The Gardens of the Dead

1

‘I’m no fool, Arnold,’ said Nancy Riley to the hamster. ‘It all adds up.’

It was early morning and she’d just slipped into the kitchen, leaving her man groaning in his sleep.

Nancy could see the connections between things. Always had done. When she’d worked for Harold Lawton on the Isle of Dogs she’d once spotted a petty fraud at the hands of the wharf manager.

‘When I showed the boss how it was done,’ murmured Nancy ‘he said I could’ve gone places.’

That was a long time ago, but the same sensation of discovery had settled on Nancy all over again: there was a link between things that didn’t seem to be connected: the death of that barrister, the photograph that arrived in the post and the change in her man’s nightmares.

A couple of weeks back, Nancy had bought a paper. A name on page five caught her eye. Elizabeth Glendinning QC, a well-known barrister, had been found dead at the wheel of a car parked in the East End. She had died of heart failure while trying to call for help. That evening Nancy showed the article to her man.

‘What a coincidence,’ said Nancy ‘She was just up the road from Mile End Park.’

Riley nodded, staring at the paper.

‘Did you see her at the fair?’ asked Nancy.

Riley’s jaw moved as if his gums were itching.

‘They found some old spoons on the seat,’ continued Nancy pensively ‘It’s sad if you ask me.’

During the night Riley moaned like he was being fried on a low heat. His face was hot and wet. And then, a couple of days ago, the letter came. Well, it wasn’t a letter. Riley tore it open and out popped a photograph. The two of them stared at the crimped black and white square on the table. Nancy noticed a booming chest and wide braces, a shirt without a collar.

Riley’s hand slammed onto the smiling face as if it were a wasp.

Nancy jumped. ‘Who’s that?’ she asked, shaken.

‘No one.’ His eyes were trained hard on his fingers as if something might crawl out.

Nancy didn’t press her man. She’d learned not to. She could read the signs. He was like hot water in a pan, close to the boil. That night he screamed. In itself, that was no surprise: Riley had suffered nightmares since the trial. (‘Occupational hazard,’ said Mr Wyecliffe, as if he had them too.) They were always the same: he was running for dear life, chased by something like a dog they’d once seen at the races, and then he was falling… but this time it was slightly different.

‘What is it?’ wailed Nancy She’d been listening to his muttering but the cry had come like a brick through the window. To her astonishment he buried his head into her neck.

‘I’m falling’ — Nancy stroked his wet scalp. It was bony like a rock on the beach. His hand covered hers and they stayed like that, as if they were waiting for an ambulance; and then Riley added the bit that was new, the change in the dream — ‘I’m just falling down an endless stairwell.’

A stairwell? Strange things, are dreams.

From that day on, Riley’s nightmares got worse. To make himself tired, he started walking in the middle of the night along Limehouse Cut, the canal that ran through Bow to the Thames. He’d listen to the foxes in the old warehouses. But that was later. On this night, when he’d calmed down, Riley turned his back on Nancy and she felt her own stomach fail, for he was always moving away and she’d never got used to it. And Nancy said to herself, I’m not stupid. This dream, the photo and the death of that barrister are tied up somehow Mr Lawton hadn’t believed her, but in the end she’d been proved right, and he’d said, ‘You could’ve gone places.’

Come to think of it, that was insulting. The boss had let slip what he thought of Nancy: how she’d wasted her life. All she’d done was work for him and marry Graham Riley.

Nancy had gone to the docks when she’d turned sixteen, along with Rose Clarke and Martina Lynch. They’d been together since primary school. They remained a threesome, well known to everyone who worked on Harold Lawton’s quay; and they were seen every Friday night at the same pub just outside the main gates, the Admiral — a hole, really but it was ever so old, and there was this side room made from a ship’s cabin. A big plastic sign said the owners had been serving ‘seadogs since the days of rigging and sails’. Martina got the nickname Babycham from the landlord because she drank nothing else. True, Nancy was the dumpy one, but it didn’t seem to matter when she was jammed between the other two. She dressed nicely and there were always lads wanting to join their table. Thinking of those days, Nancy remembered a small detail about the weekend that followed the night before: more often than not, no one had asked her out. She could admit that now. What did it matter? It wasn’t through her friends that she’d met her man, anyway.

Riley used to clock in with all the others at eight in the morning. Back then, everyone had a card that was stamped in a big machine. It was the same at lunchtime. The lads all got one hour off, but they had to stamp their cards again if they’d left the premises, to show they were back on time. It was old-fashioned, but Mr Lawton liked the contraption. He wasn’t one for changing with the times. Funny really that his business should have lasted so long on the Isle of Dogs, while everyone else went under. Anyhow, one day Riley lingered in the office until they were alone. He’d been taken on a couple of months earlier, after being made redundant just down the road. So he was new, and different from the rest — not a Friday-night man, not a drinker. Quiet. Kept himself to himself. Didn’t need friends — didn’t want them. His hair was always ruffled and his eyes couldn’t keep still. They were blue-green and confused, as if he’d been shaken up in the bottle. And he’d noticed Nancy He watched her from the driver’s cabin of a crane. She knew because he once pulled the wrong lever, and all the stevedores went off it when he dropped a crate of bananas. So, on this day Nancy sensed him hanging around, edgy and shy She thought he was about to invite her to that big dance coming up in White City, but he wasn’t. Instead he asked her to risk her job.

