The Verdict (4 page)

Never bring a bad day home. That was what my wife and I had promised each other after the kids were born. They were entitled to their childhood.

My way of sticking to the tacit pact with my family was to put a buffer between my crises and our front door. I did that by taking long walks whenever I caught a bad situation. We lived five miles from the office, south of the river in Latchmere. The walks would loosen me up a little and give me clarity, even shift my perspective on things.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t walk that evening, because I had to bring Janet her talismanic pen. So I took the train. To cap it all, today was St Patrick’s Day, which meant exactly this: happy hour every hour till last orders, Guinness and Jameson half price, plenty of shamrocks on display and those stupid oversized bright-green top hats everywhere. Small crowds were spilling out of Victoria Station’s four pubs, getting trolleyed before the stumble off home.

St Patrick’s Day always makes me think of my parents. They’re Irish. Dad’s from Cork, mum’s a Dubliner. They’re both drinkers too, Dad especially. That’s where I got it from, my old problem.

I was last to get on the train. The carriage was crammed, every seat taken, people standing in the aisles, holding on to the luggage rack, more commuters stuffed in the doorway, scowls abounding, condensation turning to rivulets on the windows.

As I stood in the cramped compartment, I clearly remembered the day I first saw Vernon James.

October 1978, a midweek afternoon. Me and my brothers were playing football in Wexford Grove in Stevenage, where I grew up. A cab stopped a few feet away from us. Vernon and his sister Gwen got out with their mother. The three of them stood on the pavement, shivering. It was cold and windy, and there were drops of rain in the air. Vernon’s teeth were chattering. His dad was arguing with the driver. Vernon spotted us all looking at them. He scrutinised us, one by one. We were staring at him because we weren’t used to seeing too many black people – and certainly not in our neighbourhood. Then he singled me out, the smallest, the one most like him, and he smiled and waved. Not at all shy, already confident. I didn’t do anything. I just carried on staring. Then he helped his parents carry a suitcase that was almost as big as him into the basement flat two doors down from our house.

The last time I saw him was also in Stevenage, on the High Street in September 1993. That was a year and a bit after we’d fallen out. I had a lot of unanswered questions about all that, like why, and was he sure I’d done what he’d accused me of.

I’d literally turned the corner and bumped into him. We were both surprised, both immediately uncomfortable. I told him we needed to talk and he said yeah sure. So we arranged to meet in the King’s Arms the next day. That had been our hangout as teenagers, because it was the only pub in town where the owner didn’t care too much about serving underage drinkers, as long as they didn’t look it. Vernon and I were already tall enough at fifteen to pass for legal.

He didn’t show. I don’t know if he deliberately stood me up, or if he was just too scared to confront me. Whatever the reason, I never saw him again.

I took Janet’s pen out of my bag. A brushed stainless-steel Parker, shaped a little like a cigar tube. Her initials were engraved on the side in scrolled capitals. ‘J.H.H.’ She’d been using it since her O levels, for every exam and every test, literal and metaphorical. We all had our baubles, our lucky heather, to ward off the fear of failure. Mine were the shamrock cufflinks my kids had bought me for my birthday a couple of years ago. I always wore them when I thought something bad was going to happen. I didn’t have them on tonight.

The train came to the first stop. People got out and the congestion eased.

I opened up the
Evening Standard
I’d picked up at the station. An unidentified Premier League footballer had been arrested for a ‘savage attack’ on a nightclub bouncer. I flicked through the pages. Riots in Athens, the looming Royal Wedding, the Chicago River dyed green. And then, squashed in the corner of Page Seven, a small heading:

‘Body Found at Luxury Hotel’.

The report was short and scant. Maids had found a body in a room at the Blenheim-Strand, and police were currently questioning a man in connection with their enquiries. No mention of Vernon.

His name would be all over the papers tomorrow. The press had their contacts inside every major hotel in London. If that didn’t produce results, they had plenty of loose-lipped, underpaid coppers on speed dial.

Of course it was a shock to me. But wasn’t it always a shock to anyone who found out a close friend or good neighbour or amiable work colleague was really a serial killer or rapist or some other kind of monster? All we know of other people is what we see reflected of ourselves. Beyond that they’re strangers.

When I’d known Vernon, I’d never seen him lose his temper. He’d never been violent, never thrown a punch or a kick. He never even raised his voice. His anger was glacial and controlled, all contemptuous stares and loaded silences. Sure, people changed, but not
that
much.

Yet what did I know? I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in almost twenty years.

