King of the Badgers

by Philip Hensher

  32.

  Sometimes Gordon Jordison saw his Friday-night outings for what they were, and felt disgusted with himself. He had never heard of it, or thought that it was possible until six or seven years before, when he had read about it in the Guardian. The newspaper had reported what it said was a new trend. Gordon had read the story half a dozen times from end to end, while the children were arguing over who got the plastic toy in the cereal box. Marion was talking on the cordless phone to her friend Anthea, walking backwards and forwards with a mug of coffee in her hand. It was a Saturday morning in their kitchen; everything was normal. Gordon was reading about people who went to car parks in quiet places, all over the country, and had sex on other people’s car bonnets with other people’s wives. It was called dogging.

  They made arrangements on the Internet, it said, and Gordon had gone upstairs to his study after breakfast. He knew that the Internet was obsessed with sex, and had looked at some of it himself. It had seemed to him that the Internet was like a giant version of the Playboys of his own youth, and he had flicked through what pictures it had to offer in a bored, passive way. It had never occurred to him that people might make their own pornography, might exchange pictures, might use it to meet and give information. But in exactly five minutes he was staring at a website called southwestdogging.com. The Friday after, not that late in the evening, he was sitting in his car with the engine off in a lay-by off the A361, not quite believing what he was seeing.

  He was a second-class citizen in the dogging world, he had no illusions about that. The four licentious wives were at the top of the tree—there were only four in the whole of Devon, Gordon believed. He had seen every one of the four fucked by dozens of men over the years. He wondered what astounding impact a fifth woman would make on the small dogging scene. Sometimes, a woman would appear in the passenger seat of a car; occasionally they would lock their doors and have sex for a wanking audience. Gordon was in the wanking audience, like them grossly overweight, reaching underneath his gut for his willie, his trousers round his ankles. He was among the solitary men, at the bottom of the pile as far as dignity and worth went. The men who brought their wives, led them out to be fucked by one stranger after another, were in this world not ludicrous and pitiable cuckolds, but heroic and bold; they clearly looked down on the crowd wanking over the windscreen, jostling like dogs towards the spread-open woman.

  There were half a dozen sites within fifty miles that Gordon knew of. They changed from time to time; southwestdogging. com was a public website, and suddenly they would discover that CCTV cameras had been put up at one lay-by or other. The website had a message board, and warnings would be posted. Or occasionally a new place would be suggested. This had happened a couple of days before. Fluffysdoggingqueen had posted to say that she’d had a fantastic time in a concealed thicket two miles up the B3227. At the time Gordon had wondered whether she really meant the B3227—in his view, fluffysdoggingqueen was an idiot with badly dyed roots, terrible halitosis and at least three stone overweight. In the world of lay-bys and car parks she was a celebrity, a star. He wouldn’t cross the road to see her buggered by an Irish builder on the bonnet of a BMW one more time.

  He couldn’t get away until it was virtually dark on the Friday, and by the time he got to the turn-off for the B3227, he was seriously thinking about turning round and calling it a day. Two miles up the road, a farmer’s gate hung half open, and beyond it some trees loomed in the dark. Was that where fluffysdoggingqueen meant? He slowed the car. There seemed to be nobody there. It was just woodland and a field running down the hill. Just to make sure, he drove the Jaguar into the half-open gate, as if to turn round. His lights swept across the woodland and there, a couple of dozen yards in, was the outline of a car. There was nobody else on the road. Gordon parked on the roadside. Anyone coming along would recognize his car, he thought. They would take it as a signal. The numbers would grow.

  The weather had been dry, and the ploughed field was rough going rather than muddy. There were a few car tracks cutting across the terrain; they seemed, however, a day or two old, and as he went towards what he had assumed was a dogger’s car, he began to think it was an abandoned wreck, just dumped in the woodland. He might as well make sure of that, writing the evening off as a dead loss and cursing fluffysdoggingqueen and her lack of grasp of the names of B-roads.

