by J M Gregson
It was a relief when he was released from his cell and led up stone stairs to a small, windowless room. At least something was happening at last. He was one step nearer to getting out of the nick. He looked round at his new surroundings and recognized them immediately. This was an interview room. He’d been in similar ones in Glasgow and this wasn’t very different; he realized now that every nick must have them.
There was a single powerful light in the ceiling, out of reach of vandalizing fists. The walls were sage green and recently painted, no doubt to cover the obscene graffiti of previous occupants. There was a small, square table, fixed to the floor to eliminate its use as a weapon. On the opposite side from where he sat, there were two chairs identical to the one he occupied. A cassette tape recorder was ready for use.
Alex was slightly disappointed that he wasn’t in one of those rooms with one-way glass, where you couldn’t see out but other pigs could see in, observing your behaviour and listening to your answers. But you couldn’t expect rural areas like this to be up to speed with the great cities of the realm. He listened to the dull sounds of movements on the floor above him, wondering if the interrogators were deliberately leaving him here alone for a while to soften him up.
When they came, the opposition consisted of a uniformed copper and a taller, thinner man in plain clothes. This man studied him without speaking for a moment, then slipped a new cassette into the recorder and announced their ranks and names, along with his as the subject of the interview. He didn’t register any information other than that this interview was beginning at 10.07. The constable in uniform said practically nothing in the minutes which followed, but his eyes never left Alex Fraser’s face.
The thin-faced man relaxed after his formal iteration of ranks and time. Alex couldn’t thrust away the thought that they’d be well into the working day at Westbourne. His absence would leave a gaping hole which he would eventually have to explain to Jim Hartley. He told himself that he needed to think about things here, not there. But the human brain, or at least his human brain, was obstinately uncooperative.
The plain-clothes sergeant eventually said with some relish, ‘Well, Mr Fraser, you’ve landed yourself right in the shit here, haven’t you?’
‘It all happened very quickly. I was involved before I knew it was happening. It wasn’t my fight.’
He’d blurted out all his mitigating circumstances arguments at once, much too quickly. He should have waited for the point of maximum effect. He knew in his bones now that this wasn’t going to go well. Grey-suit said, ‘You must have been really pleased to find yourself a serious rumble at the end of the evening. You’d gone prepared for it, hadn’t you?’
‘No. I nearly didn’t go at all. I didn’t know the people there, apart from Matt Garton and Tom Bracey. I work with them. At Westbourne Park. We’re apprentice gardeners there.’ He threw the name of the gardens in as weightily as he could; it must surely be some small evidence of his respectability.
‘You did work with them, Mr Fraser. It’s doubtful whether you’ll be resuming work at Westbourne after this. When the people there hear that you went out looking for violence last night, I can’t think they’ll be impressed.’
‘I didn’t go out looking for violence. It was a twenty-first birthday party. I nearly didn’t go at all.’
‘Doesn’t tally with the facts, that, Mr Fraser. You went looking for violence. Maybe you began it yourself. The evidence is there for all to see. You took a dangerous and unlawful weapon with you. To whit, a steel knuckleduster of the most vicious sort.’
Alex didn’t know that there were various types of knuckleduster, some apparently less vicious than others. It didn’t seem the moment to voice that thought. ‘It was just a last-minute precaution. When you’ve had nights out in the Gorbals, you tend to take precautions. You have to look after yourself up there.’ To his dismay, he heard the last statement emerge with a ring of pride, as if he was denigrating these southern softies.
Grey-suit said grimly, ‘Yes, we know about your past history of violence. It will no doubt be taken into account when the judge is passing sentence.’
Alex said desperately, ‘I shouldn’t have taken the knuckleduster. I realize that now.’
‘Indeed you shouldn’t, Mr Fraser. There’s a man with a broken jaw and another with fractured ribs who will bear witness to that.’ The plain-clothes officer wasn’t sure yet how serious the injuries were in this affray. But he’d use the details to intimidate this young thug. No one was on oath yet.
