So He Takes the Dog

Then Alice went directly, in person, to the owners of the property, and that was that, because no one, however obtuse or tightfisted he may be, can resist the ardent goodness of Alice. Confronted with Alice, when Alice’s mind is made up, no man could argue for long. When she sits down and looks at you with those unwavering deep green eyes, you know that here is a woman who is sincere and highly principled and absolutely intent on achieving her purpose. And, of course, she’s attractive, too, very attractive, which helps in the disarming process. To refuse her would be ungracious. You’d feel that you’d behaved unworthily in taking issue with her, and the landlords duly, rapidly, acceded to her request. It’s the same when she’s drumming up donations and sponsorship. Nobody ever says ‘No’ when Alice visits in person. They must dread her visitations, the lovely and implacable spirit of charity.

Before the year’s end Alice and Katharine took over the shop, and at the time of Henry’s death that’s where they were, flanked on one side by a hairdresser who somehow stayed solvent on the revenue from three customers per day and on the other by a boarded-up betting shop. Every morning Alice would set off in their resprayed post-office van to drive around the county or even further afield, gathering discarded books from libraries and colleges and anywhere else that had surplus printed matter to offload. In the afternoon, if she hadn’t returned too late, she helped Katharine to sort the haul into packages for dispersal to various wretched zones of the earth, where kids who owned nothing would learn about the world and the English language from out-of-date guidebooks and novels with pages missing, and battered old dictionaries and atlases held together with tape and glue applied by Alice and Katharine and their ever-changing crew of volunteers. It was also Alice’s job to phone the regular donors, to cold-call the potential benefactors. Above the desk – a castoff from the insurance broker in the next street – was stuck a picture of a wizened woman sitting on an oil drum in front of a shack of corrugated iron. The bags under her eyes were like tiny leather purses, but she was only forty years old, said Katharine. She lived in Mozambique and at the time the picture was taken she was learning to read, helped by the books that Alice and Katharine had sent. Now she was running a mobile library, taking books to her neighbours on a donkey-drawn cart. All round the walls there were photographs like this one, displayed like images of the saints. By the door there was one of a pretty eight-year-old. Before school she had to work on her parents’ scrap of land; when school was finished she picked up the hoe and the spade again. Of an evening, when the outdoors work was done, she had chores to do in the house, and then her homework, but when the homework was completed she sat down at the table and read to her parents by the light of a kerosene lamp. Her name was Josephine. In the photograph she was sitting at the table, the household’s one table, with the unlit lamp beside her, grinning over a ragged copy of Tarka the Otter. It came from a man in Appledore, Katharine explained, delighted at the extraordinariness of the book’s destiny.

Thousands of books passed through her warehouse every year, and Katharine seemed to know the destination of each one. She was in her mid-fifties then. Her son was a layabout junkie and she was cursed with sciatica, but Katharine’s enthusiasm could not be dimmed. Each donation of books was received as a kid would receive a Christmas present, and she packed them up as if the books were as precious as barrels of water. Katharine believed that the day was coming in which everyone would have access to the books they need for their education. What’s more, the inequality of men and women would soon be eliminated, all over the world, if not in her lifetime, then within the lifetime of her son’s generation. She really did believe this would happen, and to play her part in the realisation of this vision she worked like a demon, earning barely enough to pay the mortgage, with a small surplus for handouts to the freeloading son. We read about gold-diggers: the lusty young girlfriend of the rich and ailing dotard; the errant wife with an eye for the life insurance and a violent boyfriend in tow; the high-maintenance flint-heart, siphoning hubby’s bank account until the well runs dry, whereupon it’ll be time to snare another sap. These women exist. But a pathological love of cash is predominantly a male vice. For most women, life is not about money. What tends to be important with women is value of a different kind, the value of life itself.

After we married, we lived modestly: small house, boring car, two weeks’ holiday a year. As long as we had sufficient cash to cover the outgoings and save a little, Alice was content with that. We were both content with it. And when we began to consider changing our lives, we did the sums and decided together that it was the right thing to do: we could afford it, we should take the chance. And so, in perfect agreement, we determinedly took a wrong turn. Had Alice shown the slightest misgiving about the dip in household income, we wouldn’t have done it – and then, two or three years down the line, perhaps we’d have taken a different wrong turn.

One day, in a queue at the supermarket checkout, Alice got talking to Margaret Whittam, and a month later, such is Alice’s charm, we were guests at the Whittams’ house-warming party. As the party was breaking up, we stood with George at the door of the conservatory, looking out at the garden. ‘The job might not be great but it’s tolerable, yes? You don’t look like a man at his wits’ end.’

