The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve got no evidence either way. I just can’t work out how she got to some of these figures. I will though.’

  Trevor sighed. ‘Well, let me know when you’ve got something definite. I’d like to talk to you about the tax next week, if that’s OK.’

  ‘Of course.’

  He opened the door and went out, bumping into the unfortunate Kevin as he did so. For one moment it looked as if Trevor was going to eviscerate him with his bare hands.

  ‘Why are you so fucking clumsy? What’s the matter with you? Last night you tried to set fire to me with a match and now you keep walking into me. Do you think I work a hundred hours a week for you to walk into me? Do you?’

  ‘No, Trevor.’

  The trio of Gordon, Neil, and Kevin seemed more or less permanent, but to be fully staffed the shop needed five or even six to run the shifts involved in being open for sixteen hours a day, and though this was Trevor’s base he also had to keep an eye on his other shops. He filled the gaps with several OAP cronies, who were familiar with the routines and who were treated with respect, and a collection of casuals who barely lasted the week. Even if they were capable, they were endlessly scapegoated for everything that went wrong and most got fed up or were kicked out. One, Martin, a pale-looking seventeen-year-old, had been the butt of a particularly unpleasant outburst for having given the wrong change to a customer who had protested to Trevor. Martin, who was usually given the menial tasks of tidying the shelves, had been told to man the till when Gordon had called in sick. Trevor had ignored his attempts to refuse. When the customer had gone he turned on the terrified boy and demanded an explanation. Martin started to cry, which hadn’t bothered Trevor at all. When he admitted that he could not read nor add up, Trevor changed his attitude immediately.

  He’s as arbitrary as a tribal god, thought Jane, when Kevin told her the story next day.

  Trevor assigned Gordon, who had dropped out after a year of university, to teach Martin to read. Every evening for twenty minutes after closing, Trevor would restack and tidy the rows of magazines and sweep the floor while a reluctant Gordon would instruct the puzzled Martin in the storage room with the door open so Trevor could check that his generosity was not being taken advantage of. This was a matter about which he was deeply vigilant.

  Trevor would call over his shoulder to the attendant Kevin while he kept an ear open on the lesson.

  ‘BIG ONES!’ he would shout to Kevin. ‘OVER 40.’

  ‘See . . . the train . . . John.’

  ‘See the train, Janet,’ corrected the reluctant Gordon.

  ‘See . . . the train . . . Janet.’

  ‘A-CUP HONEYS! COME ON, KEVIN. FUCKING WAKE UP!’

  ‘See . . . the snow . . . Janet,’ misread Martin.

  ‘See the snow, John,’ corrected Gordon again.

  ‘RUSTLER! PENTHOUSE! Quickly. QUICKLY! WHEN I ASK FOR SOMETHING I WANT IT AND I WANT IT NOW!’

  When the terrified Kevin scurried over with whatever magazines he had called for, Trevor spoke softly to him as if he was in bewildered pain whose terrible effects he was stoically attempting to control. ‘When I want something, Kevin, I want it . . . and if you don’t want to give it to me you know where the fucking door is. Do you UNDERSTAND?’

  ‘Yes, Trevor.’

  ‘See the train in the snow, Janet . . . says John.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I like snow . . . Janet . . . I like trains.’ Martin, realising from Gordon’s expression that he had made a mistake, looked miserable.

  Gordon sighed. ‘It’s “I like snow, John. I like trains”,’ he intoned wearily.

  ‘I like snow . . . John . . . I like trains.’

  A fractal is a pattern in which the overall pattern can be found repeated in miniature within that pattern; and within that miniature version yet another smaller version of the pattern can be found. Unless you are told the scale of what you’re looking at, it is impossible to tell the difference between a photograph of a rocky desert landscape and another of a microscopic particle of dust. The list of known fractal systems in nature is long and growing rapidly: coastlines, clouds, feathers, forest fires, mountains, sneezes, the universe, broccoli, the heart, the lungs, the nervous system. In effect there is no more complexity in the shape of all the galaxies than there is in the shape of a cauliflower. There are no sub-plots in this natural world; in the story of the fractal universe everything is as important as everything else. Another fractal structure is the snowflake. As water cools, ice crystals form, binding the water molecules in an open lattice of puckered layers. At some temperatures, the snowflake that is formed is made of long hexagonal needles. At other temperatures, the snowflake grows in plates, resulting in fern-like crystals and dendrites. And the more humid, the more feathery the crystals will appear. This might help to explain why it is that since the first snowflake fell, quite a long time ago now, not one of them has been the same.

