Throw Me to the Wolves

by Patrick McGuinness

  To start with they were thrilled to be so close to it all. (What were they called? Ben and Claire? Chloe? – that’s it: Chloe and Ben.) You could see it in their eyes. They’d seen stuff like this on the telly, but now … well, now it’s right here, isn’t it? They were garrulous, and for all I know texting or tweeting or Instagramming pictures of us as we went in and out of the building in our white forensic onesies. She even said, as they all do at some point; as, maybe, we all do when atrocity skims us: ‘It’s amazing to think that could have been me out there in the fields in binbags.’ The boyfriend puts the statutory arm of reassurance around her shoulder, the hand coming in to stroke the top of her breast a little below the collarbone. She takes the hand, looks at us, and shivers with what she thinks is palpable distress (she probably has the phrase palpable distress in her head as she does it) but which we recognise as the thrill of the safe. They asked a few questions, pretending to care. They tried out various frowns of sincerity, but really they just wanted details to dine out on or to pin down their could-have-been-me scenarios. He wanted to know about forensic stuff, she asked if we know whether Zalie was killed here, in this house, or somewhere else. His peculiar attention to detail – amateur sleuth questions, but precise and oddly interested in the science of it – was different from her prurient excitement.

  ‘Everyone’s a detective now,’ said Gary when we left.

  Anyway, it looks like they’re gone now. They probably found all the attention too much.

  So I watch the live-streaming of the darkening house. It’s unexpectedly soothing. The clouds I see from the office will pass over theirs in two, perhaps three minutes. All this is happening in real time – Mr Wolphram downstairs, the solicitor on his way in his executive saloon with the suit jacket on the hook at the back window, the police at the front of Mr Wolphram’s house, me sipping my coffee, Gary sticking pins in the map on the wall, Deskfish on the phone: we are watching it all and we are part of it all, too. Even the neighbours are part of it, to whom nothing happened but who have tasted the limelight and for whom something is from now on always happening. It’s all happening in real time (what other time is there?), in twenty-four-hour news.

  All that now and yet we’re somehow always too late.

  The truth is out; so are the lies. Both look the same.

  Our parents and grandparents had to buy the morning papers to find out what had happened in the night. If there was more they wanted to know, they might follow a story by listening to headlines on the hour. Their idea of riding the foam on the wave of the now was buying the Evening Post afternoon edition when they came back from work and reading it on trains or buses. They knew that things kept happening when the news wasn’t on: people died or got killed, wars started, trains crashed, hotels got bombed and rebuilt, football teams won or lost. They weren’t stupid or uninformed, and I am not sure they understood less about how the happening happens than we do now, choking on the live-streaming present. Gary says that living in a live-streamed present changes how we live it.

  When I was at school, I’d set my watch according to the shopping centre clock in Port Vale Road. I knew I’d be losing time, that my own little watch would slow down, that I’d forget to wind it up or the batteries would die out, so I went to the clock every now and then and, as they saying went, I’d set it by the big clock, which was itself set by a bigger clock, and so on all the way to some great clock, the clock of all clocks. Where was that, I wondered? The moon? The sun? I would walk away from the fake olde worlde clock by Wimpy and Woolworths, long-dead shops with names that are still alive, my watch tightly set and newly in time with the time. It was like I had a full tank of it. But already, before I’d taken the first three steps, I knew it would be leaking accuracy, slowing down, that I was carrying sand or water in my hands, an estuary between my fingers, and that the only real story my watch was going to tell me was that. The only time it really told was less time, lost time, and then no time.

  Mr Wolphram told me once, after a lesson: ‘You are obviously a glass-half-empty sort of boy, because another way of interpreting the sad fact of Time’s one-way ratchet is that you should cram as much as possible into it: carpe diem, seize the day.’

  Which for months after I misquoted as squeeze the day. It probably amounted to the same thing. Like the other big adult word I misheard in the early days, when English came to me in mondegreens, a thread of potent mishearings: Returnity. For eternity they said. For returnity was what I heard.

