His father must have been waiting and watching for him—the car, it was true, made an unmistakable and incredible noise as it laboured up the last bit of hill. Daniel had hardly rung the bell before his father had opened the door. He didn’t say anything, just made a gesture towards the sitting room. His mother wasn’t there; Tim was on the stairs, just nodded and went up to his room.
“What’s up?” Daniel said, but his father said nothing, just closed the door behind him. “Where’s Mum?”
“She’s fine,” Malcolm said. “I don’t know what’s happening. It was an hour ago, an hour and a half. The doorbell went, and there were two policemen. They’ve taken your mother down to the station.”
“The police?” Daniel said. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” Malcolm said.
“It’s probably nothing,” Daniel said. “It’s probably some driving thing or, I don’t know, your television licence.”
“I don’t think so,” Malcolm said.
“You didn’t go down with her?” Daniel said.
“No, but I’m just going to,” Malcolm said. “I wanted you to come along, though, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind,” Daniel said, “but I’m sure it’s nothing. There’s nothing Mum could have done.”
There was a pause. Malcolm got up and went to the window. Turning, he looked suddenly quite old and drawn. He had always, in the past, changed out of his suit altogether when he got home, hadn’t he? But that was a work shirt, and work trousers, though he’d taken off his tie and shoes. He hadn’t wanted to ask Tim to go with him to the police station. Daniel could understand that.
“I know that, really,” Malcolm said. “I’m worrying about nothing probably. I wish I knew what it was about, though. You don’t mind?”
“No, I don’t mind,” Daniel said.
. . .
As Katherine stepped out of her house, the policemen walking, discreetly, ahead and behind her, not flanking her, the neighbours appallingly watching, she felt an inevitability about the whole thing. In whatever house she had ever lived—on the other side of every front door, the solid green door of her childhood, the door with a stained-glass inset of her teenage years, and then the three front doors of her married life, the flimsy one of the terraced house, the solid Victorian one with its two windows, and finally this modern white-painted one, behind which they’d lived for how many years—she’d always felt there would one day arrive some chariot of judgement to bear her away in exactly this fashion. Perhaps some people always lived in fear of the police knocking on the door. Katherine hadn’t. The judgement she had waited for and expected was a more general thing than that. It hadn’t been, either, a fear of being found out in whatever she might have been doing, but really the expectation of a judgement that in the end might be a positive one, confirming that there was nothing wrong with her life. She felt she needed that from outside, and without it, she would always feel as she did: slightly ill at ease. She didn’t know what form such a judgement might come in; in the event it came, as it often did in the real world, with two mineral-faced policemen.
The room she sat in had only a ribbon of reinforced window running round the top of the wall. It was not an interview room, but a sort of waiting room, rather like the rooms in hospitals where doctors tell next-of-kin of a death. She had been led in here by the policemen who had brought her in, and told someone would be along shortly. She felt almost calm. In a few minutes, a policewoman came in with a sheaf of papers, and said as if reading from a script that Katherine understood she was attending voluntarily, that she had not been charged with any crime, and then asked if she wanted to have a solicitor present at her interview. “I can arrange the duty solicitor,” she said. “It won’t take long.”
“I think that would be a good idea,” Katherine said, then asked what this was all about. She had never thought it was some traffic offence, as Malcolm had found time to say while she was leaving the house. She knew it was not. Her thoughts had gone first to Tim—who knew what he was doing in his spare time? But he had not presented an object of interest to the police, and immediately her thoughts went, more securely, to Nick. It was an unspecific insight, but it was clear to her that if her life had contained any squalor-harbouring fissure that might ultimately interest the authorities, it related somehow to Nick. She wondered how she had never seen that before.
Around her, outside the room, the life of the police station continued, a rattle of talk, of machines typing, and a man shouting unintelligibly, somewhere remotely. Katherine wondered how long Malcolm would be, though of course he would have to wait outside, she supposed. Time passed: no one came to offer her a cup of tea. It must have been nearly an hour before the door opened, and a young Asian woman came in, introducing herself as the duty solicitor. It was true: as you got older, police officers looked younger, and so did solicitors. She had expected one of the partners from Collins Rathbone and Ostler, the firm she’d worked at before her marriage, someone like that with a solid old suit and a grave manner, not a tiny woman with glossy big hair and a cheap big-shouldered suit with gold buttons, a chain-store imitation of something expensive. But she was the duty solicitor, and she began to talk. At once, Katherine was unnerved by having heard and instantly forgotten her name.
Speaking from a script again, she explained Katherine’s rights in the interview room, and then—this was troubling—stressed that Katherine was not under arrest. She might well have said “yet.” She had said that many times before, wearily, in her voice, throaty, with only a trace of a Sheffield accent. “I understand all that,” Katherine said. The solicitor nodded, and went on with her standard explanation. She shuffled her papers, then started on the specific reason for Katherine being here: and it was, as Katherine had somehow thought, about Nick.
