by Toby Faber
Now Laurie did feel the need to speak. ‘He didn’t throw himself under a train. I was there. I saw him fall.’
‘You were there? Of course you were. How did he look?’
‘Fine, happy even. He smiled at me. I think he was about to tell me I had a smudge on my nose. He had a lovely suit on.’
‘I bought him that – wasn’t really his usual style, to tell the truth. I think he probably wore it because he was travelling down with me.’
Then, without Laurie even needing to ask the question that she was struggling to form, Mrs Pennington went on. ‘I don’t go into London much. When I do I like … liked … to travel with William. We’d take the train down together. I got on the Northern line; I was going to the Chinese exhibition at the British Museum. He went onto the Victoria line like he always did. That was the last time I saw him – at the bottom of the escalator between the two platforms.’
There was a faint uplift in Mrs Pennington’s voice as she made that last statement; it gave her voice, deep as it was, an almost brittle timbre. Laurie could tell that, having already broken down once, she was desperate not to do so again. Instinctively, she made no move to comfort the older woman. Instead, she left her to breathe, to regain some measure of composure in her own time, before she herself went on, repeating her earlier assertion. ‘He didn’t kill himself; he fell. I’m sure; I was right by him. I saw it.’ Then she stopped, only too aware of what she meant by ‘it’, and of what her words might mean to the dead man’s widow.
Mrs Pennington, however, was looking her straight in the eye. ‘I wish I could believe you. But there’s no doubt what the police think, although they haven’t said it to my face. I got the impression they see it all the time: people made redundant who can’t bear to tell their wives. The inquest may return an open verdict, but that will just be window dressing.’
Immediately Laurie thought of Mum. Dad had effectively said the same verdict was just window dressing there too. What wouldn’t she give for someone to tell her they knew it was an accident? Well, she could do that for Mrs Pennington, at least. ‘I saw him fall. The platform was crowded. He was leaning across to talk to me. He lost his balance.’ Even as she spoke, the memory of the accident and her feeling about Mum overwhelmed her. Now she was the one crying. Why would no one believe her?
‘It’s true, you know.’ Dad had come through from the kitchen and was standing in the doorway. ‘At least, that’s what Laurie said when she called me straight afterwards. She was certain then, and it looks like she was the only real witness. She’s not the sort of person to make it up.’
Mrs Pennington breathed in and shut her eyes. When she opened them again there was a new sense of calmness about her, almost an acceptance of what was to come. Now she was the one who reached out for Laurie’s hand. ‘I think we’d better have that cup of tea, don’t you?’
The conservatory was no place for a heart to heart, so they sat around the kitchen table. This was the business end of the house, where everything important happened. Laurie could look across at Mrs Pennington – or Margaret, as she soon learnt to call her – while she said what she had come to say. Dad sat between them, at the head of the table. He had heard the story before, of course, and was content to sit in silence as Laurie relived that morning once again. It was at his prompting, however, that Laurie went on to describe her interview with Sergeant Atkins. It struck a chord.
‘Well, it seems you and I have had a similar experience with the ghastly Atkins. Not that she was rude to me, of course, but I got the feeling when we met that she was reading from a script for dealing with the widows of suicides. She was certainly in no mood to listen to me. She quoted some statistic that there was less than one fatal accident a year on the Underground, dripping with concern while she did so. I have to say that I’ve never felt so patronised in my life. It gave me an awful foretaste of what it will be like when I’m old.’ There was a short pause, before she added, ‘She certainly didn’t mention any witness.’
‘Do you think there’s some sort of bias that means accidents are more likely to be registered as suicides?’ Laurie asked. ‘Like a vicious circle: less than one person dies by accident on the Tube each year; so therefore the assumption with any death is that it’s the result of a deliberate action; so therefore the statistics show less than one accidental death a year.’