  Glass-half-empty stayed with me, because it was the only time Mr Wolphram ever used a cliché, and he warned us about those.

  ‘You off on one, Prof?’ Gary interjects. My coffee is now gulpably cold so I swallow it in one and slam the mug down on the table, hard enough to look decisive, but not so hard that it breaks.

  ‘Are you a glass-half-full or a glass-half-empty man, Gary?’

  ‘I need to know what’s in the glass before I can answer that question. That’s crucial contextual information, that is …’

  ‘Exactly, Gary, and it’s the one piece of information that’s never given when people ask …’ I get up decisively and sling on my coat. Gary looks startled. ‘Let’s check where the couple at the top have gone, shall we? Chloe and Ben. I’ve got a feeling they’ve been bought by a paper and moved to some tabloid safe house to be vivisected for their story, then paid off.’

  ‘There was me thinking you were on one of your internal safaris. But, actually, it’s all been whirring away in there, hasn’t it? All that horlogerie in your brain tick-tocking … I’ll go and check.’

  ‘Then we’re off to talk to the bloke with the broken herat, find out what if anything he saw, and after that we’re back here to talk to Mr Wolphram. By then he’ll have seen his solicitor.’

  ‘I like it,’ says Gary. ‘That’s a Prof with a plan.’

  ‘Then I want to see the statements of everyone on the street, every neighbour, delivery man, courier, leafleter, binman, peeper and curtain-twitcher, neighbourhood-watch busybody … plus whatever Small-Screen’s found checking the dating profiles.’

  Gary makes a call. Someone puts him on hold.

  I thought Chloe and Ben had gone to escape the attention. I should have suspected it was a better, more remunerative, kind of attention they were after:

  ‘Yep, you were right: they’ve gone. Left last night. I called Ben on the number he left us and there’s a voice message saying to direct all enquiries to Lynne Forester at the Evening Post. They’ll be in some posh hotel or a safe flat somewhere while she milks them for information.’

  The charged man is back in the interview room. Unshaved now for nearly two days, his stubble rises almost to the cheekbones, creeps down to the collar of his shirt. He looks like an intellectual Mexican bandit in a spaghetti western, or the kind of prisoner who in films helps other inmates write letters to their sweethearts. His skin is shiny, greased with sweat, and his pores are big and open. His nails are bitten down and raw on their delicate long fingers. He has no strings to pluck, no pages to turn, so he is lost, wordless and tuneless in the glare.

  All he has is a watch, and he turns the strap around his wrist, adjusting the volume inside his head. He seems to be meditating. Every now and then he closes his eyes slowly, languorously, and opens them again – perhaps he expects to open them on something different and is giving the world a chance to rearrange itself while he isn’t looking. Sometimes he rocks back and forth very gently over the table, where two cups of untouched tea have cooled down in their thin, ribbed plastic cups.

  I’m going to recommend suicide watch. He seems to be trying to exit his body. He is so slight, so pale and frightened; so thin that he might leave his flesh the way you’d leave a house one final time: shutting the door behind you and dropping the key back through the letterbox.

  ‘Looks like the last lobster in one of those posh restaurants before the chef pulls him out of the tank and boils him,’ observes Gary with affection. ‘I’ll have a bottle of Chablis
and the schoolmaster Thermidor, please …’

  He has been interviewed three times overnight. They waited until Gary and I were off duty. Deskfish and Small-Screen have done it themselves, but the transcripts show they got nothing out of him: 11.30 p.m., 1.45 a.m., 3.30 a.m. Each time for an hour.

  It is like dialogue from the Theatre of the Absurd, with the sluggish menace of a Pinter play:

  Deskfish: ‘You haven’t been charged with anything, so you can speak freely.’

  ‘Free or not, I have nothing to say that I haven’t already said, often several times, albeit in several different ways.’ Mr Wolphram may be exhausted, but he is still in charge of the words – even those of others, because Deskfish commits one of the basic errors of police interviewing: asking questions that aren’t questions:

  ‘That’s the problem,’ says Deskfish. ‘You keep on saying the same things, but we’d like to hear something different, wouldn’t we, Sergeant Binns?’ I realise I’ve never even known Small-Screen’s surname; he isn’t the sort of person to whom a surname would add much.