The solicitor finished, and asked Katherine if she had any questions at this stage. Katherine had, but she shook her head. “Right,” the solicitor said, and left the room. This time it wasn’t a long wait: in five minutes, a uniformed sergeant came in and led her down a corridor, confused noisy offices behind open glass doors to either side. At some point, the solicitor joined her, and they went into a different room. It, too, was bare, only four chairs about a table, and again that narrow strip of window round the top of the walls. Katherine and the solicitor sat on one side; the sergeant stood by the open door. Promptly, two men came in, in ties and rolled-up shirtsleeves, carrying papers and recording machinery. They set them down; the door was shut; they began to talk.
“When did you start working at Reynolds?”
“Was the job advertised?”
“Did you know Mr. Reynolds before you started work there?”
“Do you expect us to believe that?”
“Why would he employ a stranger?”
“We will, of course, be checking all this, you understand.”
“What previous jobs have you had?”
“Do you know this man?” A photograph across the table.
“What were your duties at the flower shop?”
“Would you describe the shop as a success?”
“Did it seem to be making money, from the sale of flowers, I mean?”
“What was Mr. Reynolds’s typical outlay on flowers in the course of a typical week, a month?”
“Explain your duties at the flower shop to us again.”
“You must have had a loose sense of how much money the shop made from the sale of flowers in the course of a typical day.”
“When you say that you had nothing to do with the shop’s accounts, do you mean that it was not your responsibility, or do you seriously expect us to believe that you never even saw them?”
“How long did you work there?”
“Why did you leave?”
“Again, I want to ask you, why did you stop working there, and I would very much appreciate a full and truthful answer.”
“Could you describe the shop? I mean, its storage arrangements.”
�
�You haven’t mentioned the cellar. Did you ever go down there?”
“What was stored in the cellar?”
“Did you ever see anything unusual being stored in the cellar?”
“What deliveries were made to the shop while you were there?”
“What do you know about Mr. Reynolds’s financial backing? I mean, where did the money come from to open a shop in the first place, because we know perfectly well it wasn’t from any kind of bank?”
“We haven’t heard about any brother in New York. Can you tell us some more about him?”
“Have you ever met this supposed New York brother?”
“Have you ever spoken to him?”
“Could you tell us his name, or his address?”
“Would it surprise you very much to learn that Mr. Reynolds has no brother, in New York or anywhere else?”
“I am going to ask you again, do you recognize this man—” A photograph pushed across the table.
“What do you know about the girl who replaced you in the shop?”
“How would you describe your relationship, in general, with Mr. Reynolds?”
The interview went on for an unquantifiable time, the dull, unexcitable voices of the urban policemen treading wearily over the ground, going back, pressing at some point that interested them, producing papers, photographs, asking for years-ago details with solid persistence. From time to time, the duty solicitor cut in, not sharply but judiciously marking some boundary. The interviewers accepted the point each time, and moved on. Katherine went on answering the questions, even when, as the solicitor kept saying, the point had been raised and answered. Under examination, how unmotivated ordinary life seemed; her actions deriving from nothing very concrete, and certainly not from the decision and the rational assessment of advantage the policemen seemed to believe must be there. Her ignorance, neither wilful nor feigned, but no more than a not-knowing, could not satisfy them, and she could not explain how much of her connection with Nick and his business, now revealed by the tenor of these questions as empty and criminally fraudulent, had come from the way his hair, years before, had fallen over his childishly puzzled brow. Nothing more than that; and it was not evidence.
Katherine answered all the questions calmly, and said what she knew. Only when it came to that last question, of how she would describe her relationship with Nick, did she consciously keep anything back. It was not their business; it had no conceivable relevance to their investigations. She went on answering, and in time a foolish and ugly scenario became clear from the outline of their questions.
A man had come to Sheffield, and had opened a shop. But it was not selling flowers at all. Despite appearances—customers had come in, had selected blooms, had watched them being wrapped, had handed over money, which had been conscientiously placed in the till and scrupulously registered afterwards—the shop had not been selling flowers. It was doing something completely different. Nick had been taking money from somewhere else, in regular amounts—dirty money, soiled by its origins—and slipping it in underneath the respectable money involved in the sale of narcissi. He was a useful tool for someone; she had looked like—what? She had looked to him like a useful tool, too, her foolishness and clear, shameful devotion a positive benefit. She would gaze, cow-eyed, at his lovely face, but in the end never want to say, “Nick, I don’t understand where this two hundred pounds has come from. We haven’t sold a blade of grass since yesterday.”
All the same—and this was a thought that she rather kept from her mind than hugged to it—he had, in the end, made love to her. Screwed her—done sex to her—fucked her. If she thought of that one occasion at all, she would uglify it as much as she could. He hadn’t needed to do that. He must have wanted it.
