I Saw a Man

by Owen Sheers

  He couldn’t work, and he didn’t want to leave the flat, but he had to do something. So he sat at his desk in the study making the movements of work instead: arranging notes, printing out the last chapter he’d written. In it, Michael had described his first meeting with Oliver Blackwood, but had done so while removing himself from the scene. Having filleted their conversation, recalled his observations—Oliver’s silver Mercedes SLK, the brightness of his tie—he’d recounted the action in third person as if he, himself, had not been there.

  The occasion had been a friend’s funeral, a novelist who’d died of a sudden brain haemorrhage. Oliver was the surgeon who’d operated on him. He’d failed to save him, but, as he’d told Michael in their first conversation at the wake, when he’d learnt of his patient’s profession a few days later, he hadn’t regretted his failure. “He’d have had no language,” Oliver had said with a doctor’s frankness. “No linguistic facility to speak of at all. A man of words, of letters, of meaning, robbed of all that.” Reaching across Michael he’d picked a canapé from a passing tray, a roll of salmon bedded on a slice of bread. “No,” he’d said, taking a bite from it. “Better like this in many ways. Sometimes it just is.”

  Although in the chapter before him Michael had removed his response to Oliver that day, now, sitting at his desk with the weight of the Nelsons’ home beside him, he found himself repeating it from across the years. “Yes,” he heard himself say, as if somehow the vocalised word might strengthen his resolve. “Sometimes it is.”

  ―

  Michael was staring at a pen on his desk when the entry buzzer sounded. His mind, still loosened by recurring images of Lucy, had wandered. A pulsing nausea swilled through him. All morning he’d paced his flat as if about to make an entrance into an auditorium, an uncomfortable nervousness in the pit of his stomach. So at first, on hearing the buzzer, distracted and confused, he’d done nothing. But then it sounded again, for longer, more insistent. Going into the hall Michael picked up the receiver and pressed the intercom.

  “Hello?” His voice was hoarse, dry.

  “Mr. Turner?” a woman asked.

  “Yes,” Michael said.

  “Detective Sergeant Slater, CID. I was wondering if I could come up for a quick chat?”

  Michael stared at the plastic grid of the speaker, his finger still on the intercom button. “Is everything all right?” he said.

  “Just routine,” she replied. “But I’d rather explain in person, if that’s okay.”

  “Yes, of course,” Michael said. “Fourth floor, all the way to the top.” He pressed the entry button and heard the front door click open, then the sound of Slater’s footsteps as she entered. There were no others following.

  He heard her steps again a few seconds before she reached his flat. Delicate taps echoing in the concrete stairwell. He didn’t wait for her knock but opened the door to meet her, greeting her with a nod.

  “Thank you, Mr. Turner,” she said, as he held the door for her and she entered.

  She was small, petite, of a similar frame to Caroline. She wore plain clothes: a pair of jeans, a blouse, a navy jacket over her arm. She wiped at her forehead with her hand, hot from the walk up the stairs.

  “Would you like some tea?” Michael said, closing the door.

  She smiled at him, disarmingly natural. “No, I’m fine, thanks. Some water would be great, though.”

  She followed him into the kitchen and living area. As he ran the tap, testing the temperature with the tips of his fingers, she walked the length of the room, ending where Michael had stood watching Josh the night before. “Beautiful view,” she said, looking out at the Heath, and then down at the Nelsons’ garden.

  Michael couldn’t take the waiting any longer. He’d already surprised himself with his ability to slip into the stream of his altered yesterday. But he doubted he’d be capable of sustaining it under direct questioning. He had to know if she knew.

  “Do you mind,” he said, as he brought her the glass of water, “if I ask what this is about?”

  She smiled again as she took the glass. She had close-cut brown hair, tomboyish in style. She looked no older than twenty-eight, twenty-nine. There was, Michael noticed, the scarring of a burn on her neck. “Just some routine enquiries,” she said. She took a sip of the water. “Shall we sit down?” she asked, indicating the sofa.

