.

  Two times seven is fourteen.

  Three times seven is twenty-one.

  Four times seven is twenty-eight.

  The teacher sitting on the desk was in her late twenties. To the modern observer the brown ribbed top, the texture of her nyloned legs, the cut of her short skirt and its unpleasing texture would have given her the look, for all that it was the early 1960s, of someone from the remote past. Her shape also seemed to belong to another time. The way her breasts were supported was accentuated by her beating time heavily on the desk to the rhythm of the numbers being chanted by the children. Her upper body, rigidly held in, did not seem to respond in any way.

  ‘. . . Sven svens are forty-nine . . .’ they chanted, suddenly and inexplicably changing the rhythmic pattern: ‘Eight svens are fifty-six.’

  There was a pleasantly boring mood in the room, an atmosphere of security in the repetitious nature of the schoolroom tasks: the children enjoying the irresponsibility of rote, the paintings on the wall of Mum and Dad. The obligation to be the engine of endless creativity was still a few short years away. Single parenthood hovered unseen.

  Quietly an internal door opened and a woman entered. Only part of her face was visible and nothing of her shape, except that she was slim. She had no hips, no breasts, no hair; neither did she have feet. Her eyes were cast down and she moved without sound, only the click of the opening and closing door signalled her presence. The teacher stopped talking and moved to one side as the woman took her place. She had been expecting her. The woman put a pile of blue exercise books down on the table. There was an extra-ordinary calm in her expression, an absence of fear or doubt or unhappiness. The children stood, silent in a way they had not been silent before. There was expectancy here, but it was of an odd kind. All of them, even the inattentive ones who had been whispering or daydreaming throughout the lesson, spoke as if with one voice. ‘Good morning, Sister Grace.’

  She waited, without responding, her eyes moving once from side to side. Then, slowly and slightly, she nodded and they sat. The extraordinary quiet of the children continued.

  The nun took one of the blue exercise books from the top of the pile and smiled. It was an attractive smile, if slightly forbidding in its way because not easily given, and incongruous because of the impossibility of reading anything about her from her appearance. She was encased from head to foot in black, except for the white wimple that enclosed her head, neck and ears, revealing only the middle of her forehead to just below her chin. The hem of her habit brushed the ground.

  The nun opened the exercise book in the middle, and showed the class a picture of a harlequin, and beside it, a carefully written account of its history. This was predictable enough in its childish way, copied neatly out of a book. But her most admiring remarks were for the drawing. She praised not only the care with which it had been coloured but also its vigorous sense of movement. The nun’s strange smile showed the depth and warmth of her admiration for the work – but the girl whose book it was seemed neither pleased nor indifferent; she looked as if she were waiting for the attention to stop.

&nb
sp; The nun walked over and dropped the book on the girl’s desk, then turned to the pile. None was praised in such terms; a few were commended. Most were handed over silently. Although she could be pleased, it was clearly not easy to do so. After about fifteen books, she stopped and looked carefully at the pile, then faced the class. The children sensed something, for the watchful silence seemed to deepen. At no time during the handing out had the expression of the young teacher altered; nor had she taken her eyes from the distant point towards which she had been looking. When the nun spoke again, it was quietly but her face was stern. ‘Every year I look at the work you have done, a practice I have always observed in the fifteen years since I became headmistress here. But,’ she continued softly, ‘never have I seen, and never do I expect to see an exercise book like this.’ She turned and picked up the book on top of the pile. With a sudden movement like an angry bank teller slowly counting notes, she flicked through the pages. In the absolute silence the sound of the pages being turned, harsh, angry, filled the room. She stopped. She looked up, her lips tight together, and stared around the room. Then she held up the book and panned the centre pages around the class for all the children to see. There was a terrible anticipation as the children stared. The girl whose book she had praised did not lift her eyes at all, and some of the others whose books had been returned quickly looked away. As she brought the pages to bear on the desks by the far wall an expression of shock and dread came over the face of a boy in the middle of the row. The colour drained from his cheeks, his eyes opened wider, then everything seemed to stop – his breathing, the movement of his eyes, the hands.

