Hope shared by Clive Barrow, inattentive as the rest. Junior counsel for the Crown regretted drinking more than enough with junior counsel for the defence on several occasions recently, to the extent of making personal promises he was unsure he wished to fulfil: ‘After the trial, Sissy; you and I, escape somewhere.’ Good ideas at the time. Barrow raised eyes to heaven, examining the ceiling of his conscience, recalling how definitely he had offered the kind of weekend not remembered for intellectual conversation, the threat of which weighed as heavily on him as the hangover which had followed, loaded with the prospect of deceit as well as the awkwardness of seeing Sissy every day of the trial, wigged and gowned like a suggestive nun. Without the present obligation to fix his eyes on Carey’s face with every symptom of rapt attention, he might have yawned, delighted to postpone indefinitely the fate of the defendant, and with it the prospect of Sissy advancing towards him with determined eye across some hired bedroom floor.
Carey’s voice, mellifluous and soporific, repeated the obvious for the third time in the last, long hour. Bailey stole a glance at Helen as he often had in this room, guessed she was dreaming from the pristine page in front of her, unmarked even by the doodles which were the usual sign of her restless concentration. She always sensed it, encountered the look with a furtive smile, distant but warm nevertheless, only half guilty in discovery. Thank you Helen, he told her silently, for the advice on Ryan. You were right, you know, saying there’s little I could do, except find him space, and leave the rest to him. But what is it ails you, what secret? No time to see her, no time to explain why he had become so hesitant, so preoccupied, so full of hopeless introverted dialogue which she never heard.
Mrs Eileen Cartwright had cast a spell on them, watching these lives, all harnessed and postponed by the settling of her own. And at last, the conference was over, aching eyes released into the bright light outside, each indifferent to the burst of sunshine which had followed the downpour and emptied the sky, while the threat of thunder hid behind invisible cloud.
Fickle promise of a clear evening. Instead, a damp, grizzling, bad-tempered heat, encouraging sleep, then denying it. Ryan dozed, more off than on, defeated by the sight of his accounts and bills which were the labour of his evening until he woke from his napping sleep with a mouth as dry as sand, irritatingly awake as he looked for the time on the wall clock in his room. Ten-thirty. Time for one drink in the pub on the corner, and no, he would not go to Annie. He had already told her: Tonight, I have to do paperwork. She had not understood, worrying him with these doubtful reactions of hers to all the tedious necessities of life, promising to sulk in his absence, thinking his time was her own. Strange how they had become so afraid to lose the other, each more demanding, so that for once a solitary drink was preferable, with a walk around the streets for the fresh air in between storms; half-enjoyment of a transient liberty.
Bailey could have wished he was doing the same, cradling a pint, instead of lighting a cigarette offered him by a constable at the front desk, yet another nail in the coffin of CID reputation, taking smokes from uniform, and not even his own station. He had come to see the man who knew Ed, Sergeant Jones, self-important custody officer for the night, form-filler for prisoners, anxious to show how hard he worked and making it his pleasure to keep a Detective Superintendent waiting. Jones had ears like jug handles: from where Bailey leant against the wall, they increased the dimensions of Jones’s over-large head by almost its own size. They were red ears, and they shone; everything in the charge room shone in the dead light of the neon column on the ceiling fixed by a dozen trailing wires through a clumsy hole in the wall of a room painted institutional mustard, glowing grimy, marked browner where leaning heads and bodies had contributed their own impressions on the vicious colour. Brighter light spilled from the front office separated by an open door: gloom seeped from the passage which led to the cells, detention room, surgeon’s room. In a corner, there were three large, old-fashioned typewriters, all labelled ‘out of order’, other corners adorned with chipped filing cabinets beneath the fraying instructions on notice boards. Most lists of local police numbers for police and prison services bore traces of fingerprints, damp marks drawn down the line seeking hurried help. The notice advertising the services of the Urdu-speaking community relations group for the area was pristine. As many charge rooms, not untidy, not unduly dirty, but never clean: not quite devoid of comfort but almost, stained and worn, battered by humanity. The light inside gave each of them a jaundiced glow, but the air was still clear. Early evening yet, pubs still open, fights only brewing, night shift still fresh, cigarette ends on the floor few.
‘Why did you move here from Islington?’ Bailey had asked Sergeant Jones, hopefully inviting personal recollections which might inspire confidence.
‘I asked for a transfer, sir,’ no more forthcoming than that. ‘Will you excuse me for a minute, sir, I can see a new prisoner; mustn’t keep him waiting.’ No, far better keep the Superintendent, he looked far sillier decorating a wall, and Bailey knew he was dealing with a graduate in all the arts of obstruction: the kind of sergeant who was never the subject of complaint for a rudeness which was so wooden, so solidly polite it hit like a blunt instrument, Jones’s patent way of making a fool out of a saint. Another version of politeness held him there even after the first minutes with Jones revealed little to provide clues to the working of Edward’s fertile mind and why his father should fear for him, not even if Bailey prompted him with every kind of flattery or found the one weak link in Jones’s insensitive armour.
