Brand New Friend

by Kate Vane

  ‘Just one patient?’

  ‘That’s what she said. The other guy might have been in reception, or hanging round outside. Given the clientele of the surgery they often have problems with groups congregating.’

  ‘Mark didn’t step outside? Or leave and come back?’

  ‘She says not. Says she remembers him because another patient was getting agitated and Mark spoke to him to calm him down.’

  ‘It’s not enough to publish. Not on its own. You could ask the police to confirm what a source has told you.’

  ‘I don’t want to use it. I thought it might help you.’

  There was an awkward silence. ‘Oh. Thanks.’

  ‘I mean, it’s good news, right? It confirms Mark’s alibi. I thought you’d want to know.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So we’re friends again?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Paolo, distracted, already thinking about what it meant.

  58

  Paolo had packed. He had bought a Walkman and chosen his favourite tapes. He’d read William Burroughs and Joe Orton and knew that cannabis in Arabic was kif. In short, he was ready to begin his new life in Marrakesh.

  He had already taken most of his stuff back to Swindon on the coach. He’d explained his abrupt change of plan to his parents. They didn’t know enough about university to know that it was unusual, or if they did they didn’t say.

  His mum asked him why he couldn’t just go to France as he’d planned.

  He tried to tell them of his excitement, how he was planning to read Mohamed Choukri and Albert Camus on his long Interrail trip south through Europe, how he would see cities and deserts and mountains, how he wanted to unravel the complex interactions between politics, history and culture.

  His dad asked him if Marrakesh had a beach.

  He didn’t try to tell them that intermingled with his excitement was his sadness at leaving Leeds. He was leaving the north, home of great bands and red brick and decent politics. In their imagination (if they had one) the north was a cold, impoverished place, clouded in smog, whose people were as impenetrable as their accents (except on Coronation Street and Saturday night variety shows) and they would perhaps find his sense of loss even more incomprehensible.

  He dumped his rucksack and his tote bag in the hall and walked into the living room. Claire and Kev were listening to Boys Don’t Cry by The Cure. They were sitting very close, reading the lyrics on the album sleeve. Graham was eating a plate of spaghetti on toast. Dudley was at home and Isabel was already a figment of their past. She could be in Meanwood, she could be in Madagascar. She was not here.

  ‘I’m going now,’ he said.

  ‘Bye,’ said Claire, briefly glancing in his direction.

  Kev jumped up and gave him a hug and just as suddenly sat down again and resumed his reading of the lyrics.

  ‘I love this one,’ said Kev, swaying along to ‘Three Imaginary Boys’. Claire, for once, didn’t join in. She was very still, eyes fixed on the sleeve.

  Graham put down his knife and fork. ‘Do you want a hand?’

  ‘I’m okay,’ said Paolo.

  He went to leave the room but as he pulled the door behind him, he found Graham was in the way.

  So Paolo’s last day in Leeds ended with Graham accompanying him to the bus stop, on the bus to town and from the bus stop to the coach station. He even stood on the forecourt and waited while the driver counted off the passengers and closed the doors.

  As the coach pulled out, Paolo looked out of the window. He saw a waving Graham recede and felt a surge of relief.

  59

  Graham had called again. It pricked his conscience. Poor Graham. Since he was in Salford and had no plans for the evening, shouldn’t he try and see him? So he made the call. An hour later he was on his way to Leeds.

  Graham lived in a semi in Cookridge. The house was just what his parents would have wanted if they could afford it. Thick carpets, chintzy furniture, lots of clutter. Three kids doing homework round the dining table in the open plan, the youngest in his pyjamas. Yellow electric light and white-painted radiators chugging out heat. Faint smell of a home-cooked tea. A proper home, like you get on the adverts.

  Graham was wearing the full Blue Harbour dad kit, from polo shirt to mule slippers. The acne was gone and his dark hair was full, even unruly. He was perhaps the only one of them who had got better looking with age.

