‘And how was he?’
‘Trying to give the impression he was perfectly happy and immensely interested in it all. But I could tell he was embarrassed and ashamed, even though he’s done nothing wrong. You do believe that, don’t you, Kathy?’ And suddenly her eyes were sharp and focused.
‘Yes, Suzanne, of course I do. It’s all a terrible, absurd mistake.’
‘And yet, knowing him, the kind of man he is, his long record of service, they still arrested him and charged him with murder. Can’t you make them see sense?’
‘I’ve been told to keep away, because we worked together for so long, but I am able to access information about the case as it develops. The detective they’ve put in charge is very competent and experienced, and I’m confident he’ll get to the truth.’
Actually she wasn’t, not after what she’d been reading recently. Alun Hughes’s notes on his last interview with Brock and on the forensic reports were not encouraging at all.
‘But is that enough, Kathy? Can’t we do something? Something to help Maggie Ferguson get him out of there? Although I do wonder about her.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, she got him into this mess in the first place. Maybe she knows more than she’s letting on. Maybe she’s covering something up.’
‘Oh, I don’t think—’
‘I just wonder if Brock shouldn’t have got a different lawyer to represent him. I mean, why did Maggie approach him in the first place? They weren’t particular friends, were they? And he wasn’t looking for work. Why pick on him?’
Kathy was about to say something reassuring when it occurred to her that it wasn’t a bad question. There were plenty of younger ex-detectives who’d moved into private investigation that Maggie could have thought of more readily.
‘Why don’t we ask her?’ Kathy said, and picked up her phone.
After a moment she heard Maggie’s voice. ‘Kathy? How are you? Got something for me?’
‘I wish I did, Maggie, but you know I can’t interfere. I’m sitting here with Suzanne, who’s just returned from visiting Brock, and she’s very worried about how things are looking.’
‘Yes, this is a bad time, but I’m hopeful that we’ll see some progress later in the month.’
‘That sounds like lawyer-speak for the case is hopeless.’
‘Now, now. Put me on to her.’
‘Okay, but just one thing—what made you approach Brock in the first place?’
‘Over the Pettigrew affair? It was Pettigrew himself. He suggested I get Brock to help—was quite insistent, in fact. Apparently he’d seen Brock in action in court and was very impressed.’
‘Okay, I’ll put Suzanne on.’
She handed the phone to Suzanne and half listened as she topped up their drinks.
Later, after Suzanne had caught a cab to London Bridge for her train home to Battle, Kathy got on to the police intranet and checked on her team’s recent reports. There were new entries in the list of known connections between Jarvis and Walcott, and one of them caught her eye, a trial at the Old Bailey in Jarvis’s prosecutor days, where Walcott had been the presiding judge. Not a paedophile case, thank goodness, but a 1999 murder trial at the Old Bailey that Kathy remembered well, R v J. Causley and D. Causley. Jarrod and Dean Causley were brothers, aged sixteen and fourteen, charged with the drowning murder of an eight-year-old girl, Chloe Honnery, after a rapid police investigation.
Kathy sat back, remembering the shock and outrage the murder had stirred up, given the youth of the murderers and the brutal nature of the crime. She hadn’t been involved in that one, being on sick leave following her experiences in the Silvermeadow case, and her memories of that period were shaded by her own dark state of mind. But she’d followed the daily reports of the trial, mainly because the senior detective in charge of the case was Brock.
Brock, Walcott and Jarvis, all brought together sixteen years ago for the trial of the Causley boys, just one of those random events that you would expect within the restricted criminal justice community. But still, it seemed an ominous coincidence.
No, she decided, the important thing, the only thing she should be concentrating on, was finding flaws in Alun Hughes’s case against Brock.
