by Brett, Simon
The weather outside made the space feel even stuffier. As a bass motif under the high-pitched chatter and shrieking, rain drummed on the building’s metal roof.
But the atmosphere inside was quite relaxed. A prison officer by the door was checking Visiting Orders and handbags in a desultory way. Recognizing Sandy, he waved the two of them through.
They looked around. Jude remembered Sandy’s words about the exhausted-looking wives and their finely toned menfolk, and she did see a few examples of that, but the overall impression was not as depressing as she had expected. Beneath the layer of children’s noise, there was quite a lot of laughter. People wandered back and forth to the canteen in the corner, returning with cups of tea, biscuits and chocolate bars. No doubt there were many personal crises being played out in the conversations in the room, but there was very little sign of them on the surface.
Intuitively, Sandy read Jude’s reaction. ‘Like a Sunday afternoon picnic, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘You’d notice a big difference in a closed prison.’
‘Yes, I’ve been in a few.’
Sandy did not follow this up with any enquiry, as most people – certainly Carole – would have done. Again Jude felt the relaxation of being with someone who truly respected her privacy.
‘There he is.’
Jude’s eyes followed the pointing finger. Mervyn Hunter sat alone, uneasily upright on an easy chair, away from the noisy clusters, as near to the wall as he could possibly be.
He sprang up nervously as soon as he saw the two women approaching him. He didn’t look much less nervous when he recognized who they were.
‘Have you really come to see me?’ he asked. His Northern voice was thin and tight, permanently stretched by emotion.
‘Yes,’ said Sandy. ‘Didn’t they tell you?’
‘Well, obviously they told me, because I’m here. But they didn’t tell who it was coming.’
Sandy sighed with exasperation. ‘The communications in this place are absolutely appalling.’
‘At least there is someone,’ said Mervyn Hunter. ‘Blokes in my hut thought I was doing a “moody visit”.’
This prompted a chuckle from Sandy, and Jude looked at her for elucidation.
‘A “moody visit” is a well-known prison scam. Men pretend they’ve got a visitor, so don’t go off on their afternoon’s work duty, but are sent back to their huts to smarten up. Then they stay there all afternoon. Just another way of skiving.’
‘Ah. Thank you.’
‘Look, Jude, I’ve got some stuff to sort out, so I’ll be off.’
‘You’re not leaving me alone with her?’ Mervyn Hunter’s reaction was instinctive, panicked, surprisingly fearful.
Sandy Fairbarns turned back. ‘Yes, I’ve got things to get on with. Jude has come to visit you.’
He slumped back into his chair, and leant his cheek against the wall, as if he wanted to burrow inside it, to disappear. Jude drew up another easy chair to sit in front of him, close enough to be heard, but no closer.
Amidst the raging noise of the hall, there was a long silence between them. Then, slowly, Mervyn Hunter moved his head round to take a quick look at her. When he saw she was looking at him, his gaze flickered away.
‘You don’t mind being alone with me, then?’
Jude shook her head and looked around the room. ‘Hardly alone, are we?’
‘No. You’re never alone in the nick. That’s part of the punishment.’
Again, in the general cacophony, they were a little pool of silence.
‘You don’t get a lot of visitors?’ asked Jude finally.
A twitch of a head-shake. He wouldn’t let his eyes meet hers. ‘No. My family didn’t want to keep in touch after . . . And then of course her family . . . Well, they wouldn’t have come to see me, anyway . . . And other people . . . no. But I manage,’ he concluded with an unsuccessful attempt at bravado.
Jude nodded, and let the stillness around them grow. She didn’t make the mistake of pursuing anything, picking up the hints from his words. If he wanted to tell her anything about his crime, he would do so in his own good time.
‘Reason I’m here,’ she said, ‘is because Sandy asked me to come.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘She thought you were down.’
‘I’m in the nick, aren’t I? Hardly going to be dancing round the room celebrating.’
‘No. Sandy was thinking you seemed able to talk to me in our sessions.’
‘Other blokes there then, aren’t there? Not just two of us.’ Once again he turned his cropped head to the wall, and closed his eyes as though in pain.
‘Mervyn, are you afraid of being alone with a woman?’