Pressure was starting to build up behind my eyes, the thoughts swarming too thickly to isolate and break down. There was Vernon and our history. There was me defending him. There was the looming office battle with Bella. And, on top of that, the case itself. Four separate serrating headaches, one head.

I got off at Clapham Junction station and headed for Janet’s house, via St John’s Road. It looked like every other main street in London. A McDonald’s and a Starbucks, then several mobile phone shops, two supermarkets, a bank and an electronics store – all links in those long predictable chains that dragged the guts and soul out of every British town and city.

I passed several pubs, all busy. I walked faster. Pubs reminded me of hell.

Janet lived on Briar Close, off Northcote Road. It was a different kind of environment there, almost genteel, thanks to gentrification and the money that follows it. She was waiting outside her house with her motorbike driver. That was how she got around London, to and from meetings, on the back of a Suzuki GSX-R600. KRP had a firm of riders on call, mostly for deliveries and collections, but Janet used them as a chauffeur service.

‘Here you go,’ I said, handing her the pen.

‘You didn’t touch it, did you?’ she said as she put the pencase in her rucksack. She had her raincoat on and flat shoes.

‘How do you think I got it here?’ I joked.

She chuckled as she put her helmet on. She was a good foot shorter than me, with medium-length brown hair and sharp pale-blue eyes. She was older than I was by a decade and change.

‘Any more info on the case?’ I asked as the rider kick-started the bike and she clambered aboard.

‘The victim’s a woman,’ she said. ‘A blonde.’

The place I called home was half an hour’s walk and a whole different world away from Janet’s house.

We lived in a three-bedroom flat in a place called the Garstang Estate, near Battersea High Street – the ‘we’ being yours truly, my wife Karen, and our two children, Ray and Amy, who were then eight and five respectively.

The estate was a human battery farm – a regimented sprawl of identical brick blocks the colour of toxic factory clouds and bad-tempered skies, consisting of sixty-two apartments and maisonettes, spread over five storeys with communal walkways. Laundry flapped from every other balcony like the sails of a wrecked galleon; satellite dishes clustered at the corners of the walls in an upward creep, reminiscent of an advance of mutant toadstools; and, in the car parks between blocks, a quartet of CCTV cameras were perched atop twenty-foot-high metal shafts, as ineffective against urban evils as church gargoyles.

Dozens of different nationalities lived here, side by side; a regular melting pot, the metropolis in microcosm. There were few friendships on the estate, mainly acquaintanceships. Everyone coexisted peacefully enough, as long as they managed to avoid each other, which most did or very quickly learned to do.

I hung up my coat and went to the living room. The light and telly were on, but there was no sound. Karen had paused whatever programme she was watching because Amy had fallen asleep in her arms. She’d taken the opportunity to snatch a few moments’ rest, but conked out herself.

I gazed over them, lying there together on the couch. Karen had her arms around our daughter, who was snuggled up to her, face buried in her mother’s armpit, just like she used to when she was a baby. I wanted to kiss them both, but I didn’t want to wake them and spoil the perfect image before me. Instead I committed the sight to memory, every nuance – the way their bodies lay, facing each other on their sides, almost, but not quite touching; how they’d both folded their legs up, as if in mid-jump; Amy grasping the sleeve of Karen’s T-shirt tight in her little fist.

I tiptoed past them to the kids’ bedroom and rapped on the door with my fingertips.

‘Come in,’ a young voice beckoned imperiously.

My son was sitting in the upper tier of the bunk bed reading
The 39 Clues.

‘Good evening, Ray,’ I said.

‘Hi Dad.’ He smiled and put down his book.

Ray was actually my adopted son. He was mixed race, the product of an on-off relationship Karen had had with a black Brazilian. He’d split for good shortly after he found out Karen was pregnant.

I owed my family and the life I now had to Ray.

I met him first, before Karen, one bright Sunday afternoon at a fête on Clapham Common in 2004. I was working as a part-time ‘children’s entertainer’ then, the Blue Clown – blue of costume, wig and mouth. I wasn’t a big draw. My audience averaged one or two kids plus their parents an hour. They’d gawp for five minutes and leave without laughing. Then Ray waddled up to me, on his own, barely two feet tall, all frowns and curiosity. I did my routine for him, which involved walking into a nearby lamp-post and falling over. Ray was as unimpressed as everyone else. Except he stayed put, determined to be entertained. So I repeated the routine with variations, bumping my foot against the post, hitting it with my head, and even twirling around it, but to no avail. I couldn’t get a rise out of him. Finally, I resorted to the only other trick I knew, the thing I did at children’s parties – animal sounds. He didn’t respond to my horse or donkey, my miaowing made him cover his ears and my barking made him cry. But when I did my seal noises –
Ar-Ar-Ar-Arrrrr-Ar-Ar-Ar
–
I hit paydirt. Ray’s face lit up and he laughed and clapped his hands… for all of a minute, before his frown returned.