  ‘That’s right, sir, something different’s what we need.’ He is trying to inject some bad cop into his voice. ‘And you’d be helping yourself, too.’

  ‘I rather think I’d be helping myself by saying as little as possible, don’t you? And that is certainly what my solicitor will advise me to do when I ask for one. Which I have not, you will have noticed, because I am cooperating as a witness. If I am something other than a witness, you will tell me, won’t you?’

  Deskfish sighs a police-drama-interrogator sigh: ‘When was the last time you spoke to Zalie?’

  ‘Probably on 18 or 19 December. In the morning.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘I can’t recall. The usual pleasantries, neighbourly things – bins, recycling, the day’s usually depressing news. She was an easy person to get on with, and doubtless if we had known each other better we should have been friends.’

  ‘What time in the morning?’

  ‘Half past ten. Twenty-five to eleven. I went to buy the newspaper at about ten and returned half an hour or so later. She was taking her bicycle out of the shed.’

  ‘Half-past ten/twenty-five to eleven is specific, isn’t it?’ Small-Screen cuts in. This isn’t Good Cop/Bad Cop, it’s Thick Cop/Thicker Cop.

  ‘All times are specific, Officer, it’s people who are not.’

  There’s a long pause, in which I can imagine Deskfish and Small-Screen looking at each other in panic, faces poached in sweat, then the tape is switched off. We still call it ‘the tape’, but it’s a digital recorder, and it’s so sensitive we can hear Mr Wolphram breathing in through his nostrils the way I remember at school when a lesson ended: the head rising, the chest inflating, the books closed.

  ‘Wow,’ says Gary, who is listening over my shoulder, ‘class dismissed or what?’

  ‘You see what I mean?’ I ask. ‘He isn’t exactly one of those teachers who scares people, but somehow you never wanted to mess with him.’

  ‘If I could do things like that with words I wouldn’t need to hit people.’ Gary has never hit anyone, but he likes to summon the ghost of violence whenever things get complicated. Violence is his idea of a tie-break in an argument.

  Mr Wolphram may be broken and alone, sitting in that room, in that cell, confused and fidgeting, but when he’s confronted by people, he is strong again. There are reserves in him. Of what, I don’t know, but if he doesn’t collapse and confess it’s either because he’s innocent or because he has the will to hold out and to keep holding.

  Next session: Deskfish and Small-Screen sound more tired than he does. They’re now trying the amateur shrink line and asking him about his early life. We’ve been there already – it’s where we started, and look where it got us.

  Mr Wolphram: ‘I’m never sure why people look at childhoods for answers, it must be a relic of the days when we expected people to cohere the way stories do.’

  Small-Screen (getting a bit above his pay grade): ‘Stick with the facts please, sir, leave the theories to us.’

  ‘It’s precisely your theories I’m afraid of, officer, but if it’s facts you want …’ He takes a breath and begins: ‘I was mostly brought up alone. My parents died – separately, which is how they lived – when I was small: my mother when I was six, my father when I was ten. They had the sort of marriage that made divorce unnecessary. When she died I was sent to live with two aunts in Hastings. My father was a military man, strict but with no real rationale for being so – I was certainly no rebel – and wanted a man for a child rather than a child. You know when people say of someone: he was the father I never had? Well, in my case that was my actual father: I never actually had him. And that was all right with me, frankly.’ He sighs, bored: ‘Look, I have discussed this, or a version of it, with your colleagues: the large angry one and the one who looks like he isn’t listening. At least with them there was some semblance of give and take. Need I go on?’

  Silence.

  ‘Very well. My aunts were Salvation Army. The military, in a way. I was an atheist as far back as I can recall but I loved them and they loved me. It was very simple really. One of them is still alive and I treasure her. But you know this, and maybe you have spoken to her.’ Pause. ‘Have you?’