A long time elapsed before he replied. Rain drummed relentlessly on the roof. Then, without moving his head or opening his eyes, he said, ‘Wouldn’t be that surprising if I was, would it? Given my history?’
‘I don’t know your history,’ said Jude evenly.
‘You want me to tell you?’ he challenged.
‘That’s entirely up to you.’
He hesitated for a moment, then shook his head. ‘It’s in the papers, if you want to find out. Mervyn Hunter. Wetherby. 1991. You can find it if you’re interested.’
‘I might do that.’
He flashed her a quick look, checking whether he was being sent up, and seemed to relax a bit when he realized he wasn’t.
‘How’re things going up at Bracketts? I heard that was working out quite well for you.’
‘Yes, it was. Thought that might be a way forward. That kind of work. I like the house. I’ve got quite interested in history, read a lot since I’ve been in the nick. And up at Bracketts it’s like . . . well, history’s right there. They’ve got some books about the house in the library there, and sometimes in my lunch break they’d let me go in there and read the stuff. I liked that, learnt a lot.’
‘But the actual work you were doing . . .?’
‘Liked that too. Gardening. I like the gardens up at Bracketts. I used to be . . .’ His mood changed. ‘Wouldn’t imagine they’d want me back there now.’
‘After your confession?’
‘So you know about that. Bet the whole bloody world knows about that now.’
‘But of course you had nothing to do with the crime?’
‘No. As the police made clear to me . . . when they tore me off a strip for wasting their time . . .’ Strong emotion gripped him. ‘I’m sorry, it’s just when I saw the body . . . I feel all this guilt, and I thought maybe there was something else I could be guilty for, and . . .’ He ran out of words.
‘Why did the police let you go so quickly?’
‘Because what I said didn’t stand up. Even the most basic forensic examination had shown that the body was dead long before I was born. They said it was probably buried ninety years ago. Besides . . .’ His voice went very soft, hard to hear in the prevailing clangour ‘ . . . I couldn’t have been the murderer, because it was a man’s body.’
‘And you reckon you’re only a threat to women?’
He nodded, too overcome to speak.
‘That’s why you’re afraid to be alone with a woman?’
Another nod. Then he said bitterly, ‘Perfectly reasonable fear . . . considering what happened last time I was alone with a woman . . .’
‘You don’t seem to be frightened of me, Mervyn.’
‘No,’ he conceded. ‘But you haven’t bossed me around. You haven’t told me what to do . . . yet.’
‘Perhaps I never would.’
‘Oh, no.’ His voice was heavy with irony.
‘Not all women are the same,’ said Jude gently.
‘No, they don’t seem to be the same. They may start out all nice and relaxed. But there comes a point, with all of them, when they start demanding things of you. Expecting things of you. Wanting you to do things.’ He closed his eyes, as if in reactive pain to the strong tremor of emotion that ran through his body.
‘Have you s
een a psychologist since you’ve been here at Austen?’ asked Jude.
‘Any number of them.’
‘And do they think you’re a danger to women?’
‘No. But what do they know? Every week you read another case. Some guy’s let out of the nick, every psychologist in the world says he’s no longer a public danger . . . first weekend out, he tops someone.’
‘And you’re afraid you might do the same?’
Another silent, frightened nod, then, after a time, he went on, ‘That’s why I was quite glad when they put me inside. Won’t be a danger any more, I thought. That’s one thing at least I won’t have to worry about. So I haven’t minded being inside. The violence, the bullying, I don’t like that, but at least I’m safe in here . . . and women are safe . . .’
It seemed incongruous to imagine this thin neurotic as a danger to an entire gender, but Jude said nothing and let him ramble on.
‘Most men in here – and in the other nicks before – they can’t wait to get out. All they think about, all they dream about. Me . . . that’s when the pressure’ll really start. When I get out. I won’t trust myself then. It’s less than a year now.’ He emitted a pained little laugh. ‘And I’ve behaved myself. If I’d been a bad prisoner, I’d have to serve my full sentence – might even get it extended. But I’ve been so good, I’ll be out after the minimum tariff. Twelve years, that’s all.’