‘Sergeant, you’re the only one who’s ever arrested Edward Jaskowski. How did you do it? I hear you managed the impossible; you knew the Hackington Estate better than anyone, I hear. They miss you at Islington.’
‘Well, sir, so they might.’
‘So, why did you transfer here?’
‘The wife, sir; it’s closer to home, well a bit closer. Better area.’ Each to his own. No middle-class drunks here, only poorer ones. Better than a transfer to Brixton, Bailey guessed; and Jones, a better policeman once, was mellowing slowly.
‘Tell me about Ed Jaskowski.’
Mollified, as much as he would ever be, more Welsh, more homesick.
‘He’s a thief, see? a good-class thief, and only a boy. Answer for everything. Worried me sick, that boy. You couldn’t pin him down, but I knew he was at it, see. The others told me, I used to … well never mind. I knew someone who knew someone who could get signed photos of pop stars, and I used to give them to the kids, for information, see? And they none of them liked Ed, not at all …’
‘A thief, with a knife? You had him for an offensive weapon. Not his style, was it?’
In desperation Bailey could hear Welsh creeping into his own voice, asking lilting questions, pretending ignorance of facts already well researched.
‘Yes. Funny, that. I stopped him. I said, Hallo, Ed, out late aren’t we, what you got on you, and he shrugged as if he expected it, as if he’d been waiting for me, pulled out this little knife, handed it to me by the handle, said: Go on then, arrest me. So I did. I said to him, come on, you know better than that, why carry the bloody thing? Do you know what he said?’
‘No,’ said Bailey, ‘I don’t.’
Jones leant forward, conspiratorial, ‘He said to me on the way to the nick, “I have to carry it, see? I’ve got to learn what it’s like, get used to it.” “Don’t be so daft,” I said, “do yourself a favour.” “You don’t realise,” he said, “do you, I’m in training.” “Give us a break,” I said, “training for what?” “Bigger things,” he said. “Oh yes,” I said, “bigger prisons, more like.” Didn’t put it in my notes; CID interviewed him later, he said he had it for his own protection. But you know, he didn’t, he bloody well set out to be nicked. Wanted the feel of a knife in his jacket and a hand on his collar. Odd little bugger. Not so little now.’
Something, not much of anything, leaving Ed still a creature on shifting sands, juvenile psychopath, c
onspirator with Dad, corrupt child turned corrupt man, only arrested for a laugh, somehow involved with Eileen, he was sure of it, but how, and why, and what, Bailey knew no better.
The back of his shirt was sticky hot: the flies and moths in the charge room were trained by Jones to irritate: he was tired, more than tired, wanting to be almost anywhere else in the world where he could be told he was suffering from superstition, and have someone warn him he was a fool to believe his senses, not his facts, that his imagination needed surgery. But no one said it, and unease festered in the heat. It would not, could not, rain; all this stifling, thundery stillness heavy as he waited for the area car to take him back to his own in Islington, smoking another borrowed cigarette, leaving Jones to dine out on his own superiority, life going on as normal, himself marking time on a strange pavement, wishing he could talk to her, heavy with stray, protective jumbled thoughts: Helen, Stanislaus, Cartwright, Ed, but chiefly Helen and the thunder hiding behind the darkness.
Lust, that was it: perhaps that was all that was afflicting him, something confusingly new, unlike the more frequent exercise of politeness to which he had reacted in latter years, responses to signals, like Pavlov’s dog, with Geoffrey Bailey never doubted for his sexual manners, only for his sincerity in filling a vacuum to cure his own; not like this need, not at all. End of a day where the dawn began tired. Go home, man, go to sleep for the only cure for this: it is not important, any of it, all your imagination. You are beyond reason: this woman has stopped you thinking straight and no one is worth that, nor should they be.
The driver was apologetic, the car hot. Shirt sleeve order, clip on ties loose, cotton clammy against plastic-covered seats. He considered the word again. Lust – amused by its old-fashioned descriptive power. Lust, the heat of it, the night alive with it, needing a little blood-letting, no wonder it was on his mind. Courts would be busy tomorrow if it did not rain. Nothing mattered. Cruising slowly down the stuffy Holloway Road a traffic light every twenty yards, passengers dozing, wondering if he had remembered to close his windows, persuading himself out of his state of tension, listening to the radio crackle, glad he was officially off duty, relieved, if guilty, to be so close to home, closer, at least than the others with him, six hours more to go. The benefit of age and status. His eyes began to close … nothing mattered.
Silly-sounding call signs, ‘Alpha romeo … calling all cars in area … Break-in, basement flat, Comus Road, seven nine, ambulance on way …’
The car did not alter speed.
‘Get there, Fred, will you?’, an almost apologetic direction, with his hand clutching the strap. Always so mild when anxiety tore at his throat like the acid vomit of heartburn.
‘It’s all right, sir, full relief tonight, two other cars on way: we can find your transport first, go back there if they need us.’ Break-in, only a nightly occurrence after all, look after Sir first, privilege of rank and too much deference, thinking of his convenience.
‘No,’ said Bailey, ‘we go there first. Faster than this. Now, please.’
