by Simon Brett
And now, after some of the questions I’ve been asked in the last few months, I know my instinct was right. It would have been a very bad idea.
My problems . . . yes, I suppose I have to call them problems . . . began in relation to a little girl called Bethany Jones. I didn’t know her second name when I met her. She just told me she was called ‘Bethany’. But recently her name’s been so much in the newspapers and on television that everyone in the country knows she’s called Bethany Jones.
I met her in the park, like the other children. She was six – just been six, just had her sixth birthday party, she was very proud of that. She lived quite near the park, over the other side from my house. Her parents didn’t like her going to the children’s playground on her own, but she was so close she used to sneak out when they weren’t looking.
That’s when I’d met her. And we’d talk about Children’s BBC. She didn’t call me ‘Eddie’. She used to call me ‘Fat Boy’, which I suppose could have been cruel, but I didn’t mind it from Bethany. She didn’t mean any harm. That’s what they said in the papers. Her mother said, ‘Bethany never did any harm to anyone.’
I didn’t know what had happened to Bethany before the police arrived. I don’t read a paper or watch the news – well, except for Newsround on Children’s BBC. And that’s on at five, and she wasn’t found till four-thirty, so they’d have been hard pushed to get it on that day’s programme. Anyway, Newsround wouldn’t have covered a story like Bethany Jones’s. It was too unpleasant for a children’s audience.
The police arrived very quickly. Children’s BBC had just ended, at five thirty-five as usual, and Neighbours was starting. Sometimes I watch Neighbours and sometimes I don’t. It’s not proper Children’s BBC, though I know a lot of children watch it. As for me, I’ll watch it if I like the story. If there’s too much kissing and that sort of thing, I’ll switch it off. I don’t like stories with kissing in them. I never saw Papa and Mama kiss, and the thought of people doing it sort of like in public, on the television . . . well, I don’t think it’s very nice.
The day the police arrived, there wasn’t a kissing story in Neighbours and I was watching it. And videoing it, obviously. I video everything I watch. I had to switch off the television when the police came in. But I left the video running.
The first thing the police asked me was if I knew Bethany and I said, yes, of course I did. And they said they had been talking to some of the other children and was I the ‘Eddie’ who used to give them jelly babies, and I said, yes, I was.
There was one of them, the policemen, who seemed to be in charge. He was not wearing a uniform and he was very forceful. Detective Inspector Bracken he was called. Not the sort of person you’d argue with. He reminded me of Papa, and in the same way that I’d never have contradicted Papa, I found it difficult to stand up to this man and say he was wrong, even when the suggestions he was making were absolutely untrue. It seemed rather rude for me to disagree with him.
‘And did you ever give jelly babies to Bethany?’ Detective Inspector Bracken demanded.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course I did. I like Bethany. She’s one of my friends.’
‘So she was one of your friends, was she?’
‘Is one of my friends,’ I said. ‘Is one of my friends.’
Detective Inspector Bracken looked at me thoughtfully. But his expression wasn’t just thoughtful. There was something else in it too, something that almost looked like distaste. He kept on looking at me.
I suddenly remembered that the police were guests in my house and I hadn’t even offered them anything. (‘Black mark, Edmund,’ Papa would have said. ‘Black mark on the hospitality front.’) ‘Could I get you some tea or something?’ I asked. ‘Something to eat, perhaps? I often have buttered toast with golden syrup round this time. Maybe you’d like—?’
‘No, thank you,’ said Detective Inspector Bracken. And he kept on looking straight at me. I found it embarrassing. I tried not to look him in the face.
‘So . . .’ he said, after what seemed a long silence, ‘. . . have you always had this urge to hang round little girls?’
He was getting the wrong end of the stick. I had to explain it to him. ‘It’s not just little girls,’ I said. ‘It’s little boys, too.’
‘Is it?’ he said. ‘Really?’ And somehow he didn’t say it in a kind way. Then he went on, ‘Can you tell us what’s happened to Bethany Jones?’
‘Happened to her? Why should I be able to tell you that?’
‘I just thought you might be able to.’ Detective Inspector Bracken was looking at me in the way Papa used to, when I’d done something wrong and he was just waiting for me to own up to it. I always did own up; Papa knew he only had to wait. But with Detective Inspector Bracken it was different. There was nothing for me to own up to.
‘Save us the trouble of doing it,’ he went on after a silence. ‘Save us the trouble of telling you what’s happened to Bethany Jones.’
And then he did tell me what had happened to her. It was horrid. I don’t like things like that. It’s like kissing, and people’s secret bits . . . I don’t like it.
Apparently she’d been attacked in the park. She’d been dragged off into the bushes near the children’s playground. Then she’d been ‘sexually assaulted’. And then she’d been beaten on the head with a stone until she was dead.
‘Bethany – dead?’ I said in disbelief. ‘But I was talking to her only yesterday.’
‘Yesterday,’ Detective Inspector Bracken repeated. ‘Were you? And what about today?’
‘No, I didn’t see her today.’
‘Where were you, Mr Bowman,’ asked Detective Inspector Bracken, ‘between three-thirty and four-thirty this afternoon?’
I smiled at the question. Anyone who knew me at all – and granted there weren’t that many people who did know me – but anyone who knew anything about me would know the answer to that. I was where I am every weekday afternoon at that time.
‘I was here,’ I replied. ‘Here watching Children’s BBC. I always am. Go on, I can prove it. You ask me any questions you like about this afternoon’s Children’s BBC. I bet I can give you the right answers.’
Detective Inspector Bracken smiled wryly, and looked across at my video recorder. ‘Yes, I’m sure you can, Mr Bowman. Pretty unusual habit for a grown man, I’d have thought, videoing children’s television programmes . . .’
‘Oh, but I like to have a full record,’ I told him. ‘I feel awful if I think I’ve missed a single minute of Children’s BBC.’
‘I see,’ he said. But he didn’t look at me as if he did see. Soon after that, he said he wanted me to accompany him and the others to the police station, if I ‘didn’t mind’. No, I said, I didn’t mind. I knew it didn’t do to be difficult with forceful people like Detective Inspector Bracken. Best behaviour, Edmund, best behaviour.
They kept explaining things to me. They kept stopping and checking that I understood what was going on. Then, after I was charged, they got a lawyer for me, and she kept explaining things too. And yes, I did understand. I understood the words and I understood what they meant. What I didn’t understand was how they could manage to get it all so wrong.
I think a lot of the trouble was Detective Inspector Bracken. His manner, the way he put things, was so like Papa’s that . . . well, I still found it very difficult to argue with him. He’d say something which was complete nonsense and I’d . . . well, I’d try to point out, sort of, why what he was saying wasn’t true, but somehow my words didn’t come out right.
I felt very trapped. I wanted to get back to my house, put on a video of some old Tom and Jerry cartoons or something like that, and let it wash all the horrid thoughts and images out of my mind. But they wouldn’t let me do that.
I felt very lonely too. Although there were always people around – indeed, they wouldn’t leave me on my own for a second – none of them were friendly. They all looked at me as if I was carrying some awful infectious dis
ease. I wanted someone there who’d just talk to me in a relaxed, simple way. I’d’ve loved to have one of the children from the park there to talk to. At one moment when I was particularly stressed, I said that to Detective Inspector Bracken. He gave me a very strange look.
The lawyer they got me – there was no way I could have got one for myself, I’ve never had any cause to need a lawyer – was, I’m sure, fine, but she didn’t seem very interested in my case. Maybe it was just a job of work for her. She didn’t seem concerned about putting my side of things. But maybe that wasn’t what she was there for. Certainly she didn’t stand up to Detective Inspector Bracken much. He was so strong, so dominant, so like Papa.
It was the same at the trial. There was this woman barrister who defended me. I’ve nothing against women. I like women. But I don’t think of them as strong. Probably that comes from having grown up with my parents. It was always Papa who was in charge. Mama was a kind of shadowy figure in the background. So I never really expected the judge and the jury to take much notice of my barrister.
Also I don’t think she took the right approach for my defence. She kept saying it wasn’t just Bethany Jones who was a victim. I was a victim too. Then she said things that were a bit hurtful. She said just because I was odd, it didn’t automatically make me a criminal. She said, yes, I was a sad, rather pathetic figure, somebody who didn’t fit society’s norms. But that didn’t make me a murderer.
I’m not sure that was the right way to go about it. Calling me ‘odd’ and ‘sad’ and ‘pathetic’ made me seem as if I was all those things. I thought she was playing into the hands of the other barrister. He was a man, much more forceful in his manner. He was like Papa, or Detective Inspector Bracken. He spoke in a way that didn’t brook argument. I’m not surprised that the jury believed what he said rather than the arguments my barrister put forward. If I’d known nothing about the case and I’d been sitting in that jury box, I’d have done the same.
But of course I did know something about the case. I knew I’d never touched Bethany Jones, never touched any of the children. At the time those dreadful things happened to her, I was in my house watching Children’s BBC.
There was another thing I knew, too. I knew my secret bits didn’t work like men’s are supposed to. I knew my body wasn’t capable of doing the things that had been done to her body. But I didn’t like to mention that. It was a bit embarrassing. Maybe, if I’d had a male barrister . . . But to talk to a woman – any woman – about that kind of thing . . . well, I couldn’t ever have done that.
It wasn’t nice before the trial, or while the trial was going on. I was kept in this prison. ‘On remand’, they called it. They didn’t have any golden syrup in the prison. I asked for it, but you couldn’t get it. And you weren’t allowed to watch Children’s BBC.
Also, the other prisoners were horrid to me. They all seemed to take it for granted that I’d done all those things to Bethany Jones. There was more than one occasion when only the intervention of the prison officers stopped something rather unpleasant happening.
After the trial was over, though, and that horrid wrong verdict had been given, the prison officers’ attitude seemed to have changed. I was taken back to prison – the remand prison, that is; I was going to another one to serve my sentence – in a van with barred windows. Inside the prison, the guards were leading me back to my cell. I still had handcuffs on, and we were going through one of the corridors, when suddenly this man stood in front of us, blocking our progress.
I’d seen him round the prison before. He wasn’t a nice man, very rough. He didn’t speak nicely, didn’t have good vowels. He was the kind of man Papa would have told me not to mix with. ‘They’re not our sort of people,’ he’d have said. ‘You steer clear of them, Edmund.’
And it was good advice. If I could have steered clear of him, I would have done. But there was nowhere to go. It was a narrow corridor. The prison officers who were leading me along just drew back as the man launched himself at me. He hit me in the stomach first. ‘Take that, you filthy fat pervert!’ he said.
And when I fell down and tried to scramble away from him along the wall, he started kicking me. All over. My stomach, my arms, my legs, even my secret bits. With the handcuffs on, I couldn’t protect myself. He kicked my face as well. Two of my teeth were broken. I could taste the blood and feel their jagged edges.
Then he stopped and laughed. ‘That’s just a taster,’ he said. ‘A taster of what they’ll do to you when you get in the real nick. They don’t like nonces in the real nick.’
After he’d finished kicking me, the prison officers came and moved him away. But they’d been there all the time, watching. They could have come to my rescue more quickly, I’m sure they could. I hope the prison officers in ‘the real nick’ are a bit more efficient.
They took me to ‘the real nick’ in another van with barred windows. When I was leaving the remand prison, they asked if I wanted a blanket over my head. Why would I want a blanket over my head? I’d had few enough chances to see the outside world in the last couple of months. I wanted to see everything I could out of the van’s windows.
The trouble is, what I did see, when the van emerged from the gates, was a crowd of people. There were photographers, and a lot of women too, women probably about the same age as Bethany Jones’s mother. But they weren’t like women should be. They weren’t quiet and well behaved like Mama always was. No, they were shouting and screaming. As the van went slowly through the crowd, they started banging on the sides. Some of them threw things and spat. I saw one face quite close to mine through the window. It was contorted with hatred. It wasn’t nice.
The drumming sound they made against the walls of the van stayed with me. It kind of reverberated in my head. And now I’ve arrived at the new prison, I can hear it again. I’ve met the governor, I’ve been through all the entry procedures, and now I’m being led to my cell. The drumming sound comes from all the other prisoners, banging things against the doors of their cells.
I can hear things shouted too. Not nice things. I can hear that word ‘nonce’ that the man in the remand prison used. I wonder what it means.
Still, I’m sure it’ll be all right. They may find the person who really did those horrid things to Bethany Jones, and set me free. Or they may reduce the length of my sentence. I’ve heard they do that for some prisoners. They reduce the sentence ‘for good behaviour’. And I’m going to continue to do what Papa told me. All the time I’m here, I’m going to be on my absolute best behaviour.
I wonder what it’ll be like here. I know there are only certain times when you’re allowed to watch television in prison. Maybe Children’s BBC will be one of those times.
I hope they have golden syrup in this prison.
THE MAN WHO GOT THE DIRT
To have killed Bartlett Mears from motives of jealousy would have been a small-minded, petty crime; but fortunately Carlton Rutherford had a much more respectable, wholly practical, reason for eliminating his old rival.
Murder had not been involved in his original plans for settling old scores, but Carlton Rutherford felt not the tiniest twinge of regret when he realized it would be necessary. In a sense, it would tie together a lot of ends otherwise doomed to eternal looseness.
The rivalry between the two writers had lasted nearly forty years, and though Bartlett Mears, had he been questioned on the subject, would have dismissed it with a characteristic shrug, for Carlton Rutherford the wound had never healed, and its scab required daily repicking.
Both had written their first novels at the end of the fifties. By then Kingsley Amis, John Osborne and others, burglarizing the shrine of pre-war British values and shattering its first hollow images, had declared the open season for iconoclasm.
Carlton Rutherford, at that period climbing the North Face of a doctorate on George Gissing at the University of Newcastle, had used his spare time to good effect and written his first novel, Neither One Thing Nor The Other.
&
nbsp; This was a work of searingly fashionable nihilism, the story of Bob Grantham, a working-class genius, son of a postman in Salford, who struggled, against the odds of misunderstanding parents and virginity-hugging girls, all the way up to university. The book contrived to pillory traditional educational values, and at the same time potentially to alienate everyone with whom the author had come into contact in the twenty-five years he had been alive.
And therein lay its problem. Bob Grantham was so patently the alter ego – in fact, not even the alter ego, just the ego – of Carlton Rutherford that all of the book’s other characters became readily identifiable.
Dashiel Loukes, the lean and hungry literary agent to whom (randomly from a reference book in a Newcastle library) the manuscript had been sent, confided to its author over a boozy lunch at Bertorelli’s in Charlotte Street, that, though he was ‘excited, but very excited’ about the book, he was ‘just a tidge worried’ about the libel risk. And thought a little bit of rewriting might be prudent.
That had been in 1958. Though simplified by the death of both Carlton Rutherford’s parents in a charabanc crash soon after his meeting with Loukes (you cannot libel the dead), the rewriting had proved unexpectedly difficult and time-consuming.
Eventually, a year later, at another Bertorelli’s lunch, the author presented the agent with a revised manuscript, announcing that he had contrived to disguise all of the living characters save for that of Sandra, the toffee-nosed solicitor’s daughter who had proved so tragically insensitive to the exceptional genius of Bob Grantham and so provincially unwilling to be the recipient of his extremely tenacious virginity.
Dashiel Loukes, thin and acute as a greyhound, had asked how closely this character resembled its original, and dragged from Carlton Rutherford the unwilling admission that, except for the detail of having had her eyes changed from blue to brown, Sandra was identical in every particular to Sylvia, a toffee-nosed solicitor’s daughter who had proved tragically insensitive to the exceptional genius of Carlton Rutherford and provincially unwilling to be the recipient of his extremely tenacious virginity (still, though Carlton did not mention the fact, intact in 1959).