‘It could be better.’

‘For ninety-five per cent of people it could be better,’ George countered, raising a hand to stay Alice’s objection. ‘But the time has come to make a change. You feel that. I understand.’

‘We both feel it,’ Alice interjected.

‘Fine, fine. But the job is bearable, for the time being. So my advice would be: don’t rush. Think carefully.’

‘We have,’ said Alice.

‘You must see a lot of unhappy people in your line of work,’ he remarked, emanating the wisdom of the life-seasoned policeman, though he’d yet to touch forty.

‘Nothing but, most days.’

‘Well, you’d get a lot more of that.’

‘Of course.’

‘That’s not the problem,’ Alice told him. ‘He’s had enough of just writing out the cheques. And people never see him as being on their side. You’re there to minimise your employer’s costs, that’s how they see it, isn’t it, John?’

‘Usually.’

‘Well, they’re right, aren’t they?’ George commented.

‘But he’s there to help put things back together, as well. He’s not out to rob them, but that’s what they think.’

‘So you want to be popular, John? Is that it?’

‘Not –’

‘He doesn’t want to be popular,’ Alice interrupted. ‘He wants to be in a different part of the process.’

‘John deals with the aftermath, I deal with the aftermath. We’re latecomers, both of us.’

‘You know what I mean,’ retorted Alice, an undertone of impatience in her voice.

Sipping his champagne, George cast a quick sidelong glance at Alice, an approving glance that was intended to go unobserved. ‘You mean catching the bad men.’

‘That makes it sound silly. But if you want to put it that way, yes.’

George nodded and said nothing, and surveyed the garden with an expression of mild perplexity.

‘It’s a bit late in the day for a career switch,’ said Alice. ‘Is that what you’re thinking?’

‘No. Not at all. It’s not too late.’

‘So what is it? Tell me.’

Lowering his glass, George turned to regard the insistent and beguiling Alice for an extended moment, meeting her eye. ‘Look, Alice. John,’ he said at last. ‘It can be tough, I know, what you’re doing now. Going to see people whose homes have gone up in smoke. Calling at a flat that’s been torn apart. Things that can’t be replaced, gone for ever. It doesn’t make you feel good. It can be distressing. I know. But it’s nothing,’ he told her. ‘Take my word for it, it’s nothing,’ he repeated, facing the garden rather than us, and Alice’s face took on an attentive and slightly fearful and quietly resolute expression, an expression like that which, later, would sometimes appear when the Reverend Beal was on the top of his form, expounding on the ineffable mysteries of God’s love. ‘How long have you been married?’ he asked, as if suddenly starting an interview.

‘Going on four years.’

‘You seem happy, leaving the job aside for the moment. You and John. You seem very close. Not all couples are. Tell me if this is none of my business.’

‘Yes, we’re happy,’ Alice replied. ‘John?’

‘Happy. Confirmed.’

‘Good,’ said George, in full sagacious mode. Father of two teenaged girls, high-flying officer of the law, he drew a long breath and took a last sip of champagne before going on. ‘Look, it’s a terrific job, don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t do anything else. But the things that people are capable of doing to each other,’ he went on, directing a scowl at the floor. ‘I don’t think anything could surprise me any more. The madness that comes over people. The vicious idiocy. It’s unimaginable,’ he said, turning away, and he wandered off to find a fresh bottle.

The words of this conversation are the gist of it, a reconstruction, not a copy, but those last three phrases were what was said by Detective Inspector Whittam, verbatim. He poured our drinks, chinked glasses. Smiling at the garden of his big new house, he said: ‘let me tell you about the day I lost my virginity.’

For more than thirty years these two brothers had lived together, migrating from one pocket of slum accommodation to another in various east London locales before settling in a caravan in the breaker’s yard that they ran in Bethnal Green. In the evenings they drank together in a pub across the road from the yard. At six o’clock every evening they’d take their places at their table in the corner and there they would remain until eleven, downing pint after pint after pint, like drinking machines. You’d get a nod out of them, if you were lucky, and hardly a word passed between them. One night, though, they went home and had an argument, over a game of cards. Brother A brought the disagreement to a close by going to bed: his berth was at one end of the caravan and his sibling’s was at the other. While Brother A was asleep, Brother B came into his cubicle and struck him a few times – maybe twenty-five times – between the eyes, with a torque wrench. This done, Brother B closed the door and retired to bed, leaving the body of Brother A where it lay. Every evening, through September, October, November, December, Brother B went to the pub across the road. Silent as a bollard he sat next to the void that had been his brother’s place, and at night he went home to sleep in his bed, separated from the mouldering corpse by a few feet of space and a very thin wall. ‘Gone away,’ he replied, if anyone asked, and that was enough to satisfy anyone who could be bothered to enquire as to the whereabouts of the absent man. A few people noticed a smell hanging around the piles of car parts, a sewer smell that was emanating from the vicinity of the caravan, but hygiene had never been the brothers’ strong point and nobody was inclined to make an issue of it. So the remains of Brother A were left to dwindle undisturbed until Christmas Eve, when some unexplained mental event induced Brother B, as last orders were called, to mutter to the woman sitting at the next table, a woman who had never been in the pub before and just happened to be there because she was visiting her nephew and his new wife, ‘Get the police.’ Thinking they were in the presence of a psychiatric case, and a dangerous-looking psychiatric case at that, the woman edged away. ‘Get the police,’ he repeated, louder, and then he started shouting. ‘Get the fucking police. For fuck’s sake get the police.’ He burst into tears, but carried on drinking his pint until the police arrived.