Nothing mattered. Helen’s address: he knew it by heart. White coffin ambulance, omen of harm. Nothing had mattered, nothing but this.
Tired evening, sick with heat, full of a silence far from golden. She had known not to expect Peter that evening, but could not have said why: there was always something in his partings which suggested whether it would be two days, one day, or three days before he reappeared, if only an extra wave, a funnier face poking back over the wall to check she still watched. Sometimes he would say, or she would say, not tomorrow, maybe the next day, both careful to impose no expectations; Peter more cautious than Helen, chattering in short bursts, while she swooped on clues like a magpie towards bright treasures, listening for all he had done at school (which school?), looking at the penknife given him last birthday (by whom?), but never told facts which might fix him in place, or make him less anonymous, so that sometimes she thought he was no more than a hungry ghost.
But no such friendly spirit this thundery evening, exhaustion pouring from the skies instead of rain, spreading lethargy until she slumped into bed at ten o’clock, window open, careless of the night, no sound from the garden, nothing but warm oblivion until morning.
Silence, so complete it was tangible. She breathed out slowly, only a dream. Then the same sound of restless, hesitant footsteps on the stairs outside the flat’s front door. Unlocked, she thought mechanically, always unlocked while I am here, what kind of fool am I? Pausing again, then the click of the latch, softer steps on carpet. The corridor light always burned, a thoughtless attempt to deter burglars and to dispel the frightening visions still before her eyes when she woke from dreams or lay awake listening to the cars and cats of a neighbourhood which almost slept. The visitor was not discouraged by light, not ignorant of her presence, was either careless or malevolent, slow feet carrying him into the other rooms, closing on her own, looking for her casually as she lay paralysed with fear, frozen with instinctive knowledge that he wanted more harm than thieving; her teeth drawing blood on her lip, waiting. The steps, soft, sinister, and unhurried, pulling him nearer until she could see his shadow outside the bedroom door, one hand caressing the handle, pausing, all sound suspended. The door was pushed further: she felt her own eyes reflected and caught like cat’s eyes, gazing back into the face of the intruder.
As much face as she could see through a clumsy disguise, scissor holes in a black T-shirt half covering the features above the nose, flapping, macabre, an afterthought to hide him from her and himself from his own fear, which hung on him more rancid than the sweat of the still impending storm glistening on his arms, the scent of scarcely controlled panic. He looked as if he might have retreated, but saw her staring eyes, took a step forward.
‘What are you staring at, you silly cow?’
The sound of his voice, high and nervous, broke the paralysis of her limbs: she began to shake visibly, staring, with the sheet clutched in her hands like a rope. The sight of her seemed to give him confidence.
‘Go on then, who d’you think you’re staring at then?’ jeering this time.
‘You,’ she said stupidly. ‘You, of course. Would you please get out of my flat?’
Helen had often wondered, with no anticipation of ever finding out, what she might have said to a casual burglar, reading in files numerous histories of bizarre, brave, and even flippant conversations between robber and victim, one outfacing another in a war of nerves and wit, frightened children shaming violent thieves into retreat, cooler and more composed in the face of threat than she was now. Trembling, confused by fear of his purpose, she was also ashamed of her immobility, for not moving in all that time since she had heard him first, lying still instead of running at him, screaming the rage which was beginning to take its hold on her, as furious at her cowardice as she was for his invasion.
He brought his stocky, white-skinned bulk further into the room, turned on the lamp by the side of the bed, then twitched the sheet away from her, gazing down at her tensed body, naked against the warm night, and continued staring until the anger in her broke. She grabbed the sheet back, kicking out beneath it, crouching away from him, half kneeling with her face level with his own, and spat vainly, spittle touching the T-shirt mask, not his skin. With a casual move, he raised one pale arm and struck her across the face, jerking her neck until her head hit the wall: then, took her hair in one fist, held it with ease, and slapped her again, one side of her face after the other, sharp, vicious, effortless blows before dropping her back against the pillows like a stunned clown. She was beyond shame now, eyes weeping involuntarily, still angry enough to attempt to choke it back, aware of blood in her nose and throat, but not spitting; not any more.
Large, ungainly, barrel-chested boy. Why did she know he was a boy, not a man as he ambled round the room, justifiably confident that she would remain still apart from the trembling, stressing his power with half a smile.
‘Don’t bother moving, will you?’
‘Not going anywhere?’ Again she shook her head, wondering if it would be wise, even if hypocritical, to smile, to speak briskly and sensibly, or to remain as she was, humbly silent, wondering if her throat would give her any choice. ‘Good.’ He was holding the clock, Bailey’s mended clock. ‘Nice, this,’ he remarked. ‘Does it work?’
‘Yes, perfectly.’
‘Where did you get it?’
‘In an auction.’
‘In … an … auction,’ he repeated, a poor mimic of Helen’s accentless pronunciation, raising it high above his head, bringing his arms down sharply. She waited for the crash, eyes shut; no sound came. Opened them again, to see the grinning mouth, cruelly teasing, the clock still held. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s nice, this. I’ll have it. I like nice things. It’s not what I came for, but I like nice things.’
A Question of Guilt Page 21