by Jonathan Coe
And what a desolate place that quest had brought him to. We were drinking our cheap, acrid coffee while sitting on a plain wooden bench, our backs to a wall. Our bench was at the centre of a pool of feeble neon light: all around us, the vast spaces of the warehouse stretched out into oceans of dense, impenetrable gloom. Corridors ran off in every direction, made up of row upon row of identical storage units, each one about four metres high and two wide. Above us were metal gantries, crossing and criss-crossing and leading to yet more storage units. I could imagine the echoing, metallic sound that footsteps might make if they pounded these walkways: but today, in reality, all was silent. A smothering and deathly silence. The only sound was the distant, sibilant trickle of music leaking out from the earphones of the guy sitting behind the reception desk. Roger and I spoke in low, murmurous undertones, as if we were in a cathedral or a library. Which I suppose we were, in a way. A library of unwanted possessions. A cathedral of the forgotten. In any case, we didn’t have much to say to each other.
There was no mistaking the sound of the car when it arrived, even with its tyres muffled by the snow. We both stood up and awaited Horst’s entrance. He was brushing the snow from his coat and was in a bad mood. Without saying hello to us he went to the reception desk and retrieved the keys to his two storage units. Only then did he come over and address us. I introduced Roger but he did not seem particularly interested. ‘You think there might be a film in one of these cupboards, right?’ he asked us. ‘You are looking for a film.’ I nodded and he said: ‘If we find it, you cannot have this film. It’s my property.’ I said of course, that was completely understood, and Roger said: ‘But we must see it. You must let us watch.’ Horst said something non-commital to the effect that he would think about that, and then we set off on our quest.
Horst’s units were on the ground floor of the warehouse. They stood directly opposite each other: one of them was Number 24, and the other was Number 11. The doors were painted yellow, and each one had a strong chunky padlock fitted to it. When Horst unlocked the door to Number 24 and threw it open, I peeped inside, and my heart sank. The cupboard looked much bigger than you would imagine from the outside, and it was packed from floor to ceiling with furniture and cardboard boxes. As for Number 11, it was even worse. The objects were stacked right to the very doorway, so that you could barely close the door and it was impossible to imagine what lay beyond the first stack. Sifting through all this jetsam, I realized at once, was going to be the work of many hours.
Well, I shall cut a long and difficult story short. Slowly and with great effort, we began to work our way through all the junk of Mr Güdemann, his sister and his brother-in-law. Roger and I looked through the contents of Number 11, while Horst concentrated on Number 24: he was looking for something specific, I could tell that, I expect he was hoping to find items of jewellery or something similar. We explained to him very carefully what a can of film would look like and he gruffly assured us that we would be told if he found one.
It was long, tiring and painstaking work. Looking through the contents of the opposite cupboard, Horst had his back to us, but he still seemed to be fully aware of our movements, and was quick to call out ‘Be careful with that!’ or ‘Show me what’s in that box!’ whenever something caught his attention. As I had expected, it was the small items of jewellery that he would always take from us and put carefully to one side.
After about an hour we were both very tired and I thought it would be a good idea if we took a break. But Roger had a feverish glint in his eyes and would not suspend the hunt, even for a few moments. I offered to fetch him another cup of coffee, but he said he didn’t want one, so I just went to get one for myself.
I had been sitting on the bench by the reception desk for about ten minutes, drinking my coffee and attending to some emails, when I heard his cry. I have never heard such excitement, such exaltation – bordering on ecstasy – in a human voice before. ‘James!’ he called. ‘James – I think I’ve found it!’ Those were his words, but my impression was more that he was giving out a primal scream of joy. I put down my coffee, sprang to my feet and ran towards the cupboard but I had not been moving for more than five seconds before I heard a different kind of scream – the most terrible scream of fear – followed by a terrific crash. Or rather a series of crashes: three or four of them, each one louder than the last, culminating in what sounded almost like an explosion, the dying echo of which filled the warehouse like a reverberation, leaving behind it a shocking silence. In a few more seconds I was at the door of cupboard Number 11, where Horst was also standing, and where a scene of chaos confronted us. Half the contents of the cupboard were outside, in the corridor where we had been stacking them. Inside the cupboard itself was a vision of total disarray, with boxes, books, items of furniture and shattered crockery and glassware everywhere, forming a huge disordered pile, at the very bottom of which, crushed by the weight of all this junk, lay poor Roger’s already lifeless body.
The man from the reception desk came to hear what the noise was and then he went straight to phone for an ambulance. Horst and I began clearing away the debris that had crushed Roger’s body. We worked like demons now, tossing things to one side without looking at them, not bothering about whether we broke them or not as we did so.
I don’t know what else to tell you. The medics arrived on the scene quickly and Roger was pronounced dead as soon as they looked at him.