  As Michael sat she took out a notebook and a pen from her jacket, then joined him. “If I could just confirm your name?” she said, holding her pen above the page.

  Michael laughed, a short expulsion of breath. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But not until I know what this is about.”

  She looked up from her pad, her pen still poised. For a moment she said nothing, as if weighing his guilt. But then she smiled again. It was, Michael saw, the opening gambit of much of her conversation. A learnt trait, perhaps.

  “It normally works better with me asking the questions,” she said, then paused as if allowing her official tone to catch up. “We’re conducting,” she continued, resting her pen, “house-to-house enquiries. In connection with an incident at your neighbour’s house yesterday.”

  “An incident?” Michael said.

  “Yes,” she replied, taking up her pen again and returning to her notebook. “The Nelsons. A death.”

  Looking back over the years, Michael would come to see how his response at that moment, although formed in relation to his knowledge of what had happened, might still have replicated that of a neighbour genuinely hearing the news for the first time. It was something about hearing those words in the mouth of another. Of knowing for certain, through language not sight, that Lucy’s fall had happened, that the fact of it was alive in the world. It was history, already causing action and reaction.

  His intake of breath was involuntary, as if he’d touched a scalding plate. DS Slater looked back up at him.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “The youngest daughter,” she said simply. “Lucy.”

  Michael brought his hand to his mouth. “Oh my God,” he said, turning away. His words, his feelings were real. He didn’t understand how, but it was like learning it anew. Hearing it, not just knowing it.

  “How?” he said, turning back to her.

  She met his eye. He half expected her to say, You tell me, Mr. Turner, or to pull his fingerprint from the back of her notebook. But she did not. She licked her lips, and he saw she was anxious. Was she meant to be telling him so much? Perhaps, for all her familiarity, she was a novice. Certainly her age would suggest as much.

  “A fall,” she said. “Most likely an accident, but…” She tailed off, then smiled again, brief and tense. “Well, you know. We have to be sure. So,” she took up her pen again, “if I could just confirm your name?”

  “Michael,” he said quietly. “Michael James Turner.”

  “And your date of birth?”

  The questions were standard. If she was a novice, then DS Slater acted her part well, reeling through them with a practiced rhythm. How long had he lived in the street? His occupation? For how long had he known the Nelsons? Michael answered them directly. None of them yet required him to deviate from the facts. But then, running into it as if it were as innocuous as any of her other questions, she asked him, “And what were your whereabouts between three and five p.m. yesterday afternoon?”

  Michael began with the unaltered truth. “I had a fencing lesson,” he told her. “At four. Over at the leisure centre in Highgate.”

  She wrote her notes. The silence unsettled him. The sound of her pen. “The one by the school,” he added.

  She looked up from the page. “Yes,” she said, as if asking him to keep it simple. “I know.” She looked back down. “And what time did you leave for your lesson?”

  Michael paused. This had to be arrived at, not presented. Thought, not said. “Um,” he said. “It must have been around three-fifteen, three-twenty at the latest.”

  Again, she brought her eyes up to meet his. “To get to Hi
ghgate?”

  “Oh, sorry,” Michael said. “I walk. I should have mentioned that. I always walk to my lessons.”

  “Right,” Slater said, making another note in her pad. “And can anyone verify you were at the leisure centre?”

  And that was it. Michael, with fewer than ten words, had spoken the course of his alternative day. And Detective Sergeant Slater had written it down. It was a statement. It existed. It could be questioned, challenged. Strangely calm, Michael went on to tell her about Istvan, looking for his number in his phone to give it to her. If she questioned Istvan would he mention Michael’s being sick? And if he did, would she guess the cause? It couldn’t be helped. It was a risk he had to take. Istvan was, after all, his alibi.