  ‘Geoffrey Healey,’ said the nun. ‘Come here.’

  The boy stood up. Eight or nine years old, he was short compared to the other children but sturdy, even a little fat. His black hair and navy blue sweater, dishevelled and with a small hole in one seam, framed the colourless face. He walked to an adjacent desk and the seated child hurried to let him pass by shunting his seat into his desk. In his desperation to give him space to pass he seemed to have squeezed his stomach so that he was only three or four inches wide. The frightened boy slipped past and walked up the aisle towards the nun who held his book open like a beacon. He came to a stop in front of her, dazed by terror. His face was now completely white.

  The blow, when it came, seemed to arrive from a great distance. With astonishing speed, she had raised one arm behind her head and then turned her body into the movement with the timing and grace of an athlete. It was not a slap. Her open hand took him just above the ear. He staggered back from the force.

  ‘Stand still!’ she screamed. ‘Stand there!’ She raised her arm again as she waited for the boy to move back into position. Slowly he did so, head held away from the direction of her arm. Again she swung it with all her strength; again the boy staggered back from the weight of the blow.

  ‘Don’t you move!’

  The scream made the girl in the desk next to the boy wince. The young teacher blinked but kept her eyes in the distance. There were no tears from the boy but a terrible whimpering sound emerged from somewhere at the back of his throat – a terrible whining of pain and horror. She waited and he moved back into his place. Still she waited. She made a feint with her upraised hand, once, twice and each time it was echoed by the boy moving his head away from the direction of the blow and the holding up of his hand to protect his head. She waited, staring at him. Slowly, the defending hand fell to the sound in the back of his throat, a noise like whooping cough.

  ‘Don’t you move,’ she said, barely audible.

  When the blow came, his head seemed to bounce but he had set his legs wider apart to obey her and he stayed where he was. She hit him again. The noise in his throat was now continuous, exhausted and high pitched, like the grizzle of a two-year-old. She started to point to the book and, page by page, shared the source of her anger with the thirty children. With each new blasphemy, an inept drawing, a clumsy-crossing out, an unmade punctuation mark, she would hit the boy: a blow, then an error pointed out, and then another blow. And throughout, the terrible noise from his throat and the deadly white face. The boy stared ahead, seeing nothing. He seemed to be in a private world in which there was only pain, humiliation and fear. And the woman in front of him defined its beginning and end, its limits in every direction. She could do whatever she wanted, and there was no one to stop her. And she had not finished.

  ‘Come here!’ She turned and walked around the table. She picked up a piece of white chalk from the blackboard and held it out to Geoffrey Healey. He looked at her, stupefied.

  ‘Come here,’ she said quietly. The boy approached and took the chalk, his hand shaking so badly he could barely hold it.

  Again she spoke in a low voice. ‘Write a nine on the board. Go on.’ The boy hesitated then awkwardly scrawled on the blackboard. She looked at the number he was trying to draw neatly. Terror was causing him to lose control of his hands. As he tried to draw the loop of the nine her cheeks darkened and then, slowly spread across her entire face like a stain, as great a contrast with the white of her wimple as the boy’s black hair to his pale face. Her rage, unappeasable, unrestrained, seemed almost ready to spread into her clothes and infect the floor, the wall, the board itself. Again she struck him. Again he fell back. A terrible low moan came from the boy. She looked at the number nine drawn clumsily on the blackboard and turned to the class. ‘Do you see that?’ she asked incredulous, wanting them to share in her inability to understand what was in front of her. Two white spots formed in the middle of her dark red cheeks. She grabbed the boy’s hand and forced him to redraw the nine, guiding his hand with her own until it was nearly identical in shape to the one he had made. Then she took the chalk from his hand and corrected it by adding a slight tail to the loop of the nine. ‘A nine has a tail. It has a tail. Do you understand?’ She drew another tailless nine. ‘Put it in, Geoffrey Healey.’

