The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  Cole Brothers had moved in Katherine’s lifetime. Where it had been had once been a favourite meeting-place. When she and Malcolm had first known each other, they, like most of Sheffield, had been accustomed to meet at that point, and still she thought of that turn at the end of Fargate, now occupied by Chelsea Girl and the Midland Bank, as Cole’s Corner. Now it was in a glassy sixties block opposite the City Hall and the war memorial, facing the new prancing statue that looked a bit like an emaciated Princess Anne on a thin rearing donkey. The women’s clothes were on the first floor, and Katherine quite often bought hers there—she’d given up on Belinda’s in Broomhill and, in fact, on Broomhill altogether since she’d stopped working at Nick’s. Today she was buying a suit. The case was on Thursday.

  “What is it for?” the shop assistant said—the first one she’d approached had said it was just about her tea break, and passed her on to an older colleague with a violet rinse in her hair, only needing rhinestone horn-rims to make the resemblance to Mary Whitehouse complete. “Is it a wedding?”

  She hadn’t waited for an answer, and Katherine was glad. “Yes, that’s about the size of it,” she said.

  “Is it your daughter who’s getting married?” the woman said, sizing up the suit Katherine was trying. “Perhaps she ought to come and advise you, too.”

  “No,” Katherine said. “It’s an ex-colleague of mine. We never thought it would happen to him, but it finally has. He’s in his late thirties.”

  “Well, I do call that nice,” the assistant said. “There’s no need to be too sombre, though, even so. That’s a nice suit for a professional woman, a very smart work suit, but I think a navy that dark might make you look a bit too sombre in the photographs. You could almost wear that to a funeral, now, couldn’t you?”

  “All right,” Katherine said, shrugging off the jacket.

  “My ladies always think they can jazz up a dark outfit with a brightly coloured shirt or blouse, but it’s never quite right,” the woman said. “Now, it’s definitely a suit you’re wanting, is it? What about a smart dress with a little bolero jacket on top? We’ve got something—”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Katherine said. “I think definitely a suit.”

  “You’ve got the figure for a little dress,” the assistant said, “and you could just shrug off the jacket when it comes to the wedding breakfast. No? All right, let’s see, now. There’s this—”

  “That’s too bright,” Katherine said. “I couldn’t wear that shade of red, not to this sort of occasion.”

  “You should try it on,” the assistant said. “I’m sure there are lots of lovely bright colours you could get away with that you haven’t considered. For instance, you should consider more warm greens, gold and rust. You shouldn’t be wearing that scarf, it’s salmon pink, that’s more a sort of pink-and-blonde lady’s colour, like teal or periwinkle.”

  “I’m not sure what periwinkle is,” Katherine said.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter, because you won’t be wearing it. Now, just for the sake of it, let’s put you in this long dress. I know it’s not what you’re looking for.”

  “No, it certainly isn’t,” Katherine said, because it was a gold taffeta strapless ballgown, ballooning out. She would never wear such a thing, though the idea of turning up to give evidence in it—again that familiar glitch, like a needle skipping over a scratch on a record—was an impressive one.

  “I know,” the assistant said. “It’s just to give you an idea of the way that colours you’ve probably never considered could do the world for you. Just slip it on, and you’ll see straight away.”

  Katherine meekly obeyed. She came out of the dressing room with her eyes cast down, feeling ridiculous, but the shop assistant clapped her hands; a pair of shoppers who had been sorting through the ra-ra skirts in the middle distance paused in what might have been impressed amazement.

  “You see,” the assistant said, leading her to a mirror. “Just take a look at that, see if it isn’t a fantastic colour for you.”

  Katherine didn’t know what to expect, but certainly not the full transformation; in this aisle-wide dress, the cloth rustling, its skeleton creaking, she seemed not the apologetic worm she had expected, but an ageing beauty who hadn’t had time to do her hair properly. In this extraordinary colour, she just glowed.

  “Welcome to the 1980s,” the assistant said.

  “It’s just the dress, though,” Katherine said. “I couldn’t ever wear something like that, I don’t have the occasions.”

  “No, it’s not just the dress, it’s the colour,” the assistant said. “Now, let’s have a look for suits, but something in your colours, warm green, golds and rust.”

  “Not too gold,” Katherine said, making a gesture at the luminescent dress, which, splendid though it was, was still a little like the Christmas turkey wrapped in gold foil.

  “Perhaps a nice warm green tweed,” the assistant said. “I know what you’re thinking, but it’ll be a nice modern sort of take on tweed, a tweed suit with—a classic with a twist. I might have just the thing. And you’ll be wanting a hat.”

  “I’ll leave the hat for another day,” Katherine said. “I want to think about that a little bit first, see what people are wearing, these days.”