Alex couldn’t see a way out of this. Perhaps he should have demanded a brief from the start, but he’d hoped it wouldn’t come to that. ‘Look, we weren’t the guilty parties. We didn’t start it. All we did was enjoy a twenty-first birthday party in a private room. It was boisterous and noisy, but it didn’t cause any trouble. That came when we came out of the pub, when we were ready to go home after a good night. We had a taxi organized, Matt and Tom and me.’
‘But by that time you were pissed and looking for a fight. And you found one for yourselves immediately, when you spotted a rival gang.’
‘No! We weren’t meaning any harm to anyone, and then we found these buggers waiting for us as we came out of the pub.’
‘And promptly set about them, rather than finding your taxi and departing.’
‘We’d no choice. They were waiting for us in the street. They had us cut off. And not a bloody pig in sight to keep order and prevent violence.’
For the first time, Alex saw the uniformed man smile in unison with grey-suit, and knew that he’d made a mistake. He said hopelessly, ‘I shouldn’t have taken the knuckleduster. I realize that. But we were the innocent parties in this. They set upon us. We had to defend ourselves.’
Grey-suit smiled, registering his victory before moving forward. ‘What do you propose to tell us about your attempts to sell drugs, Mr Fraser?’
‘Sell drugs? I’ve never dealt in my life. I’m not even a user, never mind—’
‘You were found with a considerable quantity of class A drugs on your person. Are you now trying to suggest they were planted upon you?’
For a wild moment, Alex was tempted to take up that suggestion, to claim that the filth must have slipped the stuff into his pocket as they flung him into the van or led him into the station. But he sensed that such lies would only infuriate them and make them throw everything they could at him in the way of charges. He said dully, ‘No, they weren’t planted.’
‘So who’s your supplier?’ Grey-suit couldn’t disguise his eagerness.
‘I don’t have one.’ He realized he couldn’t leave it at that. ‘Those drugs were passed to me. I was supposed to hand them on to someone else. No money changed hands.’
Grey-suit looked at the uniformed man, then back into the pale, lightly freckled features beneath the fiery red hair. He sighed theatrically. ‘Surely you can do better than that, son. You wouldn’t even believe that yourself, if someone tried to sell it to you.’
Alex had an uncomfortable suspicion that this was true. His tale sounded like fiction, even in his own ears. And very unconvincing fiction. ‘It sounds daft because it’s true. If I’d made something up, it would have been more convincing than that.’
Another elaborate sigh. ‘Would it, indeed? Let’s pursue this fairytale of yours for a minute or two, then. You had in the pocket of your jeans cocaine rocks with a retail value of around five hundred pounds. Who was going to be the grateful recipient of this valuable little package?’
‘I can’t say that. I’m not a grass.’
Grey-suit gave him a withering smile, then turned a more affable one upon his uniformed companion. ‘The man seems to be admitting these drugs were for his own use, Constable. Criminal offence in its own right. Perhaps we should just throw the book at him for that and have done with it. We’ve wasted enough time on the little slug, if you ask me.’
Whilst the uniformed man grunted affirmatively, Alex wondered desperately what he was to do. He c
ouldn’t grass on Matt Garton, not if he had to go on working alongside him in the gardens. But these men said he wouldn’t be doing that, even though he desperately wanted to. He took a decision. ‘I was to pass the package to Matt Garton, who works with me. The drugs were already paid for, which was why no money changed hands. The package was handed to me when I went out for a breath of fresh air at the back of the pub, after I’d been to the Gents.’
Uniform made a note of the name. Grey-suit continued to look at Fraser contemptuously. ‘Describe the man who supplied you.’
‘He was young. Younger than I am. And he was nervous. I don’t reckon he’s been dealing for long.’