There were no prison visits on Mondays, and Brock sensed a mood of weary resignation among the inmates. He’d only been there a couple of days, but already he was beginning to understand what long-term imprisonment might be like. The first shock of a new and potentially hostile environment, alert to every novelty and nuance, was wearing off as his life narrowed into a range of tedious routines. His relationship with his cellmate had settled into a chilly acceptance, although Danny hadn’t abandoned his campaign to get Brock to admit that he really had murdered a woman. Confined together in this small room, Brock felt like someone stuck in a claustrophobic marriage with a partner determined to get him to confess guilt—a partner who spent most of the day on his bed watching TV, who snored and farted in his sleep and who wouldn’t keep his stuff to his own side of the room.
On the positive side, he’d struck up the beginnings of a friendship with one of the prison chaplains, who had encouraged him to get involved in practical activities, and he’d enrolled in courses of bricklaying and fitness for over-fifties in the gym, and had volunteered for a job in the library.
He had also made contact with Charles Pettigrew, whose cell was on the lower floor of the same house block four. He had spotted him on Sunday in the visits hall, where he had met Suzanne for one of the three half-hour sessions they would be allowed together each week. Pettigrew was sitting at his table with a grey-haired woman of around sixty, he guessed, who was speaking intently to him. Watching them together, Brock was struck by the contrast between them—she gesturing vigorously as she spoke, while he slumped listlessly over a plastic cup. Brock wondered if that was how Suzanne and he appeared. Later Brock caught up with Pettigrew as he was about to disappear into his cell. He looked at Brock with a wondering frown.
‘I heard you were in here, Mr Brock. I thought they were pulling my leg. Murder, they told me. Can that be true?’
‘So it seems, Charlie. But I see you’ve got a girlfriend.’
‘Oh, one of my authors, Donna Priest, kind enough to pay me a visit. Probably after material. She writes true crime, you see. I think she wants to make a case study out of me.’
Seeing him close up, Brock was shocked by his pasty complexion and the dead tone of his voice. In less than three months he seemed to have become a broken man. Brock suggested they find a quiet corner and have a chat, but Pettigrew excused himself, saying he was feeling tired and wanted to lie down. Brock was so disturbed by the change in him that he mentioned it to one of the house warders, who shrugged and said Pettigrew had been having regular checks at the medical centre, and that some people just withdrew like that. ‘Get him down to the gym,’ he urged Brock. ‘Get him to go outside, get a bit of fresh air.’
That night, lying sleepless in the narrow bed, Brock was filled with an overwhelming sense of dread, of fear of gradually losing touch with Suzanne and the outside world, and of dying here alone.
15
‘You seem to have a rapport with Jarvis,’ Torrens had said. ‘Go and have a chat to him. He’s under a lot of pressure now with the press articles. Maybe he’ll come clean to you.’ So, reluctantly, that’s what Kathy was trying to do. The phone was hopeless, continuously engaged, and she imagined the press siege outside his house, so she tried his sister-in-law’s home phone, also jammed, and then her mobile. Finally she got through, hearing the desperation in Audrey Gowe’s voice.
‘He’s not here,’ she said in a rushed half-whisper, as if afraid of being overheard. ‘He left Highgate on Friday, thank God, and was with us on Saturday night. But the reporters were on our doorstep on Sunday morning and we barely managed to get him out through the back lane before they closed in. Oliver is incensed; we all are. It’s madness, cruel madness. You’ve no idea the messages posted on
the web. Hateful, obscene things. Of course, it’s all untrue, what they’re saying about him. And coming on top of Caroline’s murder … I’m frightened for him.’
‘I understand,’ Kathy said. ‘So where is he now?’
There was silence.
‘Mrs Gowe? If you could tell me how to contact him, I may be able to help.’
Finally she answered, a chill in her voice, ‘I’m not sure we can believe that anymore. All I can tell you is that he’s no longer in England. If you really want to help, you can put a stop to this witch-hunt.’
Frustrated, Kathy called Alun Hughes, who invited her to share a sandwich lunch. They sat in a weak patch of sunlight glimmering through the glass curtain wall of the Box, looking out over the Broadway shopping centre and the constant stream of traffic on the Hammersmith flyover. Hughes unwrapped his lunch, complaining about the air-conditioning in his corner of the office, about the coffee and about the latest round of HR memos, then said, ‘So is there something I can help you with, Kathy?’