The detectives, young George Whittam among them, entered the caravan to find this thing that was halfway to being a mummy, dressed in brown pyjamas, lying on the foulest mattress in Western Europe. ‘It was really something special,’ George marvelled. ‘Most of him had drained away into the mattress, and there were so many dead flies, you could have filled a bath with them.’ We listened to his cautionary tale. He described the scene for us so vividly, with such relish: the stink when they opened the door; the brown mulch of a bed with the sticky rind of a corpse lying on it; the demented drunk man stamping on the heaps of flies as if it had been the insects that had killed his brother. We listened and we felt that we were almost there in the caravan with George Whittam, the young constable, as he stared at the bed and tried to stop the shake in his hand. But a case like the deranged brother must come along once in a decade, we told ourselves. There’s an element of bravado in the telling of the story too. ‘The man who looked on darkness and is not afraid,’ joked Alice afterwards, on our way home. And the brothers were from London, after all. London’s a different world. Life down here is more sedate. It’s not murder or GBH every day of the week. And the satisfactions of justice will outweigh whatever unpleasantness may lie in store. We can handle whatever happens. We love each other. We are happy.

So the decision was made and the reaction to George Whittam’s warning was nothing more than a pause, a hesitancy that was soon overcome. But George was right. You can’t completely imagine it, and what it does to you is unimaginable – or, to be more precise, we didn’t imagine what it would do to us. When you deal with violence and its consequences every week, when every day you’re talking to people you know are lying to you, then perhaps it’s inevitable that you become a different person. In the beginning it’s a performance: you play the part of the hard man, the man with no illusions, the cynic. You learn quickly how it’s done. You observe and imitate, but at the outset there’s a difference between the role and the real person, between who you are being and who you are. Here’s a picture of a girl, can’t be older than eighteen, a prostitute, slashed so badly by her punter she was having to hold one side of her face in place when she crawled out of the park on her knees. ‘Poor kid,’ you say, and you pass the picture on without another word, but your eyes are prickling and you’re hoping that the bastard gets sentenced by a judge whose values come straight out of the rule book of Genghis Khan. A couple of years on there’s the blistered beetroot face of Evie Challoner, whose boyfriend has doused her with a kettleful of boiling water to make her ugly, so her ex-husband, who wants her back, won’t want her back any longer. At this you shake your head, and the weary shake of the head isn’t too far from representing what you feel, because the convulsion of pity isn’t there any more. ‘Christ,’ you mutter, and you get on with the work. In fact, you’re not so sure what you feel now. It’s as though you’ve spoken your character’s lines for so long that you’ve come to think like him, most of the time, and whenever you’re not thinking like him, when you get a pang, you wonder sometimes where it’s come from, if you’ve just slipped out of one character and into another one, the one you used to play all the time. And the home that Alice created and maintained, the pleasant and tranquil and orderly home environment, was intended to be something like a refuge for both of us. It was the place where life was restored to what was dependable and true, a place where the guises of working life were cast off, its contaminations rinsed away.

By agreement we had a house rule: no shop talk in front of Luke. But from someone else he heard the story of the dead man on the beach, and one evening, on his way to bed, he stopped on the stairs and asked, ‘Why did someone kill that man?’ Sitting side by side on the top step, we talked about Henry for a while. ‘Why didn’t he have somewhere to live?’ he asked. ‘Who did it?’ He rested his chin on his knees, pondering his father’s less than entirely satisfactory answers, not frightened, it seemed, by the thought of the uncaught killer, but unhappy at the unfairness of homeless Henry’s death.