A small silence greeted this remark, long enough for Laurie to feel faintly embarrassed at having made it. Perhaps now wasn’t the time to search for patterns; for Mrs Pennington this was all too personal. It was Dad who brought it back to the specific. ‘Would you like to talk about your husband?’
Mrs Pennington was oblique in her reply. ‘Sergeant Atkins seemed to assume that just because he’d spent forty-odd years with the same company then he must have found it too hard to take when he lost his job. I don’t know. We’d had some bad news too, of course. At least he’d told me that.’
‘Bad news?’ Dad asked gently.
‘Just the week before: an old colleague of William’s who hanged himself. No wife or children. He left some sort of a note, but he wasn’t found for a while. Sergeant Atkins seemed to think it might have been the last straw.’
‘Old colleagues? Were they particularly close?’
‘I don’t know. They’d certainly known each other for a long time. Roger arrived at Sanderson’s only a couple of years after William. He was the finance director – something like that. William was head of sales. It’s a firm of recruitment consultants: William joined it straight out of school, when it was just a man and a dog. It specialised in IT. William always said that computers were the future. For a long time it seemed he was right.’ Margaret tailed off, lost in remembrance.
‘Go on.’ Encouraged Dad.
‘Well, William always said it was the millennium bug that did it – just not in the way they’d all expected. That was the boom time, you see. There weren’t enough programmers to go round. Recruitment firms could write their own ticket. Sanderson’s expanded to cope with the demand. Then, of course, it all hit a brick wall. New Year’s Day, 2000: the world didn’t come to an end; all those programmers were suddenly surplus to requirements.’
‘Why was it called Sanderson’s?’ Laurie queried.
‘Peter Sanderson started it. He’s been dead for a few years now, and he’d already handed it on to Dominic, in any case.’ Margaret’s tone of voice changed as she said the name.
‘Who was in charge in 2000?’
‘That was Dominic already.’ Margaret pursed her lips. ‘He wasn’t even thirty; had to make all these people redundant. William was rather impressed by his decisiveness, then started to worry that he was enjoying it. Anyway, between them, they kept the company going, but it’s a lot smaller than it was.’
‘So why would he have made William redundant now?’
‘You’d have to ask Dominic that, but I don’t suppose you’d get a straight answer. He wrote to me after William died, to express his sympathy. Didn’t say sorry, though. Called it “early retirement”. I shredded the letter. There always was something a bit odd about that man.’
‘Was William close to retirement?’
‘Not for a few years. He was only sixty, you know. He’d certainly said nothing to me about wanting to stop work.’
Laurie would have left it there. They’d come back to where they started. It was pointless to probe further. She wanted to be somewhere else, away from a suburban house in mourning. All of a sudden, she thought of Paul; she savoured the moment, imagining what they might do the next time they met. Catching Dad’s eye, Laurie felt herself blush. Could he read her mind? Then she realised he was speaking, asking something: did Mrs Pennington have any idea what her husband had been doing when she thought he’d been going to work?
It was to hide her embarrassment as much as anything that made Laurie leap in: ‘Might he have been going to the British Library? Only I found one of their locker keys near where he fell.’
Mrs Pennington l
ooked faintly startled, then reminiscent. ‘He used to say that it held the answer to every question. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him more excited than when he got the letter approving his request for a reader’s card. She paused for just long enough for Laurie to remember her own feelings the day before, and then continued. ‘That was a few years ago now. He had this idea to write a book about whether there were still descendants of Alexander the Great living in Central Asia.’ She gave a short laugh and shook her head. ‘Well, it gave him something to do on Saturdays. Then he had to make half his team at Sanderson’s redundant and work later in the evening. Come the weekend, the last thing he wanted to do was head back into the city to read about Afghanistan. I assumed he’d forgotten all about it.’
