by Nicci French
Seamus left and Frieda went and stood by her window, her eyes resting on the site across the street. Once there had been houses there, before a wrecking ball had swung through their walls, smashing them into dust, and diggers and cranes had moved in among the rubble. For a while, it had been a construction site, with Portakabins and men in hard hats drinking tea. Boards had gone up round the perimeter, announcing the imminent arrival of a brand new office block. But then work had stopped: this was a recession after all. The men had left with their diggers, though one stumpy crane still stood in the middle of the space. Weeds and shrubs had grown up where the rubble had been. Now it was a wild place. Children played there; homeless people sometimes slept there. Frieda occasionally saw foxes roaming through the brambles. Perhaps it would stay like that, she thought, reminding people that even in a great city like London some things have to remain uncontrolled, unpredictable, sending up nettles and wild flowers and even a few stray vegetables, the stubborn survivors of gardens that had been demolished.
No. She couldn’t help Seamus Dunne, although the image of him cutting his father’s hair remained with her, the bright blades opening and closing in her mind.
Dearest Frieda, I do understand that you can’t make any plans just now. Just don’t make plans without me, OK? I went to see some very purple paintings today. And I bought some pots of herbs for the balcony – though I don’t know if they will survive the cold wind that cuts through this city like a knife. I think you could grow to love it here. You could certainly lose yourself in the crowds and the strangeness. There are days when I fancy I glimpse your face among the crowds. A certain lift of your chin. A red scarf. My heart turns over. Surrounded by people I like, I am lonely here without you. My love, Sandy xxxxx
TEN
Jim Fearby never gave up: his doggedness was his gift and his curse. He couldn’t help it, he was made that way.
When he was ten and on a school trip, he had seen a demonstration of how to light a fire without a match. It looked simple the way the man in the combat jacket did it – a board with a notch cut into it, a long stick, a handful of dry grass and bark, a minute or so of rolling the spindle between his two palms, and there was an ember catching at the tinder nest, which he gently blew into a flame. One by one the class tried to do the same, and one by one they failed. When Fearby got back home, he spent hours rolling a stick between his palms until they were sore and blistered. Day after day he squatted in their small garden, his neck aching and his hands throbbing, and one day an ember glowed beneath the tip of his stick.
Fearby’s mother, who was now long dead, had always declared rather proudly that her son was more stubborn than anyone she had ever met. His wife called it bloody-mindedness. ‘You’re like a dog with a bone,’ she would say. ‘You can never let go.’ Fellow journalists said the same, sometimes admiringly, sometimes with incredulity or even contempt, and recently with that shake of the head: old Jim Fearby and his notions. Fearby didn’t care what they thought. He just rolled his spindle, waited for the ember to catch and grow into a flame.
It had been like that with George Conley. No one else had cared about Conley, barely thought of him as a fellow human being, but he had struck a spark in Fearby, who had sat through every single day of his trial. It was his passivity that touched him: Conley was like a beaten dog just waiting for the next blow. He didn’t understand what was happening to him but neither was he surprised by it. He’d probably been bullied and jeered at all his life; he no longer had the hope in him to fight back. Fearby never used words like ‘justice’ – they were too grandiose for an old hack like him – but it didn’t seem fair that this sad lump of a man should have no one to fight his corner.
The first time Jim Fearby had visited George Conley in prison, way back in 2005, the experience had given him nightmares. HMP Mortlemere, down in Kent on the Thames Estuary, wasn’t such a bad place and Fearby wasn’t sure what it was that had particularly got to him. There were the resigned, tired faces of the women and children in the waiting room. He had listened to their accents. Some of them had come from across the country. There was the smell of damp and disinfectant, and he had kept wondering about the smells the disinfectant was covering up. But, almost embarrassingly, it was mainly the locks and the bars and the high walls and the barbed wire. He had felt like a child who had never properly understood what a prison was. The real punishment is that the doors are locked and you can’t go out when you want to.