It was half an hour or more before Alice came downstairs from Luke’s room. ‘He wanted me to stay,’ she said, taking food from the fridge. ‘It’s upset him.’ There was no sense that blame was being apportioned – there was never that, not until the day of judgement. Rather, it was as though we all had the misfortune to be living in a place with an unhealthy climate, or night-long noise outside. Over the meal there would have been some kind of conversation about Henry, a brief conversation, perhaps with a mention for Henry’s mysterious female companion, but there was nothing much to say about the case of Henry and by then it was understood that if nothing was offered, Alice would not enquire. Trusting her husband to do all that could be done, she would prepare the evening’s meal, watch the evening’s TV with him, and the following Sunday they would go to church together, where Alice would pray and think about Henry’s soul, in the belief or the hope that all will be well, that in the end – if not on this earth – the innocent will have their reward.

At 10.30 or thereabouts on the night that Luke was upset, Alice would have gone to bed. On the TV, likely as not, there was yet another report from some hellish zone of Africa: thousands starving, thousands dying of Aids, kids being born diseased, schools set on fire and teachers hacked to death by child-soldiers, the infantry of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Psychos, washing away their sins in the blood of the lambs.

7

A thin broth of sea cloud fills the mouth of the river and through the greyness, here and there, it’s just possible to make out where the sky begins, what’s hill and what’s water, which seam of the mist is a sandbank and which is a thickening of the mist. On the seafront the windows of empty guest houses gleam like slabs of wet slate. Here and there a head can be glimpsed, a hand on a radio, a newspaper being turned, a lampshade in a style that’s twenty years old. Kids are skateboarding down the middle of the road and riding their bikes across the putting greens. Names have been spray-painted on the doors of the beach huts. You can stand in the car park and hear nothing but the gasping of the sea. In winter half the town is in a coma.

We call at one of the bigger hotels, and on the afternoon of our visit the register shows that the number of guests in residence is precisely three. The previous weekend a couple from Ontario had stayed for two nights and they’d had the place to themselves. We sit in the manageress’s office, noting the names and addresses of all the people who stayed here during the period within which Henry died: that’s fewer than thirty individuals to trace, interview and eliminate, a task soon completed. Some of them came here for a break from London, one came for a break from her husband, one was a photographer taking pictures for a travel agent’s calendar, one a geologist on a working holiday, one a bibulous clarinettist on the brink of a breakdown. The clarinettist is still on the brink when he’s interviewed: he’s a jittery wisp of a man, an emaciated five-foot vegan who couldn’t bring himself to swat a wasp, let alone kill Henry. None of them could have killed Henry.

Two old blokes are sitting in the hotel bar, mumbling at each other over two-inch Scotches. One of them is our friend Mr Latimer, who slowly finds a match for our faces in the scrambled card index of his memory and greets us with a squint, as if we’re approaching from a mile off. We explain our business to his companion and from the depths of his armchair he regards us with eyes that are dissolving in their little puddles of rheum. Gravely as a High Court judge he considers the question of the dead tramp. His chin sinks into the folds of an outsized paisley cravat. He might be falling asleep, so long does he take to formulate a response, but at last he replies: ‘No. I’m sorry. Didn’t know the chap.’ It’s as if we’d asked him for the loan of a thousand quid. We take our leave, then there’s a tap on the shoulder and Yousif introduces himself, having overheard our exchange with Tweedlepissed and Tweedlestewed.

Yousif is a Lebanese lad, mid twenties, with hair like moleskin and quick dark eyes that betray an excessive eagerness to please. He works as an odd-job man and is helping to patch up the hotel in the comatose months, replacing some skirting boards, doing a bit of rewiring, unclogging the drains and so on. He himself never spoke to Henry, he tells us, but his friend Malak did, many times. Malak worked in the hotel kitchen last year. Late one night, at the end of a long shift, he went out of the back door and there was Henry, grubbing around in the bins. Everyone else had left by then, so Malak went back inside and put together a bag of food for him. They talked for a few minutes, and after that night Malak would make up a parcel of leftovers for Henry whenever he could. When he finished work, he’d leave the food on one of the little dunes, wrapped in foil, for Henry to collect. Sometimes he didn’t have to put it in the box, because he’d see Henry on the beach and they’d walk together for a while. Henry wanted to know all about Malak’s life and his family, and there was a lot to tell, because Malak had six brothers living in four different countries, and there were four sisters too, at home. ‘And cousins, so many cousins,’ says Yousif, gesturing as if to raise the spectres of Malak’s relatives on the lawns in front of the hotel. ‘And they would fire Malak’s gun, sometimes,’ he adds, securing Ian’s attention, which was beginning to slacken. ‘It was Malak’s hobby. He was a soldier and he likes guns. He has great eyes,’ he says, making a finger-pistol and taking aim at the nearest lamp-post. ‘Malak had an air rifle, a good one,’ he tells us. ‘Very expensive. In the morning, early, very early, he went down to the beach to shoot his gun. Sometimes he met Henry there. He went there and sometimes Henry would be there. He would put a small thing, a coin or something, in the sand, and he could hit it from fifty metres, every time,’ says Yousif, dumbfounded with admiration. ‘And Henry was good. Not every time, but he could hit the coin. He knew about guns.’ But how much Henry knew about guns, and how he came to know it, Yousif does not know. Malak himself didn’t know much about Henry, because Henry didn’t like to talk about himself. He liked to hear about Malak’s family but never spoke about his own, and this gave Malak the feeling that none of Henry’s people were alive. All Malak really knew about Henry was that his home was on the beach and his full name was Henry Wilson.