  On platform two of Marylebone Station, a new sleek diesel, turbocharged, gently hums to itself. Inside the carriage it is clean, the seats spacious and comfortable, with lumbar supports adequate to the buttressing of many aching commuter backs. This train will leave on time. Only a few years ago, you would have had to endure the smell of damp, a heater dispersing a benzene-scented too-hot air, decaying coverings to the seats and frequent cancellations because the diesels were too old to work.

  The station itself has had a facelift, too. Once a decaying reminder of Victorian ambition allowed to lapse, it now has marbled floors, and quiet machines to keep them free of dirt, monitors to give you information that is up to date. There are no kiosks selling dried-up sausage rolls in Cellophane grown brittle through being kept for many hours in glass and stainless steel; now there are food halls, carefully lit and carefully designed, with the shop assistants and the food to match. Papaya, Class I Mauritius, the chewiest of breads, exotic-flavoured drinks; and coffee: latte, mocha, with a twist or double fun, and neat, attractive people serving them.

  Waiting for his train to leave, George Winnicott sits in his comfortable seat looking pale and distant. This train has been the subject of much mockery. Three weeks into their winter start the snow had fallen. Within hours the pride of British Rail – free of delay, incompetence and grime – had stopped, defeated by a December fall barely thicker than a dusting of sugar on a cake. It was the wrong kind of snow, they said, for England: not only rare, unique. The wrong snow, the wrong snow, endlessly repeated in the press, in sniggering asides, weary exchanges, tired, cynical, full of hysterical contempt. A legend.

  The Inuit have twenty words for snow, or is it forty or a hundred? At any rate, we know it’s quite a lot. They also have a word for the wrong kind. I don’t know what it is, but I bet they have one; and also I bet they wouldn’t laugh at a bright train stalled by the unpredictability of matted crystals formed at minus 32ºF on minute particles of dust locked in a chaos of pyramids and prisms and stars, and each one different as a fingerprint, each one wrong. It’s easy to see why Eskimos would have a lot of words for snow, harder to see why we have only one.

  A few seconds before the train was due to leave, the sliding doors gasped open and a woman entered. She had been following Winnicott for forty minutes. In her anxiety not to be spotted, she had made a mistake in letting him get too far ahead and had lost sight of him as he boarded the train. She had intended to take the carriage behind him. She sat down quickly, her heart thumping. At first she did not notice the admiring glances from the two men across from her, both of them scanning the attractive face and the curve of her breasts. She gave them a brief, disdainful look.

  Trying to ease his aching back into his comfortable seat, Winnicott began to feel an upsurge in his throat, as if something soft was on the move in his larynx. He barely had time to reach the toilet and lock the door. The dreadful cry as he stared into the mirror was muffled by the revving of the engine as the train left the station.

  The woman kept her eyes on the door of
the toilets for the next fifteen minutes until he returned to his seat looking horribly ill. She was feeling only one thing:

  I.

  I hate.

  I hate you.

  It was six o’clock on a Thursday evening and in his comfortable consulting rooms David Hendrix listened with considerable alarm to George Winnicott. He had phoned him earlier that morning in an unusually agitated state and asked to see him as soon as possible.

  ‘Can I ask why you didn’t tell me about this the first time it happened?’

  ‘I couldn’t . . .’ Winnicott’s voice trailed away. ‘I didn’t want to face what it meant, I suppose. I thought . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘And as far as you know, your wife is the only other person who has heard this voice, after your collapse at the school.’

  ‘As far as I know. Obviously the teacher heard it – but other than that no one has said anything to me.’

  ‘Would they be likely to?’