During the trial, pathetic little Conley had been bemused, almost numb, in the face of so much attention. When Fearby had met him for the first time in prison, he was pale and utterly defeated. ‘This is just the beginning,’ Fearby had told him but he seemed barely to be paying attention.
Fearby had seen on his road map that Mortlemere was next to a bird sanctuary. Afterwards he had parked his car and walked along a path by the water, mainly so that the cold northerly wind could blow the rank prison smell off him. But even so he couldn’t seem to shake away the stench, and that night and for many nights afterwards, he had dreamed of doors and steel bars and locks and lost keys, of being shut in, of trying to look out at the world through glass so thick that nothing was visible except blurry shapes.
In the years since, in the course of writing articles and finally his book, Blind Justice, he had visited Conley in prisons all over England, up in Sunderland, down in Devon, off the M25. Now, visiting him at HMP Haston, in the Midlands, Fearby hardly noticed his surroundings. The parking, the registration, the entrance through multiple doors, had become routine, irritating rather than traumatic. The prison officers knew him, they knew why he was there and mainly they were sympathetic to him – to Fearby and to Conley.
Over the years Fearby had heard of inmates who had used prison as a sort of school. They had learned to read; they had studied for A levels and degrees. But Conley had only got fatter, paler, sadder, more defeated. His dark hair was greasy and lank, he had a long ragged scar down from the corner of one eye, the result of an attack while he was queuing for lunch one day. That had been early in his sentence, when he was the subject of constant threats and abuse. He was jostled in the corridor; his food was interfered with. Finally he was confined to solitary for his own protection. But gradually things changed, as questions were raised, as the campaign began, largely inspired and then sustained by Jim Fearby. Fellow prisoners started to leave him alone and then became positively friendly. In recent years, even the prison officers had softened.
Fearby sat opposite Conley as he had so many times before. Conley had become so fat that his bloodshot eyes almost disappeared in the fleshy slits in his face. He compulsively scratched at the top of his left hand. Fearby made himself smile. Everything was good. They were winning. They should both be happy.
‘Did Diana come to see you?’ he asked.
Diana McKerrow was the solicitor who had taken over Conley’s case for the latest appeal. At first Fearby had worked closely with her. After all, he had known more about the case than anyone else in the world. He knew the weak links, all the people involved. But as the case had proceeded, she had stopped phoning him. She had been harder to reach. Fearby tried not to mind. What mattered was the result, wasn’t it? That was what he told himself.
‘She phoned,’ said Conley, never quite looking Fearby in the face.
‘Did she tell you about the appeal?’ Fearby spoke slowly, separating each word, as if he was talking to a small child.
‘Yeah, I think so.’
‘It’s all good news,’ said Fearby. ‘They’ve got the details of the illegal interview.’ Conley’s expression didn’t change. ‘When the police picked you up, they didn’t interview you properly. They didn’t warn you. They didn’t explain things the way they should have done. They didn’t pay attention to your …’ Fearby paused. At the next table a man and a woman were facing each other, not speaking. ‘Your special needs,’ said Fearby. ‘That’s enough on its own to quash the conviction. But added to the details of your alibi that
the prosecution suppressed …’
Fearby stopped. He could see from the blank look in Conley’s eyes that he had lost his attention.
‘You don’t need to get bogged down in the details,’ said Fearby. ‘I just wanted to come and say to you that I know what you’ve gone through all these years. All that stuff, all that shit. I don’t know how you did it. But you just need to hang on a bit longer, be strong, and it’ll all come right. You hear what I’m saying?’
‘Coming right,’ said Conley.
‘There’s something else,’ said Fearby. ‘I wanted to say that it’s good, but it’ll be hard as well. When someone gets paroled, they prepare them for months. They take you out on visits, you know, walks in the park, trips to the seaside. Then, when you’re on the outside, you get to stay in a halfway house and they check up on you. You’ve heard that, haven’t you?’ Conley nodded. Fearby couldn’t make out if he was really following what he was saying. ‘But it won’t be like that for you. If the appeal court quashes your conviction, you’ll just walk free that minute, straight out the door. It’ll be difficult. You should be prepared for that.’