‘And where’s Malak now?’ Ian asks.

‘He left in September.’

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘Gone,’ says Yousif, with the shrug of a young man who has almost become inured to the perpetual disappointments of life in England. We suspect that Malak was last year’s one new friendship.

‘Wilson, you said?’ asks Ian, writing it down.

As expected, sharpshooter Malak has no official existence: no National Insurance, no bank account, no forwarding address. He’s moved on to some other kitchen and the chances of finding him are vanishingly slim. Malak said he would get in touch when he found a job, Yousif tells us; he promises to let us know if he hears anything.

A full day’s footslogging had established little more than that Henry had a degree of expertise in the handling of air rifles, but at the next morning prayers it turns out that Henry Wilson-Ellis-Yarrow-McBain-McCain-McSwain had another skill. A woman named Martha Swinton, in the first week of December, around the fourth or fifth, had been driving out of Knowle when her car cut out and cruised to a standstill. There was heavy fog, and Martha was turning the ignition key over and over again, praying that the thing would miraculously spark into life, when she looked up and saw this wild-looking man looming out of the fog. It was Henry – or rather, it was the homeless man from the beach, as she knew him. Purposefully Henry strode towards the immobilised car, as if he’d been summoned to rescue her, and as he came nearer he was making a gesture that she took to be threatening, before she realised he was miming the action of pulling the bonnet release. Indicating that she should stay in the car, he hoisted the bonnet, then came round to the passenger’s side and rapped on the window. Martha wound down the window. ‘I need to listen inside,’ he told her. This was something of a quandary, being stuck in the fog with this fairly frightening old man demanding admittance to your vehicle, but he waited patiently beside the door and after a few seconds, seeing her hesitation, he suggested that, if she was scared, she could step out of the car as he got in and get back in when he stepped out, so she stayed in the car and opened the door for him. ‘Thank you,’ he said, but he didn’t actually get in, not completely. Instead, he knelt on the road and bent his head into the footwell, placing an ear close to the floor. He seemed to be wearing about a dozen T-shirts, and his clothes gave off a reek of old seaweed. ‘Turn the key,’ he ordered. Martha turned the key. ‘Once more,’ he said. Martha turned the key again, and he nodded like a diagnosing doctor at whatever it was he’d been hearing. Then he got out of the car, saying nothing. ‘Again,’ he instructed her from behind the bonnet. She turned the key and a moment later Henry came round to her window. ‘We need a bit of wire,’ he told her. ‘You don’t have a bit of wire, do you? No. Of course you don’t have a bit of wire. Why would you have a bit of wire? Right. Wait here.’ These words were addressed not to Martha directly but to a point somewhere over her shoulder, as if to a back-seat passenger whose incompetence was to blame for the situation. He loped down the hill, vanishing into the mist. Martha waited and half an hour later, just as she’d decided that Henry wasn’t coming back, he reappeared, looking angry. He didn’t speak, but went straight back under the bonnet. She could hear him muttering loudly while he worked, perhaps to himself, but perhaps to her as well. ‘Turn the switch and the light bulb comes on but what’s happened to make it come on? What’s the science? Do you know? No, you don’t have a clue,’ she heard. He was going on about televisions and computers and telephones, and how we don’t understand anything. The implication seemed to be that only trained mechanics should be allowed to drive cars. Martha did not take issue. In mid-mutter he interrupted himself with a shout of ‘Again!’. The car started and Henry slammed the bonnet with more force than required. He crouched at the roadside, wiping his hands on the wet grass. ‘That’ll do for a mile or two,’ he said. ‘Tell your garage it’s the fuel pump relay. What’s your name?’ he asked, quite aggressively, with no pause between the statement and the question.