  ‘I don’t think so. But it’s not the sort of thing you can really ask people, is it? Just after one of the collapses my deputy came into my office and clearly thought he had heard my secretary in there. I suppose he must have heard the voice. Since then I’ve got used to the signs, and I’ve always been on my own when it’s happened.’

  ‘And this voice always says the same thing?’

  ‘Yes.’ Winnicott looked miserable and ashamed. ‘It always talks about a secret and that I’m going to have to tell it.’

  There was another long pause before Hendrix spoke again. ‘It’s important that you’re honest with me. Do you know what this secret might be?’

  Winnicott stared at Hendrix – it was a desperate look from a man who was now too afraid to be evasive. ‘I have absolutely no idea.’

  ‘So if I understand correctly, your wife heard the voice before you were yourself aware of it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why didn’t she say anything to you?’

  Winnicott shifted uncomfortably in his chair as if in real physical distress. This kind of thing is agony for you, thought Hendrix.

  ‘It’s not . . .’ He rubbed his hand along his chin as if wiping away a stain. ‘I haven’t been entirely straight with you. Things haven’t been particularly good between us for a while. I’m not sure why, if you were going to ask. These things seem to happen, don’t they? You just find yourselves not talking. You suddenly find you don’t get on. And you don’t know how it happened, but it has. I suppose she didn’t tell me because she’s been worried about what’s happened between us. This was just one more thing to make her anxious. So she just put it out of her mind. It was just one of those things . . . pretend it didn’t happen.’ He looked across at Hendrix again and smiled. It was as wintry a smile as Hendrix had ever seen.

  ‘You see, however badly we’re getting along, we have a lot in common, my wife and I.’

  Hendrix felt a rush of pity for the man sitting in front of him.

  ‘Harry Stack Sullivan calls it selective inattention – the unconscious censorship of information likely to lead to an increase in anxiety.’

  ‘It’s nice to know one’s failings have a name,’ Winnicott said.

  Hendrix was silent – the rebuke had been well deserved.

  ‘What now?’ said Winnicott after a while.

  Hendrix sighed. ‘I’m not sure. Although there is one thing we must do.’

  Winnicott looked at him, anxious and hopeful.

  ‘You must go back to your doctor. I’ll write to him. It’s important that you’re checked out thoroughly – and I mean thoroughly.’

  The phone rang on his desk. ‘Yes?’

  ‘There’s a policeman wants to talk to you,’ said his receptionist. ‘A Sergeant Roache.’

  The cramped and airless room used for identity parades looked like a recording studio fallen on hard times. A window took up the upper half of one wall and behind the window there was only black. Roache stood beside a woman dressed in clothes that looked as if they had come from a charity shop, and not recently. The door opened and in came Inspector Healey, smiling affably. ‘Thank you for coming at such short notice.’

  The woman seemed anxious. ‘Does this mean you’ve found Maria?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Healey evasively, ‘no, no sign of her at all. There are a few other reasons why we need to go through this at this stage. It won’t take long.’ He went over to an intercom on the wall and pressed a button. ‘OK, Des, send them in.’

  Immediately a fierce light went on in the space overlooked by the window in the wall. It was so bright and so uniformly applied across the room that there was no shadow anywhere, as if some overachieving football hooligan had stolen a floodlight from a premiership football pitch and switched it on in their front room.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Roache reassuringly. ‘When they come in they won’t be able to see or hear you.’ A door opened in the brightly lit room and a line of men made their way along the far wall looking as if they had been allowed out into the noon sun after several months in darkened solitary confinement. ‘I have to be formal here.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Please take a careful look at the men in front of you. Take as long as you require. If there is someone here you recognise, then loudly and clearly speak the number you will see on the wall just above their heads. I have to make it clear to you that the person you saw may or may not be here.’

  The woman looked anxiously at the line of men. What if she thought she saw him in the line-up and was mistaken? What if she wasn’t sure? Should she say so, or keep silent? What was the right thing to do if you were almost sure but not absolutely sure? There was a bleached look about them as if they were a collection of albinos who had tried to disguise their lack of colour by dyeing their hair black. They all looked uneasy, as if each had something important to hide. She found herself wondering if by an astonishing coincidence every one of the randomly chosen people at an identity parade had actually committed a serious criminal offence.

