Never Tell

The Johnson story turned out to be a damp squib. Richard and I spent a chilly hour supposedly hiding outside his house, drinking stewed tea in polystyrene cups from the Copper Kettle, only for the wife to arrive at our window and bang on it with a cross be-ringed hand.

‘This is private property, I’ll thank you.’ Her front tooth was tipped with fuchsia lipstick.

‘It’s not you know, love, it’s a public highway, actually,’ Richard pointed out affably. ‘Have you got any comment on your husband’s recent arrest?’

‘He was not arrested.’ Her soft chin quivered as she drew her camel coat tighter around her. ‘He was merely ‘elping the police with enquiries.’ She’d got very grand, apparently, since her husband won his seat four years ago. A stone squirrel gazed at us from the pillar behind her, concrete nut held forever between his paws.

‘Rightio. And why was that, then?’

She drew herself up to her inconsiderable height. ‘I wouldn’t know. You’d have to ask him. But, I might add,’ she fixed us with steely little eyes, ‘he won’t tell you.’

‘Rightio,’ Richard repeated. ‘Well, thanks for your help.’

I leaned across him, offered her my hand. ‘Hi, Mrs Johnson. Rose Miller.’ She refused my hand and glared at me instead. ‘We will find out, you know, Mrs Johnson. It’ll be in the public domain before long, so you’d be doing yourself a big favour by telling us your side of things now.’

‘I have no interest in speaking with you,’ she said stiffly. ‘None whatsoever.’

‘This is your chance to put your side of the story across. We could offer you an exclusive.’

‘No comment,’ she sniffed. The little boy statue peeing into the lily pond looked on languidly as she slammed the garden gate behind her and sailed towards her house.

Richard sighed, and started the car without looking at me.

‘Richard, I—’

‘What?’ He concentrated overhard as he pulled out.

‘I hope – I mean, you didn’t think I was stepping on your toes back there?’

‘Of course not.’ He was obviously lying.

‘I just thought – she needed some coercion, and—’

‘Rose, it’s fine really.’ We slowed to a crawl behind an old red tractor. ‘I understand, honestly.’

But he still stared straight ahead, refusing to look at me. My heart sank. I rarely mentioned my previous incarnation, and although sometimes they actually asked my advice at the Burford Chronicle, it was hard not to see how differently we had done things on the nationals. I was used to the pace of the major broadsheets, the fast-track of a story you had to turn around immediately. I was used to working alone, pushing on despite being told no, unrelenting when I was on the trail of a story. But in Burford they ran a polite ship – it was just that kind of operation. However welcoming they’d been since I’d joined their ranks a year ago, sometimes I felt they just suffered me because they were just – well, polite.

‘So, what now—’ I began as a shiny black Range Rover with partially-tinted windows swung into the small lane far too fast, ragga music pumping from it, narrowly missing our wing mirror. I ducked instinctively as Richard swerved into the hedgerow.

‘Blimey!’

An indignant crow flapped out with a rusty squawk.

‘Bloody idiots,’ Richard muttered. ‘Can’t even drive the bloody things. I don’t know why they bother.’

In the mirror I watched the Range Rover disappear round the bend. It was impossible to see who was driving.

‘Stupid poser,’ Richard muttered, reversing.

I thought of my husband’s big car and cringed.

‘It must be so annoying when you’ve lived here all your life,’ I murmured.

‘What?’

‘All these fake farmers driving round in Chelsea tractors.’

‘Or lived here since ‘ninety-eight, any road.’ Richard’s face finally relaxed into a smile. ‘Truth be told, I wouldn’t mind having a go in one of them myself. I bet they’re bloody powerful.’

We drove back to the office debating the finer points of Mrs Johnson’s twee front garden. In the end, the pissing boy won genitals-down.

* * *

I was packing up to leave when Tina called me over.

‘I have got one thing that might be more up your street. We want to do a kind of Homes & Gardens thing about the new guys up at Albion Manor. Bit of local glamour.’

‘Oh?’ I chucked my notebook into my bag, unenthused. It might be time to give up on the Chronicle. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Hadi Kattan.’ She stuck her pen behind her ear. ‘I want to approach them about a lifestyle piece. It’d be quite a coup, wouldn’t it? And I think they’ll be quite keen because he’s already involved with some community stuff. Word is he’s helping launch his son’s political career, so they’re getting stuck in all over the place. And you’re our big catch really, so he might buy it.’ She looked up at me. ‘Sound up your street?’

