The Northern Clemency (56 page)

He undressed, and, with a towel round his waist, popped downstairs for a quick bath. The woman never cleaned the tub, and a single long grey hair lay like a calligraphic squiggle on one flank. Trying not to think too much about it, he sluiced it quickly, and ran a bath, the pipes clanking in objection as if, somewhere in the house, they were being hit with spanners. He prepared himself as if he was going out for a date; he stood up in the bathtub and, with his floral soap, worked up a lather, covered himself all over with a half-inch-thick coat of suds. There was a little mirror over the sink, now clouded over with steam; in it, the cloudy reflection of his brown face. It was a tiny bathroom; he leant over and with a sudsy forefinger drew a smily face, outline, two dots for eyes, a vertical line for a nose, a little O of moueing astonishment for the mouth, and he leant back, bare and soapy, and bent his knees a little until the vague reflection of his face coincided with the drawn outline. But underneath the surprised mouth, his own reflected real one was smiling broadly, and he leant forward again, and with his palm wiped the steam from the mirror, and there was his face; dark, listening, with kindness in the eyes and a gleam of a smile, even here in this shabby hired bathroom. He greeted his own face like his best friend.

It was getting a little cold; he plunged back into the bath, splashing noisily, once, twice, three times. He pulled the plug out, and lay there as the water fell to the drains, running his fingers with pleasure through the dense black hair on his chest. He liked that feeling; he liked the clean smell of his own body, like an expensive scent, as he towelled it dry. A girl had once told him that he should live his entire life dressed in nothing but a white bath towel, about his hips. He tried to remember, bouncing up the stairs, soap in hand, who that had been, exactly.

Soon he would have a car of his own, paid for by the company, but for the moment he got around in a tatty old yellow Cortina. He’d bought it because it was wide and low, and had, if you chose, a faint echo of those big glamorous American cars. Walking out of the house in a clean white shirt and tightly pressed black trousers, he felt he deserved something more. It was one of those things, like living in a rented bedsit, that would have to be seen to when his life became what it was becoming. He drove with one hand on the wheel, the other stretched out across the back of the front passenger seat; he might have been setting off on a long Pacific journey. He had forgotten to bring a
bag of washing; it would wait until the next time. As the car whinnied up the hill, he entertained himself between thoughts of girls by focussing on random houses as they came into view, and pricing them. Location; condition; size; adaptability; the office mantra went through his head, and he produced confident figures as if out loud, to a vendor. At the top of the hill the houses drew back behind massive walls, parklike estates, and here and there even a new set of gates at the bottom of their drive. Behind these mansions, the more modest estate of his parents; he slowed, signalled right, turned with a sense of almost American scale to the sweep of the Cortina’s manoeuvre.

His father must have been waiting and watching for him—the car, it was true, made an unmistakable and incredible noise as it laboured up the last bit of hill. Daniel had hardly rung the bell before his father had opened the door. He didn’t say anything, just made a gesture towards the sitting room. His mother wasn’t there; Tim was on the stairs, just nodded and went up to his room.

“What’s up?” Daniel said, but his father said nothing, just closed the door behind him. “Where’s Mum?”

“She’s fine,” Malcolm said. “I don’t know what’s happening. It was an hour ago, an hour and a half. The doorbell went, and there were two policemen. They’ve taken your mother down to the station.”

“The police?” Daniel said. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” Malcolm said.

“It’s probably nothing,” Daniel said. “It’s probably some driving thing or, I don’t know, your television licence.”

“I don’t think so,” Malcolm said.

“You didn’t go down with her?” Daniel said.

“No, but I’m just going to,” Malcolm said. “I wanted you to come along, though, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” Daniel said, “but I’m sure it’s nothing. There’s nothing Mum could have done.”

There was a pause. Malcolm got up and went to the window. Turning, he looked suddenly quite old and drawn. He had always, in the past, changed out of his suit altogether when he got home, hadn’t he? But that was a work shirt, and work trousers, though he’d taken off his tie and shoes. He hadn’t wanted to ask Tim to go with him to the police station. Daniel could understand that.