  He stumbled over a heavy rut, almost falling, and another. He put his hand out, and it met with an edge, sharp and rock-like. He raised himself, briskly, brushing his hands as if to demonstrate to an unseen audience that he had intended to fall. But there was nobody there to see. He was sure of that now. All the same, treading carefully, he went onwards towards the dark shape of the car. There was nobody in it, he could see that now. He turned, and stumbled; not on earth or grass, but on something soft; a piece of cloth. He bent to feel, and with a burst of disgust realized that he had set off in search of bare flesh, and had found it. His hand closed around a cold and rubbery hand. Even then, his thoughts were of the doggers, and one of them was what he thought for a moment he had come across. There was no reason for him to suppose that he had come across the body of Marcus McColl, lying with a knife in his ribs, half hidden by the long grass at the edge of the woodland, his legs lying where they had been dragged, under the back end of his abandoned old Ford Escort. That was what Jordison had seen in the dark, and he was to spend some hours explaining to the police what, in an abandoned and unremarkable shape, had persuaded him off the B-road in the dark; and considerably longer to his unbelieving wife.

  33.

  ‘So you see,’ a policewoman explained to Ruth McColl, ‘we just don’t know what your brother’s plans were. For the sake of China’s safety, you have to tell us, Ruth.’

  ‘I’ve told you,’ Ruth said. ‘I’ve told you everything I know. I don’t know any more than you do. And my brother’s dead. Don’t you think I care about that one?’

  ‘I thought we were getting somewhere,’ the policewoman said to her supervisor. ‘But I honestly don’t know where we go from here.’

  ‘Mobile phone records didn’t yield anything?’

  ‘Marcus didn’t have one. Hardly used the landline, either. We’ve no idea who he was in touch with.’

  ‘Someone must have seen something.’

  ‘She just seems to have disappeared.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ the supervisor said, ‘you just draw a blank.’

  34.

  The tinies, in uniform casuals of tiny white polo shirts and tiny blue trousers, lined up on the railway platform. Each had a baseball cap on, advertising their father’s or mother’s company, or some recent family day out; the adults waiting for a train thought that when they were young the sun had not seemed to present so much of a threat, could not remember being required by school to wear a head-covering on a sunny May morning. ‘Everyone line up behind your adult,’ the head of the expedition called out, and the tinies regathered, some holding their best friend’s hand. ‘Has everyone got their sunscreen on?’ the leader said, and a forest of hands went up. ‘Now, while we’re waiting for the train, let’s have a survey,’ she called. ‘What have you got in your lunch-boxes for a morning snack? Who’s got an apple! Good. Who’s got some other sort of fruit? Good. Who’s got some dried fruit—what do I mean by dried fruit? Anyone? Yes—raisins, prunes, dried apricots, anything like that—yes, good. But I don’t see everyone’s hands going up. Has anyone not got a morning snack in their lunchbox? No? What has everyone else got? Let’s have a survey.’

  Around her, the subordinate adults, each with their group, cast a stiff surveying eye over the tinies. ‘What was that, Chloë? A packet of crisps. Yes. Anyone else’s parents think that a packet of crisps is a sort of fruit? Because we were supposed to bring a piece of fruit or vegetable for our mid-morning snack, weren’t we? A pepperoni stick, Jacob? Well, no, a piece of fruit is really much better for us, isn’t it? Stay behind your adult. Don’t wander off, it’s very dangerous on the railway plat
form.’

  The other passengers, some quite close to middle age, thought of telling the headmistress what they had in their bags for lunch, or what they proposed to have for lunch: the cheese strings that were supposed to be for their kids’ lunch tomorrow, the prospect of a pint and a pub burger, a spliff for the park.