  ‘Take your time,’ said Healey. She walked to the window and began scanning the ten men. Both policemen watched her carefully to see where she paused. The first time she stopped it was to look at a tall, slightly drawn man in his thirties: Maria Vaughan’s boyfriend, Steven Grlscz. There was a long pause. ‘Can I see him more closely?’ she said. Healey spoke into the intercom. ‘Number five, please step forward to the black line.’

  Healey watched Grlscz carefully. His expression was not the look of a guilty man, it was the look of a man who was appalled at what was happening to him but unable to think what he should do. Healey felt an unaccustomed stab of guilt: what must it be like to have lost someone you loved, someone you had rescued from a life of relentless misery, only to find that she had vanished and now you were standing in a police station at an identity parade and you were the one they wanted a closer look at? Healey also felt bad because when they had talked at the flat, Grlscz had been lean already; but now he was verging on gaunt. It was the same look Healey had seen in his brother two months after his wife had died.

  Grlscz stood about three feet in front of the others and waited in his solitary, over-lit purgatory. Only this particular purgatory, thought Healey, could end in hell as well as heaven. Still the woman looked. Roache began to smile with satisfaction.

  ‘He can step back now,’ she said at last. The smile left Roache’s face as Healey spoke into the intercom. Steven Grlscz moved back into line. The woman walked on but did not pause again until the last man. After a moment’s hesitation she turned to Healey. ‘Number ten.’

  ‘Number ten, please step forward to the black line.’

  David Hendrix looked as if he had been struck a hard blow to the face. He moved towards the line fearfully, as if approaching the edge of a vertiginous cliff. There was another pause, not as long as the first, then she turned to the policemen. ‘I’m sorry. They have similar kinds of faces but I don’t think so.’

  ‘But there’s a possibility?’ urged Roache sharply.

  �
�Sergeant Roache!’ said Healey sternly. Roache realised what he’d done and looked as if he wanted to swear loudly. But before he could apologise, the woman let rip her own confusion and annoyance.

  ‘If we’re talking about possibilities, Sergeant, you’ve got the kind of face I saw in the street that night.’ She felt as if she had let Maria down and resented that feeling. She looked at him angrily. ‘There’s a possibility it was you.’

  Healey smiled placatingly. ‘I wonder if you could just give us a few more minutes. There are some photographs I’d like you to look at. It won’t take long.’ Healey gestured towards the door and as he did so caught sight of a terrified Hendrix still standing at the black marker. He had clearly decided that he was about to be arrested for murder, given that he had been left standing in front for twice as long as the man further down the line. Healey pressed the intercom. ‘Um . . . step back, number ten,’ he muttered apologetically. ‘That will be all, gentlemen.’

  Sitting at the computer in Healey’s office the woman finished scanning a succession of twenty faces. She scrolled back to one of the earlier ones.

  ‘Him,’ she said, unreassuringly uncertain.

  Both men were shocked. It was a photograph of George Winnicott.

  The woman was puzzled by the intensity of their reaction until she realised what she’d done. ‘No, I don’t mean he was the man in the street that night. I mean it could have been him. He’s got the same shape of face as the others. Other than that . . .’

  ‘Obviously we have rules about leading questions,’ said Healey. ‘I have to be careful here. Can you definitely identify this as a photograph of the man you saw in the street the night you last saw Maria Vaughan?’

  The woman sagged. ‘I can’t be sure. It could have been him.’

  Out in the street Steven Grlscz was feeling unwell. The police had told him very little about the reasons for the identity parade, only that someone had seen Maria arguing with a man several days after her disappearance. Whoever had seen the argument had obviously not been certain it was him or he would not be free now. But how could they have been certain? Maria Vaughan had been dead for two days when the witness claimed to have seen her. He had almost been picked out at an identity parade as having had a violent row with a woman who had vanished and whom he had claimed not to have seen for weeks before that disappearance. This would have made him a proven liar and a probable murderer. And yet the argument had never happened. It was not ironic. It was appalling.