A Death to Remember

by Ormerod, Roger

  ‘Oh sure,’ I heard myself say. The voice seemed to come from a distance. ‘We know him. Name’s George Peters. Clayton’s stepson, he says. Only they put the cast on the wrong place, ‘cause it was his chest that got it...got it...Then they put him in a black bag till I came round asking for him, but they didn’t know I’d lent him my p...pen, with the slopin’ nib...to do his statement, so they had to hide him in my car...as far as I know...as far as I remember...remember...’

  I heard Porter saying something about getting a chair quick, but everything was happening with intense clarity, and then, I suppose, I passed out. Nobody to blame but myself. I’d been warned. No stress, they’d said. Well all right, so I’d just give it a little rest...

  5

  I was sitting in one of the plastic chairs, Porter’s face close and concerned. The clarity was still with me. His concern was genuine, though to reach it I had to examine every fleck in his eyes, every shade in the wrinkles round them. I had not thought of him as old, and perhaps it was weariness that channelled the lines from mouth to chin. His lips were dry, chapped, as though he’d been out in a chill wind. His ears were red, I saw. Colours were particularly bright. His tie was a piercing green.

  Somewhere in the background Clayton was saying, over and over: ‘I don’t know what happened...what happened...’

  ‘I’m all right,’ I said to Porter’s face, but no flicker of expression eased his anxiety, so perhaps it had not been aloud. ‘I’m all right.’ This was a great effort, and I felt my lips moving.

  Then Porter sighed, and he stood back. ‘You gave me a right turn. What was it?’

  How could I explain that for a moment my mind had flown away? Clayton was offering me a glass of water and I took it, to put off the explanations, the rim chattering against my teeth.

  ‘I could get a doctor,’ Clayton said, moving about in distress, his own face harrowed, but probably because the body could be that of his stepson, I decided.

  I realised that my brain was working again. I’d captured a thought and held it. Porter was considering me soberly, and I felt that some understanding passed between us.

  ‘No,’ he decided. ‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary.’ Then he turned to Clayton. ‘Was it true, what he said? That it could be your stepson, George Peters?’

  Clayton ran his hands in agitation over his hair, then made a series of gestures of vague dismissal. But he considered the possibility seriously.

  ‘My wife’s lad,’ he said. ‘George. Yes. Could be. But not as tall as you said. More like five-six. But the rest...I suppose it fits. And he did get his arm broken – my wife told me that. Tessa. She said he’d done that.’

  ‘She had to tell you?’ asked the sergeant smoothly, feeling his way.

  ‘He wasn’t living with us, if that’s what you mean. Then. Hadn’t been for years, since he was around sixteen.’ He looked into Porter’s bland face. ‘I’m talking about a year ago. More. Sixteen months ago, when I got arrested...you know.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Then he’d got a busted arm. Had it a week or ten days before, I think.’

  I’d erected an invisible filter around my mind, so that it allowed in only the facts I could assimilate. So far, I was doing fine. We were talking about the George Peters I’d interviewed at 17C Rock Street.

  ‘You don’t seem to know much,’ said Porter bleakly. ‘Not much help.’

  The scorn jerked Clayton into a predictable response. He’d been too wary, still viewing Porter with suspicion, but Porter knew how to play it.

  ‘What the hell d’you expect?’ Clayton demanded. ‘He was my stepson, thirteen when me and Tessa got hitched. I liked the lad, he’d got a cheeky smile and a sense of fun. You wouldn’t have thought he was hers...’ He stopped, shrugging, looking at Porter to see whether he was to be reproved for drifting into irrelevancy. But Porter merely paused in his wandering tour of the office to glance up and nod. Clayton licked his lips and went on, more quietly now, more confidently.