Alexander the Great and Afghanistan! The idea was crazy, but wonderful too. How would you go about establishing that? And William Pennington had been as excited as Laurie was at the receipt of a BL card. She remembered his smile and his suit; OK, he might have been wearing it as a decoy, to let his wife carry on believing he was going into work, but that didn’t make it any less elegant. This was a man she would have liked to know. ‘I imagine,’ Laurie said, ‘that it wouldn’t be hard to find out if he had been going into the library. They must keep some sort of record of everyone’s requests.’
*
The police still had Mr Pennington’s wallet, along with the other personal effects recovered from his body. Laurie toyed with the idea of suggesting that Dad impersonate the dead man. Surely it wouldn’t be too hard to get the library to issue him a new card if he went in with the correct passport and something like a utility bill? They’d never check the photograph that carefully, surely? But she soon gave up the notion. How would she go about even suggesting such a thing to Margaret? In any case, a new card would still be useless without her husband’s password. That, at least, was a point she could make. ‘Even if we had his card, we’d need his password too, of course.’
‘I can probably help you there at least,’ Margaret replied. ‘William kept a list of all his passwords in a drawer in his desk.’ She disappeared for a moment before re-emerging with a sheet of A4. ‘Now, William was rather cryptic when he wrote these down. What sort of thing do you think I should be looking for?’
Laurie noticed the ‘I’ and made no attempt to look over Margaret’s shoulder while she scanned the list. Instead, she brought out her own library card. There was a code above the expiry date, just to the right of her photograph. ‘Some sort of membership number? Mine has six digits.’
‘Ah yes. Here we are. Three-six-four-five-one-one.’ Laurie resisted the urge to note it down. ‘And then against it he’s typed “d-n-i-l-g”. That will be the password.’ Margaret stopped, folded up the piece of paper and put it down. She smiled at Laurie, but she seemed to have nothing more to say.
Laurie considered this. Dnilg? Could that be a password? Didn’t they have to be at least six characters long? How many more questions could she ask? Then Dad stood up. ‘Margaret, you’ve been really kind to us. Now, unless you’d like us to stay, I think we’d better go. We’ve been pestering you for long enough.’
He had called it right. Mrs Pennington made no attempt to prevent them leaving. Within a couple of minutes they were outside the house, walking back towards Watford Junction.
‘Thanks for backing me up about him falling,’ Laurie said.
‘Well, in the end it didn’t seem right to ask if he might have been pushed. In the meantime, I’m keeping an open mind on the subject for your sake.’
Laurie was wondering whether it was worth restating her certainty, when Dad changed tack ‘I wonder if she’ll ever think all that through.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, the British Library is only a five-minute walk from Euston station.’
‘So?’ Laurie replied without thinking. Then the implication hit her. ‘I see what you mean. Why would he have got on the Tube to get there?’
‘I’m awfully afraid that it was only because his wife was with him. I thought we’d better leave before she reached the same conclusion.’
‘Right,’ said Laurie. ‘It seems a shame, though, just as we were beginning to make some progress.’
‘Oh, I think we’d learnt about as much as we could in a first visit.’
‘Hmm.’ Laurie’s acquiescence was definitely half-hearted. ‘You know, I’m not sure about that password she found for us. I set one up yesterday. They have to be at least six letters long. What she told us only has five.’
‘Yes,’ Dad couldn’t keep a note of triumph out of his voice, ‘but when you heard “d-n-i-l-g” I heard “d-nil-g”. Margaret said he was cryptic. That was just his way of writing “dog”.’
Laurie could think of all sorts of retorts to this flight of fancy, but limited herself to a single, not entirely dismissive, ‘So?’
‘So there’s a dog’s bowl on the floor in the kitchen. It’s got a name on it: Freddy. There are your six letters.’
Thursday, 6 August – 4 p.m.
It was touching, Dad’s level of excitement, as they sat down at his computer. He insisted on being there while Laurie navigated her way round the British Library website until she found Log in as a Reader Pass holder. Did she only imagine his hum of approval when she typed in 364511? There could be little doubt that her facility with numbers came from him. If by any chance she had forgotten the digits read out by Mrs Pennington, she was sure he would have been able to fill the gap. Now for the password. She tried freddy first, all lower case. No joy there: the red error message at the top of the screen made that clear. Freddy had the same result.