“I know that, really,” Malcolm said. “I’m worrying about nothing probably. I wish I knew what it was about, though. You don’t mind?”

“No, I don’t mind,” Daniel said.

.   .   .

As Katherine stepped out of her house, the policemen walking, discreetly, ahead and behind her, not flanking her, the neighbours appallingly watching, she felt an inevitability about the whole thing. In whatever house she had ever lived—on the other side of every front door, the solid green door of her childhood, the door with a stained-glass inset of her teenage years, and then the three front doors of her married life, the flimsy one of the terraced house, the solid Victorian one with its two windows, and finally this modern white-painted one, behind which they’d lived for how many years—she’d always felt there would one day arrive some chariot of judgement to bear her away in exactly this fashion. Perhaps some people always lived in fear of the police knocking on the door. Katherine hadn’t. The judgement she had waited for and expected was a more general thing than that. It hadn’t been, either, a fear of being found out in whatever she might have been doing, but really the expectation of a judgement that in the end might be a positive one, confirming that there was nothing wrong with her life. She felt she needed that from outside, and without it, she would always feel as she did: slightly ill at ease. She didn’t know what form such a judgement might come in; in the event it came, as it often did in the real world, with two mineral-faced policemen.

The room she sat in had only a ribbon of reinforced window running round the top of the wall. It was not an interview room, but a sort of waiting room, rather like the rooms in hospitals where doctors tell next-of-kin of a death. She had been led in here by the policemen who had brought her in, and told someone would be along shortly. She felt almost calm. In a few minutes, a policewoman came in with a sheaf of papers, and said as if reading from a script that Katherine understood she was attending voluntarily, that she had not been charged with any crime, and then asked if she wanted to have a solicitor present at her interview. “I can arrange the duty solicitor,” she said. “It won’t take long.”

“I think that would be a good idea,” Katherine said, then asked what this was all about. She had never thought it was some traffic offence, as Malcolm had found time to say while she was leaving the house. She knew it was not. Her thoughts had gone first to Tim—who knew what he was doing in his spare time? But he had not presented an object of interest to the police, and immediately her thoughts went, more securely, to Nick. It was an unspecific insight, but it was clear to her
that if her life had contained any squalor-harbouring fissure that might ultimately interest the authorities, it related somehow to Nick. She wondered how she had never seen that before.

Around her, outside the room, the life of the police station continued, a rattle of talk, of machines typing, and a man shouting unintelligibly, somewhere remotely. Katherine wondered how long Malcolm would be, though of course he would have to wait outside, she supposed. Time passed: no one came to offer her a cup of tea. It must have been nearly an hour before the door opened, and a young Asian woman came in, introducing herself as the duty solicitor. It was true: as you got older, police officers looked younger, and so did solicitors. She had expected one of the partners from Collins Rathbone and Ostler, the firm she’d worked at before her marriage, someone like that with a solid old suit and a grave manner, not a tiny woman with glossy big hair and a cheap big-shouldered suit with gold buttons, a chain-store imitation of something expensive. But she was the duty solicitor, and she began to talk. At once, Katherine was unnerved by having heard and instantly forgotten her name.

Speaking from a script again, she explained Katherine’s rights in the interview room, and then—this was troubling—stressed that Katherine was not under arrest. She might well have said “yet.” She had said that many times before, wearily, in her voice, throaty, with only a trace of a Sheffield accent. “I understand all that,” Katherine said. The solicitor nodded, and went on with her standard explanation. She shuffled her papers, then started on the specific reason for Katherine being here: and it was, as Katherine had somehow thought, about Nick.

The solicitor finished, and asked Katherine if she had any questions at this stage. Katherine had, but she shook her head. “Right,” the solicitor said, and left the room. This time it wasn’t a long wait: in five minutes, a uniformed sergeant came in and led her down a corridor, confused noisy offices behind open glass doors to either side. At some point, the solicitor joined her, and they went into a different room. It, too, was bare, only four chairs about a table, and again that narrow strip of window round the top of the walls. Katherine and the solicitor sat on one side; the sergeant stood by the open door. Promptly, two men came in, in ties and rolled-up shirtsleeves, carrying papers and recording machinery. They set them down; the door was shut; they began to talk.