It seemed incredible to her now that she hadn’t wondered where the money had come from to buy the charming Ranmoor cottage with its London furniture. She had never thought that it had come from the flower shop. If she had considered the matter at all, she would have thought that Nick had a deep reservoir of his own money. Quite natural that such a person could run a shop, making no money, for years, and not take the matter remotely seriously. The question for Katherine now was not what she had believed at the time, but what the police could reasonably presume she had believed, as the time went on, the questions dully circling, setting out what Katherine could now see was the substantial truth of the situation. She wondered where Nick was at this moment; perhaps in this police station, locked up. She almost felt like asking.
There was nowhere to wait in the police station; nowhere but where everyone waited, out in front of the public desk. The walls were shiny with washable yellow-white paint, and hung with firmly advising posters about drink and drive, about drugs, about guns, about all manner of things. There was a leisurely traffic through the reception area, some drunk and noisy, more drunk and rebuked, their heads down. One defiant prostitute, her frizzy, hennaed, half-greying hair plastered down with sweat, her white leggings obscenely hoisted into the cleft of her cunt, greeted the desk sergeant by name and was greeted, sardonically, by name in return; she looked round, grinning, and found Daniel to stare at. Malcolm had never seen such people; Daniel said, when appealed to, that it was more like you had seen them, glimpsed them out of the corner of your eye when walking through town. You wouldn’t want to look directly at people like that. They sat on the orange plastic chairs, bolted in rows against the walls in case someone decided to throw them at the policemen, and read the posters, over and over, passing desultory and general observations, like a conversation struck up between strangers on a bus. At one point, around half past nine, on the other side of the desk, the station filled with hundreds of policemen, appearing from nowhere, dishevelled and dusty, their tunics open and their helmets in their hands, shouting with the hoarse voices of men occupied all day in the open air. They didn’t have Yorkshire accents; they had been called in from elsewhere, and had been policing a miners’ picket line all day. “Where can we get something to eat round here?” one called out.
“In the canteen,” the desk sergeant said, in his normal voice, breaking off from a discussion with a worried old man.
“They’re in no hurry,” Malcolm said, attempting cheerfulness, but Daniel wouldn’t answer that. If they started wondering about how long they were going to keep her, they would start thinking about what his mother might have done, and it obviously wasn’t a parking ticket.
“I should phone Tim,” Malcolm said a little later.
“I’ll phone him if you like,” Daniel said. “Have you got any two-ps?”
“There’s not a lot of point,” Malcolm said. “And he won’t be worrying. Do you think we should phone Jane?”
“When we know if there’s anything to tell her,” Daniel said. “It’s probably nothing.”
“Yes,” Malcolm said desolately.
But the time went on, and they went on reading the posters; so many useful telephone numbers.
It was late when the Austin Allegro drew into the driveway. Across the way, a light in the front room of a house snapped off sharply, so as not to reveal the woman standing up and peering out. Katherine—you could see how the story would run—had been carried off in a Black Maria, and they wanted to see if she was coming back tonight. There had been no question about one thing. Daniel had come home with them, riding in the back as if he were a child again. No one had mentioned dropping him off in Crookes and he hadn’t thought of it until they were halfway up the Manchester Road. Anyway, the car was still in Rayfield Avenue.
Certainly, it had always been his job to jump out smartly to open the garage door, one of his household tasks, like gravy-making. But tonight it was his mother who made a point of getting out. She had thought, evidently, during the long, silent exchanges of their drive home, of the neighbours’ watchfulness. She fumbled with the key at the lock, lit by the headlight beam, and with a wrench lifted it up over her head. She stood aside to let Malcolm drive in, and Daniel caught an unguarded glimpse of
her face, as a stranger might see it. The faces of his parents were surely just as they had always been, ever since he had been able to identify them, they had grown no older, but now he saw Katherine’s face as the worn generic face of a middle-aged woman, its lines full of some unknowable care, and only the eyes were definitely those of his mother. She had found time to change not only her shoes but all her clothes. She was wearing the little jacket and, underneath it, exactly that sort of piecrust pussy-bow-collared blouse Mrs. Thatcher so liked to wear on the television, exactly the same shade of baby shit as the Austin Allegro, now a bit wilting at the end of this long guilt-strewn evening.
His father leant over to lock the passenger door before getting out and locking his own. Katherine was standing there, her arms upraised on the garage door, her back to the street. She seemed tall; but she had her high-heeled shoes on. Malcolm looked at her, a volunteering expression in his eyes.
“I think,” Katherine said, swallowing as she spoke, “I might go for a walk before bedtime. I feel—” she lowered her voice as if she could be overheard “—all wound up, if you know—”
Daniel looked at his watch. He had no idea what time it was, and it was well after eleven. But as if he’d made a rational objection with the gesture, Malcolm seized Daniel’s forearm and held it. She pulled the garage door down, and swiftly walked away. Above, the snake-hiss of a curtain opening, a slash of light in the upper floor. Tim was watching her go. Katherine clicked away down the street; her increasing speed made it seem as if the clicking was growing louder the further away from them she got.
The Northern Clemency Page 45