‘Unless you start misbehaving now,’ Jude suggested light-heartedly, trying to ease the atmosphere.
‘Don’t think I haven’t thought of it! Thought of getting reconvicted for something else.’ He shot her a sharp look, then relaxed a little. ‘I’m here at Austen to “get used to the real world”. I don’t think I’m ever going to fit in the “real world”. It’s too dangerous.’
‘The real world’s too dangerous?’
‘The real world with me in it’s too dangerous.’
‘So you’re afraid that in the real world, when you come out of here, you’ll kill another woman?’
He nodded slowly. ‘Seems logical. That’s why I’m in here, after all. I’ll try not to, I won’t go looking for it. I’ll try never to be alone with a woman, but one day it’s going to happen, isn’t it? By accident. There’ll be me and some woman in a room, and . . .’ Savagely he choked back a sob. ‘It’ll be just like the last time.’
‘Not necessarily.’ Jude used her most healing voice, which had soothed many more troubled than Mervyn Hunter. ‘You’re still full of guilt, and you’re still full of fear. That doesn’t mean—’
But she’d lost him. Abruptly, he rose to his feet. ‘Thank you for coming. It’s very kind of you. But I’m afraid it won’t work. This is my problem. No one else can help me with it.’
And the thin figure in blue denim moved swiftly across the hall to the exit. Jude watched him go, all the way, out into the rain. She saw how carefully, how gently, he stepped around the hurtling children in his way.
And her imagination could not accommodate the idea that Mervyn Hunter would ever be a danger to anyone other than himself.
Chapter Thirteen
There was nothing on her answering machine when Carole got back from her visit to Graham Chadleigh-Bewes. Professor Marla Teischbaum would be ringing her later in the day.
The fridge offered little of excitement for lunch and, in a spirit of righteous abstinence, Carole made herself a cottage cheese salad (even though Jude would think she was eating ‘an abomination to God and Man’). Graham’s greed had left her with a reaction of distaste, and she felt the need to be cleansed, detoxified from the memory.
After lunch, once she had tidied everything up, Carole sat back at her dining-room table, and took out the file she had been given by Graham Chadleigh-Bewes. Although literature had never excited her that much – except as a point of reference for the Times crossword – recent events had made her hungry to find out more about Esmond Chadleigh.
There were twenty or thirty papers, some single sheets, others untidily stapled together. Only one dated from later than 1935, and she soon decided that it had been put in the file by mistake. Sent only the week before and addressed to Graham Chadleigh-Bewes, the letter was from a publisher, asking permission to reprint ‘Threnody for the Lost’ in an anthology of War Poetry for schools.
She rang through to Graham immediately, describing the letter and asking if it was meant to be handed over to Professor Marla Teischbaum. Her surmise proved correct. He reckoned he must have picked it up with the other papers. (Having seen the state of his desk, she didn’t find this hard to believe.) With no apology, he asked if she was going to be back at Bracketts soon; could she drop it in? Carole said that was unlikely, and he instructed her to post it back to him as soon as possible. The petulant tone in which he said this suggested that the misappropriation of the letter was her fault rather than his.
After this rudeness from Graham Chadleigh-Bewes, she had no qualms about reading the contents of the file. (Nor did she feel guilty when, later in the afternoon, she went down to the Fethering Stationers and took photocopies of all the documents.) If she was going to be used as a mere messenger by the Bracketts Trustees, then at least she had a right to know the message she was carrying. Besides, the schoolboy glee in Graham’s manner had suggested Professor Teischbaum was going to be offered little that was controversial or confidential.
So it proved. The photocopies were mostly scraps of drafts from articles and verses written by Esmond Chadleigh, or correspondence written to him. His distinctive untidily small handwriting, which veered slowly upwards to the right-hand side of unlined pages in his creative writing, was in evidence on none of the letters. Somewhere, presumably, was a collection of the letters that he had actually sent, rather than received. As she had the thought, Carole remembered Graham Chadleigh-Bewes at the Trustees’ Meeting talking about ‘getting together a selection of the letters’. If he was making as much progress on that task as he was with the biography, it might be a while before the published edition saw the light of day.