I had a chance to say no. I knew I should. But the part of me that had been chasing a story since I was twenty-one said yes.

‘Sure,’ I said quickly. ‘Always. Let me know what you want to do.’

At bedtime I realised Effie’s efforts at breakfast meant we were out of milk, forcing me to unearth a reluctant James from the studio. Leaving the kids glued to Alice in Wonderland, I drove to the garage at the end of the lane.

Pulling my cardigan over my head, I dashed through the driving rain to the kiosk, plucking a carton of milk from the fridge. As I joined the queue, there was a sudden screech of tyres on wet tarmac and a collective gasp. A small sleek silver sports car had taken the corner too fast, swerving to miss a motorbike, mounting the grass verge outside the garage and coming to a juddering halt inches from the Entry sign.

She looked like the mermaid from Alicia’s book of myths, the young woman who flung herself from the car, and she was wailing. Her soaked green dress flowed round her body like seaweed, her face streaked with black kohl, her long hair dark and tangled under the fluorescence of the petrol station forecourt. The rain drummed down and the queue shifted and muttered as one organism, succumbing en masse to horrified fascination – for a moment, I couldn’t drag my eyes from her either. I stared out of the kiosk window at this beautiful barefoot woman weaving unsteadily between the petrol pumps, the silver Porsche abandoned behind her, driver’s door flung wide. In this light it was hard to see where the rain ended and her tears began.

I looked away, discomfort palpable in my chest, gazing instead at the damp and rather dirty neck in front of me, its owner now halted in her laborious counting out of coppers as she too stared, the silver raindrops on her beanie glistening.

‘She’s pissed out of her head,’ the burly man in the next queue muttered. ‘She don’t know what she’s doing. Look at her.’

‘Someone should call the police,’ an elderly woman said, her whiskers twitching, her face a sagging mask of disapproval above her ill-fitting mac. ‘It’s a disgrace.’

The mermaid raised her face to the heavens and howled into the night, her words incoherent. There was something so primal in her voice that all the little hairs on my arms stood on end. I pulled my old cardigan tight around me and willed the cashier to hurry up.

‘You should call the police. They should, shouldn’t they?’ The man looked to me for approval as he folded his newspaper, but I found that I was speechless, as round-eyed as one of my own children.

When I looked back, the woman was falling. Her hands out before her to meet the ground, she crumpled like a wounded soldier until she was finally on her hands and knees, where she froze for a moment, head bowed. A car behind her sounded its horn irritably.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, pushing past a boy on a mountain bike gawping in the doorway. I hurried across the short distance to where she crouched, attempting now to pull herself up, doubled in half as if in pain.

‘Are you all right?’ I bent beside her. Her eyes seemed blind as she looked up at me.

A black Range Rover pulled up behind the Porsche, bumping up onto the grass, gleaming with rain and polish, braking just in time.

‘I …’ She wiped her face on her arm, smudging the streaming eye make-up further. She seemed slightly delirious.

‘Can you stand?’ I said, offering her my hand, trying quickly to assess what was wrong. ‘Are you ill?’

I was half aware of the Range Rover’s door opening, a tall fair man in a black windcheater jumping down now from the driver’s seat.

‘I – I’m not sure,’ she mumbled. Her hand was ice cold. ‘I don’t feel – I’m not—’

‘Maya,’ the man behind me said.

I turned.

‘Thank you,’ he said to me, but he was looking at her. He spoke with a faint Celtic burr that I couldn’t place. ‘I’ll take over now.’

Our eyes met briefly as I stood too fast, staggering very slightly. He put out a hand to me but I’d regained my balance so he turned back to the girl now, sliding his hand into hers, gently releasing mine. I stepped back. He had her now; supporting her, holding her upright. I thought I could smell lemon sherbet.

‘If you’re all right then …’ I backed away, ‘I’ll just—’

‘We’re fine, really. Thanks a lot.’ The fair man nodded at me. Under the artificial light, his eyes were frighteningly blue, his tousled hair sun-bleached like a surfer’s. ‘Ash is in the car, Maya. He’s been really worried. Let’s get you back home, OK?’ His tone was soothing, like he was coaxing a nervous animal into a cage.