‘Oh. This man with no experience thinks he can recognize a new dealer when he sees one, Constable. Perhaps we should consider recruiting him to the Drug Squad.’ They both chuckled inordinately at this suggestion. Then grey-suit said sternly, ‘You will be returned to your cell now. We shall decide later in the day exactly what charges to proffer. Probably you will then be released and told not to leave the area without informing us.’
They were gone as abruptly as they had arrived, leaving him to contemplate a future which seemed to become bleaker with each passing hour.
SEVEN
Westbourne Park, despite the ever-increasing numbers which move around the house and its acres, remains for the residents a very private home.
It is a quiet, cheerful place before ten a.m. At this time, the resident staff, particularly the gardeners, get on with their work without an audience. Once the gates open at ten, the workers who come in daily to staff the shop and restaurant and to act as guides take up their posts and are fully occupied. But they leave with the public at six o’clock. Westbourne then becomes once again a quiet and private place.
Alex Fraser, released after his grilling in the police interview room at Cheltenham, was grateful for the peace and the privacy of Westbourne. He hadn’t enjoyed the inevitable interview with Dennis Cooper which his conduct had caused, but he tried not to think about that. He threw all his energy into his work in the gardens. He didn’t talk much with the men around him, though he was well aware that Matt Garton had been taken in for questioning after Alex’s revelations about the cocaine package.
No one accused him, but he was aware that the other young men who worked alongside him in the gardens watched him now with a new reserve. Never the most articulate of groups, they nevertheless made him feel now that he was an outsider. His accent and background had always set him apart; now the fact that he had been forced to reveal Garton to the police as a drug user made them even more cautious about him. Alex didn’t much mind this; he felt shaken and he needed to regroup, to decide what he was to do about his future.
He was unaware of the main cause of his isolation amongst his fellows, though it should have been obvious to him. They did not blame him for releasing Matt’s name to the police, accepting that he had had little option when under such pressure. What compelled a mixture of fear and respect was his performance in that fight which had been forced upon him at the end of the evening. Any man who not only possessed knuckledusters but took them on an innocent night out warranted caution. Any man who inflicted the damage which Fraser had inflicted upon the opposition merited a certain awe.
Unlike the other apprentices, Alex read each night as he collapsed with a pleasant lassitude upon his bed. He was reading a book about the Battle of Britain, about those young men of his age who had saved the nation in 1940 and 1941. He was excited by the descriptions of those dogfights against blue summer skies, with the fate of a nation at stake. But it was the first time he had read about the ‘phoney war’, those strange months before the dogfights, when everyone waited for carnage and invasion and very little in fact happened.
The quiet week between his night in the cells and the defining event at Westbourne seemed afterwards to Alex Fraser to have been his own ‘phoney war’.
Like many young men in crisis, he thought himself much more the focus of other men’s thoughts than was in fact the case. The other people around him were busy with their own lives. The Westbourne workers struggled with their own problems, which were unknown to the young man from Glasgow with the fiery red hair and the fiery red temper. In some cases, their dilemmas were even more serious and life-changing than those confronting Alex Fraser.
It was at the end of this strange hiatus that the weather broke. After four weeks of warm, dry nights and long, sunny days, the rain came late in the afternoon on Sunday, July the third. The gardens were packed with visitors and all the facilities of Westbourne Park were strained. The man giving his talks about the history of the gardens found that he had his biggest ever audience, so that those on the fringes missed much of what he said. Sales were high in the plant shop and in the National Trust shop by the courtyard. There were patient queues throughout the day outside the toilets.
It was heavy and humid, and by noon the sun had disappeared behind menacing grey clouds. The atmosphere grew increasingly airless and sticky during the afternoon. As the skies darkened, children grew fractious and tearful, the ceiling fans in the restaurant seemed scarcely to move the air, and visitors began to hurry back to their cars, casting anxious eyes at the sky in anticipation of the downpour everyone now knew was inevitable.