  Was there, Slater asked him, anyone else who might have seen him at the lesson? A receptionist? A gardener? Michael didn’t think so, as far as he knew. She nodded. When prompted he told her about his walk home, across the Heath. It was a beautiful evening, so he’d stopped, rested in the woods. He’d taken his time. Had he seen anything in the Nelsons’ house when he’d left? Or when he’d returned? No, Michael said. No, nothing he could think of.

  As he talked, Michael no longer felt as if he was hiding his actions from Slater, but rather pursuing a cause, beyond her detection. He knew he could help Samantha and Josh. That it was the right thing to do. As much as he wished he wasn’t, he was a recent graduate of their breed of loss. It was the least he could do, to risk his own prosecution to remain in their lives.

  Slater continued her questions: No, he hadn’t seen the ambulance. And no he hadn’t heard anything from next door once back inside his flat. Had he seen Josh? Not since…he paused to think of the night. Thursday night. It must have been Thursday. Yes, they’d had dinner.

  “No,” he corrected himself. She paused in her writing. “Sorry. It was the next morning.”

  “When you last saw him?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Michael said. Somehow he’d really forgotten. “I dropped round to lend him a screwdriver. For his glasses.”

  “A screwdriver? He didn’t have one of his own?”

  “Not of that size, no,” Michael said. “It was from my fencing kit,” he added, looking towards his fencing bag in the hallway.

  “At what time was this?”

  “It was early, before eight. Samantha,” he said, remembering Lucy banging that spoon against the table. “She hadn’t taken Rachel to school yet. So yes, it must have been early.”

  ―

  Minutes later Slater was leaving, putting her notebook and pen back into her jacket pocket and handing him her card—“In case you think of anything else.”

  “Yes, of course,” Michael said, putting it on the kitchen counter.

  He showed her to the door. “How are they doing?” he asked, as he opened it. “Samantha and Josh,” he explained, although there was no need.

  She frowned, then sighed, looking out into the stairwell. No, Michael thought, she hadn’t done this many times before. “They’re devastated,” she said, still looking away and raising her eyebrows, as if there could be no other answer. She turned back to him. “It’s been a terrible shock.”

  Extending a hand, she shook his. “Thank you for your help, Mr. Turner,” she said. “I’m sorry to have disturbed your day.”

  “No, thank you,” Michael found himself saying, “for letting me know.”

  She nodded, the flicker of a question passing through her expression. She let it go. “Not at all,” she said, as she went to the stairs. “Have a good day, Mr. Turner.”

  And then she was gone, her small feet tapping down the staircase, carrying his false day in her notebook out of his front door and into the real one.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THREE DAYS AFTER DS Slater’s visit, Michael was sitting with Josh on their usual bench on Parliament Hill. It was early in the morning and the first time Michael had seen Josh since the night he’d watched him weep beside the fence. Samantha had called him the previous day. He’d been washing up at the sink in the kitchen when she’d rung. As the phone pulsed on the work surface, he’d stared at her name on the screen before answering it.

  “Samantha.” He hoped her name would be enough to carry all he wanted to say.

  “Thank you for your card.” Her voice was quiet, a whisper. She paused. When she spoke again her voice broke across his name. “Oh, Michael.”

  For a few minutes she cried. Michael listened, then asked if she wanted him to come round. No, she said, not yet. But could he, she wondered, go for a jog on the Heath? With Josh?

  “He needs it,” she said. “He needs to get out, to talk.”

  “It’s very soon,” Michael said.

  “I know, but honestly, he needs to get out.” She paused. “I need him to get out. Just for a bit.”

  “Yes,” Michael said. “Of course.”

  “I think he’ll talk to you,” she went on. “Because. Well…”

  “Yes,” he said again. “I know.”

  After Samantha hung up, Michael stood for a while where he’d answered the phone, looking out at the street below. Then he’d gone into his study, selected a Beethoven string quartet on his iPod, and sat at his desk, letting the long, reverberating notes wash the room, and him.