Through the open car door I saw the shadowed passenger lean forward and pull the cigarette lighter from the dashboard. I hesitated for a second, and then I ran back to the kiosk before I got any more wet.

The unnerved cashier was still muttering to her colleague about what to do and the burly man in his smelly red anorak was still loudly demanding someone call the police when another collective groan went up. I turned to see the girl collapse again, and now another man was by her side, dark-skinned like her, dressed in an expensive navy coat. The fair man stepped back.

The dark man pulled her up with gentle force and for a moment she hesitated, pulling away. He said something to her, taking her chin in his hand and making her look at him. Her make-up was streaming down her face in rivulets as she gazed at him, and she seemed to be listening. Eventually she stopped resisting and let herself sink into him, almost gratefully, her face in his shoulder as he guided her towards the big car like a docile child, ensuring she didn’t fall despite stumbling several times.

The girl in front of me had finally pocketed her 10 Rothmans. ‘Blimey,’ she said, pulling her beanie down protectively, ready for the downpour. ‘You don’t see that every day.’

‘You can say that again. Bloody foreigners. Just the milk?’ My cashier held her hand out. ‘Eighty-four pence, please.’

When I looked again, the girl like a maddened mermaid was being swallowed by the Range Rover. The dark man shut the door behind her and turned with a graceful movement to his audience in the kiosk. He smiled politely, bowed his head to us in a courtly gesture. Instinctively I stepped back.

He climbed into the Porsche. With a screech of tyres the Sweeney would have been proud of, both vehicles were quickly swallowed up by the night.

And then I went home, put the milk in the fridge, checked the children, fed the cat and finally went to bed alone again, I found that the woman’s image was imprinted on the back of my lids. And even as I fell into sleep, I couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that the second man, the man called Ash, had been less guiding her towards the vehicle than forcing her.

And there was something else, something deeper down, something clicking, whirring into place, like the levers on a deadlock that are not quite true yet. Images from the day: the mysterious Kattan, the MP’s wife so outraged, James, all newly tense. These images fought something I couldn’t quite access, a memory buried deep. A memory fighting to the surface.

UNIVERSITY, AUTUMN 1991

FRESHERS’ WEEK

The vague city … veiled in mist … A place much too good for you ever to have much to do with.

Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy

In the beginning …

In the beginning there was just me. And then they found me.

Had I known I was being chosen for such immoral ends, I like to think I would have declined the invitation, that I would have made good my escape before it was too late – though I fear that my belief only comes from the beauty of hindsight – and anyway, theory is too hard now to distinguish from fact. But if I had ever guessed it would all end in tragedy and death, I would have stayed at home.

But I didn’t know. I was a true innocent when I began.

Petrified and knowing absolutely no one, I arrived in the small soft-coloured city with my father’s best suitcase, a dog-eared poster of the Happy Mondays and a box-set of Romantic poets that my grandma had bought me for my eighteenth birthday. I’d tried really hard to decline the green velvet lampshade my mother insisted I take from the spare room, to no avail; I planned to dump it at the earliest opportunity.

About to become part of an institution so venerable and famous, in the place of pride I felt fear, constantly wishing I’d gone with Ruth to Bristol to study drama with all the cool kids. I’d endured a painful Freshers’ Week of starting stilted conversations with other monosyllabic teenagers, or worse, kids who wouldn’t stop talking about anything elitist. By and large the beautiful crowd from Britain’s public schools – Roedean and Eton, Harrow and King’s – all seemed to know one another already and were imbued with the knowledge they needed no one else. Completely ignored, I felt adrift and friendless; overawed by the beauty of the city and the magnitude of history resting on its shoulders. Everywhere I walked were buildings so classical I’d seen them in books or on television; everywhere I wandered, the voices of students far more erudite than I echoed in my ears.

Eventually, sick of my own company, and with the vague hope I could win kudos enough to hang out with the ‘journos’, I wrote a ridiculously pretentious piece for the student newspaper (cribbed largely from library textbooks) on the Romantic poets, their denial of organised religion and how they would have loved the speed and freedom of motorbikes. To my undying amazement, it was printed.