‘Try moving the upper-case letter along the word.’ Dad suggested. fReddy, frEddy, freDdy, fredDy and freddY were all equally unsuccessful. Just for the hell of it, Laurie tried dnilg: useless.
‘The trouble is’ Laurie said, ‘that even if you’re right about “freddy”, he could have manipulated it in any one of a number of ways that only he would know.’
‘No,’ Dad replied with surprising certainty, ‘because then he would have had to remember it. It’s got to be something simple.’
‘What if he had another dog, one that died, or a cuddly toy when he was a child?
‘They’re all possibilities.’ Dad admitted. He seemed deflated, or at least lost in thought.
Laurie tried logging on as herself. It was marvellously simple. She could, she realised, order any book she wanted from the comfort of the computer in her bedroom and find it waiting for her in the Reading Room by the time she’d cycled down. More to the point, there was the button at the top of the page: My Reading Room requests. She clicked on it, re-entered her details and got straight through to a page with three tabs: Current requests and Unsuccessful requests were both empty, but Older requests showed, all too clearly, the previous day’s activity. Behind her, Dad murmured, ‘Nothing wrong with a bit of Georgette Heyer for soothing the soul.’
Laurie shut down the page and stood up. ‘I’m going out for a walk,’ she declared. ‘Just to clear my head.’ She had to get away from Dad for a while. It was lovely spending the day with him, but he knew her too well. Besides, this would be her first chance to phone Paul all day: perhaps in five minutes she would be speaking to him!
‘Hi, this is Paul. I’m sorry I can’t take your call right now, but if you leave a message I’ll get back to you.’
That was Paul’s voice all right, but no substitute for talking to the real thing. Laurie tried hard to sound positive after the beep. ‘Hi, it’s Laurie. Give me a call when you can. I’d love to talk to you.’ His gym might be underground, she reflected. That would explain why her calls kept going straight through to voicemail. She carried on walking.
Turning the corner, Laurie suddenly remembered the argument she’d witnessed there a few days before. What had brought that to mind? The man had been so free with his swear words. Well, used one swear word a lot, but then been curiously reluctant to say the word ‘shit’. How had he said it? ‘Ess-a
itch-one-tee’. Laurie liked it, the idea that you denatured a word by replacing its vowel with a digit. That was, now she thought of it, what Dad said William Pennington had done with the word dog – just replaced the ‘o’ with ‘0’ when storing the clue to his password. You could do it with every vowel really: ‘A’ would be ‘4’; ‘E’ would be ‘3’. Laurie never got on to thinking about ‘U’. She’d had an idea. It was time to return home.
fr3ddy: that was it! Laurie was logged on to the British Library website as someone else. Was she doing something wrong? Should she be feeling this excited? Who cared? With Dad watching, she clicked on the link for My Reading Room requests and re-entered the user number and password. Just as it had been for her, the Current requests page was empty. She clicked on the tab for Older requests, entered a date range for the whole year, and there, in front of her, was the complete record of what William Pennington had been reading.
Titles like The Greek Kingdom of Bactria from Alexander to Eucratides the Great and A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia leapt out at her. What was it Margaret had said her husband was interested in – that there might be descendants of Alexander the Great in Afghanistan? Well, no inconsistency there: William Pennington was taking his research seriously. Dad pointed out the date against the first titles on the list. ‘Looks like he ordered these the day before he died. That doesn’t strike me as the action of a man about to kill himself.’
‘No,’ Laurie agreed, ‘but I don’t know if the police would see it that way. I guess if we look at his unsuccessful requests we can see if he’d ordered books for the following days.’ She clicked on the appropriate tab, and entered the same dates in the search boxes. Only three books were listed, and all had been requested months before William Pennington’s death.