The Light of Day: A Novel (12 page)

29

I sit on the bench. Not yet noon. Time to kill. But if I leave soon and take it slowly . . . And I always allow time, I’m never late. As if I’ll earn privileges, too, for good behaviour.

The usual routine: park in the side road, walk first in a different direction. Not that I’m ashamed. Ashamed to be seen to be a visitor, a prison visitor. For God’s sake, I’d be over that by now.

And anyway: the most precious moments of my life.

Twice a month they see me. An old hand by now, a regular. His home from home. A women’s prison. Something must keep him coming back, coming back for more. When you think about it, it can only be one thing . . .

And he can’t be her husband, can he?

“George” they call me. Or “Georgie-Porgie.” Or sometimes, because of the “homework” they know I hand in and collect, they call me “The Schoolboy” or “The Teacher’s Pet.” And they all know as they frisk me (they can’t touch you in certain places, they have to get a male warder) that I was a cop once, a DI. Now I’m a private dick.

A regular. Never misses a fortnight.

But I was so nervous, those first times, of being late. So she might think—what? That she’d been stood up? Though she wasn’t thinking much at all, then, wanting to be like ice.

So nervous, I’ve long since got into the habit of being early. A bite to eat first. I walk, the other way, to the main road. It’s “Snacketeria” usually, which, despite the name, does good stuff.

“What was it today, George? The mozzarella and grilled vegetables? Or the spicy ham?”

She wants to know these things. Every detail, every crumb. Life outside. As if I can live it for her, ordinary blessed life. The smell of good coffee. Lunchtime bustle. A sandwich, well made.

It was a good sign when she started to ask (a little like Helen): what was I cooking, what was I eating? A good sign when she said: the food’s crap in here.

It might be a good spot to munch a sandwich, right here. A bench against a sunny wall. It’s what benches are for: a bench, a sandwich. But can you eat, should you, do they let you, in a cemetery? Crumbs for the dead.

What do the dead most wish for—if they’re watching? The feathery warmth of a November sun on their eyelids? The taste of fresh bread?

Bob could tell me. But how do you ask?

Patel was lucky. Stabbed, scarred—out of action for months—but alive. He’ll have known what it’s like to come back from the dead.

Lucky? Well, yes and no. Enough to make him put aside the smaller factor: that he never got any justice. The law let him down. And he and his wife would finally quit that shop—that shop that had become part fort anyway, trading post and fort, in enemy territory.

Even though he would say to me it was Dyson, no mistake. He’d got a good look.

Well, we had him, Mr. Patel—I had him for you. But we had to let him go. A police fuck-up. Twisting the rules. Perverting the course of—

I went in to see him. A big bunch of flowers. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d spat.

A cop gets the boot, Dyson goes free. Patel gets the nightmares and the scars.

As it happens, Mr. Patel, my life is pretty much in pieces too, pretty much up the spout—if it’s any consolation.

But I couldn’t say that. Nor could I say to him: There was a moment, Mr. Patel, a mad blood-thirsty moment when I actually hoped—so much the worse for Dyson—you might die.

30

I went along to Dyson. Room Number Two. He should have been stewing, but Dyson wasn’t the kind who stewed. The face like some soft stone.

His brief was there beside him. Who’d be Dyson’s brief?

I said, “We’ve got Kenny Mills in here as well.”

Not a flicker.

“That cunt.”

“We had to bring him in. He was there, you see. He’d walked into the shop. He must almost have been there when it happened.”

I watched Dyson’s face.

“So—have you arrested the cunt?”

“I’ve been chatting to him. The thing is, he says he saw you. Before he got there. He says he saw you coming away from Patel’s shop.”

Not a flicker again. Just something clicking into place at the back of his eyes, as if it was Kenny he was looking at, not me.

“How could he have done if I was round at Mick Warren’s watching the game?”

They were searching Warren’s place still. As if they’d find a blood-stained knife stuffed down the sofa.

His brief was quick. “Do I understand correctly? Your other witness has made a statement to this effect? A statement on the record?”

“Yes.”

A small word, but the tape picked it up.

“My client and I would like to consult.”

I went back to Number One. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, the chase can all be over inside four walls. Sometimes it’s you who gets caught.

The duty solicitor was there. I didn’t like the look on his face.

I switched on the tape.

“Okay, Kenny, you’ve done a good night’s work . . .”

His brief said, “Mr. Mills wishes to withdraw the statement he’s made.”