On the Sunday evening, about to venture to the college bar for the first time, confident I finally had something to talk about of interest, I stacked my ten-pences up on the top of the payphone in my corridor and rang my parents to tell of my first success. My mother had just answered when I heard a snigger behind my back.

‘Shelley fucked Mary on a Yamaha, didn’t you know?’

‘Yeah, but Keats preferred Suzukis, I think you’ll find. La Belle Dame Sans Suzuki. Brilliant.’

Mortified, I banged the phone down on my poor mother and hid in my room for a week.

But boredom eventually got the better of me and I finally accepted an invitation from my sole acquaintance, a sulky girl called Moira, to go to the bar – where I drank two pints of snakebite ill-advisedly fast through sheer terror. Moira, who’d attached herself to me the previous week in the introductory lecture on Women’s literature of the nineteenth century, was for some reason deeply bitter already, and I was concentrating hard on blocking out both her drone and her rather pus-encrusted chin when a dark-haired boy, who looked like he might be about to introduce himself, tripped over a stool.

‘Watch out!’ I shrieked, ten seconds too late. He’d deposited his entire pint in my lap, the cold beer soaking straight through to my skin. ‘Oh God.’

‘Very sorry,’ he said, smiling broadly. ‘I’ll get you another one if you like.’

‘I don’t like, thanks very much,’ I huffed, standing up, my smock dress an unpleasant second skin. I had an odd feeling he’d done it deliberately. ‘I absolutely stink now. I’ll have to go and change.’

‘Oh, don’t do that,’ said the boy. ‘At least you’ll deter this lot.’ He nodded towards a group of apparently giant youths whose ears stuck out at funny angles and who had just begun a round of indecent rugby songs. One of them winked at me and immediately began to sing, ‘The girl with the biggest tits in the world is the only girl for me.’

‘I doubt it.’ I found I was emboldened by the alcohol. ‘The smell of beer’s probably a turn-on for them.’

The dark-haired boy laughed. ‘You could be right there.’

‘I’ll come with you.’ Moira shot to her feet, clamping my arm between slightly desperate hands as if she sensed she was about to be usurped. ‘I need to start work on my Wollstonecraft essay anyway.’

‘Oh dear, do you?’ I looked at the boy’s grin and then at Moira’s yellow pimples. ‘Look, actually, you go on.’ I eased my arm gently from her hold. ‘I’ll have a gin and orange please,’ I said to the boy with a confidence I didn’t really feel. It was what my grandma drank; the first sophisticated drink that came to my slightly panicked mind. ‘As long as you promise to stay between me and him.’

The rugby player’s ruddy face was gurning scarily at me as he invoked the delights of the arse of an angel. Moira stomped off muttering about beer and Wollstonecraft and ‘some people’.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I called after her, rather too quietly.

The evening became a blur of alcohol and fags, and smoking a joint round the back of the bar, which was not as scary as I’d feared before my inaugural hesitant drag, though my head did spin a bit, and then going to someone’s room in Jesus College, where someone else suggested a drinking game and we shared what they called ‘a chillum’, and I felt very debauched and grownup until a plump girl called Liddy was sick in the bin, so we left. And frankly I was relieved, because my head was by now on the verge of spinning right off.

‘I’ll walk you back if you like,’ said the boy, who was called James and had nice smiley eyes and freckles. He said his dad had been a butcher and he was the first in his family to go to university, which bonded us because I was also the first in my immediate family, though actually my uncle – the white sheep of the Langtons – had attended this college and I wasn’t entirely sure that hadn’t helped me a bit to get my place. That, and the fact that during my interview the white-haired professor had sucked a stubby old cigar throughout, most of the time gazing at the velvet smoke whilst I’d banged on about William Faulkner and the great American novel for fifteen painful minutes. Finally, as bored of the subject as the be-suited professor obviously was, I’d asked what brand he was smoking as my father imported cigars from Cuba to his little shop in Derby and loved a Monte Cristo himself. After a discussion about the hotspots of Havana, where I managed to drop in mentions of both Hemingway and Graham Greene, as well as the delights of a daiquiri, the enchanted professor was happy to recommend I got an unconditional place.

On the way back to my room James and I passed a polished Ducati parked between two obviously student cars, one of them an Escort leaning dangerously towards the pavement. Drunkenly I admired the bike; my big brother rode one and there was nothing I loved more than getting a lift on the back – though my mother always went mad when I did.

