Shadow Play

by Frances Fyfield

  They were supposed to discuss, in mutual confessional, those cases which troubled them, which is what they did, more or less, among themselves, ignoring Redwood, whose gaze meanwhile travelled round the walls. High ceilings with broken mouldings, big, panelled doors so thick with a dozen layers of shiny paint the panels had all but disappeared. There was a large and ugly open fireplace from the 1890s obscured by an electric equivalent from the 1950s, now defunct. Gas pipes ran up the wall, again redundant since the newer radiators stood side by side with the old. It was a room of many additions with nothing taken away except what might have been beauty. He almost broke his fingers each time he tried to open one of the huge sash-windows which rose from near floor level to above his head. He was uncomfortably aware that below his feet and over his ceiling, there were rooms in this colossal warren of a building he had never even seen. On arrival, it had taken him three days to find the lavatories on this floor and even now, he took a different route each time.

  Smoking was not allowed within his personal domain, and Redwood noticed with obscure satisfaction that Helen West was not only fidgeting but looked as if a strong gin would be preferable to weak tea. He regarded her with his customary mixture of grudging respect and awkwardness. She had changed, recently. Before, she had always seemed to campaign for them to be aware of the possible innocence of those charged with criminal offences, but now she seemed obsessed with their frequent inability to prove guilt. At the moment she was keeping them all entertained with the story of a man named Logo.

  ‘Well, he came in, suit, tie, the lot, looking the soul of poverty-stricken respectability, and, oh yes, I forgot, clutching his Bible. “I brought my own,” he said sweetly and bowed to the bench. He listened to all the evidence, asking only the most pertinent questions, as if he’d been representing himself all his life.’

  ‘He probably has,’ said Dinsdale, laughing. Helen was accompanying her saga with a number of gestures. He, too, had seen Logo before and he anticipated the perfection of Helen’s mimicry.

  ‘“Excuse me,” he says to the mother of the first witness, “but your dear little daughter did not complain that I had touched her in any way, did she?” “No, she never,” the witness concedes. “I only offered her sweets, as I offered them to others?” “Right on,” says the witness. “I did not accompany my offer with any kind of lewd gesture?” Witness puzzled. “What’s one of them?” “I don’t know, madam. I cannot really define what I could not do, but I thought that was what I am accused of.” Oh, he’s so horribly articulate. “I’m afraid, madam,” he says finally, “I only followed your daughter from the school gates because she was alone and crying, because I was concerned for her, and because she so resembles my own daughter, who I’ve lost.” He had the witness in tears, feeling guilty. And the bench. He’s sort of naïvely ingenious. Then he told us how rough the police were, showed us the handcuff burns and no-one dared point out they weren’t recent at all. Everyone ended up turning somersaults to be nice to him and then when he was acquitted, you know what he did?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dinsdale. ‘He sang.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Helen. ‘“Abide with me, fast falls the eventide. The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide …” He’s got a beautiful voice, but he knew the limits, so he stopped after verse two.’

  ‘I know,’ said John Riley, the only churchgoer of them all.

  ‘Swift to its close, ebbs out life’s little day;

  Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away;

  Change and decay in all around I see;

  Oh, thou who changest not, abide with me.’

  His fine, bass voice finished on a cadence of embarrassment and he looked down, blushing. A pin would have dropped with a clatter in the silence which followed. Redwood stirred uneasily. This was really too much for a man who preferred others to remain inhibited.

  ‘You see what I mean?’ said Helen, breaking the spell. ‘You can’t cross-examine a man who sings hymns like that. Nor can you get across that it’s the fifth time he’s been caught prowling. You know his first speciality, years ago? Being found on enclosed premises. People would turn round in some office block he used to clean and suddenly, he’d be there. Now he’s a road sweeper. These days he tries to lure dark-haired little girls to go with him for walks in graveyards. And he knows how impotent we are. He never actually does anything. Am I the only one who finds him so sinister?’

