‘People like me, you mean?’
‘People like you, Prof. It still goes on; always will – same finger, different hands. Anyway, often there was this girl – reddish-blonde hair, kind gentle face, must have been about eighteen or twenty or something. It felt like a huge age gap but it wasn’t really. She’d be standing there in the middle of the bridge. It was a couple of years before they put those barriers up. When the Samaritans used their old number. Nineteen ninety-four or five.’
Gary checks his phone. Sees there’s another message and doesn’t read it.
‘Sometimes, she’d talk to me. Never said anything big. Weather talk. Nice day. Less nice day. Crappy day. She seemed so adult to me, so grown up. She sighed a lot, had those faraway thoughts adults had. I used to wonder, Will I ever think stuff like that? Her hair was always in the sun … it wasn’t, of course, that’s just how it felt to me, like one of those seventies easy-listening album covers.
I was spotty and chubby, had chafing legs in itchy trousers, a nylon shirt with yellow underarms and BO ranging from fresh-and-fierce to historically stale. She asked me my name. She was so beautiful and peaceful standing there with the wind in her hair that I felt I was spoiling things by saying ‘Gary’. Why couldn’t I be – I dunno – Oliver or Jacob or Gabriel? Alexander? But you know me, I can’t lie, and say Gary I did, Prof. Gary Maffett. Music to the ears. We chatted a bit – she said she was from St Leonard’s and was studying at the art college. She had paint on her fingers, at the edge of her jumper, on her shoes. I know because I kept looking at everything but her eyes because I was too shy. I saw all these bits of detail, bitten nails, scuffed shoes, stuff like that. We said goodbye and I went off feeling stupid for not having anything interesting to say, and there was like a little pull at my back. I turned to say I’d like to see what she painted … but she was gone. Finally, my big line, Gary’s big chat-up gambit. But no one to hear it. I had to go to where she’d been standing just to make sure, I thought her smell would still be hanging there. And it was … is how I remember it. I still smell it now, Prof, when I pass the spot. Then I looked over and there was nothing down there. In the water, in the mud, on the road. Nobody.’
‘She jumped?’
‘I guess so. There were other people on the bridge, one of them some kind of amateur photographer, and they hadn’t seen her, let alone someone jumping. We looked down but no cars had stopped on the road and there was no one pointing and screaming down below. They told me I’d made it up, said I should be ashamed of myself.’
‘You sure you didn’t imagine it?’
‘As sure as you didn’t imagine all that stuff that happened in your school. I kept an eye on the Evening Post to see if they’d found a body or if anyone had gone missing. In those days we didn’t have computers in every house so you couldn’t look it up. Online news wasn’t what it is now. For weeks afterwards I read the paper and I can’t have missed more than a handful of news bulletins. Didn’t find a thing: no bodies, no missing persons, no appeals.’
‘You could probably find out now. We’ve got all we need at the station, all computerised, all linked up, going back forty years.’
‘Don’t you think I have, Prof? I’ve looked at every possible bit of archive, I started in Hastings and St Leonard’s and there was nothing there, so either she was lying or no one missed her. That happens, too, you know. I checked coroners’ reports, news sites, MisPers and unsolveds, from here up to London and then Dover, Folkestone, Ramsgate, all the way to Portsmouth, Brighton … I checked the big ferry towns where people go in and out and no one cares. Then the resorts – Margate, Gravesend, Broadstairs, end-of-the-pier places … Checked with river rescue, the psychiatric hospitals … But no. She’s the ghost in my head. I reckon she’s perfectly preserved in that mud, like those ancient Irish warriors in the bogs. We did poems about them in school. Turns out some of them weren’t so ancient after all. Probably not warriors either. Still, that’s all water under the bridge, isn’t it, Prof? We’re all friends now, eh?’
‘Maybe she just escaped … really escaped: left no trace, no memories, no friends, no family, no body. Maybe that’s what she wanted: one minus one equals zero. Maybe you should leave her alone.’