  Graham gestured to an overstuffed armchair and Paolo sat. ‘Coffee?’ asked Graham.

  ‘Tea would be great if you’ve got it. No milk or sugar.’

  ‘You lot want drinks?’ he asked, and received a complex set of instructions in return.

  His daughter slid out of her chair and followed him into the kitchen. The boys carried on working quietly, occasionally murmuring to each other or looking to see what the other was doing. It was all quite peaceful and soothing.

  Ordinary. That was what he’d hoped to escape from. But here, in the quiet of Graham’s home, in this horrifically uncomfortable armchair, he saw that it had its appeal.

  He might have had this life if he hadn’t gone abroad. Maybe he’d have been working as a journalist at a trade paper or as a corporate press officer. When he tried to imagine his ordinary wife in this ordinary life, she somehow looked extraordinarily like Claire. Which was ridiculous. He and Claire were like a couple who had already been married twenty years, like the sitcom stereotype they had both grown up with. Probably on one level he had assumed that was how all marriages ended up, but he had hoped at least to have some thrills before then.

  He couldn’t have imagined marriage to Salma. That he could still be in love after so many years. That routine and domesticity and the demands of children and careers and his enslavement to that money-burning juggernaut of a house only enhanced the daily miracle of waking beside a fascinating, clever and still surprising woman.

  ‘They’re very good,’ he said to Graham, nodding towards the table where they were doing their homework.

  ‘They’re always well behaved for visitors. You should see them when we’re on our own!’ But he looked at them with a love that was so intense it cut through Paolo.

  ‘You wanted to speak to me,’ he said.

  ‘I just thought I’d see if I could help. It must have been a shock for you to find out what happened. I always thought Mark was a decent lad. Claire must really be feeling it.’

  Claire’s feelings were never as straightforward as anyone would hope, thought Paolo.

  ‘You haven’t been in touch with her?’ he asked.

  ‘I sent her a Facebook message after my wife died, but I didn’t hear back. I expect she’s busy.’

  Paolo instinctively looked at the children. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’

  ‘It was a couple of years ago. Cancer.’ His daughter looked up at the word, then away again when her eyes met Graham’s. ‘I haven’t been in touch with anyone since leaving uni. But I’ve still thought about you all. That was why –’

  Paolo realised his mind was drifting, that thinking of Salma as a surprising woman was leading him to wonder what her next surprise might be, but he turned his attention back to what Graham was saying. Poor Graham, even when he was in the same room he was too easy to forget. Until Graham finished his sentence.

  ‘That was why I thought she should know the truth about Mark,’ he said.

  ‘Wait,’ said Paolo. ‘Do you mind if I record this?’

  ‘You won’t use it, will you? I mean, my name.’

  ‘It’s just for my own use,’ he said, hitting the record icon on his phone before Graham could object. ‘Please, tell me what happened.’

  ‘I remember seeing the news about Bob Lambert in the paper,’ said Graham. ‘You know, the first undercover officer to be exposed. The one who got a lass pregnant and abandoned her. And there was the other one, Mark Kennedy. That was a few years ago now. I didn’t pay much attention at the time. But there was a more recent one, just after Maggie died. I can’t even remember hi
s name, but it got me thinking.

  ‘Once the kids were in bed, the evenings were really hard, on my own, so I started wondering about your lot, just as a way to distract myself. Then I went online to find out more. I found this site that had been set up by a woman who’d had a relationship with one of these guys. Well, you can’t really call it a relationship now, can you? She’d done a lot of her own research and made a checklist of how to spot an undercover officer. It had things on it like he probably lives alone, he turns up out of the blue one day, he never introduces you to family or friends from the past, he has a van –’

  ‘Mark,’ said Paolo. How come no one else had thought of it? Because Mark hadn’t got involved with the serious activists. He’d attached himself to a naïve group of students.

  ‘Once I’d had the idea, it took hold. I suppose it became a bit of an obsession. Just something to block out how I was feeling. Maggie had been doing some family history research before she got ill and we still had an Ancestry subscription so I looked for Mark Benson on there. Of course, it’s a really common name so that took me ages but I had a lot of time to fill. And he always claimed to be about eight years older than us, so that would have meant probably 1958 or 1959. Eventually I found a Mark Benson who was born at Catterick.’

  ‘He told me once his dad was in the army.’

  ‘Mark Benson died in a car accident when he was six years old.’

  ‘So how did you find out his real name?’

  Graham chuckled. ‘Now that really was slow. I thought I could find the information online. I started looking for details of officers who attended Hendon Police College because I thought he must have been in the Metropolitan Police, but there isn’t much from that period. Their records went to the National Archive when they closed but they aren’t digitised. I thought I might have to go there! Then I found a picture, by chance, when I was browsing. It was on one of those stock image sites. They have pictures of all sorts and you can pay for permission to use them. Well, you’d know that, it’s your job.

  ‘Anyway – it was a passing-out parade from Hendon and I was sure it was him. It didn’t name the cadets but it did name the sergeant who had taught them who was also in the picture. I looked him up on Ancestry and it seemed he was still alive so I did more detective work and I ended up ringing him. He’s a sprightly seventy-six-year-old! He said he had his own photos of each year’s parade and a list of all their names. So he called me back and told me. It was Mark Swift. He even emailed me copies for that year.’

  ‘What did you tell him? About why you were looking.’

  ‘I said I thought it was a lad I’d known in the army but I’d forgotten his last name. Pretty thin but he seemed to accept it. Said he remembered that Mark had been out in Germany before he joined them. But I wish I’d said something else, like five-a-side, because then he started asking me where I’d served and I had to cut it short. He seemed lonely and I would have liked to stay on the line and chat, because he’d been such a help to me.’

  ‘And then you sent what you’d got to Tilda?’

  ‘No. Then I thought, this has gone from a distraction to being a bit unhealthy. And the spring was coming and I thought, take the kids out, stop wallowing. Get a babysitter and go out with the lads and watch the match in the pub. Maggie made me promise that I wouldn’t cut myself off, but in the beginning – So I forgot about Mark. Until I was in town one day and there was a group of people handing out leaflets about fracking, and one of them was Mark and another was Claire and I suddenly felt furious. Anger like I’d never felt before. That he was still doing it, still deceiving Claire.’

  ‘What did Claire say?’

  ‘They didn’t see me. I turned and walked away. Maybe she wouldn’t remember me anyway.’

  Oh God, he was still infatuated with Claire.

  ‘So I remembered this blog I’d come across when I was trying to find out if any undercover officers had been exposed in Leeds. And it seemed like a good one, not that I’d know, but I just had a good feeling about it. So I uploaded what I’d got to the site – notes, documents, screenshots. I didn’t send the sergeant’s photograph but I included a link to the stock image. You see I’d got a theory, but I had no proof. I thought, she’d know how to check it out, and she did, didn’t she? Spoke to the Met and everything.’

  He said it with a kind of wonder.

  ‘She did a good job,’ said Paolo.

  ‘And now it looks like he might have killed someone,’ said Graham, ‘and I don’t know if I’m responsible in some way.’

  There was that. And there was the fact that, in seeking to protect Claire, he had actually tied her to another murder. But Paolo didn’t say any of that.

  ‘Do you mind sending me a copy of your file? Just for my own use.’

  Graham hesitated but then nodded. ‘I’ll do it now if you like.’

  He asked his daughter to let him use the laptop she was working on and she handed it over immediately. She was such a good girl. Too good, thought Paolo sadly.

  He told Graham where to upload his file and while they were waiting he asked if he could see the photo and list of names that the former sergeant had sent.