  ‘He shouldn’t have been prosecuted in the first place,’ said Redwood angrily. ‘Not if the evidence was as slim as you suggest. What were you thinking of, Helen? What’s happened to your judgement? You’re becoming a persecutor!’

  It was an old joke, persecutor, prosecutor, the best he could do to make it seem as if he had listened to anything other than the singing, but Helen rounded on him without any humour at all.

  ‘Of course there was evidence!’ She stopped and blushed. ‘There was at least half an indecent assault. I mean he was pretty persistent.’ A smile began to emerge at the corner of her mouth. ‘OK, point taken. He didn’t actually touch her. He says he’s driven mad by football. Like a werewolf by the moon.’

  ‘What’s half an indecent assault?’ Dinsdale enquired.

  ‘A decent one,’ said Redwood, ‘and now if you don’t mind, I mean if that’s all …’ He had done his duty. They took the signal and rose simultaneously with relief. The meetings were a strain, the room was stifling.

  ‘Helen, would you wait?’

  Dinsdale paused at the door, ready to come back as Helen remained where she was. ‘Oh, it’s all right, man,’ Redwood barked. ‘I’m not going to tick her off, it’s about something else entirely. No need to be so protective, she doesn’t need a witness.’ He wondered, not for the first time, how it was Helen acquired her legion of allies. But once Dinsdale had gone, Redwood wished he would return to save him from being alone with her. He coughed with the hollow sound of a man looking for his place on a page, unable to stand a silence, but wishing to postpone speech. He waited for the door to close. At least the doors here closed with a weighty quietness, unlike the windows which rattled like thunder.

  ‘Helen, I could do with your help. Rather a delicate matter and I don’t know how to handle it.’

  She looked at him sharply, waiting for irony, remembering that Redwood didn’t send people up, only brought them down when they were not looking. Perhaps it was a genuine plea from a man helpless when faced with the complexity of emotion, envious of her own insouciance in the brash, prison corridors of life. She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. He coughed again and searched for a handkerchief, abandoning the quest in the desire to begin so he could finish. He often referred problems to Helen and he was ashamed of it.

  ‘Rose,’ he said ponderously. ‘Rose Darvey.’

  Helen was instantly defensive. ‘She’s a great girl. Clever, should have more responsibility, works like a Trojan, early morning, late night—’

  ‘It’s the late nights I’m talking about,’ he interrupted.

  ‘Why? We should be pleased to have someone like her. I thought you said she could go out, see more trials, take on more. I know she isn’t exactly polite, but who’s complaining? She’s rude but she’s keen …’

  ‘How very apt, both rude and keen. I’m glad you see her as that. So does the Chief Inspector at the local nick who has particular responsibility for the welfare of his youngest police constables in the police section house up the road. He came in to see me.’ Another cough. This time he found the handkerchief, looked at it, uncertain whether to blow his nose, but increasingly certain what to say. ‘Rose has been through the whole division like a dose of salts. She’s out with one or other of the bachelors every night. She has favourites, but it all seems to depend which shift they’re on and their consequent availability, otherwise one’s as good as another. I asked the doorman downstairs and he confirmed there’s a lad in half blues out there every evening when she leaves. What’s more, I happen to know for a fact, she’s changed
her address in the year she’s been here and we’ve only got an old one on the file. The Chief Inspector’s worried: he says the section house is in a state of riot. Youthful jealousy, all that. Could we have a word with her? Oh Lord, what do we do?’

  He spoke with the weariness of a man who has lost sight of youthful lust and jealousy; on that account alone, Helen sympathised. She was silent. Redwood went on.

  ‘The CI is politely concerned because he says he’s got six young bloods on one relief who are at one another’s throats, though God knows why, they don’t apparently have to compete for her favours, which are priced at roughly three drinks and a packet of crisps—’

  ‘You mean that’s all they offer,’ said Helen angrily. ‘Mean bastards. They aren’t badly paid.’

  ‘I mean that’s all she seems to ask,’ said Redwood. ‘The Chief Inspector says of course there’s nothing new about the situation, girls will be girls and boys will be boys, but they haven’t had a man-eater from the Crown Prosecution Service before. Doesn’t exactly engender respect from the constabulary for our service, does it?’ he finished lamely.

