“They didn’t tell me what—”
“But,” she broke in because the last thing she could bear was to hear him justify, protest, deny, or excuse. She just wanted the truth and she was determined to have it from him before she left the room. “You didn’t mean him to die. To be used, yes. To have some bloke touch him up, rape him even—”
“No! They were never—”
“Barry,” his solicitor said. “You needn’t—”
“Shut up. Barry, you offered those boys for cash to your slimeball mates at MABIL, but the deal was always sex, not murder. Maybe you had the boys yourself first or maybe you just popped your cork by having all those other blokes depending on you to supply them with new flesh. The point is, you didn’t mean anyone to die. But that’s what happened and you’re either going to tell me that the bloke in this picture is the one who called himself two-one-six-oh or I’m going to walk out of this room and let you go down for everything from paedophilia to pandering to murder. That’s it. You’re going down, Barry, and you can’t escape it. It’s up to you how far you want to sink.”
She had her eyes locked on his and his skittered wildly in their sockets. She wanted to ask him how he’d come to be the man he was—what forces in his own past had brought him to this—but it didn’t matter. Abused in childhood. Molested. Raped and sodomised. Whatever had turned him into the malevolent procurer he was, all that was water under the bridge. Boys were dead and a reckoning was called for.
“Look at the picture, Barry,” she said.
He moved his gaze to it another time and he looked at it long and hard. He finally said, “I can’t be sure. This is old, isn’t it? There’s no goatee. Not even a moustache. He’s got…his hair is different.”
“There’s more of it, yes. But look at the rest of him. Look at his eyes.”
He put his glasses back on. He picked up the picture. “Who’s he with?” he asked.
“His mum,” Barbara said.
“Where’d you get the picture?”
“From her flat. Inside Walden Lodge. Just up the hill from where Davey Benton’s body was found. Is this the man, Barry? Is this two-one-six-oh? Is this the bloke you gave Davey to at the Canterbury Hotel?”
Minshall set the photograph down. “I don’t…”
“Barry,” she said, “take a nice, long look.”
He did so. Again. And Barbara switched from Come on to prayer.
He finally spoke. “I think it is,” he said.
She let out her breath. I think it is wouldn’t cut the mustard. I think it is wouldn’t get a conviction. But it was enough to spawn an identity parade, and that was good enough for her.
HIS MOTHER had finally arrived at midnight. She’d taken one look at him and opened her arms. She didn’t ask how Helen was because someone had managed to catch her en route from Cornwall and tell her. He could see that from her face and from the way his brother hung back from greeting him, gnawing on his thumbnail instead. All Peter managed to say was, “We rang Judith straightaway. She’ll be here by noon, Tommy.”
There should have been comfort in this—his family and Helen’s family gathering at the hospital so that he did not have to face this alone—but comfort was inconceivable. As was seeing to any simple biological need, from sleeping to eating. It all seemed unnecessary when his being was focussed on a single pinpoint of light in the midnight of his mind.
In the hospital bed, Helen was insignificant in comparison to the machinery round her. They had told him the names, but he recalled only their individual functions: for breathing, to monitor the heart, for hydration, to measure oxygen in the blood, to maintain watch over the foetus. Aside from the whir of these instruments, there was no other sound in the room. And outside the room, the corridor was hushed, as if the hospital itself and every person within it already knew.
He didn’t weep. He didn’t pace. He made no attempt to drive his fist through the wall. So perhaps that was why his mother ultimately insisted he had to go home for a while when the next day dawned and found them all still milling round the hospital corridors. A bath, a shower, a meal, anything, she told him. We’ll stay right here, Tommy. Peter and I and everyone else. You must make an attempt to take care of yourself. Please go home. Someone can go with you if you like.
There were volunteers to do that: Helen’s sister Pen, his brother, St. James. Even Helen’s father although it was easy to see that the poor man’s heart was in shreds and he’d be no help to anyone while his youngest daughter was where she was…as she was. So at first he’d said no, he would stay at the hospital. He couldn’t leave her, they must see that.
But finally, sometime in the morning, he consented. Home for a shower and a change of clothes. How long could that take? Two constables ushered him through a small gathering of reporters whose questions he neither understood nor even heard very well. A panda car drove him to Belgravia. He dully watched the streets roll by.
At the house they asked did he want them to stay? He shook his head. He could cope, he told them. He had a live-in man in the house. Denton would see that he had a meal.
He didn’t tell them that Denton was off on a long-awaited holiday: bright lights and big city, Broadway, skyscrapers, theatre every night. Instead, he thanked them for their trouble and took out his keys as they drove off.
The police had been. He saw signs of them in the scrap of crime-scene tape that still clung to the narrow porch’s railing, in the fingerprint dust that still powdered the door. There was no blood, Deborah had said, but he found a spot of it on one of the draughts-board marble tiles that comprised the top step just before the door. She’d been so close to getting inside.