  An enormous sob broke from the child as he took the chalk and clumsily drew the tail. She looked at what he had done with loathing. She turned to the class, appealing to them: ‘Look at the tail on the nine! Look what Geoffrey Healey has done!’ She hit him again across the face and he began to cry. Too big to roll down his cheeks, the tears fell in large drops onto the dusty floor. His nose started to run and she stared at him, her eyes full of earnest hatred. A sob erupted from deep inside his chest. For a moment there seemed to be a terrible struggle within her, as if her rage threatened to break the very flesh and bones of her body. Then she raised her hand again.

  ‘You all right, sir?’ said Roache, who was standing in the foyer of the flats and looking back insolently into the lift at Healey.

  ‘Oh.’ Healey blinked. ‘Yeah. Miles away.’

  The little girl, still muttering her times table, was walking through the front door.

  Jane Healey sat on the edge of the bath, towels around her head and breasts. The effect she created when naked was striking because her nipples were remarkably large and a dark rose pink. The contrast with her skin produced a riotously erotic effect. In changing rooms at the local swimming pool, even fastidiously heterosexual women were struck by her body or, rather, by its colours, because she was in other ways an average enough shape for a woman in her early forties: bottom large, waistline a little thick. She had nice breasts, and good legs, not long but shapely.

  She smoothed the white foam over her wet shins giving the hairs plenty of time to soften and the blood vessels in her legs a chance to cool down so that she would not bleed too easily. For years she had shaved straight out of the hot water with the result that the bathroom often gave the impression, according to Geoff, that she had been using it to butcher a small, short-haired mammal.

  To shave her pubic hair she put on a pair of white knickers that looked cream-coloured against her skin. She put on a pair of high-heels because they made her taller so it was easier to raise her leg to the sink. She filled it, took off the right shoe and lifted her leg over the edge. She rubbed more fo
am over the hair that had grown down the inside of her thigh and began, head bent low and breasts brushing her raised thigh, to shave as close to the crotch as she could. Her hair fell in a curtain almost touching the water and for five minutes she thought of nothing but what she was doing. It was only when she had finished, had taken off the now soaking knickers and was patting herself dry again that a sudden desolation swept over her. She sat on the edge of the bath and tears large enough to splash rolled down her cheeks and on to her breasts, wetting them then falling on to her stomach and thighs. But despite her best efforts – she was tired of crying, tired of that awful pain in her chest – she could not stop. I don’t want this, she thought. I don’t.

  It was the dog that had destroyed her life. If there had been no dog everything would have been all right. She was not foolish enough to blame her as such – she still petted her and took her for walks – but if it had not been for the dog she would not have known, and as knowing was what had destroyed her life it was straightforwardly true. But for the sake of something that might easily never have happened, her life was in ruins.

  Unusually she had been working at home on a weekday during a long and complicated audit trying to get to the root of the nonsense in the financial records of TLC. Numerous sheets of paper, reports and pages of figures were spread over her desk as she worked on her computer. A couple of hours earlier, she had made herself a cup of tea but she had put it down at the back of the desk and then forgotten about it as she became engrossed in her work. She had gone to the kitchen to make herself lunch and about ten minutes later she heard a crash. Running into the study she found Millie under the desk licking up the puddle of cold tea. She shouted at the dog, which bolted as she aimed a furious swipe at her. Groaning with irritation as the puddle seeped into the pale carpet, she went to get a towel and some water. She started soaking it up as quickly as she could but most of the liquid had fallen down the back of the desk against the wall and was awkward to get at. After a few minutes of sponging and pouring water on the carpet in a desperate and not very successful attempt to get the stain out, she was on the point of deciding that it wasn’t worth the trouble. The stain wouldn’t be seen because of the desk, but as she put her hand on the floor to steady herself, one of the floorboards wobbled. She lifted the carpet and was mystified to see that two of the boards had been sawn to create a square about two feet by two. She pulled the carpet back so that it was uncovered completely, then tried to lift the boards. They had been glued together so that they came up in one piece. The space below was dark but not deep. There was a large book inside, like a brown wedding album but thicker.