The next few hours are a blur. I remember only one detail, which is that in the course of digging through the junk in order to reach him, I spotted the item that he must have seen, and that must have inspired him to call out to me. It would have been at the very bottom of the pile, but in his eagerness to put his hands on it, he must have tried to pull it out from underneath, and that was what caused the huge, towering stack to tumble down. It was a metal can of the sort which might have contained a 16 mm film, and on the side of it was a label, upon which was written, in faded capital letters – more than seventy years old – Der Garten aus Kristall.
I opened up the can. It was full of old tobacco tins, most of them containing Deutschmark coins in small denominations. Also some buttons and ribbon and needle and thread and other things for sewing.
Perhaps it’s a good job he never saw that. Perhaps if he had, he might have died another kind of death.
*
Rachel was an early riser, and she was the first to get out of bed the next morning, although when she came down to the kitchen, Keisha had already arrived: she was making coffee and preparing Harry’s breakfast. Not wishing to disturb her, and finding the thought of conversation awkward, Rachel went out into the garden.
She sat on the old wooden bench again, as she had done the afternoon before. Once again, her eyes were drawn to the silent, broken-down fountain at the centre of the lawn. It was a shame that it didn’t work. Laura should really get it repaired. The garden still seemed attractive to Rachel, but no longer magical, no longer unreal.
After a few minutes Laura came out to join her. She was wearing bedsocks, and a jumper over her pyjamas, and a thick dressing gown over her jumper, and she was carrying two mugs of coffee.
They sat for a while drinking their coffee in silence.
‘Are you going to get the fountain fixed, then?’ Rachel asked.
‘I don’t think so. I think I’m going to put this place on the market.’
‘And move back to Oxford?’
‘Maybe. Or ma
ybe London. I’ve been applying for professorships.’
Laura shivered, and leaned forward on the bench. It was far too cold to be sitting outside.
‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘I don’t want Harry to turn out like Roger.’
Rachel wasn’t sure how to interpret this.
‘Obsessive, you mean?’
‘Oh, he can obsess as much as he likes, as long as he obsesses over something useful.’
‘You mean, something other than the broadcast dates of old black and white films?’
Laura corrected her quickly. ‘I mean something other than the past.’ She sipped her coffee, and gripped the mug in both hands, warming her fingers. ‘Like a lot of people, Roger was convinced – even if he never really admitted it, even to himself – that life was better, simpler, easier, in the past. When he was growing up. It wasn’t just a hankering for childhood. It was bigger than that. It was to do with what the country was like – or what he thought it had been like – in the sixties and seventies.’
‘Before I was born.’
‘A long time before you were born. The culture was different back then. Very different. For Roger, it was about welfarism, and having a safety net, and above all … not being so weighed down by choice all the time, I suppose. He hated choice. The very thing that Henry Winshaw – and every government minister after him – said we should have more of was the thing Roger hated most. I mean, think about it. Think about that image, the one he kept coming back to, over and over.’
‘The crystal garden?’
‘Not just the garden. Everything about the memory of watching that film. The whole … texture of it. Waiting for his father to come home from work – from the same place he worked for forty years. His mother in the kitchen, cooking dinner – the same dinner she always cooked on that night of the week. Can’t you see how secure that must have felt? The beautiful, blanketing safety of it? Even the fact that the film came on television that afternoon and he happened to be watching it. That wasn’t his choice, you see. Somebody else had made that choice for him. Some scheduler at ATV, or Chris’s grandfather – it doesn’t matter who it was, the only thing that matters is it wasn’t Roger. The whole thing that defined that situation, and the whole beauty of it, as far as he was concerned, was passivity. Other people were making choices for him. People he trusted. He loved that. He loved the idea of trusting people to make decisions on his behalf. Not all of them. Just some. Just enough so that you were free to live other parts of your life the way that you wanted. I suppose, apart from anything else, that’s one of the definitions of a happy childhood, isn’t it? But Roger also thought he could remember a time when we all felt that way. A time when we trusted the people in power, and their side of the deal was to treat us … not like children exactly, but like people who needed to be looked after now and again. As I suppose many of us do.’
‘It seems … a bit naive,’ Rachel ventured.
‘Yes,’ said Laura, crisply. ‘It is. Life’s not like that. In fact it gets less and less like that all the time.’ She glanced at Rachel: a sly, rapid glance. ‘I know that you’ve noticed how I talk to Harry. You think I’m too tough on him.’
‘A bit,’ Rachel had to admit.
‘But you see, I couldn’t bear him to end up looking back on his childhood – back on the past – the way his father did.’
And then, without another word, Laura rose to her feet and walked briskly towards the kitchen door, not looking back once: either to hide the tears that she had been withholding all this time, or simply because it had become too cold to sit in the garden for a moment longer.
William Cowper, The Task (1785):
Yet what can satire, either grave or gay? …
What vice has it subdued? whose heart reclaim’d
By rigour? or whom laughed into reform?