The thunderstorm was impressive. Lightning forked vividly down black clouds and the thunder cracked loud on its heels, rumbling impressively away into the distance. Then an eerie, expectant silence stretched for a few seconds before the next and even fiercer outburst. The deluge when it came fell in vertical rods, forming swiftly into rivulets over the parched earth. The heavy spattering of the downpour eliminated all other noise save the Wagnerian bursts of thunder.
The storm lasted in all for some six hours. The rain became intermittent, but each time that it seemed it was over there was a renewed short, heavy burst, as if nature was rebuking those who chose to venture forth before the drama was concluded. Eventually the lightning ceased to dazzle the sky and the thunder growled away to the east. By the time the rumbling ceased, natural darkness had fallen over Westbourne Park.
Its residents looked out of their opened windows and smelt the fresh green of vegetation as the great garden offered its gratitude for the rain. They settled down thankfully for a good night’s sleep in this newly buoyant atmosphere. Only the occasional note of a screech owl disturbed the warm silence of the summer night.
The dawn chorus of birdsong woke Matt Garton. Usually he slept far too heavily to be disturbed by it. This day it seemed as if even the birds were rejoicing in the mini-monsoon which had for a few brief and precious hours irrigated Westbourne. Matt lay on his back for a while and congratulated himself upon the simple fact of existence. He relished the exhilarating sound of the birds; he relished the first rays of the sun amidst the coolness of the new morning; he relished anew being young and being alive.
He had heard the previous day that he was not to be charged with the possession of a class A drug. The police were content with a caution. The truth was that he was far too small a fish to be worth pursuing. He had not been dealing. He was merely a user and this was a first offence. They had given Garton a week to consider the error of his ways and the need to amend them, then informed him that on this occasion he was lucky.
It was an immense relief to him, for all that he had behaved with a brittle bravado amongst his fellows. His joy had only increased when his tentative enquiry elicited the news that his fellow-offender Alex Fraser had as yet heard nothing from the police about what action they proposed to take against him for his violence on that fateful night. Matt felt guilty about his pleasure, but he supposed it was a normal human reaction. And Fraser had after all shopped him to the fuzz, hadn’t he? He was surely entitled to remember that. The fact that he would have done exactly the same if the circumstances had been reversed scarcely occurred to him. Matt Garton was not a deep thinker.
He lay for a while with his hands behind his head, running his fingers through the thick blac
k curls of his hair, staring contentedly at the ceiling whilst he listened to the birdsong spilling under the eaves of the old cottages where the apprentices slept. Presently he eased himself from the sheets and slid into the jeans and tee shirt he had discarded on the previous evening. Quarter to six. Plenty of time for a stroll before he showered and faced the new working day.
He crept quietly down the stairs and out into a perfect morning. Everything looked and smelled very fresh after the prolonged downpour. The dawn chorus was long over now, but the birds piped exultantly still, as if celebrating the fresh green of nature’s response to the rain. Matt sniffed the air appreciatively, rubbed his hands together for a moment, then moved out to look with new eyes at the gardens which had hitherto been a source of employment rather than aesthetic delight to him.
He had never really walked round the place with a visitor’s eyes before. In the perfect peace of the early summer morning, he saw exactly why people made long journeys to see what he was looking at. Even the water lilies seemed better for the rain, turning their flowers to the eastern sun as if seeking to display their freshness. The leaves and buds on the shrub roses in the rose walk were quite definitely greener and fuller after the storm. In the white garden, the white flowers and silver leaves which gave the place its name were surely purer in form and colour than when they had stood over parched earth twenty-four hours earlier.
He moved on through the red borders, brilliantly vivid in the early morning sun, exulting now in having this magnificent place to himself, looking with newly opened eyes at the glories he had helped to tend. He paused for a moment between the twin gazebos at the end of the Long Walk, gazing down the neatly mown grass between the hornbeam hedges to the distant wrought-iron gates and the Cotswold landscape beyond them.