“When did you start working at Reynolds?”

“Was the job advertised?”

“Did you know Mr. Reynolds before you started work there?”

“Do you expect us to believe that?”

“Why would he employ a stranger?”

“We will, of course, be checking all this, you understand.”

“What previous jobs have you had?”

“Do you know this man?” A photograph across the table.

“What were your duties at the flower shop?”

“Would you describe the shop as a success?”

“Did it seem to be making money, from the sale of flowers, I mean?”

“What was Mr. Reynolds’s typical outlay on flowers in the course of a typical week, a month?”

“Explain your duties at the flower shop to us again.”

“You must have had a loose sense of how much money the shop made from the sale of flowers in the course of a typical day.”

“When you say that you had nothing to do with the shop’s accounts, do you mean that it was not your responsibility, or do you seriously expect us to believe that you never even saw them?”

“How long did you work there?”

“Why did you leave?”

“Again, I want to ask you, why did you stop working there, and I would very much appreciate a full and truthful answer.”

“Could you describe the shop? I mean, its storage arrangements.”

“You haven’t mentioned the cellar. Did you ever go down there?”

“What was stored in the cellar?”

“Did you ever see anything unusual being stored in the cellar?”

“What deliveries were made to the shop while you were there?”

“What do you know about Mr. Reynolds’s financial backing? I mean, where did the money come from to open a shop in the first place, because we know perfectly well it wasn’t from any kind of bank?”

“We haven’t heard about any brother in New York. Can you tell us some more about him?”

“Have you ever met this supposed New York brother?”

“Have you ever spoken to him?”

“Could you tell us his name, or his address?”

“Would it surprise you very much to learn that Mr. Reynolds has no brother, in New York or anywhere else?”

“I am going to ask you again, do you recognize this man—” A photograph pushed across the table.

“What do you know about the girl who replaced you in the shop?”

“How would you describe your relationship, in general, with Mr. Reynolds?”

The interview went on for an unquantifiable time, the dull, unexcitable voices of the urban policemen treading wearily over the ground, going back, pressing at some point that interested them, producing papers, photographs, asking for years-ago details with solid persistence. From time to time, the duty solicitor cut in, not sharply but judiciously marking some boundary. The interviewers accepted the point each time, and moved on. Katherine went on answering the questions, even when, as the solicitor kept saying, the point had been raised and answered. Under examination, how unmotivated ordinary life seemed; her actions deriving from nothing very concrete, and certainly not from the decision and the rational assessment of advantage the policemen seemed to believe must be there. Her ignorance, neither wilful nor feigned, but no more than a not-knowing, could not satisfy them, and she could not explain how much of her connection with Nick and his business, now revealed by the tenor of these questions as empty and criminally fraudulent, had come from the way his hair, years before, had fallen over his childishly puzzled brow. Nothing more than that; and it was not evidence.

Katherine answered all the questions calmly, and said what she knew. Only when it came to that last question, of how she would describe her relationship with Nick, did she consciously keep anything back. It was not their business; it had no conceivable relevance to their investigations. She went on answering, and in time a foolish and ugly scenario became clear from the outline of their questions.

A man had come to Sheffield, and had opened a shop. But it was not selling flowers at all. Despite appearances—customers had come in, had selected blooms, had watched them being wrapped, had handed over money, which had been conscientiously placed in the till and scrupulously registered afterwards—the shop had not been selling flowers. It was doing something completely different. Nick had been taking money from somewhere else, in regular amounts—dirty money, soiled by its origins—and slipping it in underneath the respectable money involved in the sale of narcissi. He was a useful tool for someone; she had looked like—what? She had looked to him like a useful tool, too, her foolishness and clear, shameful devotion a positive benefit. She would gaze, cow-eyed, at his lovely face, but in the end never want to say, “Nick, I don’t understand where this two hundred pounds has come from. We haven’t sold a blade of grass since yesterday.”