  Hearing her voice, he’d wanted, desperately, to tell her. On the wall above his desk was a postcard of a Grecian urn with Keats’s lines written underneath—Beauty is truth, truth beauty. He was consigning himself to ugliness, to a single lie that would bleed through the years ahead of him. He would be a deceiver forever. Not as he was in his writing, in pursuit of a greater clarity, but in his life, in pursuit of an omission, a lie. He’d become a manifestation of his authorial technique, disappearing himself from those minutes in the Nelsons’ house just as he’d always disappeared himself from the page.

  But he was determined. And as the music moved on to the next movement, it seemed to confirm the rightness of his resolution. The sacrifice of it. So he’d resisted and said nothing. He hadn’t called Samantha back. Instead, he’d done as she’d asked of him and woken early this morning, dressed in shorts, T-shirt, and trainers, and gone next door to call for Josh.

  Michael found him already waiting outside their front door. He could tell he hadn’t slept. The skin below his eyes was bruised with tiredness. As Michael had answered Samantha’s call with her name, so as he approached Josh he met him with his.

  “Josh.”

  He didn’t reply, but just nodded and began walking down the street towards the Heath, as if they had a job to do that was best done, if at all, quickly. Turning onto the grass at the bottom of the street, they began their usual route, walking in silence up through the colonnade of London plane trees, through the worn fields of the fairground sites and on into the shaded path of the boundary road. As they crossed the South Meadow, Michael felt his calf begin to loosen, the knots of muscle opening like a rose. But Josh, pacing beside him, remained closed. Michael didn’t want to be the first to talk. He knew, from those first days after Caroline had died, when Peter had been so often in the cottage—coming by, cooking him meals—that for Josh his silence would feel like the only part of himself he still owned, that he might still understand.

  On reaching Highgate Gate they dropped down through the trees into the grounds of Kenwood, then rose again onto the gravel path that traversed the façade of the house. As they passed its shuttered windows they heard the attendants preparing for the day inside. Opening the shop, stocking the tills. Somewhere in the gardens a strimmer worked at a hedge. In the last window Michael caught a glimpse of them both—Josh walking with his head down, as if following a guideline just in front of his feet. Michael, tall beside him, his amputated stride arriving in his shoulder as an awkward jerk. At the end of the house they followed a stream down between the layers of Bagshot Sand and Clayton Beds, then crossed a footbridge over Wood Pond and on up into the South Woods itself. They began jogging without any communication, picking up their pace exactly w
here they always did, at the edge of the Duelling Ground, crossing its oval of scotched turf to join the path leading down towards Hampstead Gate. Their route remained unchanged, undisturbed. And everything else about their run, too, was the same as it always had been. Except for the air they bore with them, polluted as it was with the unspoken knowledge of Lucy’s death, partly known in each man, but only completely between them both.

  On reaching Parliament Hill they slowed up the slope, walking the last few metres to the scattering of benches on its summit sitting in salute to London below. Michael sat on their usual bench, then felt the wood beneath him give as Josh added his weight beside him.

  The heat wave had broken. Armadas of high cumulus were patching the city’s mosaic with shadow. A cool breeze spoke of rain, approaching from the north behind them. A flock of starlings rose and fell on the sports fields below, like a sheet shaken over a bed.

  Michael looked across at Josh. Apart from his tiredness, he looked unchanged. Although his eyes, he saw, had lost the distance of their focus, as if they could no longer bear the promise of a horizon.

  “I’m sorry,” Michael said, and he meant it, in the full scope of the word, more than he’d ever meant it before.

  Josh didn’t look at him. “How did you hear?” he said.

  “The policewoman. She came to the flat.”

  Josh was already shaking his head, biting his lower lip. A vein, like a sudden worm, appeared across his forehead.

  “That bitch,” he said. “Treating me like a fucking criminal. A suspect!”

  Josh turned to face him, anger enlivening his eyes. Michael saw how deeply it was rooted, below his heart, his stomach. “I mean can you imagine if after Caroline…someone had come along and pointed a finger and—” He broke off. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking away again. “It’s just…”