  ‘And what did you say to the Chief Inspector?’

  ‘I said I wasn’t responsible for the private lives of our case clerks, or lawyers for that matter.’ He looked at her meaningfully. Helen’s ongoing love affair with a police officer was still the subject of comment. ‘I asked him if he had had a word with the lads themselves, since it takes two to tango.’

  Helen, approving of this response, nodded.

  ‘But he was insistent,’ Redwood went on. ‘Would someone have a word with our Rose? Well, it can’t be me. She’d spit in my eye.’

  ‘And in mine,’ said Helen.

  ‘But you seem to get on with her best.’

  ‘Best doesn’t mean well. How can I stop her, if this is really what she’s doing? Perhaps I wouldn’t want to, perhaps she’s having fun …’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Redwood volunteered with surprising wisdom. ‘I doubt it very much. I’ve always thought the height of sexual pleasure lay in monogamy.’ Helen looked at him in one of those rare moments when they understood one another. He was not, after all, a man devoid of compassion and he did have daughters. ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind me taking her under my wing rather more than I do, perhaps we could offer her alternative stimulus? Like better quality work? prospects of promotion?’ Redwood winced and smiled wanly. Helen always exacted a price.

  He watched her get up to leave, recovering her shopping as she went. Only Helen West, always in a hurry, would be shameless enough to dash into a meeting late, armed with groceries, as if she was trying to make some kind of point. He forgot she had come in from outside and it was a long haul to her own room.

  ‘You look as if you’re about to feed the five thousand,’ he grunted.

  ‘No,’ said Helen, suddenly embarrassed by the weight of what she carried. ‘Only one. But I need a wife.’

  The groceries bounced against her legs as she wandered down the endless corridor to Room 251. What on earth had possessed her to stop at a market stall and buy kilos of fruit and vegetables when she still had to do the supermarket on the way home? Oh yes, my turn to apologise for being so mean yesterday; my turn to cook and I hate cooking, why didn’t I just say we’d go out? But, poor soul is a bit embarrassed about being seen in public with an enormous black eye which I wasn’t qualified to kiss better.

  Tapping down the corridor over the lumpy carpet, rustling as she walked, Helen forgot Rose Darvey. Rose could wait until tomorrow. Waiting, like everything else, until Geoffrey Bailey with his black eye (worse this morning than the night before) had gone.

  The clerks’ room was only three enormous doors down from Redwood’s office, but he visited it as rarely as possible. The red light for the ludicrous goods lift winked in the gloomy corridor. Helen passed the room where Dinsdale and John, the one as extrovert and charming as the other was shy, kept one another company. Three of the case clerks, Rose included, gathered by the door, drawn by John, who had carried on singing. Helen paused in passing, drawn as they were drawn, not only by the sound, but by the glamorous Dinsdale who was not like the rest of them at all. There was nothing of the misfit, for a start: he bore all the signs of privilege, private money, charm, humility and a way with words. Everybody loved him. Even Rose, which meant he had passed the acid test. To Helen Dinsdale was a divine problem: the thought of him made her go pink, remember her age (five years older than him), and also remember Redwood’s remark about the joys of monogamy. As Helen watched, prepared to join the fan club, Rose detached herself from the group and sped off, running for the telephone, her spiked hair waving and that plait swinging against her neck. Helen plodded behind with her own prosaic shopping of which she was faintly ashamed. Bags of potatoes and fruit made her feel she had traversed the loop between youth and age: they diminished her into nothing and she quickened her step down this endless corridor in the shadow of the girl. Helen found herself standing outside the door, listening to Rose answering the call, looking for some sort of confirmation of what she had just been told about Rose and the police boys, uncomfortably aware that she had not really questioned anything Redwood had said, not shouted, Where’s your evidence that our most promising non-professional is as promiscuous as a rabbit? Knowing she had not argued because she had not been surprised. Helen often worked late. She knew that Rose never left the office alone.