‘You know me, Alun, I’m biased. I worked with Brock for far too long to believe he killed that woman, so bear with me if I’m being a pain. But it seems to me the only way they knew where Brock parked his car was because they were tracking him, and the obvious way was by his phone. So I have to ask: are you absolutely sure his phone wasn’t being tracked?’
‘Oh …’ Hughes gave a disappointed sigh. ‘You’re surely not going to call me stupid or incompetent, are you, Kathy?’
Kathy winced, embarrassed. ‘No, but …’
‘Of course we checked and rechecked his phone. There were no rogue apps or hidden spyware but, yes, he was being tracked.’ He looked with satisfaction at his roast beef sandwich and sank his teeth into it.
Kathy blinked at him. ‘He was?’ She hadn’t seen this in the technical reports.
Hughes chewed. ‘He was.’
‘Who by?’
‘By his partner, Suzanne. Very simple with a smart phone, very useful for keeping tabs on wayward children or elderly men who are losing their marbles.’
‘She told you this?’
‘When we asked her, yes. She did it after he got mugged that time and drove home from London in a semiconscious state. She was worried that he needed watching. Not quite compos mentis. Her words.’
‘Oh.’ Kathy was deflated.
Hughes went on, ‘But tell me, Kathy, who is this “they” who might be tracking him? This mysterious “they” you’ve dreamed up to avoid facing the bleedin’ obvious? Who the hell are “they”?’
Kathy took a breath and said, ‘What about Elena Vasile’s thug friend, the one who beat up Brock in Walworth? Have you checked on him?’
‘Of course we’ve bloody checked on him!’ Hughes sounded distinctly annoyed now. ‘Marku Constantin flew out of Gatwick on an easyJet flight to Bucharest on Christmas Eve, two weeks before Elena was murdered, and has not returned since.’ He puffed out his cheeks, then said more calmly, ‘Anything else?’
‘Motive, Alun. He had absolutely no reason to kill that woman.’
‘He just lost it, Kathy. That’s my belief. Elena was working a scam, and when Brock realised she was playing him for a mug he just lost it, lashed out.’
‘No, not Brock. Never.’
‘People change, Kathy. He wasn’t his old self. Elena’s boyfriend had beaten the shit out of him just three weeks before. It must have had a devastating impact on him, forced to face the fact that he wasn’t the man he’d once been. When she taunted him, turned her back on him, he saw red and let her have it.’
Kathy bowed her head. It was the same argument that she’d used to Brock about Pettigrew.
‘I’m sorry, Kathy. Believe me, this grieves me too.’
Later that day Kathy was trying to understand a preliminary technical report on the contents of Jarvis’s home computer when her mobile rang.
‘Kathy? Hi, it’s John.’
She recognised the Canadian accent of Brock’s son with a mixture of pleasure and guilt that she hadn’t contacted him. ‘John! Hello. You’ve heard about Brock?’
‘Yes. I’m still in shock. Suzanne finally decided to call me yesterday, and I caught the first flight I could.’
‘You’re here, in London?’
‘Heathrow, yes. Look, I’d really appreciate having a talk with you about this. Any chance I can buy you dinner tonight?’
He had booked a room at a small hotel in Pimlico, he explained, and they agreed to meet at the Orange pub nearby.
The bar on the ground floor was crowded, and he didn’t see her as she stepped inside, although she spotted him immediately—as tall as Brock but leaner in build, a lock of dark hair fallen forward over his forehead. She hesitated for a moment, watching him, the eyes half closed with the preoccupied look she recognised so well from his father. There was something else too that reminded her of Brock, a sense of self-possessed calm. In the older man it had always been reassuring, but with John it had a different effect on her, a quickening of the pulse. And then he glanced up suddenly and saw her and gave a big grin. They pushed their way through the crowd towards each other and hugged.
‘Kathy,’ he said, ‘it’s so good to see you again.’