Then Karen appeared. Frantic and tearful, she had a steward and a cop at her side. It turned out Ray had been missing for an hour. He’d wandered off while Karen was buying him a balloon.

I didn’t talk to Karen then. She grabbed Ray in her arms and carried him away, sobbing with relief.

That should have been the end of it, but, later the following week, I was working my other job, stacking shelves in Asda, when I spotted Ray sitting in a half-full shopping trolley. Karen was nearby, choosing fruit. Ray stared at me hard, and I swore he recognised me.

It was one of those moments where your life turns on a decision. In my case it was whether or not to make a crappy seal noise. So I did and Ray started laughing and clapping.

I introduced myself to Karen. ‘I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on,’ she said.

And that was pretty much how it started.

‘What did you do today?’ I asked him.

‘I got 85 per cent in maths.’

‘That’s great,’ I said. Maths had never been my strong suit.

‘It’s very good, but not great,’ he corrected me, after a moment. ‘Great is 90 per cent or more. Do you know maths is the only subject you can score 100 per cent in?’

Typical, I thought. Not even nine and he was a glass half-empty guy. He was a bright spark, much cleverer than I’d been at his age. He was a quick study and a voracious reader, one of those natural intellectuals who find out everything there is to know about something that interests him.

I looked at my watch. It was almost 9 p.m.

‘Can I tell you something?’

‘If you want,’ he said.

‘You won’t understand this now, but in time you may,’ I said, looking at him. ‘Always finish what you start. OK? Every beginning deserves an end. There’s nothing worse than unfinished business.’

Ray wasn’t one of those kids who simply nodded along to everything you said to make you happy and go away. He liked to think things through. And he was thinking now, furrowing his brow as he tried to make sense of what I’d said. When he couldn’t, his brow relaxed.

‘I know you’re not talking about my dinner,’ he said, eventually.

I laughed and tousled his hair – or tried to, because it barely yielded to my fingers.

‘Your bedtime’s looming. You cleaned your newtons?’

‘Newtons’ was Manchester slang for teeth. That came from Karen, a proud Mancunian. She kept talking about moving back ‘home’ at some unspecified point in the future, but every time we went there to visit her parents and she found that another part of the city had changed or disappeared altogether, she started missing London.

Ray shook his head.

‘Off you go, then,’ I said.

I sat down on Amy’s bunk. I was exhausted but knew I wouldn’t sleep tonight. Too many thoughts leapfrogging around in my brain. And I didn’t have the first clue how I’d face tomorrow, let alone get through it. I needed a plan.

Ray had left his laptop open on his desk and forgotten to turn it off, as he often did. I checked what he’d been looking at. Karen and I made a point of doing that at least twice a week, just to be on the safe side. We were discreet about it.

Tonight he’d browsed Wikipedia and two history websites for a homework assignment.

I turned off the computer.

Moments later Ray came back, followed by Karen carrying Amy.

We tucked them in and kissed them goodnight. Then we went to the living room, where I kissed Karen and gave her a hug, as I always did at the end of the day, when we were alone.

We sat down on the couch. Karen looked ready for bed.

‘Your dinner’s in the micro,’ she yawned. She was wearing a faded New Order
Technique
T-shirt two sizes too big for her.

‘Not hungry,’ I said. ‘I need to talk to you about something.’

She sat up, looked at me a little closer, read trouble the way only she could. A little of the sleepiness left her face.

‘Shall I make us some tea, then?’ she asked. By tea, Karen meant one of five herbal varieties. They were all supposed to do wonders for you, but I never touched any of them. When they tasted of anything, they tasted horrible.

‘Coffee for me.
Not
decaff. And
definitely
not instant either. Real coffee.’

For the first time in God knows how long – what I really wanted – no,
craved
–
was a drink. A tall cold Guinness Export: 8 per cent alcohol, a kick in every sip. That’s how I’d always started my benders. Five of those, then the spirits…

I choked the urge.

‘That kind of talk, is it?’ she said.

‘’Fraid so, yeah.’