James looked at me strangely as I kneeled down by the bike (wondering, actually, whether I could ever stand again). ‘You’re the girl who wrote that article in the Cherwell, aren’t you?’

‘My fame precedes me,’ I agreed, too drunk to be embarrassed. The fresh air was doing nothing for my level of intoxication. ‘I thought it was quite good when I wrote it, but everyone else thought it was terrible. It was terrible wasn’t it?’

‘Do you know Society X?’ James said quietly. I could have sworn he checked behind him before he did so, but I was having some trouble focusing at all by now, so perhaps I’d imagined it.

‘Nope,’ I shook my head. ‘Never heard of Society X.’ I’d just attended the Freshers’ Fair because frankly I’d had nothing else to do. I’d signed up to do Martial Arts because I quite fancied Bruce Lee and the idea of felling a villain with the single chop of a swift hand, and the Poetry Society because occasionally I wrote a few fairly dreadful stanzas myself, mainly about my dreams – but to be honest I found large groups of people rather shy-making. So instead I made a bad joke about X-rated films but James didn’t laugh; he just looked at me strangely again before depositing me at the porters’ lodge without so much as trying to kiss me. I was a bit surprised but actually relieved because that week I was still in love with a boy called Ralph whom I’d met in the summer holidays and who had promised to call me a fortnight ago. I was still waiting.

And to be honest I forgot all about James and Society X until I met Dalziel, the aristocratic Honourable who spoke like he’d stepped from the pages of Waugh but partied like a rock star in the making.

UNIVERSITY, OCTOBER 1991

The heavenly Jerusalem.

Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy

A week or so later Moira and I bumped into James on the Bridge after a tutorial, battered old guitar slung across his back.

‘Come for a drink. I might even play something, if you’re lucky.’ James winked at me, dodging the bike-riders who sounded indignant bells. I didn’t need much persuading; I realised I was pleased to see him. So far, university wasn’t turning out to be the social whirlwind I’d imagined. As I followed James into the King’s Arms, the pub where all the cool kids drank that term, I felt a quickening in my step. For the first time since I’d arrived in the city, I felt like I might actually be part of something.

I spotted Dalziel as soon as I walked in; it was impossible not to. His reputation preceded him; I’d heard a couple of girls whispering and giggling about him a few times in the bar or over coffee in the rec. He was apparently infamous, a third year known for his flamboyance, his looks and his charm. Lounging against the bar with an indolent grace, seemingly born of the innate knowledge that the world was his, he idly saluted James and then turned back to his friends. James bought a round of cider whilst Moira and I found a table beside Dalziel’s friends.

I watched Dalziel hold court, laughing about something, blowing smoke-rings. After a while, I found I couldn’t look away. I heard him mention a group called The Assassins.

‘I’ve never heard of them,’ I muttered to James. ‘What do they sing?’

‘They don’t sing anything, petal,’ James laughed. ‘They’re a group of supposed student dissidents who mess around with gunpowder, amongst other things.’ He downed half his pint in one. ‘Bunch of stupid schoolboys, if you ask me.’

‘I got sick of blowing things up, to be honest,’ I heard Dalziel drawl, and I felt a quiver of something visceral; a leap in my belly that I couldn’t name. I stared at him. ‘Pretty bloody tame.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Not enough banging.’

What did I feel then? Did I see a chance to be lifted from my so-far dull suburban life? The chance for the parameters of my life to be widened? Or did I just sense pure unadulterated danger?

Dalziel’s group leaned together and began to whisper. A peroxided beauty, small and dark-skinned, lazed beside him, biting her nails in evident boredom and scowling at a taller girl with a funny angular chin, apparently called Lena. Lena was swaying at the table between the bar and us; talking very fast and with great animation to anyone who’d listen. I heard the words ‘X’ and ‘commandment’ and then she was told to keep her voice down.

‘Is that the society – the X one?’ I asked James. ‘That you were on about before?’

‘Shh,’ he said nervously, sliding his eyes towards Dalziel.

‘What?’ I frowned at him. Moira came back from the loo and sat heavily between us. James looked even more worried.

‘It’s – I’m not – I shouldn’t have mentioned it really.’