I looked at Kenny. Kenny looked at the table. So: more scared of Dyson than of me. With justice maybe.

“Mr. Mills informs me that none of the words in the statement he’s made are his.”

I looked at the lawyer. You cunt.

“They were not volunteered by him. Mr. Mills alleges that he was coerced into making his statement by intimidation and deceit.”

It’s true. That’s how the tape might show it.

“Kenny—” I said.

He gave me a quick look. A brave look, in a way, a brave coward’s look.

I’ll swear it still, to this day. Everything was true. Ninetyfive per cent. Even the bloody knife waved in his face.

But looks don’t get picked up by the tape.

I couldn’t say it in front of the brief, with the tape listening. I made my eyes say it: He’ll get you anyway, Kenny.

But he wouldn’t get him. Since Kenny would get Dyson off. The two of them would crow about how they’d got me. Kenny would move in with the big boys now.

The brief saw it, I think. And Ross, the DC, must have done. That I was on the edge, I was teetering. But the tape doesn’t pick up teeterings either.

And still the hope—the hopeless hope—that Dyson might cave in anyhow.

The smell of interview rooms, like contaminated zones.

I went back to Number Two, with Ross. The gist of Dyson’s chat with his brief? I knew it. Try it out first: call the fucking copper’s bluff.

And now he could even say—and did—he was the victim of police malpractice.

But Dyson wasn’t a victim of anything—take it from an old DI. A victim-maker, a victimizer, full-stop. None of that sob-stuff victim-makers are supposed to be victims of: deprived upbringing, etcetera etcetera. He stabbed Patel because he wanted to, wanted to and did.

He didn’t speak. His brief spoke. “My client has nothing further to add . . .”

Dyson just looked at me. Now, when I remember it, it seems he was already up there, looking down, watching me fall.

And Gibbs, the new Super, would say he couldn’t help me. No cover-up. In the circumstances, and with the Force getting public flak. The word was “corrupt.” He was going to drop me too. He wanted Dyson banged up as much as I did, but he was going to drop me down a big hole instead.

The smell of police stations—even in a Super’s office. Who’d want to work in one?

And I’d been hoping—it’s true, it’s true—Patel might not pull through.

His brief spoke. Dyson just looked at me. He looked at me as if he might have been waving that knife in my face too. Come on, grab it if you can.

I went back to Number One.

Kenny’s brief said, “Mr. Mills wishes to reinstate his previous statement.”

Beer and fags.

I said, “Think again, Kenny.”

He looked at the table.

“Mr. Mills—”

They say you see red. I can’t remember seeing red. Something came over me. I can’t remember seeing anything but my hands round Kenny’s throat.

I grabbed Kenny, with his brief and Ross as a witness— so his brief had to intervene. I grabbed Kenny, the innocent one. I didn’t even grab Dyson.

31

And it did die a death. Or so I thought. The Freemans moved, in any case, to Bristol, in ’65, the year I joined the Force, so I assumed that was that, even if it hadn’t stopped beforehand. Though there was still the fact of it, the secret of it, lurking.

I watched his face for signs of—I don’t know—sadness, heaviness. Something Mum might notice. What’s up, Frank? And of course, I know now, obstacles, distances (London to Bristol?), they aren’t necessarily the end of anything at all.

But he was always Mr. Smile, Mr. Breezy. “Smile everyone, please.” So how could you tell?

Monday afternoons, once upon a time, with Carol Freeman, never anything serious. Did that make it better or worse?

And then—twenty-one years later—he died. Twenty-one years of the secret lurking and never surfacing and of me becoming a cop, a boy in blue and then a detective, and getting married myself and having a family—Helen—and popping round every so often for Sunday lunch (Rachel’s parents not being part of the picture). And even now and then finding time to play a token round of golf with him, even sitting with him on that bench with that scatter of fag-ends. A secret smokers’ place. Husbands who were supposed to have quit, wives who’d never know.

He died. 1986. He was only just sixty. But I supposed they’d already reached the point where the thought was real between them: one of us one day must go first. And I suppose Mum had reckoned, as I suppose women must reckon, going on the evidence, on widowhood. But not yet.

April ’86. Alongside all the other thoughts, I couldn’t help thinking: well at least she’d be safe now, and I’d be safe—my secret would be safe. Her memories wouldn’t have any scars. Except the scar of seeing him there on that bed, when he should have been good for another twenty years, who knows? Working his way towards death.

We kept watch while his chest heaved up and down, and he slipped away from us then back again—if he knew we were there, we couldn’t tell—sometimes muttering things, sometimes just groaning and wheezing.