  So, surprisingly, as Katherine entered the Sheffield court building with Malcolm three days later, Daniel following behind soberly dressed—they’d both managed to take the day off work with a made-up excuse—she was wearing something she’d never thought of wearing, a tweed suit in a warm green she’d been persuaded into. Her shoulders moved experimentally within the wide board-like expanse of the jacket’s cut. She’d thought of livening it up with a blouse to match her usual American Tan tights, but in the end she’d taken the advice, and wore a white silk shirt with a sort of pussy-bow collar and something she’d not worn for years, a pair of black tights. She’d not announced them as new when she’d come home with them; Malcolm must have understood when she came back with the big Cole Brothers bag why she’d bought a new outfit, but he’d not said anything, and this morning, when she’d come down in all this for the first time, he’d only told her something reassuring about repeating exactly what she’d said to the police, and that would be fine.

  It had been explained to Katherine that she wouldn’t be allowed to listen to the evidence of other witnesses, just as they couldn’t meet her or listen to her evidence. But she could, if she liked, listen to Nick defending himself later in the day. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to, or what she would gain from that. She didn’t mention it to Malcolm. So she was separated from Malcolm and Nick, and settled in a kind of private space, with nothing to read or look at apart from a neutral pair of old prints, pictures of Sheffield before the war. A cup of coffee was brought, and another. She waited, emptying her mind as much as she could. She remembered what she had been told, that a good witness listened to the questions, and answered only the question that had been put; a witness did not get angry, or try to explain the whole situation, or the witness would be stopped. It all seemed impossible, and had never been further away.

  But soon an officer of the court stepped in and asked her to follow him. The corridors were plain, not the wood panelling she had expected, and when he opened the door and led her into the courtroom, that was a surprise, too. It was a smaller room than she had thought, and full of people; it seemed strangely smoky, its dust rising up in the light from the high windows. Nobody looked at her. She allowed herself to be led to the witness stand, and took the vow on the Bible. Then, before the barrister started to ask questions, she managed to glance around, and there, suddenly, were a few people she knew; in the public gallery, Malcolm and Daniel and, unexpectedly, Helen too; and her eyes fell on Nick, looking exactly as he always had, his gaze anywhere but on her. He only looked bored, that was all.

  One of the barristers rose; he was fat, broad-faced, and his wide mouth seemed almost to cut his face in two, like a toad’s. His gown swelled out before him; he res
ted his two hands on either side of his pile of papers, crouching there like malignant amphibians about to leap. The questions started, and they were much the same as the questions the police had asked her the first time, and the more recent occasion when they had gone through the whole business again.

  “When did you begin work at Mr. Reynolds’s shop?”

  “Did you know Mr. Reynolds before starting work there?”

  “What drew you to apply for a job there?”

  “What experience did you have working in a shop before then?”

  “Why did you want to take a job at all?”

  “How would you describe your family finances?”

  “How many days a week did you work there?”

  “How would you describe Mr. Reynolds’s methods of running the business?”

  “Did you see the accounts of the shop at any point?”

  “Did anything ever strike you as peculiar about the amounts of money coming into the shop?”

  “What banking arrangements did Mr. Reynolds have?”

  “Is that the only bank account you are aware of?”

  “Did Mr. Reynolds ever ask you to pay any money into the bank?”

  “Did you ever question Mr. Reynolds about the accounts?”

  “Did you ever see the bank statements pertaining to the shop?”

  “Did you ever go to Mr. Reynolds’s house in Sheffield?”

  She paused then.

  “Just answer the question, please, Mrs. Glover,” the judge said gently.

  “Yes,” Katherine said. “I went once to Mr. Reynolds’s house in Ranmoor, just after he had bought it.”

  She could almost feel the stiffening from the public gallery, a willingness not to hear what was about to be said.

  “How would you describe Mr. Reynolds’s house?”

  “It was a very nice house.”

  “Would it surprise you to learn that it cost seventy-eight thousand pounds to buy?”

  “No, I would guess that that was about what a house like that in Ranmoor would cost. I live quite nearby. It’s a very good neighbourhood.”

  “How did Mr. Reynolds find the money to buy a house like that?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Did he never mention how he was buying the house?”

  “No, I don’t believe he did.”

  “Would it surprise you to know that Mr. Reynolds bought the house outright, without needing to take out a mortgage?”

  “If I had known that, I would have thought that he had bought it with his own money.”

  “Did it not strike you as strange—”

  There was an objection here, for some reason, the defence barrister popping up like a black jack-in-the-box, and the judge asked the barrister to move on with his questions. Katherine felt released from something; she would not have to answer at least one question, though it was a question she hardly cared about or worried over, and with the release she found herself trembling.

  “How would you describe your relationship with Mr. Reynolds?”

  “We had a good working relationship,” Katherine said carefully. “I liked him.”

  “How close was that?”

  “Well, I invited him to come to a party my husband and I were holding once,” Katherine said. “We were good enough friends for that.”

  “So you socialized together.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Katherine said. “He didn’t come to my party, and I only went once to his house.”

  “Did he take you into his confidence on any subjects?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, seeing that there were too many ways to answer this question.

  “Did you believe, from anything Mr. Reynolds said, that there was anything improper about the way he was running his business?”