Fearby waited for a reaction, but Conley just seemed puzzled. ‘I just came up here today to tell you that I’m your friend. Like I’ve always been. When you’re out, you might want to tell your story. A lot of people would be interested in what you’ve been through. It’s an old-fashioned tragedy-and-triumph story. I know about these things and you’ll want to put your own side of the story because if you don’t people will do it for you. I can help you with that. I’ve been telling your story right from the beginning, when no one else would believe you. I’m your friend, George. If you want help telling your story, I can do that for you.’ Fearby paused, but the reaction still didn’t come. ‘Are you all right for things at the moment? Anything I can get you?’
Conley shrugged. Fearby said goodbye and that he’d be in touch. In the old days he would have driven home however late it was, but since his wife had left him and the children had gone, he usually made a day of it. People joked about the hotels at motorway service stations, but they suited him. He’d got a cheap deal at this one. Thirty-two pounds fifty. Free parking. Coffee and tea in the room. A colour TV. Clean. Except for the paper flap across the toilet bowl, there was no sign that anyone else had ever been in there.
He had the usual luggage. His little suitcase. His laptop. And the bag with the files. The real files were back at home. They filled most of his office. These were the ones he needed for reference: the basic names and numbers and facts, a few photos and statements. As always, his first action was to take the purple pending file from the bag and open it on the little desk next to the colour TV. While the miniature white plastic kettle was starting to heat up, he took a new sheet of lined paper, wrote the date and time of the meeting at the top and noted everything that had been said.
When he had finished, he made himself a cup of instant coffee and removed a biscuit from its plastic wrapping. It was then that he remembered his first visit to Conley at Mortlemere. ‘This is the beginning,’ he’d said, ‘not the end.’ He looked at the file. He thought of the room full of files at home. He thought of his marriage, the squabbles, the silences and then the ending. It had seemed sudden, but it turned out that Sandra had been planning it for months, finding a new flat, talking to a solicitor. ‘What will you do when it ends?’ she had said – referring not to their marriage but to this case, in the days when they still talked of such things. It was more like an accusation than a question. Because there never really were endings. He’d been thinking he could produce a new edition of his book if Conley was released. But it felt wrong now. The book was just negatives: why this hadn’t happened, why that wasn’t true, why this was misleading.
The question now was different and new: if George Conley hadn’t killed Hazel Barton, who had?
ELEVEN
‘Northern countries,’ said Josef. ‘They all drink the same.’
‘What do you mean, drink the same?’
Josef was driving Frieda in his old van. They were on the way to Islington because Olivia had rung in a near-hysterical state to say that the washbasin in the upstairs bathroom had been ripped off the wall during the party and she needed it repaired. Urgently. And she was never, ever going to have teenagers in her house again. Josef had agreed to abandon the bathroom briefly to help Olivia. Frieda felt strangely torn in her emotional reaction. There was Josef taking a break from doing up her bathroom for nothing in order to help her sister-in-law. Not for nothing: Frieda would insist on that, if she had to pay for it herself. At the same time he was constantly in her house, which had stopped being her own. And each time she looked at what once had been her bathroom, its state seemed to be getting worse rather than better.
‘In the south, they drink wine and stay upright. In the north they drink clear liquid and fall down.’
‘You mean they drink to get drunk.’
‘Forget cares, lose sorrow, escape darkness.’
Josef swerved to avoid a man who stepped blithely out into the road, his ears encased in giant yellow headphones.
‘So, at this party, were there lots of people drinking clear liquid and falling down?’
‘They learn too young.’ Josef gave a huge, sentimental sigh. ‘The recovery position.’
‘That sounds ominous.’
‘No. no. This is just life. People fight, people dance, people kiss and hold, people talk about dreams, people break things, people are sick.’
‘All in a few hours.’
‘Chloë, she did not have such a good time.’
‘Really?’
‘She kept trying to clear the mess. No one should clear the mess before the party is over. Except for broken glass.’