‘That or she wanted me to see, so one person would know.’
‘Or that.’
‘Anyway, Prof, I didn’t want that murdering bastard down there – not with her and all the others. They don’t deserve that.’
Gary finishes his drink and waves for a repeat round.
‘I’ll tell you something else, Prof. Every now and then – nothing regular or anything, just when I remember and can be bothered – I leave a little bunch of flowers for her, tie them to the railings at the spot where we spoke. It’s not a ritual, I don’t get all solemn or anything … I just do it because now it’s part of me.’
*
The theory? We’ll never know for sure, but here is the theory:
Phelps recognises Zalie from her profile on the site. He has no need to message her – he can see her anytime he likes. This bit’s hazy, but goes something like this: he stopped her, chatted, tried it on, got told to piss off, mentioned he’d seen her on the site, freaked her out. He watched her, kept on at her and one day he just came in.
He says she let him in. He’s lying, but we can’t prove that. There’s a scuff mark on the bottom of her front door that matches his shoe, and that will help us to argue that he forced his way in. It’s consistent with having the door shut on you and wedging your foot in to stop it. The forensics matched it to him, found a print of his on the inside of the door, and traces of him in her hallway but nowhere else. Which makes it easy to disprove his claim that she invited him in and they had a drink. They found traces of her on the washing-up gloves, and the tear marks on the masking tape in his flat match those on the binbags he wrapped her in. There’s even DNA from his saliva on the matching edges of the tape.
The detection is done.
We have enough to put him away for life, but it’s as if his vanity won’t allow him to admit that he forced himself in. He sticks by the story that she asked him in but somehow changed her mind at the last minute. That she ‘didn’t have the guts to go through with it’. That she ‘changed her mind’. That she ‘flipped’ and attacked him first. He is vain to the end: she wanted it, to start with anyway, just ‘bottled out’. He is computing how, despite being a murderer, he might still salvage some sexual amour propre. He says he didn’t mean to kill her, just to pin her down and stop her screaming. He’s holding out for manslaughter, thinks he might avoid a life sentence, wants to pitch this as a flirtational encounter gone wrong, and himself as the victim of a misunderstanding. He’ll blame her because he can, and he can because she’s dead. She will become his victim a second time. Why not? It’s a genre after all, and it has worked for other men. There are already comments below the bar on Lynne’s latest article condemning the ‘mixed signals’ women give off, and the news of his arrest has only been out a few minutes.
He knows, too, that introducing some ambiguity about Zalie’s sexual motivation will hurt her parents even more. That gives him power. They’ll never know why she answered the door or how. The randomness of it will ache in them, the catastrophe that needed so many variables to happen and could so easily not have. If she had stayed out until later, or gone to bed earlier; if he had gone out to his work Christmas party instead of skipping it or if his girlfriend had skipped hers instead of going … A shift of one or two degrees, a mouse click left or right, and there’d have been nothing: Zalie still here, with the life she was entitled to, but not this: a hole in her parents’ lives the size of life itself.
We skip the celebratory drinks at the station. No one is up for it. There is an emergency cupboard of beer and supermarket Prosecco; there’s even a fresh packet of plastic glasses, but no one is in the mood. Even Deskfish, who is about to become the nation’s crime-solving hero, looks depressed. But why, when we’ve given the country the C
hristmas present it wants? It’s more dramatic, more fraught with reversals than the two-part star-studded BBC Christmas special. But most of all we’ve given the nation justice, and it’s all the more thrilling because of a dose of injustice.
But no one is clapping or cheering or pouring drinks.
*
The Chief Constable wants it announced immediately, so people can go back to their families relaxed and reassured he says, ready to enjoy the festive season with their loved ones. Turkeys in their tinfoil crematoria, corkscrews at the ready, fresh batteries in the nation’s remote controls.
New suspect, new story, we discover, because Lynne and the other reporters are already asking: Police Blunder as Wrong Man Charged?