Thinking back to the Trustees’ Meeting, Carole also recalled the vehemence with which Graham had insisted that no contact should be made with ‘that dreadful woman’. He’d had quite a change of heart since then; now he was actually volunteering material – albeit of minor importance – to Professor Marla Teischbaum. Though the idea for this diplomatic rapprochement had come from Sheila Cartwright rather than Graham himself.
There were only a few of the photocopied documents to which Carole gave more than a cursory glance. The first attracted her attention because it looked like a pastiche of a schoolboy’s letter home. There were crossings-out and misspellings, and occasional splutterings of ink, where the writer’s pen could not keep pace with his thoughts.
17 Leinster Terrace,
London W.
29 December 1917
Dear Chadders,
It was topping to see you over Christmas. Back here in London under the beedy eye of Aunt P., I realize what an absolute collosal bore it would have been had I had to stay with her right through the festive season. I don’t think she likes anyone – certainly not me or Mr Lloyd George, so she’s in an even sourer mood than usual. You’re a real brick to have arranged my visit to Bracketts, and, as a small expression of my gratitude, my tuck box is open to you any time you feel a bit peckish next term. You never know, I might some day soon get some scoff through from the Aged Ps. When he started the war, the Kaeser should have been a bit more considerate, and thought about the effect it was going to have on communications between people in Calcutta and their poor starving sons incarserated in British public schools.
Talking of Aged Ps, I have, needless to say, done the proper thing by yours. The Bread and Butter Letter went off by yesterday’s first post, so I hope it’s arrived by now. They were real sports to take on another ravening inkey thirteen-year-old, and I really apreciated their generousity. I thought they seemed in frightfully good spirits, given the beastly circumstances.
I w
as also glad to meet Lieutenant Strider – what a brave chap. Seeing someone like him makes me feel really cheesed off yet again that we aren’t old enough to go out and have a pot at Fritz ourselves. I’d like to get a bit of revenge for all those chaps Strider lost on the Somme. He seemed raring to go back, didn’t he, champing at the bit to finish the job? Now our boys have got those new-fangled tanks out there, it shouldn’t take long. You can see why Lieutenant Strider wants to be in at the kill, can’t you? Be a real frost to miss the end, wouldn’t it – like being run out on 99 and not making your century? Did you hear, incidentally, that old ‘Rattles’ Rattenborough, School Captain of a couple of years back, has died of wounds he sustained during that Somme fixture? Bit of a damper when you hear about chaps you know, but it seems to be happenning all too often these days.
On a more chearful note, your new house is an absolute pip. I just hope, when the Aged Ps finally come back from India, they get somewhere half as nice for us to kick our heels in. I know the place is a bit run down, but gosh, it’s going to be topping when the builders and gardners have been let loose on it. I enjoyed the shooting we had on Boxing Day and, when the woods have been properly tidyed up, it’ll be even better. Lieutenant Strider’s a pretty handy shot, isn’t he? I wonder if there’s anything that fellow can’t do? From what he was saying – though of course he didn’t brag – he’s a very useful batsman too. (I’m really determined to get into the nets early next season and consentrate on my batting.) You’ve got plenty of space in the grounds at Bracketts too, haven’t you? I hope you do manage to persuade your Old Man to have a tennis court laid. That would be corking fun in the summer, and I hope I’m invited to have a game with you. Maybe I’ll get my revenge for the trouncing your lot gave us in the House Cricket Competition!
So thank you, my dear old chum, for a topping Christmas. I was delighted to be part of your first one at Bracketts, and wish you and your family many more happy Christmasses in that jolly house. And you and I will meet up all too soon, won’t we? Assuming the Kaeser doesn’t suddenly invade, or we haven’t starved because of the price of bread, within a week the prison gates will once again close behind us, and we’ll face another term sentenced to the inhuman cruelty of Father Grey’s pep-talks about ‘Unhealthy Thoughts’ – not to mention ‘Blotter’ Parsons’ Irregular Verbs. ‘Moritui te saluant’, or whatever that wretched tag is he keeps quoting. It’s a monumental bore to have three more years of school to face, when I for one would much rather be out there for King and Country giving Fritz a bloody nose!