And then he said (with only hours to go in fact): “Carol . . .” His eyes were shut and God knows where he thought he was, but he said it clearly and he said it again and again: “Carol . . . Carol . . .”

It’s almost a treat, here on this bench. You can close your eyes, the sun like a gift on your eyelids, lift your face and think it’s spring.

You couldn’t mistake it, couldn’t ignore it. “Carol . . .” Couldn’t avoid the meaning.

I thought: Now I’ll have to pretend again, a different kind of pretence. I’ll have to pretend, for her sake, to be shocked, bewildered, like her.

But not heart-broken: that was for just her.

You couldn’t mistake it. Both of us there. I was a witness. And if we hadn’t been there—or if he’d died quicker, if he hadn’t laboured on like that, so that the delirium, or whatever it was, hadn’t set in . . .

“Carol . . .”

Of course, I had to say it: he’s delirious, just delirious. But I could read her face. Like hell, George, like hell.

Just delirium. The chestnut tree. The way he scurried through the rain and was let in like a bird swooping into a nest.

Just those few hours. Cheated, right at the end, by a few hours.

I think that became her position: she might never have known. She might never have had to know. If she could trade it all back, not the fact, just the knowing, the having to know, she’d have settled for that. I never said a thing.

And now she’d have to pretend, too. To be the brave grieving widow. To cherish his memory. All those photographs.

But was it such a pretence?

“He could make me smile, George—my God, he could make me smile.”

It was a few weeks later. Something had shifted in her since the funeral, an adjustment, a decision. We’d stopped talking about, even skirting round, the subject of Carol.

“I’ve got an idea, George. Will you help me?”

She wanted to buy a bench—have a bench made. One of those wooden benches—you see them everywhere—that have little plates or inscriptions: “In Memory of . . .” She wanted to have a bench made in his memory, and she wanted it put on Chislehurst Common, just up from the High Street. Because, after all, he’d been a public figure in his way, the local photographer.

It would be a gesture. A public bench, for everyone. But of course she could go there and sit on it too whenever she wanted—if it was free. “Hello, Frank.”

She didn’t know how you went about it, nor did I. There must be some procedure. Of course I said I’d see to it.

“Thank you, George. And will you do something else for me?” she said.

She looked at me for a while. “When—I go, will you make sure that my name goes on the bench too? So it says ‘Frank and Jane’?”

Of course, I said, of course I would.

I saw to it. You have to apply through the Parks Department. A solid wooden bench, the best teak, a silky deep-brown then—grey and weathered now. There was a simple unceremonious moment when it was put in its designated place and she went along to be the first to sit.

I go there still, myself, when the mood takes me, just to sit. Wimbledon to Chislehurst. The points on your map, the poles of your world.

It’s good to sit there. It was a good thing to do, the right thing to do.

On the far side of the Common is St. Mary’s Church where the Emperor Napoleon—Napoleon III—was first laid to rest, when he died in 1873. Then his wife Eugénie lived on for almost fifty years.

But Mum didn’t have a long stint of being ex–Mrs. Webb. No second life. It surprised me: I thought she would simply go on, the resigned, enduring, steady type. And, by the law of averages, since my dad went early . . . But she died only three years later, only months, as it happens, before I was kicked out the Force.

And whether if she’d never known—about Carol—she’d have lived on longer, whether it was like a sentence for her and so better made short, I don’t know. I don’t know about these things.

But she never knew I knew. I’m proud of that. And I carried out her wish to the letter, of course.

“Frank and Jane.”

If there’s someone else sitting there, I’m miffed, I’m even a little affronted, for a while. Then I relax, I’m strangely pleased. They don’t know who I am—how could they? I watch them not knowing who I am. I walk around, I take my turn.

It’s good to sit there. It’s a good thing to do. Never mind all the other things that happen with public benches. Dogs come and cock their legs—and as for some of the human users. Public benches, golf courses. What’s civilization for?

And whenever I sit there (I can’t help it), I know I’m glad they’re dead. I’m glad they died when they did. So
they
never knew, neither of them, about
my
scandal and disgrace. Their boy, getting on in the police—a good job, for all the mud that got slung at coppers nowadays. For all the talk of corruption.

They never knew, they’d never know. Nor about Rachel and me. About Rachel and me not being Rachel and me any more. About my life falling apart.

And as for me now: this—visitor. This man on his way to prison, resting on a bench: what would they have made of that?