  ‘For a while I thought we’d got something going, me and him. Used to go to football matches together, and we even went to Brum for the ice skating. He was good, me lousy.’ He gave a small, twinkling chuckle of laughter. ‘I got to thinking of him as my own boy. That’s how it should be, you know. It all depends on how you think, and for a while it was me and him, understanding what we was both after, and how we was gonna get it. Sort of. But he was brighter than me. Quicker. Sharper. Was doing great at school, and I was thinking – well, you dream a bit I suppose, everybody does – thinking about which University he’d go to. He was best in maths. Yeah, he’d have made a good scientist. But then he flopped in his O-levels, and we had one great almighty row about it, and I found there was nothing I could say to him or do with him. I dunno. Maybe I shouldn’t’ve shouted at him. I do, you know. Shout. The bloody temper, it runs away with me...’

  ‘We know about your temper,’ said Porter gently, reading one of the certificates in motor engineering that Clayton had acquired through the years, and had framed so lovingly. Clayton himself might have yearned to go to University, and would never have understood George’s rejection of the same dream. ‘Don’t blame yourself.’

  Clayton snorted his contempt. He’d blame himself if he felt like it, and nobody was going to rob him of that.

  ‘The young bugger went wild, no disputing that. Tessa couldn’t do anything with him, only excuse him, even when it got on to...’ He stopped. ‘I’m not goin’ to accuse him of anything I couldn’t prove.’

  ‘But?’ Porter raised his eyebrows.

  ‘But I reckoned he was on drugs. Some of the louts he went round with – I knew they were sniffing or shooting, or whatever they do. And of course, with me keeping an eye on him every minute, you can bet he couldn’t wait to get off on his own. Which he did. When he was sixteen. Just upped and offed, and even if he’d never got one O-level to his name, I’d have given him a job. He knew that. But no. Off he went, and from then on it was just bits and pieces of news from time to time.’ He stopped, looking anxious, wondering what he might have said and shouldn’t have done.

  Sergeant Porter moved one of the chairs, stared at the result, moved it back. A shaft of sunlight angled his jaw. ‘And one of these bits of news was that he’d broken his arm?’

  I cleared my throat. ‘Crushed,’ I said. ‘Not broken. Though of course, the crushing...’

  ‘You know where he was staying?’ Clayton demanded.

  ‘Knew,’ I said. ‘At the time. When I came here that day.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me,’ he said accusingly.

  ‘I didn’t know he was your stepson.’

  Porter had been looking from one to the other of us. He interrupted. ‘Let’s keep to the point for now. ‘He’d left home. You heard bits of news, from time to time. Presumably, by way of your wife?’

  Clayton grimaced. ‘I suppose she kept in touch with him. Somehow, it got so that we never spoke about George. She knew he’d let me down...you know. But I knew she gave him money. From the firm’s petty cash. It was often short, but I said nothing.’

  Something about the way he said that caught Porter’s attention. ‘It annoyed you?’

  ‘He could’ve bloody-well come to me. But what she gave him was only going to buy drugs for him. That made me wild, I can tell you. I’d have looked after him, not fed the filthy habit...’

  ‘Sure you would,’ said Porter evenly. His eyes were on me. ‘So what we’ve got is that he injured his arm about ten days before he was last seen – that’s on present knowledge.’

  ‘Did I say that?’ Clayton demanded, looking from Porter to me, to Porter. ‘Did I?’

  Porter still didn’t look directly at him. ‘I seem to have got that impression from somewhere. But no doubt your wife’s seen him since.’

  ‘No. She said she was worried.’

  ‘Said? When did she say she was worried?’

  ‘Told me she was.’

  He seemed reluctant to
expand on it. Porter looked away from me. I’d got the message. We’d both seen the same possibility. I sat back, feeling good, because my brain was still working well on making logical conclusions. I could afford to let Porter make the running.

  ‘Let’s get this clear,’ he said to Clayton. ‘This George Peters was seen on that day, November the 16th, at which time he was alive but had an injured arm. So far, we’ve got nobody who’s seen him since then. Maybe we’ll come up with somebody, but for now...last seen on the same day that you, Mr Clayton, bounced our friend, here, on the head. From that time, you didn’t get much chance to speak to your wife about your stepson. So I just wondered – when did she say she was worried about him?’