Josef drew up outside Olivia’s house and they got out of the van. Olivia opened the door before Frieda rang. She was wearing a man’s dressing-gown and her face was tragic.
‘I just had to go to bed,’ she said. ‘Everything’s such a mess.’
‘It was quite a mess before,’ said Frieda. ‘You said you wouldn’t notice a bit extra.’
‘I was wrong. It’s not only the washbasin. My blue lamp is broken. My wheelbarrow is broken because they tried to see how many people could fit in it and still be moved – that, apparently, was your friend Jack’s idea. How old is he? I thought he was an adult, not a toddler. And my nice coat has disappeared, Kieran’s favourite hat he left before he went away has a cigarette burn in the crown.’ Kieran was her mild and patient boyfriend – or perhaps her ex. ‘The neighbours have complained about all the bottles dumped in their gardens and the noise, and someone has peed into my ornamental orange tree in the hall.’
‘I will fix the washbasin anyway,’ said Josef. ‘And perhaps the wheelbarrow too.’
‘Thank you,’ said Olivia, fervently.
‘Don’t let him take the washbasin away,’ said Frieda.
‘What?’
‘Is a joke,’ said Josef. ‘Is a joke against me by Frieda.’
‘I’m sorry, Josef, I didn’t mean that.’ She looked at the wheelbarrow. ‘How many did it hold?’
Olivia gave a shaky giggle. ‘Something ludicrous, like seven. Standing up. It’s lucky nobody got themselves killed.’
Although it was days later, the floor was still sticky underfoot. Pictures hung lopsidedly on the wall. There was the sweet smell of alcohol in the air, and Frieda saw dirty smudges on the paintwork and grime on the stair carpets.
‘It’s like one of those children’s picture books: spot the hidden object,’ said Olivia, pointing at a glass inside a shoe. ‘I keep finding unspeakable things.’
‘You mean condoms?’ asked Josef.
‘No! Oh, God, what happened that I don’t know about?’
‘No, no, is all right. I go on up.’ He bounded up the stairs, carrying his bag.
‘Let’s have something to drink,’ said Olivia, leading the way into the kitchen. ‘Sorry! I didn’t know you were back from sch
ool.’
Chloë was sitting at the table, and opposite her was a gangly, dishevelled figure: a mop of greasy, dark-blond hair, feet in trainers with the laces undone, jeans sliding down his skinny frame. He turned his head and Frieda saw a thin, pallid face, hollow eyes. He looked bruised and wrung-out. Ted: the boy she had last seen retching over the toilet bowl. The boy who had just lost his mother. He met her gaze and a hectic blush mottled his cheeks. He muttered something incoherent and slumped further over the table with his face half hidden by one hand. Nails bitten to the quick. A little tattoo – or probably an ink drawing – on his thin wrist.
‘Hello, Frieda,’ said Chloë. ‘I wasn’t expecting you. It’s not chemistry today, you know.’
‘I’m here with Josef.’
‘The washbasin.’
‘Yes.’
‘It must have been loose anyway. It just came away.’
‘Because two people sat on it!’ Olivia lowered her voice. ‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?’
Chloë looked embarrassed. ‘This is Ted. Ted, my mum.’
Ted squinted up at Olivia and managed a hello. Olivia marched up to him, grabbed his limp, unwilling hand and shook it firmly. ‘I’m so pleased to meet you,’ she said. ‘I keep telling Chloë she should bring friends home. Especially handsome young men like you.’
‘Mum! That’s why I don’t.’
‘Ted doesn’t mind. Do you, Ted?’
‘And this is Frieda,’ said Chloë, hastily. ‘She’s my aunt.’ She cast a beseeching glance at Frieda.
‘Hello.’ Frieda nodded at him. If it were possible, he turned even more crimson and stuttered something incoherent. She could see that he wanted to run and hide from the woman who’d seen him vomiting – weeping too.
‘Shall we go to my room?’ Chloë asked Ted, and he slid off the chair, a raw-boned, awkward, self-conscious young man, all angles and sharp edges.