Over a drink she told him what she could about Brock’s situation and how it had come about. When she reached the end, he shook his head in disbelief. They finished their drinks and went upstairs to a table in the dining room with a view out onto Orange Square, pedestrians hunched against the wind hurrying across the small triangular open space beneath the skeletal trees.
John said, ‘Both Pettigrew and Brock were caught up in this because of The Promised Land manuscript, and in both cases the woman who was trying to sell it was murdered. Why? In order to frame them? That sounds so crazy, Kathy. It’s not surprising the police don’t believe it. It’s like the plot of some weird Jacobean tragedy.’
‘Yes. And part of me doesn’t want to believe it either. You have to remember that I’m leading the team that’s bringing the case against Charles Pettigrew, so I’m not a disinterested observer, and I can’t be as open with you as I’d like. But if you can tell me anything useful about that manuscript I’d be grateful, wherever it leads. Brock sent you a copy of that first page, didn’t he?’
‘And of the second page too, yes. In fact, I was planning to come over anyway to talk to him about it. I showed the pages to a colleague in the university who’s a specialist in mid-twentieth-century literature, and she’s very interested.’
‘What, she thinks they could be genuine?’
‘She doesn’t go that far, but she certainly considers it’s a possibility.’
A waiter came to the table and they gave their order, then Kathy said, ‘Go on, convince me.’
‘Well, I’m not sure I can do that, but it’s intriguing. Orwell was fascinated with utopias gone wrong, as in his last two novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the idea of a third and last one, challenging the utopian uber-text, Thomas More’s sixteenth-century book Utopia, head on is certainly appealing. And those first two pages are scattered with sly references to More’s book. In that story the narrator meets a traveller called Raphael Hythloday, while in The Promised Land he meets Ralph Halliday. The visionary who founded the ideal state is called Utopas in More’s book and Ulisses Topaz in this one, and the main settlement is called Amaurot in one and its exact opposite Toruama in the other. There are other cross-references—the Portuguese nationality, for instance, and the promised land utopia being on an island. So it’s got the appeal of a puzzle text, and Kimberly, the professor who’s been helping me out on this, was very taken with that idea. But would Orwell/Blair have done that? I thought his writing was more straightforward and blunt than that, but Kimberly could quote me examples where he made allusions to other books.
‘There are also lots of references to Orwell’s own early life in Burma: the Strand Hotel in Rangoon, which he certainly knew well; the teak timber business which also features in his first
novel Burmese Days; and the floating island farms like those on Inle Lake in central Burma, which he would have been familiar with. So those also have an appeal, with Blair, knowing he was near the end of his life, returning to his literary roots in Burma to write the definitive dystopian novel, and under his real name.
‘Well, that’s Kimberly’s area; mine is the more mundane things like sentence structure, word choice and frequency, that kind of thing. Orwell recorded his views on literary style, favouring a no-nonsense approach—avoid long words, elaborate figures of speech, jargon and the passive sense—and The Promised Land pretty much follows that line. It also has some slightly dated words—“piteous”, for example—that would be right for Orwell’s era. And the opening—“The Strand Hotel, Rangoon, six in the evening”—it’s pure Orwell; compare the opening sentence of his Down and Out in Paris and London: “The Rue du Coq d’Or, Paris, seven in the morning.”’
‘So you really think it could be genuine?’ Kathy asked.
‘I haven’t made up my mind yet. The problem for Kimberly is that she’s never heard of “my dear friend Amar Dasgupta” to whom Blair dedicates the manuscript, and she can’t find any reference to him anywhere. So what I was intending to do, before this bombshell with Brock, was to spend time in the Orwell Archive at University College London trying to find him. If Dasgupta isn’t there, then I think we have to conclude that someone has been playing us all in the most elaborate and monstrous game imaginable. Two men in prison. Two women dead!’
Four, Kathy thought, thinking of the murders of Andrea Giannopoulos and Caroline Jarvis. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘Brock’ll be really glad to see you.’
A cloud seemed to pass over John’s face. ‘How’s he doing? Suzanne said he was managing pretty well, but I had the feeling she was pretty worried.’
The Promised Land Page 15