  ‘Visiting days. You know...at Winson Green. You gotta talk about something, and when you’re waiting for a visit, then hundreds of things come into your mind, but when the time comes they’re gone.’

  ‘So maybe we’d better talk to your wife about him.’ Porter’s tone made it a question, his shrug just a comment. ‘Can you ring home and get her here? No...perhaps we’d better go there ourselves. The Super will want to give her the news.’

  ‘She’s not at home.’

  ‘Oh? Where then?’

  ‘She’s kind of...well, done a bunk herself.’ It embarrassed Clayton to say it, in the context of what had gone before. Two of his family disappeared. ‘She hasn’t been around since I got out.’

  ‘Well now...’ said Porter.

  There was a freshly-kindled despair in Clayton’s eyes, and with surprise I realised he might have been cherishing the possibility that his wife had joined her son somewhere. Perhaps he’d been ashamed of that possibility, or he’d have mentioned it to me, ashamed that they’d link together their fear of him.

  ‘Then perhaps we’d better find her,’ said Porter as the door opened.

  The three men who entered were apparently senior officers, outranking Porter, though there was no deference in Porter’s voice.

  ‘This is Superintendent Rogers,’ he said, making a gesture towards the tall slim man with the silver hair, who led the way. ‘And Chief Inspector Caldicott.’ A bull of a man, thrusting and powerful. There was no introduction of the third man, so I’d been wrong about him. The way he melted into the background and produced a notebook suggested he could be a CID constable.

  ‘I think we’ve got an identification,’ Porter told them. ‘George Peters. Stepson of Mr Clayton, here.’

  The silver-haired man looked dubious. He glanced at me. ‘And this is?’

  ‘The body was in his car. Clifford Summers.’

  ‘Got his address?’

  ‘I can always find him, sir.’

  ‘Right. He can go.’

  Then, to all intents and purposes, I was surplus furniture. Quietly, I slid out of the office and down the outside staircase. There was a rope barrier around my car, and a team of men swarming over it. As it had been sitting in its corner of the repair bay for over a year, and had been washed and polished, there’d be little to find. No doubt, in due course, they’d be wanting my fingerprints for comparison purposes, but for the moment everybody was leaving me in peace. But that couldn’t last long. I was intimately involved. Somebody – probably Bill Porter himself – would be worrying me for a statement. He’d said he knew where to find me. Probably he meant my Aunt Peg’s place. I’d been living there at the time of the assault. Strange he’d remember that, and strange that he’d know I was still there.

  In any event, I had no intention of sitting around at Aunt Peg’s, worrying her, just so that Porter could walk in on me. I took a bus into town and had lunch at a cafeteria I’d used in the old days, but which had lost its attractions, then went for a walk in the park.

  It was a fine day. After a severe winter, spring had seemed to come late and hesitantly, as though hovering in the wings wondering: is it my turn yet? Now it was here. The beds were ablaze with daffs and early tulips and forsythia. I’d been home a month and not been into the park once. Now I knew why. I was now wallowing in recaptured memories, and I had not previously sought them. No...I’d actually been afraid of them, sharp and bitter memories of what might have been, when I’d brought my briefcase there on fine days and eaten sandwiches and fed the pigeons, sometimes sitting by the pool and feeding the ducks. The reluctance had been the symptom, the cause was my miserable self-pity.

  Returning to my home town had perhaps been a mistake. I hadn’t at the time been certain whether to explore for memories or avoid them. Well, Clayton had broken into the mood, thrusting me into a spiral of recall. And now...now I strolled the paths in the park, wondering whether it might be here that I’d discover I was drained of curiosity, and I could at last leave the district and seek a new life.

  That, I decided, was what I was there for. In this park, in this town, everything was drenched with memories, and I now knew they were not healthy for me. I was a man with an allergy who’d plunged himself into a greenhouse full of the flowers he used to love.