  Another objection, again sustained. The courtroom—she was able to look around her properly, now—was modern, but wood-panelled, the panelling brought from some older and more august building. For the first time, she saw to one side of the room a box of people in two short lines, inspecting her with frowning disapproval, boredom, concentration. It was the jury. She wouldn’t turn to the other side and look at Nick again.

  “What were Mr. Reynolds’s suppliers?”

  “I can’t remember their names,” Katherine said.

  “Was he supplied, for instance, with flowers, by Gracechurch’s?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Katherine said. “Those were his suppliers.”

  “What other suppliers did he have?”

  “Later, he found a different supplier, I think—yes, they were called Bradstone. He got fed up with the others, he said they never had much of a range.”

  “So he dropped Gracechurch’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “When would that be?”

  “I think it was in the very early spring one year.”

  “Would it have been in 1977?”

  “Yes, it could have been. In fact, yes, it definitely was, because I remember Nick saying that he was worried Gracechurch’s might let us down in some way when it came to the Silver Jubilee if there was a high demand for flowers, so we ought to change a few months in advance.”

  “Did Mr. Reynolds ever, to your knowledge, use more than one supplier at the same time?”

  “No, definitely not.”

  “How much of a mark-up did Mr. Reynolds generally make?”

  “Could you explain, please?”

  “Mrs. Glover, there’s no need to dissimulate.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You must be aware of what the shop’s mark-up was. What did Mr. Reynolds pay for flowers from the wholesalers, and what did he charge for them?”

  “I’m sorry,” Katherine said. “We always used a different word. I think if he paid five pounds, he would try to charge enough so he’d make between eight and ten pounds if he sold all of them. Lilies, that would have been. I think that’s about right.”

  “So between sixty and a hundred per cent mark-up, is that right?”

  “I don’t know,” Katherine said. “I really don’t know.”

  “That would follow from what you’ve just said.”

  “Yes, but,” Katherine said, hoping to help Nick in some way here, “I don’t think he ever really made a hundred per cent profit at the end of the week. There were all sorts of other things he had to pay for, like the van, and rent, and then, of course, there were lots of flowers which had to be thrown away at the end of the week because they hadn’t sold—”

  “Mrs. Glover, the court is quite familiar with these concepts of business,” the judge said. “Could we move on?”

  “If your lordship pleases,” the barrister said. “Now, Mrs. Glover, I wonder if you could take a look at Exhibit G.” It was passed up to her by one of the clerks, sitting in the well of the courtroom. “As you see, these are three pages from the accounts for September 1976. These are sample pages, m’lud. And with it, the business’s bank statement for the same month. You will see that recorded sales and the amount paid in on successive Friday afternoons by, I presume, you, amount to £1,223, £1,076, and £1,150. Is that correct?”

  “I don’t remember ever seeing any of this,” Katherine said. “I don’t remember those weeks in particular.”

  “Does that seem like the sort of amount that you were being asked to pay into the bank around that time?”

  “It sounds about right,” Katherine said. “But I didn’t really pay very much attention.”

  “Now, please look at Exhibit H.” Again, three sheets of paper in a folder, passed up in an unfamiliar hand. “These are the relevant pages from the order book of Mr. Reynolds’s supplier at the time, which you have testified was his only supplier, is that correct?”

  “Yes, that’s right, as far as I know.”

  “You will see that for the corresponding weeks, Mr. Reynolds paid £220, £240 and £215 to the supplier for flowers. You have testified that Mr. Reynolds’s usual mark-up was somewhere between sixty
and a hundred per cent, a usual commercial rate. These rates suggest, however, something more like five hundred per cent or a little more. Can you offer any explanation?”

  “We sold vases too, sometimes,” Katherine said hopelessly. “And stationery, as well.”

  “Did you ever sell as much as six or seven hundred pounds’ worth of those goods in a week?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Try to remember, Mrs. Glover.”

  “I don’t think we could ever have done,” Katherine eventually said.

  “Did nothing about any of this strike you as being remotely strange at the time?”

  No, it didn’t.”

  “What other business associates did Mr. Reynolds have, apart from the suppliers?”

  “I don’t know of any.”

  “Come, now, Mrs. Glover. You must have been aware of the sources of this extra income in the shop. Who brought the extra money to Mr. Reynolds?”

  “I never saw anyone.”

  “We know they came very regularly, these sums of money.”

  “I don’t know that.”

  “We also know that they were most likely brought in person.”

  I don’t know that, either.”

  “Were there never any regular visitors to Mr. Reynolds’s shop whom you became familiar with?”

  Katherine paused, looking to the public gallery as if for assistance. She could see her family, Daniel leaning forward in concern; behind him, there was a girl in a beautiful cream jacket and perfect hair. She stood out; and though she was not looking at Katherine, or at anything in particular, there was something about her forced stillness that had a significance. Katherine had no idea what that significance might be. “I only knew the regular customers,” she said. “There was nobody apart from that, as far as I know.”