It took him three tries to get his key properly in the lock, and when he’d managed the whole operation, he felt light-headed. He expected the house to be different somehow, but nothing had changed. The last bouquet of flowers she’d arranged had lost a few petals to the marquetry top of the table in the entry, but that was it. The rest was as he’d last seen it: one of her winter scarves hanging over the railing of the stairs, a magazine left open on one of the sofas in the drawing room, her dining-room chair sitting at an angle and not replaced the last time she’d sat upon it, a teacup in the kitchen sink, a spoon on the work top, a binder of fabric samples for the baby’s room on the table. Somewhere in the house, the bags of christening clothes were probably stowed. Mercifully, he did not know where.
Upstairs, he stood beneath the shower and let the water beat upon him endlessly. He found he couldn’t exactly feel it, and even when it struck his eyeballs, he didn’t blink nor did he feel pain. Instead, he relived individual moments, silently imploring a God he could not say he believed in to give him a chance to turn back time.
To what day? he asked himself. To what moment? To what decision that had led them all to where they now were?
He stood in the shower until there was no hot water left in the boiler. He had no idea how long he’d been there when he finally emerged. Dripping and shivering, he remained undried and unclothed till his teeth were castanets in his skull. He couldn’t face walking back into their bedroom and opening the wardrobe and the drawers to search out clean clothes. He was nearly air-dried before he summoned the will to pick up a towel.
He moved to the bedroom. Ridiculously, they were babes in arms without Denton there to sort them out, so their bed was badly made, and consequently the impression of her head was still in her pillow. He turned from this and forced himself over to the chest of drawers. Their wedding picture accosted him: hot June sunshine, the fragrance of tuberoses, the sound of Schubert from violins. He reached out and toppled the frame so it fell facedown. There was fleeting mercy when her image was gone and then quick agony when he could not see her so he righted it again.
He dressed. He gave the procedure the sort of care she herself would have taken. This allowed him to think about colours and fabrics for a moment, to search out shoes and the proper tie as if this were an ordinary day and she still in bed with
a cup of tea on her stomach, watching to see he didn’t make a sartorial faux pas. His ties were the thing. They had always been. Tommy darling, are you absolutely certain about the blue one?
He was certain of little. He was certain, in fact, of only one thing, and that was that he was certain of nothing. He went through motions without complete knowledge of making them, so he found himself dressed at last and staring at himself in the mirrored wardrobe door wondering what he was meant to do next.
Shave, but he couldn’t. The shower had been difficult enough, labeled as it was “the first shower since Helen” and he couldn’t do more. He couldn’t have more labels because he knew the very weight of them would kill him in the end. The first meal since Helen, the first tank of petrol since Helen, the first time the post dropped through the door, the first glass of water, the first cup of tea. It was endless and it was burying him already.
He left the house. Outside, he saw that someone—most likely one of the neighbours—had left a bunch of flowers on his doorstep. Daffodils. It was that time of year. Winter faded to spring and he needed desperately to stop time altogether.
He picked up the flowers. She liked daffodils. He’d take them to her. They’re so cheerful, she’d say. Daffodils, darling, are flowers with spunk.
The Bentley was where Deborah had carefully parked it, and when he opened the door, Helen’s scent floated out to him. Citrus, and she was with him.
He slid into the car and closed the door. He rested his head on the steering wheel. He breathed in shallowly because it seemed to him that deep breaths would dissipate the scent more quickly, and he needed the fragrance to last as long as it possibly could. He couldn’t bring himself to adjust the car seat from her height to his, to sort out the mirrors, to do anything that would erase her presence. And he asked himself how, if he couldn’t do this much, this very simple and essential thing because, for the love of God, the Bentley wasn’t even the car she regularly drove, so what did it matter, then how could he possibly walk through what he had to walk through now?
He didn’t know. He was operating on rote behaviors that he hoped could carry him from one moment to the next.
Which meant starting the car, so that was what he did. He heard the Bentley purr beneath his touch and he reversed it out of the garage like a man performing keyhole surgery.
He glided slowly along the mews and into Eaton Terrace. He kept his eyes averted from his front door because he didn’t want to imagine—and he knew he would imagine, how could he help it?—what Deborah St. James had seen when she’d walked round the corner having parked the car.
As he drove to the hospital, he knew he was taking the same route the ambulance had taken when bearing Helen to Casualty. He wondered how much she’d been aware of what was going on around her: drips being established, oxygen seeping into her nose, Deborah somewhere nearby but not as close as those who listened to her chest and said her breathing was laboured on the left side now, nothing going into a lung that had already collapsed. She’d have been in shock. She wouldn’t have known. One moment she’d been on the front steps, searching out her door key, and the next she’d been shot. Short range, they’d told him. Less than ten feet away, probably closer to five. She’d seen him, and he’d seen the shock on her face, the surprise to find herself suddenly vulnerable.
Had he called her name? Mrs. Lynley, have you a moment? Countess? Lady Asherton, isn’t it? And she’d turned with that embarrassed, breathless laugh of hers. “Drat! That silly story in the paper. All of it was Tommy’s idea, but I expect I cooperated more than I should have done.”