  After a while I left the park and turned towards the Social Security office. I had to tell Nicola what had happened, that I wouldn’t, after all, have a car in which to take her out to dinner...and recalled that we’d done that, and used her car. No – I was going to tell Nicola that I was intending to leave the district as soon as the police allowed me to. It was better to face one fact, that only Nicola would care. And Aunt Peg, of course. Could I leave Aunt Peg? I wondered.

  This time I went in by way of the car park and the side entrance, which was unlocked. Straight up the stairs and into the Inspector’s office, no hesitation, the words on my lips: I couldn’t care tuppence any more about a day lost from my memory.

  She wasn’t there. Idiot...I should have looked for her car in the car park. I sat for a moment at my old desk, and glanced out of the window at the same old view. From there I’d watched the seasons change in the park across the way. She’d shifted the phone farther away, and had a personal calendar in front of her pen tray. There was a signet ring in the pen tray. Hers? I lifted it out. Yes – N. W. I wondered why she’d left it there, and remembered a question I’d been intending to ask her. What had happened to my notebook? We all carried notebooks, secretarial types with the fold at the top. Mine hadn’t been in the envelope she’d given me. They were Stationery Office issue, so I suppose were legally the property of the Department, but the notes in mine had been personal to me, and therefore my possessions. This was the only reason I wanted to find it. Nothing to do with prompting my memory.

  I’d worked my way down to the bottom desk drawer before I realised the office door behind me was open.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Clifford,’ said Claud Martin mildly. ‘I thought I heard Miss Waldron...’

  This was twice I’d seen him on his feet. My ex-manager was developing into quite an expert liar. He’d seen me walking into the car park and guessed where I’d be. I tried to match his smile, but he’d had longer to work his into a suitable shape.

  ‘I’m looking for my old notebook.’

  ‘You should have come to me.’

  ‘You’ve got it?’

  ‘No. But I could have told you. The man from HQ took it with him. It could have been...’

  ‘Evidence?’

  ‘Useful. In re-creating what you’d done that day.’

  ‘That’s just why I was looking for it.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Almost a complete blank.’

  ‘Ah...yes...’ He held out his arm. It was the professional shuffling gesture, the one that eased you out of doors. ‘Well, I wouldn’t worry. There was nothing. Nothing worth remembering.’

  He had me out in the corridor, the latch making a solid little click behind us.

  ‘That’s what I’m beginning to realise,’ I agreed, smiling again, this time with more assurance.

  We stood and looked at each other, each waiting for the other to make the first move. He could hardly order me out of the building, but was reluctant to turn his back on me.
I’d got one of my stubborn moods coming over me. They usually arrive when I feel myself being pressured. I held the smile. He cleared his throat.

  ‘Well…’

  He turned on his heel and walked back to his room, and I felt a ridiculous and childish moment of triumph.

  Then I went to have a word with the Local Insurance Officer.

  If there’s one thing an Insurance Officer likes it’s to be interrupted. His job is to consider all the difficult, borderline cases that come to hand, those claims and applications that do not quite fit into the framework of the laid-down normal circumstances. To assist him, the Commissioner has pronounced a series of precedents, which have arisen as each new deviation threatens not to fit into the legal regulations. It is the Local Insurance Officer’s job to consider the facts put before him and place them beside the various precedents that could have a bearing on the matter in hand. This is, or this isn’t. And sign it. You’d be surprised how difficult this is to do, sometimes. It’s a lonely job. An interruption is welcomed.

  For Frank Inskip, the responsibility of the decisions would weigh heavily. He looked up almost eagerly when I put my head in.

  ‘Got a minute, Frank?’

  His pen was slapped down on to his desk with a finality that gave me my answer. ‘Come in, Cliff. God, I’ve had a bloody awful day.’

  I drew up a chair and we sat almost knee to knee. His office was like that. I’d noticed it before, with him. He always seemed to attract clutter around him, as though surrounding himself with wagons against the marauding Indians.

  ‘What d’you know about industrial accidents, Cliff?’

  I laughed. ‘I’ve got the perfect defence, mate. I’ve lost my memory.’

  ‘Oh sure,’ he said doubtfully. ‘You wouldn’t like to look at this one?’