  Rose’s voice sang with irritation as she held the phone; it was an inflection carried on a draught from another huge window. Helen’s belief in the imperviousness of youth fled. ‘Listen,’ Rose was saying, ‘listen. You either fucking turn up or you don’t. If you don’t, well forget it. Sod you.’ It was clearly milder than it might have been. Rose was speaking through gritted teeth, controlling herself. ‘What do you mean later?’ she was saying. ‘What use is fucking later to me? Oh, I might be in a pub. Oh, Crown and Anchor, somewhere like that. You’ll have to look, won’t you? Bastard,’ was what she hissed, putting the phone down. ‘Bastard, bastard, bastard.’

  It was already dark outside, darker than black velvet, darker than the charcoal with which Helen drew her odd but often accurate depictions of faces, and that was all Helen saw through the window as Rose looked up and spied her own reflection. Rose’s face on the old glass bore wavy lines of a childish and unattractive fury, but the look as she spun round had changed to one of cunning.

  ‘Oh, it’s you. Well, I don’t mind people hearing me mouthing off.’

  ‘You’re quite entitled,’ said Helen. ‘As long as you weren’t talking to the Attorney General. Wouldn’t do your career much good.’

  Rose barked with laughter, her sharp little face alight with it and becoming animated into that of a different, more malleable creature until she stopped abruptly and looked at Helen assessingly. Helen could feel the scorn for the depressing bags of fruit and vegetables. Such luggage would never weigh down Rose Darvey or make her consider there was ever a time in Helen’s life when she too might have lived on gin, tonic and crisps, a modus vivendi she still often craved.

  ‘You look tired, Miss West. Why don’t you come out for a drink with us after work?’

  Helen was amazed, gratified in a way. Whatever the hidden motive, there must surely be in there some expression of approval which she needed in her present insecure frame of mind. But before she could think, she was stuttering the negative, raising the polythene bags in a helpless gesture which made her feel older still. Apples, oranges and potatoes, God help me.

  ‘Rose, I’d love to, but I can’t. Got to get home, food shopping, you know …’ Rose did not know. Too late, Helen found herself making excuses for a refusal which could have been both warm and gracious but sounded merely lame. The moment in which she could have established some intimacy died in the speaking. Rose turned back to her desk, fiddled with the phone, showing no sign of disappointment, shrugging.

  ‘No problem. Forget I asked.’

  ‘An
other time …’

  ‘No, forget it. Only an idea. But listen, while you’re here, can I ask you something?’

  Perhaps the chance of mutuality had not fled after all, but Rose was businesslike. ‘You know how I keep track of all the case papers in a notebook? And then who’s-your-face puts them in the computer every day with all the dates for the remand hearings, so we know where everything is, and which dates someone’s got to turn up to court the next time?’ Helen was ashamed to say she did not really know, deliberately ignorant of the way the office worked. ‘Well,’ Rose continued, ‘someone keeps nicking the notebook. You’ve got the untidiest room. My sodding notebooks haven’t wandered in there lately, have they?’

  It was spoken like an accusation, so unnecessarily aggressive that Helen had the fleeting suspicion Rose somehow sensed that she had been discussed in critical terms and was defending herself in advance. Or maybe it was her response to the mildest of rejections.

  ‘I don’t think so. Why should I have them? Does it matter, as long as it’s all gone on the computer? That’s the only record we need, isn’t it.’

  ‘Oh, you are stupid,’ said Rose. The other five girls were clattering back, yawning, reaching for hats and coats, grinning at Helen. They were all so much nicer than Rose and so much less complicated, she thought with the rise of a familiar irritation. Rose’s back view and her overbright hallos to her mates had the same effect as a dismissal and Helen took the hint. Rose had a shining charisma and energy in her which defied the brash rudeness; she would find someone else to go to the pub. ‘Night!’ she yelled, rudely, and then with a last, pitying look at the unglamorous bags, added, ‘Have a good evening.’ Suddenly her pretty face split into a grin. ‘Listen, you can always wow a man with potatoes …’