‘You’d better get used to headlines like these,’ says Lucy Hall. She has come for Wolphram as we release him. ‘You’ll announce that Wolphram’s been released without charge and exonerated. That’s the wording I agreed with your chief. Exonerated – say it.’
‘Exonerated. Yes. I’ve seen the statement. The CC will make a statement and Press Relations will send it out to the media straight away. I’ll say the same thing when I do the press conference.’
She looks suspicious and only partly mollified. ‘Also an apology – it’s probably better if you make it now than after we’ve taken legal action. I’ll be advising him to sue the newspapers, too. Whatever you’re doing to help him now changes nothing about what’s going to happen when we take the police to court – you understand that?’
‘Oh yes,’ I say with enthusiasm, ‘absolutely.’
She begins to turn and go, but there’s one last thing. ‘What’s your first name?’ she asks. I notice the tiny dent in her nostril where a nose-ring used to be, the hole now filled in with flesh but the delicate perforation-scar still visible.
‘Alexander. Ander, as was. Is that your father asking?’
‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘He wondered what had happened to you. Asked me to check if it’s you he knew from school. What do I tell him?’
‘Tell him … tell him …’
Gary has arrived in the car and opened the front passenger door. ‘Get him in!’ he shouts.
Wolphram comes out, escorted by Thicko and Small-Screen. They’re trying to look like bodyguards from an action movie, scanning the rooftops and speaking into walkie-talkies, though there’s no one here but us. Wolphram has had his hair cropped. He has shaved and changed clothes. You can tell he hates them because he half walks, half writhes in his outfit: jeans, trainers and a sweatshirt with a hood over which he wears a faux-leather jacket. The trainers are a special indignity for a man used to wearing leather shoes, even at weekends. Everything is one size too big for him. He looks like an emaciated rocker from a pub band. His disguise is completed by thick grey-lensed glasses that make his eyes look like celebrities hiding behind the smoked windows of a limousine.
Gary sounds the horn to hurry me up.
I turn back to Lucy: ‘Tell him we managed to stop this one in time?’
*
Gary has asked for Wolphram’s car to be released, but we have two hours to kill before it’s ready. I’ve seen auto-forensics at work: it’s like a machine autopsy, the parts splayed out on sterile sheets, weighed, photographed, sampled and slid under microscopes. I’m surprised they can put it back together in two hours.
‘I’m behind on my Christmas shopping,’ Wolphram says acidly when we ask where he wants to be taken. So we take him shopping and stay close to him. There’s always the chance he will be recognised. Especially if he speaks.
We follow him with a trolley, looking like a reclusive mogul’s bodyguards. We listen to him with his deep, expensive voice, walking his refined tastes from aisle to aisle. The supermarket jingles grate on him. The Christmas songs run on a loop. All he wants is to be back in his flat, in his listening chair, with a box set of Keith Jarrett and some George Eliot.
Instead, he’s here, among the two-for-one offers and the bullet-hard frozen turkeys. There’s hardly anything left to buy. The meat counters are so bare that all that’s left is the blood collecting in the bottoms of the trays. He looks around and blinks.
Someone will recognise him – today, tomorrow, in three weeks. And for the rest of his life. But the later the better, so he has time to graft a new life onto the stump we’ve left him with. So he gets used to his prosthetic life, his new face, his bad clothes.
Gary is on the lookout for the surreptitious smartphone taking pictures, the whispering, the pointing. Someone phoning the newspapers on their Binbag Murder Hotline, which remains open to suck up the dregs of news and gossip. He has been lucky so far. Provided he doesn’t speak too loudly, because he can’t change that voice.
There’s no guarantee that people have heard that he’s free, that there’s a new suspect, that he’s innocent. Exonerated. Some of them won’t care. ‘And some of them will think it’s a new form of execution,’ Gary tells me: ‘He was found guilty and immediately exonerated by lethal injection.’
Besides, all the stuff from school is still out there, all the allegations from ex-pupils and teachers. That won’t go away because there’s no exoneration from rumours. They have no body, and facts are not bullets. It is like shooting at smoke. It’ll be the shadow in his peripheral vision, something always on the outskirts of his mind wherever he goes, whenever he almost forgets.