  Graham opened the file. Paolo took the laptop from him and expanded the image till it fitted the screen. Rows of men, and a small number of women. He wondered what life in the police had been like for women then, if any of them had made Detective Inspector like Danni Huxton. Mark was there, as unreadable as always. He looked at the rest of the faces.

  He was looking from the photo to the list and thinking. He was trying to remember his long ago visit to the solicitor in Swindon.

  ‘Is there any way of checking if someone has changed their name?’

  ‘Not necessarily. There’s nothing legally to stop you using another name. Even if you change it by deed poll you don’t have to enrol it. So only people who have sight of the deed poll know about it.’

  Paolo was thinking, wondering if he should ask Graham to do him one more favour, but Graham hadn’t finished. ‘Then there’s marriage of course. That’s easy, you just look for a marriage licence.’

  Somehow Paolo always forgot about that, because he couldn’t understand why some women still chose to define themselves in relation to their husband. Salma hadn’t even considered it.

  Once Graham had sent the file and Paolo had checked he’d received it, he asked Graham for a favour. There was one more thing he wanted to find out. Graham was painfully obliging.

  ‘Do you see anyone else from the old days?’ asked Graham, as he passed the laptop back to his ever-patient daughter.

  ‘I hadn’t, until this happened. But I’ve seen Ratman and Isabel as well as Mark and Claire.’

  ‘Isabel was clever, wasn’t she? I remember seeing her reading one of my engineering textbooks once and being surprised. Not because she was a lass,’ he said hastily, ‘but you were all arty, weren’t you? She was clever though, she already knew the basics of electrical circuits, said she had a boyfriend who did Physics ‘A’ Level and she helped him revise. She almost understood it better than me.’

  ‘Understood what?’

  ‘It was for a play her friends were putting on in the Raven Theatre. She wanted to do a timed sequence of lights. I offered to come and help but she said they’d be fine.’

  Graham looked a little disappointed when he said he had to go, but then said it would soon be the boys’ bedtime.

  He came to the door with Paolo. As he walked down the path, Graham called after him, ‘You will give my regards to Claire, won’t you?’

  60

  He was with Isabel in a mall to the west of Edinburgh. In fact it was an atrium, with a glass roof that apparently did some kind of renewable energy thing (he’d been reading the information boards near the entrance while he waited for her). There were coffee shops and a place to buy essential groceries and toiletries. It was like the real world except it was part of the out-of-town campus for the bank where Isabel worked.

  Th
ey were sitting by a fountain drinking coffee. He looked into the water to see if there were any fish, if they too were swimming in the ecosystem of the bank, but the only living creature he could see was a sparrow that had found its way into the atrium and was perched on a metal beam near the roof.

  ‘This is handy,’ he said.

  ‘There isn’t much else round here,’ she said. He thought of those Victorian factory owners who paid workers in tokens that could only be spent at the factory shop. ‘People from the scheme actually come here for fun.’ She nodded to the housing estate which was just visible beyond the campus and he noted how she’d used the Scottish word, ‘scheme’ but how her accent was still pure Hampstead.

  She was wearing a grey shift dress which emphasised her tall, slim frame, and that world-weary elegance which he had found so captivating. Like she was permanently wafting a cigarette in a holder, dismissing the mundanity of life. Her hair was pinned up in a simple but elegant style. This woman was impressive, poised, and quite unlike the figure muffled in a hoodie in the shabby kitchen. In his mind he struggled to reconcile the two.

  ‘I know what you did,’ he said.

  She looked unsurprised. She didn’t ask how he’d worked it out, but he felt compelled to tell her anyway. Did he want her to pat him on the head for his skill?

  ‘I’d always assumed that you were walking away from the house, that Claire was so off with you because she thought you’d rejected her. It never occurred to me that it might be the other way round. Claire made you go. It fell into place when Graham told me about your interest in his electronics textbooks, how you were studying electronic timers. He said you were doing lighting for a play.’