Alas! Leviathan is not so tamed.
* * *
THE WINSHAW PRIZE
OR,
NATHAN PILBEAM’S BREAKTHROUGH CASE
A ‘NATE OF THE STATION’ STORY
1
Scotland Yard were baffled.
Or rather, they did not yet know that they were baffled. But by the time Detective Chief Inspector Capes had finished reading the email, he would have a new case on his hands, and he would be baffled by it.
The email had arrived two hours ago, had been forwarded from computer to computer and eventually came to the attention of ‘Capes of the Yard’, as his colleagues insisted on calling him. Incidentally, why did they call him that, he asked himself, as he asked himself every day? It was a pathetic nickname. Totally without originality, and doing no kind of justice to his stature within the force. Why on earth couldn’t they call him ‘The Caped Crusader’? He’d been dropping hints about it for months. It was the perfect soubriquet, combining a subtle play on words with a clear gesture towards his almost superhero-like approach to police work. Why wasn’t it catching on?
Sipping his third black coffee of the day as he contemplated the stark injustice of this situation, he realized that his attention was drifting away from the email, which he was yet to read in full:
To Whom It May Concern
Forgive me for writing to you ‘out of the blue’ as it were. As a mere Trainee Detective Constable from the provinces, my name will not be known to you. However, two items of news from the London papers have recently caught my eye, and I wanted to make sure that their potential significance was understood by those in positions of authority at Scotland Yard.
The first of these items is the death by drowning of Michael Parr, a Caucasian male in his late twenties, on the southern bank of the Thames near Greenwich, on the 13th of last month. Mr Parr was, by profession, a stand-up comedian. The coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death.
The second is the death of Raymond Turnbull, another Caucasian male in his late twenties, after falling from a seventh-floor balcony at a block of flats in Acton Town, west London, on the 18th of this month. Mr Turnbull was also a stand-up comedian and, once again, the coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death.
It is my belief that neither of these deaths was accidental, and that the two fatalities are connected.
You may wonder why it is that I make this declaration with such assurance. I would be happy to explain my reasoning to you over a drink at any time and place that might be mutually convenient. In the meantime, you might acquire some insight into the methods that have already brought me some modest measure of notoriety by perusing the attached article, which was published in the features section of the February issue of Police magazine.
Sincerely
Nathan Pilbeam
*
PC Pilbeam lived in an unremarkable apartment building on Guildford’s north-eastern outskirts. It was a new block, set back from the road and securely gated. You had to enter a code to gain access to the paved forecourt and then another, different code to get into the building itself. He had a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor, which looked out over a pleasant but uninspiring communal garden. PC Pilbeam lived alone and used the second bedroom as his study.
This study was distinguished by the volume and variety of the books and paperwork with which Pilbeam had filled it. Two of the walls were covered from floor to ceiling with bookshelves, which overflowed not just with the expected volumes of Blackstone’s Police Manuals and Operational Handbook, but also a huge library of works devoted to history, politics, sociology, cultural theory, media studies, Marxist philosophy, semiotics, and queer studies. There were shelves filled with box files which contained back issues of journals deal
ing with the same subjects: PC Pilbeam was on familiar terms with most of the local postmen, who were forever arriving with copies of the latest issue of Prospect, Private Eye, the New Left Review, Sight and Sound, Monocle, Diva, History Today, Searchlight, Index on Censorship and Intelligent Life. He read them all, then filed and cross-indexed them on his computer using a complex spreadsheet of his own devising.
It was not that PC Pilbeam had a wide variety of hobbies or leisure interests. His ambition was to be the country’s leading expert in the field of criminal investigation, and every waking moment of his life was devoted to that aim. Ever since he was a young boy, and his grandfather had introduced him to the stories of Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, he had been fascinated by the art of detection. A modest upbringing in the suburbs of Portsmouth had given him plenty of time to nurture his obsession. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, while his friends and contemporaries fell under the sway of the internet, Nathan felt himself set apart: he was drawn, instead, to the library of books left behind by his grandfather, which after his death sat in unsorted piles, accumulating dust in a spare bedroom. Here, besides a large collection of detective stories, were the classic works of Marx, Orwell, Tressell and Shaw; essays by Chomsky and Gramsci; histories by Hobsbawn and Thompson; well-thumbed volumes bearing the names of Marcuse and Lukács, William Morris and Raymond Williams. Nathan devoured these books and was shocked that his own parents took so little interest in them, regarding them as little more than an annoying clutter which had been dumped on them to take up space in their house. His grandfather had been an autodidact, relying on the public library, the Workers’ Educational Association and cheap paperbacks from Pelican Books and the Left Book Club. Nathan decided that this was a path he would follow himself, and chose not to enter university, applying directly to the police force at the age of eighteen instead.