And then the gun: automatic pistol, revolver, what did it matter? A slow, steady squeeze on the trigger, that great equaliser among men.
He found it difficult to think and even more difficult to breathe. He struck the steering wheel as a means of bringing himself round to the moment he was in and not one of the moments already lived through. He struck it to distract himself, to cause himself pain, to do anything to keep from fracturing beneath everything that assaulted him from memory and imagination.
Only the hospital could save him, and he hurried in the direction of its refuge. He wove round buses and dodged cyclists. He braked for a crocodile of tiny schoolchildren on the kerb waiting to cross the street. He thought of their own child among them—his and Helen’s: high socks, scabby knees, and miniature brogues, a cap on his head, a name tag fluttering round his neck. The teachers would have printed it for him, but he’d have been the one to decorate it any way that he liked. He’d have chosen dinosaurs because they’d taken him—he and Helen—to the Natural History Museum on a Sunday afternoon. There he’d stood beneath the bones of the T. rex with his mouth agape in wonder. “Mummy,” he would have said, “what is it? It’s tremendously big, isn’t it, Dad?” He’d have used words like that. Tremendously. He’d have named constellations, he’d have known the musculature of a horse.
A horn honked somewhere. He roused himself. The children were across the street now and on their way, heads bobbing and shoes scuffling along, three adults—fore, mid, and aft—keeping a careful eye on them.
Which was all that had been required and he’d failed: keeping a careful eye. Instead, he’d as good as provided a map to his own front door. Photographs of him. Photographs of Helen. Belgravia. How difficult could it have been? How tough a proposition even to ask a few questions in the neighbourhood?
And now he reaped the result of his hubris. There are things we don’t know, the surgeon had said.
But can’t you tell…?
There are tests for some conditions and no tests for others. All we can do is make an educated guess, a deduction based on what we know about the brain. From that we can extrapolate. We can present the facts as we know them and we can tell you how far those facts can take us. But that’s it. I’m sorry. I wish there were more…
He couldn’t. Think about it, cope with it, live with it. Anything. The horrible day after day of it. A sword piercing his heart but neither fatally, quickly, nor mercifully. Just the tip of it at first and then a bit more as days became weeks became the necessary months in which he waited for what he already knew was the very worst.
A human being can adapt to anything, yes? A human being can learn to survive because as long as the will to endure remained, the mind adjusted and it told the body to do the same.
But not to this, he thought. Not ever to this.
At the hospital, he saw that the journalists had finally dispersed. This was not a twenty-four/seven story for them. The initial incident and its relationship to the investigation of serial murders had mobilised them at first, but now they would check in only sporadically. Their focus would be on the perpetrator and the police from this point on, with passing references made to the victim and canned footage of the hospital used—a shot of a window somewhere, behind which the wounded was ostensibly languishing—should that be required by the producers. Soon even that would be considered a rehash of a twice-told tale. We need something fresh and if you haven’t got a new angle on this situation, bury it inside. Page five or six ought to do it. They had, after all, the meat of the matter: scene of the crime, press conference from the doctor, the image of himself—nice, good, a suitable reaction shot—leaving the hospital earlier in the day. They would be given the name of the press officer from the Belgravia station as well, so that was it, really. The story could just about write itself. On to other things. There were circulation figures to concern them and other breaking news to bolster those figures. This was business, merely business.
He parked. He got out of the car. He moved towards the hospital entrance and what waited for him inside: the unchanging and unchangeable situation, the family, his friends, and Helen.
Decide, Tommy darling. I trust you completely. Well…all except in the matter of ties. And that’s always been a puzzle to me because you’re generally a man of impeccable taste.
“Tommy.”
He stirred from his thoughts. His sister Judith was c
oming towards him. She was looking more like their mother every day: tall and lithe with close-cropped blonde hair.
He saw she was holding a folded tabloid, and he would later think it was this that set him off. Because it wasn’t the most recent edition but rather the one in which the story about him, his personal life, his wife, and his home had appeared. And suddenly what he felt was shame in such a wave that he thought he’d actually drown beneath it and the only way to struggle to the surface was to give in to the rage.
He took the tabloid from her. Judith said, “Helen’s sister had it stuffed in her bag. I hadn’t seen it yet. I actually didn’t know about it, so when Cybil and Pen mentioned—” She saw something, surely, for she came to his side and put her arm round him. She said, “It isn’t that. You mustn’t think so. If you start to believe—”
He tried to speak. His throat didn’t allow it.
“She needs you now,” Judith said.
He shook his head blindly. He turned on his heel and left the hospital, returning to his car. He heard her voice calling after him and then a moment later he heard St. James, who must have been near when he’d first seen Judith. But he couldn’t stop and speak to them now. He had to move, to go, to deal with things as they should have been dealt with from the first.
He made for the bridge. He needed speed. He needed action. It was cold and grey and damp outside, and there was clearly a rainstorm on its way, but when the first drops finally fell as he turned into Broadway, he saw them only as minor distractions, splatters on the windscreen on which was already written an unfolding drama, of which he wanted no part.
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