He’s strong, I tell Gary, he’ll get through this. But Gary says it’s after the crisis, after the trial, after the extremes, that the survivor cracks. When life slackens and the flat time comes again. ‘But he’s resilient,’ I say.
‘That’s what I mean, Prof: all that resilience might be the end of him.’
And now in the supermarket a few people notice him. Something about him snags on their attention and pulls them back for another look. They can’t quite piece it together. Until one of them does: a young mum with a calm toddler in the trolley seat and a baby in a carrier on her front, gets it straight away. Where have I seen him before? She looks at him, he is right beside her where the good wine is. Where have I seen him before? Everywhere. He looks at her and he is scared again.
She is sure. She nods a little. Yes, I’m sure now. He raises his eyebrows and his expression asks her what she’ll do about it.
‘Would you mind reaching for three bottles of that one up there?’ she asks. ‘I can’t quite get to it with the baby.’
Gary has come up close just in case, but now he hangs back and watches.
‘Of course.’ Wolphram gets up on tiptoe, hands the first one carefully to her and then places the next two into her trolley, flat on their side so they won’t break as she pushes it. He does this slowly, in detail.
‘Thank you,’ she says, keeping her eyes on him, and then, quietly, ‘I hope you have a good Christmas’, and she is gone, back to her husband who is already at the till saving their place in the queue.
And that’s it. The recognition scene, the first in many to come.
Wolphram is cheered by this because it’s a stranger’s kindness. His gaunt face has filled out with pride, not at himself, but at the fact that the good he still thinks of people is well placed.
I know that kind of double-accounting: we like to count kindness twice, three times, four … in order to help it tally favourably against unkindness. Thus a stranger’s one-off grace holds its own against a whole country’s routine brutishness. Wolphram will count it over and over when he does the sums of what the world has done to him.
The people hunting him down to lynch him are now hunting him down to fête his innocence and make him perform it. But she helped him just by doing nothing.
That’s what it has come to: kindness is being left alone.
‘Has he even ever been into a supermarket, Prof? He walks around here like an astronaut,’ whispers Gary, relieved.
It’s true. He walks as if he’s about to float away; he looks around, everything catches his attention. The man looks unhoused, uncountried, unplaneted. Away from his things,
his books, his music and his friends, Wolphram looks like a millionaire stranded in a foreign land with the wrong money, rich in a currency he can’t spend.
*
Gary and I drive Wolphram to White Cliffs Auto-Forensics. ‘Let’s hope they gave you a free service,’ says Gary. Pike Road Trading Estate is where the bathroom showrooms and carpet wholesalers are, the MOT garages and the shops that sell railings and front doors, ballast and paving stones; where the fork-lifts rest at night and the local buses go to get repaired, stripped for parts or left to rust as husks, their last destinations still in their blinds: Cheriton, Golden Cross, Hythe Hill. There’s a van festooned with Union Jacks that sells bacon and sausage baps from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Benji’s British Food. People drive in and out of here all day, and to those of us who know how cities work, the industrial estates on the edges of towns, skirting the bypasses, the Park and Rides and the commuter rat runs, are where a whole other life takes place – far from the sourdough bread, the milf and the olive platters of the suburbs.
‘You’re unrecognisable,’ the man at the desk tells Wolphram sourly. ‘But I’ll still need photo ID.’ He’s heard Wolphram is free and resents it; thinks of all the stories he might have been able to tell.
Wolphram looks up at the CCTV. Then around the empty courtyard. Everyone has gone home early. There’s a light on in Barry’s Bathrooms across the road, but that’s to deter burglars. While Wolphram signs half a dozen forms, reading each one carefully, the car is brought through a secure automated gate by a man in a plastic oversuit. He too looks disappointed. These privatised forensic services and DNA labs like catching the big cases. It gives them something for their promotional material when they bid for government contracts.
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