  And on the station platform, the train was late, the tinies showing signs of wandering off from their lines, each headed by a designated adult in charge. ‘Let’s have another survey,’ the headmistress cried. ‘What did everyone have for breakfast? Did anyone not have breakfast? Jacob? Did you have breakfast? What did you have for breakfast?’ Jacob was overcome with shyness, and tried to hide behind his best friend Ben. Ben found himself conspicuous; tried to hide behind Jacob. They twisted about each other for a minute. Then, without appearing to make any decision or transition, they burst into a fight, punching each other’s face and tugging at each other’s little polo shirt. ‘Jacob, Ben,’ the headmistress said, separating them. ‘It’s very dangerous to mess about on a railway platform.’ Around the group of children, the adults thought again of their past; what they had had for breakfast when they were as small as that. One thought of porridge; one thought of biscuits; one thought of a cold London suburb with fog outside, and a father coming down and rushing his cup of tea, running for the train. His mother at the sink, smiling in her pink housecoat and morning shock of ginger hair. That had been the advice in the late 1960s, a boiled egg, a piece of protein to start the day; and on the table there had been two soft-boiled eggs, one for him in a blue china egg-cup, one for his sister in a green egg-cup.

  There was a hoot round the bend. In the morning sunshine, the train emerged from between two hedges. The passengers picked up their bags; the children took each other’s hands, right in left and left in right.

  FIRST IMPROMPTU

  THE OMNISCIENT NARRATOR SPEAKS

  Kenyon left his house at seventeen minutes past eight. The time was recorded by the observing camera on the gate to the boatyard opposite their house, the fat black wires running up to its single eye like black veins. It registered Kenyon, in—if it could see in colour—a blue suit, with a surprisingly yellowish raincoat in the crook of his elbow, leaving the house and shutting the door behind him. It saw him look about him, up into the sky, hesitate for a moment and then raise his umbrella, an old-fashioned non-folding object with a knotty wooden handle. From that, any future watcher of its record could deduce that the forecast for the west of England that morning, of light passing showers, was as accurate as the meteorological record, published the day after the meteorological events had taken place, would subsequently prove to be.

  The boatyard camera was not the first mechanical record Kenyon had left that morning. While his bath had been running, he had checked his emails, gaining access at seven fourteen and logging off at seven twenty-two; he read six emails, three of which were from Australia and sent overnight, concerning a conference in Canberra Kenyon was to attend in January. These emails, and the replies Kenyon sent, were recorded remotely, in several buildings devoted to the communications industry, available should any government officer wish to read Kenyon’s communications. Also registered remotely were the names of three websites Kenyon logged on to and read distractedly while his bath was running, one concerning the film appearances of Rita Hayworth, whom Kenyon had dreamt making a singular appearance in the film The Sound of Music: Kenyon established to his satisfaction that Rita Hayworth, contrary to his vivid dream, had not played a nun in the film of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. After his bath, quickly observing that his wife was still asleep, he made a short call on his mobile telephone. He did so standing at the breakfast counter with a purple towel about his waist, and another, a blue one, draped over his shoulders. The telephone call began at seven fifty-three and ended ninety seconds later, at seven fifty-four. At seven fifty-six he phoned the same number and spoke more briefly, for only nine or ten seconds. The number, the times and the lengths of the calls were relayed to the computerized records of another communications company, to remain there until summoned by an official agency, deleted, or most plausibly Doomsday. Thereafter, no one registered the movements or actions of Kenyon until he left his house and was filmed by the boatyard camera. He had a cup of coffee.

  The boatyard camera, installed in spring 2004 against the worry of vandalism, and still working without any problem, filmed Kenyon walking from left to right across its field of interest. Then he disappeared from public observation until he reached, five hundred yards towards the centre of town, the quay. In turn, he was recorded by the camera attached to the pub, which looked down on its own patrons; the camera on the bus-stop, panning across the car park; the camera fixed to the entrance of the antiques centre. He passed between their fields, a small figure in a blue suit with a yellowish raincoat in the crook of his arm. Some of the cameras only observed a black shining mushroom with ribs, the dome of the umbrella. Cross-referencing between cameras would have been necessary to establish the identity of the single figure, moving between cameras like an object passed from stranger to stranger. Other cameras, pointing outwards from jewellers’ shops, filmed him passing, recorded and deposited in unknown vaults, to be watched by who knew who. Other cameras merely looked plausible, but had never filmed anyone or anything, were only empty boxes, deterrents, placebos.