  Deskfish and Small-Screen say nothing, because they don’t know the answer. They are totally unbriefed, amateurish and unprepared. (No: we have not spoken to her. We will.) They haven’t even looked at the transcripts Gary and I left for them. You don’t need to be a connoisseur of silences to realise that they’re gormless and lost and have no idea what they’re doing. Mr Wolphram can tell, because he can sniff it out. It’s not so different from school, sensing who has and hasn’t done the reading, who has and hasn’t done the homework. Deskfish and Small-Screen are just back-row bluffers.

  ‘Shall I carry on?’ he asks. He is interrogating them. When once again they say nothing, he carries on:

  ‘I saw the point in everything my aunts did, even if I didn’t believe in their supernatural reasons for doing it. The church, the band, the hymns, the feeding of the poor, the hatred of poverty, of misery … I saw the point in that and I admired it. They were people who did things out of kindness and out of care for others, not because of God. If God didn’t exist, or were to suffer an unexpected accident, they would have done it all anyway. I see it as a mark of their selflessness that they used Him as a pretext for what they did: anything not to claim the glory for themselves. What can I say? They were kind people, and kindness is hard to sustain. Unlike love, which is glamorous and depends on stimulation, kindness is all about consistency, about going the distance, even when you run out of breath or your heart’s no longer in it.’

  Gary is interested now. He’s not mocking him, laughing at him or calling him gay, perverted or a child molester. He switches off the machine. ‘Laurel and Hardy are out of their fucking depth, Prof. He needs a wordsmith like me in there, running rings around him – with the back of my hand …’

  ‘Switch it back on please, Gary’:

  ‘My aunts were religious people, but they weren’t strict or especially devout. There was a great deal of laughter in that house, and they let me do what I wanted, say what I wanted, read what I liked. You could call them God-fearing, but I’ve never liked that phrase: either God exists or he doesn’t – there seems to be a lot to fear either way, doesn’t there?’

  End of interview.

  In the car, as we head to Castle Street, Gary asks: ‘Don’t you think we should meet his aunt?’

  ‘Why’s that, Gary? If we’ve got our man, I mean …’

  ‘Belt and braces, Prof. She might have some nice background story on him, and the papers are going to get there anyway. I can imagine her already: nice warm fire, tea, maybe some cake – home-baked by a neighbour called Olive – surrounded by photos of him in his shorts, bucket and spade, sticks of seaside rock …’

  He’s right. They’ll have tracke
d her down and laid siege to her. I can’t imagine she’ll take their money, but she might believe their lies: we’ll protect you from the other papers who are out to shred his reputation, we can give your side of the story, doesn’t he need someone to stick up for him, etc. If not already, then soon. Everything is happening fast now and the worst is about to happen: charge sheet, lawyer, primetime news, headlines and editorials, old friends lying for cash, colleagues cutting him loose, official statements from the school …

  There’s no one in when we get to Castle Street. The owners have been told not to remove the graffiti, so it blazes there in its fuzzy aerosol, across the rich people’s wall. I hope they’re furious and embarrassed. Gary gets out of the car, says he’s off to stretch his legs. There’s an old butcher’s nearby. I remember it from school. It just about survived the supermarkets and the out-of-town shopping centres. But now that the old stuff has come around again, the vinyl, the scotch eggs, the craft brews and the beards, they’re suddenly doing good business. Just no longer to their old clientele. The old clientele can’t afford it; and, anyway, they’ve moved. They’ve been moved.

  Gary likes it there, because it’s where his parents shopped, back when people like them lived in this bit of town. He’s gone to buy a pie or a sausage roll, the old traditional stuff he remembers from before the council housing dried up and the sushi and the chai lattes arrived.

  He comes back, pork pie in each hand, complaining about the price. ‘Symbol of gentrification, Prof.’ He takes a bite so large that all that remains is a collapsing rim of crust between his thumb and forefinger. Chewing, he goes on in the manner of a TV history programme presenter: