The Silent Ones

by William Brodrick

  Anselm walked to the door, keeping the carved face out of view.

  ‘The Silent Ones?’ Father Tabley had pulled off his mask. There was confusion in his voice.

  ‘Edmund’s name for those who made the Dorothy Newman Centre possible,’ replied Anselm, turning the handle. ‘Their silence was central to her rescue and everything that happened afterwards.’

  Father Tabley thought for a while, struggling, it seemed, with uncontrollable shame, wanting to make some kind of reply.

  ‘I changed,’ he said at last. ‘I’m not that man any more. I don’t recognise the man I was … I hate the man I was. Tell Edmund, will you? Tell him I changed. I want him to know.’

  Anselm could just see Kester outside. His cigarette blazed, sending a glow of faint light upon his face. He could very well have been the next victim. But he hadn’t been.

  ‘I did change,’ repeated Father Tabley.

  Cautiously Anselm moved into the darkness of the vestibule, hands outstretched feeling for the walls. ‘Changing was never enough … because remorse doesn’t end with change. It ends with justice.’

  A moment later he was standing outside where Kester had once vowed to help an old man die with some peace of mind. He’d been bullish and sure. An ambulance had flashed by. Now they were joined by the darkness and silence.

  ‘What am I to do?’ asked Kester, breaking out of a reverie.

  ‘Keep him alive.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘His trial. That’s where his story ends and all the others begin. That’s our goal, Kester: a new beginning for those who didn’t think it was possible.’

  * * *

  Kester still had the mobile phone he’d used at PwC. It was no longer state of the art, but it worked; and Anselm used it to make one last important call. A woman he didn’t know answered. She was evidently in tears. And notwithstanding Anselm’s gentle and polite remonstrations, she refused to put him onto the person he needed to contact. Finally, he said:

  ‘May I ask … has something bad happened?’

  ‘No, something good,’ she replied, with one of those sniffing laughs. ‘Something very good.’

  With that happy concession she agreed to allow a meeting. But there was no rush; Anselm was to take his time. And so, after throwing the wooden mask into a refuse truck lurching along Uxbridge Road, Anselm hailed a cab and asked the driver to meander south of the river. They chatted about a scandal at Westminster but Anselm’s attention was riveted on a picture in his mind: Lazarus with shining eyes, restored to his family, children pinching at his skin to see if he was real.

  51

  The conversation between Robert and his father flowed easily. And that was because Andrew’s innocent deception had worked: they already knew each other. Best of all, they’d already reached the depth proper to a father and son relationship because Andrew’s misreading of the Littlemore case – the conspiracy that never was – had played a significant role in damaging Robert’s career with the Guardian. They’d kicked off their association with the sort of mixed baggage that ordinarily takes years to accumulate. It was nigh on perfect. They’d put their coats on and were sitting outside on the decking, hunched in garden chairs.

  ‘I don’t understand how he could have been one man to you and another man to me,’ said Robert, hands thrust into his pockets. They’d discussed almost everything else, slowly approaching the dividing line between them. ‘Was he two people at the same time? Or did he change? And if he changed, does it matter?’

  Robert’s mind was teeming with questions – cold analytical questions – that seemed to have no bearing on the man he’d known and loved. The Lenny Sambourne who was ‘Dad’ had been a wonderful, irreplaceable presence in Robert’s life. The image of his ‘mother’ screaming in fear was simply unreal. This other man could not have been responsible for the nightmare; but he was.

  ‘For a long time, I just didn’t care,’ said Andrew, from behind an upturned collar. ‘If I wanted to know anything, it was why. Why had he been so out of control? Why couldn’t he relate normally? Why had he kept exploding? There had to be an explanation.’

  Andrew discovered the reason by chance, after a friend in Zambia invited him to spend a couple of weeks bartending in Brisbane. He stayed on and hitchhiked north to Mackay, knowing his father had worked on a sugar cane plantation near Bakers Creek. He made enquiries, finally meeting a boozy fisherman who remembered Big Lenny Sambourne. And then came a totally unexpected revelation. Big Lenny was no native Aussie. He’d been born in Sheffield, coming to Australia aged eight with his twin sister. His parents? They’d died. The sister? Hadn’t seen her since they arrived in Melbourne. Never said how they got parted. And as for Big Lenny, well, he was a strange kind of raw prawn, because, having said all that, which wasn’t much, he went back to Britain in the sixties to find his parents after convincing himself they were still alive.

  ‘It’s taken me time to piece things together,’ said Andrew. ‘I spent years trying to trace his past. And now I know a little of what my father and your grandfather kept to himself.’

  Leonard Andrew Sambourne and his twin Margaret Lucy were brought into the care of the state by court order. Two years later, they were included in the child migration scheme that sent 150,000 children from Britain to different parts of the empire, 7000 of them to Australia.

  ‘It was a way of saving money as much as anything else,’ said Andrew. ‘They deported vulnerable kids overseas and then looked the other way.’

  If similar cases were a guide – and it seemed that they were – Lenny and his sister were told their parents were dead, and the parents were told that their children had been adopted. Without any documents linking them to their past or each other, they were separated on the quayside upon disembarking and taken to different institutions where – and again surmise had to take the place of established fact – Lenny was subjected to grave and prolonged abuse.

  ‘Many kids were sent to loving homes and decent schools, but a lot weren’t. They were seen as cheap labour. And other things. My dad – your grandfather – was one of them. He had no childhood memories. He never spoke of playing in the backyard or swimming in the sea. I only realised this recently, after I began to remember him without anger. But he only talked about animals. Never people. He spoke about koalas and dingoes and wallabies and cane toads but never people. He’d lost faith in people.’

  Andrew had been helped by the Child Migrants Trust in Nottingham. But the absence of records – the erasure of identity – meant that without an oral account from a victim only a sketch of the possible was within reach. But this much was certain: Lenny had run away from a brutal regime and gone looking for his sister. He failed, it seemed. But he also came to believe that he’d been misled about the fate of his parents. Crofty had remembered Lenny as a young man ostensibly researching his ancestors, joking that they’d been sent to Van Diemen’s Land on a prison ship. He got nowhere, he’d said. Which must have been true, because there was no way of linking him to any surviving relatives in England. Government departments and the relevant charitable agencies only kept closed archives. Lenny will have had no realistic chance of retrieving any information. Years later, and helped by the Trust, Andrew finally traced a Barnardo’s file and the identity of Lenny and Margaret’s parents. Further research demonstrated that they died while he was in Australia. He came home too late.

  ‘I don’t know what happened to him in that children’s home,’ said Andrew, ‘but I can work backwards from how he behaved with me. I can see that he was damaged. That he’d tried to cope on his own and couldn’t. He was harmed and then he went on to harm the people closest to him. He’d tried to live a normal life with Mum, only it fell apart when I came along. Maybe the sight of me brought back his own childhood and everything that had happened. I don’t know.’ Andrew shifted deeper behind his collar. ‘It doesn’t have to be that way. Many people suffered the same type of abuse as my dad and they didn’t go on to hurt anyone else. But
my dad did. That’s his story. He never let the anger out. He never told anyone what had been done to him.’

  Unlike Andrew, who’d spent years running away from himself until he met that barely coherent fisherman. He was saved by an irony, because, in asking questions about his father, he was confronted with the antecedents to his own story.

  ‘I think it helps to know why someone behaved in the way that they did,’ said Andrew. ‘It’s made a difference to me. Did he change? Yes, he did. Does it matter? Yes, I believe it does. You knew someone completely different to me. Keep what you can out of your own experience. No one should take that away from you … or from him. It’s yours and it’s real.’

  ‘But what about you?’ Robert wasn’t sure he’d be able to cherish a memory in isolation from his father’s experience; it, too, was real.

  Andrew was feeling the cold. He was hugging himself, blowing warm air through pursed lips. ‘It’s no different for me. No matter what’s happened, nine times out of ten, there’s something worth keeping. I’ve looked at my experience. I’ve taken what I can, and I value it.’ He paused to let a train go past. ‘I just wish you’d kept that ship. I’d have liked that ship.’ They listened to the fading rumble. ‘Because the ship you describe was the Arcadia. It left Tilbury in February 1953 and took him to Melbourne. It took him away from who he might have been, and me. It took him away from me. Do you fancy a bacon sandwich? There’s nothing like a bacon sandwich.’

  On entering the kitchen Robert’s grandmother put her arms around her son and grandson, drawing them to her and together. They were all too tired to speak. She’d been crying and her stained cheeks provoked more tears, this time from her brood, but then the doorbell rang. Robert pulled away, wiping his eyes. Moments later he was taken aback. There, on the front step, was the monk, Father Anselm. He looked exhausted, too.

  ‘Is this a good time or a bad time?’ he asked, uneasily.

  ‘A good time,’ said Robert, with a laugh. ‘A very good time. Come on in. I’d like you to meet my dad.’

  52

  The last time Anselm had tasted a bacon sandwich he’d been significantly inebriated after a night out with Roddy Kemble QC. They’d narrowly escaped arrest. Then, as now, he’d been struck by the mysteriously calming effect of sliced white bread – the soft, spongy variety that no self-respecting nutritionist would ever recommend. It was the cornerstone rejected by the builders, said Anselm. Absolutely, replied Andrew. Agreed, said Robert. The woman who’d taken Anselm’s call – Robert’s numinous grandmother – was smiling to herself at the stove, shaking the pan. Presently she left and closed the door behind her.

  ‘Dunstan picked you for a very specific job,’ said Anselm, in the pause. ‘You thought that you’d been tipped off. You thought that your role was to publicise the Littlemore trial to draw more victims into the open. You thought there’d been a conspiracy with members of the Church hiding one of their own at the expense of the abused and betrayed.’

  ‘I did and I was wrong.’

  ‘No, you were right.’

  ‘What? About Littlemore?’

  Anselm shook his head. ‘Dunstan’s target was someone else. Helped by Littlemore and Carrington. I missed the signs and you weren’t to know, but make no mistake about it, we are dealing with hidden victims and a conspiracy of silence, and it’s your task to reach them. It’s your task to help them speak.’

  Robert turned to his father in astonishment, but his father was almost scolding. ‘Didn’t you see this coming?’

  ‘Me? How could I?’

  ‘You should have taken a closer look at the evidence.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of that letter. It spoke about victims needing help to speak out. In the plural. Remember?’

  Anselm was amused: they were like tag wrestlers, fighting but on the same side. Robert seemed to speak for them both: ‘Who was the target, then?’

  ‘Dominic Tabley.’

  Robert frowned. ‘The hermit?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Understandably Robert couldn’t make any of the necessary connections. ‘Why target one of the good guys?’

  If the answer to that question had been simple, then maybe Anselm would have picked up one or two of the signs during Edmund’s trial. As it is, a kind of protocol stopped him from offering any further explanation. Only the victims were entitled to speak about what had happened to them. The nearest Anselm could go to making a disclosure was now, as he gave a forewarning:

  ‘Justin Brandwell is going to contact you. Listen to what he says and take it from there.’

  Robert’s questions tumbled out, one after the other, but Anselm only shook his head. There was nothing else he could say. To clear up some of the confusion he recounted Harry’s disclosure concerning Fraser – leaving out the death because that would only distract from the matter in hand – stressing that, for present purposes, the Littlemore trial had been a window onto another secret landscape.

  ‘Justin will explain everything. He’ll take you there.’

  Robert capitulated. He was content to wait for some future meeting. Turning to his father, he recalled those reports in the Boston Globe. They’d exposed a secret landscape, too, he said. Sad, wasn’t it (he added), that these hidden worlds kept recreating themselves in institutions of every kind … including the family. There was a perpetual need for intervention.

  ‘May I give you some advice?’ said Anselm, rising. His thoughts were on home.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Your father is right. Go back to the wording of Dunstan’s letter. Victims need help to find their voice. Your primary goal isn’t to report on a scandal or damn an institution or bring the instigators to account. All that is going to happen anyway. You’ve got a different objective. It’s to persuade. To encourage. To reassure. There are people out there who’ll never speak as long as they think they’re just fodder for a headline. Make them feel that in coming forward they’ll recover some—’

  ‘Dignity.’ Robert’s father had spoken quietly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Anselm, with a smile. ‘Precisely.’

  On opening the front door Robert said he had to ask one last question. ‘Did that old monk really meet Baden-Powell?’

  ‘Oh yes. Shook his hand at Olympia. What did he drill you to the floor with? Scouting in the Matobo Hills? The Siege of Mafeking?’

  ‘No. King Dinizulu’s necklace. Do you think he’d give me an interview?’

  Anselm didn’t quite know how to explain the paradox. ‘Not a cat’s chance in hell. He’s old school. Doesn’t believe in talking. Thinks we should never have dropped the sign language.’

  Anselm caught a late train to Cambridge where Bede was waiting in the community’s aging Fiat. They trundled along the empty lanes to Larkwood, Bede complaining in advance that the press would go too far in their praise of the detective recluse; that he’d keep the more moderate examples, out of obedience, but the rest would be used to light the fire. I’m home, thought Anselm. But he wasn’t, not quite. Robert was yet to do his work and Anselm’s own understanding of events was not yet complete. He understood almost everything, save the beginning; the great beginning that had sent Edmund Littlemore into the past of a man who’d watched over him like an absent father. He’d shortly find out because Edmund and George Carrington were waiting for him, probably with Dunstan, eager to know the upshot of their extraordinary bid for transparency and justice.

  Part Six

  The investigation into Fraser’s death wasn’t carried out by Sanjay, but it was Sanjay who came round to disclose the results. After he’d finished his explanation, Harry felt the eyes of his family upon him. No one spoke. They were as shocked as he was, only there was pity too. Pity for Harry.

  ‘I’d like to be on my own, if you don’t mind,’ he said, rising.

  His mother began to fuss but his father said let him go; let the lad get some fresh air. His grandfather agreed. Only Uncle Justin stared into space, barely seeing Harry as he
crossed before his eyes on the way to the door. Once outside, Harry walked slowly to Strath Terrace, the road between Battersea Rise and St John’s Hill; the road with a bridge and a shrine to three dead children. When he got there, he noticed that more flowers had been laid on the ground. People had been adding their own tributes. There were small cards with messages. The heap of affection and compassion took up half the pavement. Before long the police would have to remove it, or at least reduce its size. Harry stood looking down at the three plants he recognised: Fraser had chosen yellow for Ryan, green for Katie and blue for Ellie. Tears began to run down Harry’s cheeks. He’d come to know these children. He’d seen the freckles, the bunches and the pixie nose. He’d found a place for them inside himself, something to make sense of what their father had done to him; something to give a meaning to his silence. Sanjay’s voice seemed to come on a light wind.

  ‘Fraser never intended to go the Western Isles, Harry, because his grandfather never had a croft on the Isle of Barra. That was all invention, to send us in the wrong direction if you ever decided to speak out after he’d gone.’ The police officer’s voice was drowned by a passing dump truck; then he continued, more quietly. ‘Fraser had no children, Harry. That was all invention, too. They didn’t exist. He was never married. He’d never been a street cleaner in Glasgow. There’d been no house fire. This was all a world he invented to win your sympathy; to keep you quiet. I’m sorry.’

  Harry still couldn’t believe it. He’d spoken to Ryan, seeing him try to put out that fire. He’d shared the panic and terror. He’d closed his eyes like Katie and Ellie as if to sleep through a nightmare. They’d all been so real. They were still real.

  ‘The poor man killed himself,’ said an old woman, appearing in Harry’s line of vision. ‘He did my garden and he fixed my washing machine. You’d never have known he was so unhappy.’ Then she was gone, a bunch of white roses laid on the pile.