  Kenyon stopped at the cashpoint machine belonging to the HSBC bank at the end of the Fore street, a square metal box let into the wall of a white eighteenth-century customs house, the windows discreetly strengthened against robbery or filled in with brick and plaster. The bank’s records would have shown that at eight twenty-eight a.m., Kenyon took out a hundred pounds in cash, leaving him with a debit balance of £4,524.20 A curious investigator, from the bank, from a central public authority, from the sort of agencies that investigated and propagated the creditworthy qualities of individuals to anyone who subscribed to their database, or simply some hacker who for curiosity’s sake or in hope of robbery and fraud had investigated Kenyon’s finances—any of these people would have discovered that his agreed overdraft facility was £5,000, that in three days his salary would be paid into his account, reducing the overdraft but not quite erasing it, and that he also owed £7,477.98 on his one credit card. They would not have discovered, either the investigators or the cameras under whose gaze Kenyon fell that morning, the fit of panic and worry that came over him when he fed his card into the machine, knowing that his bank balance was around the £5,000 limit, not knowing exactly whether it had breached the line.

  It would, however, record for the benefit of anyone who was able to breach the bank’s security protocols that the next person to take any money out was the sixteen-year-old Anna McLeod, staying with her grandparents, who took out twenty pounds at nine nineteen, an unusually long gap between users at this hour in the morning. It would be only the fourth time Anna McLeod had used a cashpoint machine on her own behalf—her mother had trusted her with her own card once or twice, but not a third time. Anna McLeod would use it with a sense of excitement and exuberance, and not at all with the sense that it was her own money that she was removing from its resting place with no particular objective or need. The machines and lenses of record registered all of this, and would come to register more about Anna McLeod. Before the year was out—on the last day of the year, in fact, heading away from a party in Exmouth in the passenger seat of an erratically driven old Fiat—the then seventeen-year-old Anna McLeod would be discovered by police to be in possession of two illegal pills, and the building blocks of her body and mind, her blood and skin and hair, the particular configuration of deoxyribonucleic acid, which resulted from the confluence of Marianne McLeod and (unknown to anyone at all, buried in that configuration of deoxyribonucleic acid) Marianne McLeod’s boss Stewart at the Vehicle Licensing Centre where she had worked for six months in 1993 and not Marianne’s Scotch-accountant husband Mungo at all, that DNA which had made an Anna McLeod out of the conjunction of an egg a
nd a stranger’s sperm in 1993 would be stored for ever more in a file, on a computer, in a database, to be drawn up and rifled through in future by bored forensic policemen whenever any kind of crime had been committed, anywhere in the country.

  Kenyon took the money, which he now considered his, and walked down the Fore street. He had never come into contact with the police; had never been suspected of any crime, whether justly or unjustly. So no one had his DNA, apart from Kenyon himself, and Hettie, of course. His appearance, on the other hand, was registered on the police cameras outside the post office, the ones outside the community centre, which were trained on the statue of the Crapping Juvenile and only caught his legs from the knee down. Private security cameras outside three pubs, in the windows of the hedge-fund trader’s one-man abstract art emporium, in another jeweller’s shop and a souvenir shop captured Kenyon, his tense face and drawn-in, rapid walk. Perhaps the observers who followed his stride from the record on this succession of cameras might have observed the figures counting the time at the bottom of the film, might have wondered about the irregular service of the train from Hanmouth. Such an observer would have realized that at the last of the cameras, outside the Three Ferrets, Kenyon had been caught three minutes before the Bide-ford train left the station, with two hundred yards to run.

  As the ticket machine at the station was refusing to accept bank notes or coins, it recorded Kenyon putting his bank card into the slot and pressing his four-digit code. The camera above the machine and, more remotely, the cameras positioned at either end of both platforms would have recorded the same events, though with less detail. The machine, and the database behind it, would have recorded the same user, the same bank card, the same numbers being used to acquire a train ticket every Monday morning for several years. It was unusual, however, for the ticket to be bought on a Monday morning, and the machines would have known that Kenyon was not buying a ticket this morning for his usual destination, London. His bank account, in addition to the one hundred pounds already debited this morning, was now debited a further £2.30 only. This information was stored, too, against an eventual retrieval by the authorities or those who concerned themselves with such matters.