‘Do my card for me, will you? I’ve got tenants to see.’

Nancy had been impressed. Here was a man with a bit of property. Hardly common among Lawton’s boys. A nest egg, he’d explained. He was getting other people to pay off the mortgage.

‘I just need about half an hour,’ said Riley looking over his shoulder.

Nancy agreed, and he studied her face like he was looking for spots. Then he said, as if he were handing over something precious, ‘I knew I could trust you.

She waited for him to ask her out, but he didn’t. A week or so later he suggested having tea in a hotel. She said yes, thinking he meant some place on Commercial Road, but he took her to Brighton, which was a double shock, because he paid for the train as well — first class, if you please. They were married within six months. Babycham and Rose were the only witnesses. There was no reception, just a free drink at the town hall and a cheeky kiss from the registrar. Her man didn’t like that. And he didn’t like her pals. She still saw them at Lawton’s, but the threesome had been split. So the Friday-night sessions came to an end. Nancy didn’t altogether mind, because, looking back, she’d never really enjoyed herself.

They moved into Riley’s bungalow and set up home. Nancy had always wanted a herb bed but there was no garden, just flagstones. So she started collecting bricks from the towpath by Limehouse Cut —just one at a time, if she happened to see one in the grass. Slowly as married life got underway the pile of bricks grew bigger, but the bed was never built. She was a few short. And that mirrored their life together. There were some missing pieces. Within weeks of that free drink at the town hall, the man who’d taken her to Brighton went into hiding — in his own home.

But, of course, he had to come out again. They were under one roof. During the day he was sharp and brusque, baring his teeth when he felt he was being crossed. His jaw would creep forward, and his eyes would go wide, staring to one side, as if he daren’t look at you for fear of what he might do. During the evening, he’d sneer at the television: at politicians, soaps, the news, bishops. His bottom lip would warp, and his bitten nails would scratch the rests of his armchair, catching on the nylon covers. In disgust he’d put on a Walt Disney video, slamming it into the machine. Them his face would light up. He’d weep with Bambi or shake his fist at the queen in Snow White. All his feelings crackled and popped, like the cereal. But when the film was over, he became pinched, as if it shouldn’t have ended. (Nancy didn’t like the word ‘unstable’, but she got the impression that her man held himself together, a bit like a barrel with those iron bands, and that if one or two of the screws came loose, he’d just explode. So she learned to keep well back. She didn’t tinker with his ways.) At night he wouldn’t touch her. There was a cold part of the bed, right in the middle. It was like that channel in the sea opened up by Charlton Heston, when he was Moses. Both of them were like walls of water, waiting to collapse from the sheer weight of separation. Only it never happened. Not even after that policewoman came to Lawton’s and arrested her man at the foot of his crane. At the time, Nancy watched him being led away waiting for those iron bands to snap; but they didn’t.

‘It all adds up,’ repeated Nancy solemnly ‘I’m no fool.’

Suddenly Arnold froze on his drum. His neck seemed to beat as though his heart was lodged in his throat.

‘You think too much,’ said Riley quietly.

Nancy let out a cry. Right behind her, an arm’s length away was her man. He was wearing his camouflage parka with the hood up. A high collar almost covered his mouth. He’d picked it up from an old soldier who’d topped himself.

‘You scared me,’ laughed Nancy Her pulse found its stride, and she said calmly ‘Don’t you want some breakfast?’

‘No.’ His voice cracked, and his eyes were famished. ‘I’ve got a clearing.’

‘Where?’

‘Tottenham.’

The back door slammed as if they’d had a row Standing by the window, Nancy watched her man as if he were on another planet. A dense mist had risen off the Thames and dissolved the streets of Poplar. It would swamp the Isle of Dogs from Canary Wharf to Cubitt Town. Street-lights hung like saucers and Riley slowly disintegrated. When he’d vanished, Nancy turned to Arnold. His little legs started moving and the wheel clinked and whirred.

‘How on earth did he get like that?’ she asked sorrowfully.

2

As arranged, Anselm arrived at the Vault near Euston Station at seven in the morning. Scaffolds and hoarding covered tall buildings on either side of the day centre. Sheets of polythene flapped and winches clinked in the breeze. A queue of figures shuffled to a gate, evoking the fortitude of travellers bound for the New World. Anselm passed behind them into a narrow, cobbled lane and found the back-door buzzer beneath a nameplate.

‘How is Uncle Cyril?’ asked Debbie Lynwood, opening the door to her office at the end of a dimly lit corridor.

‘Hot and bothered,’ said Anselm. ‘I threw away a receipt.’

‘Cantankerous beast.’

Anselm had expected genetic determinism (bulk in overalls) but Debbie’s frame was slight. She wore black trousers and a scarlet roll-neck jumper. A selection of enamel badges revealed an interest in classic motorcycles.

‘I can’t promise much,’ she said, hands in her back pockets. ‘Finding someone on the street is almost impossible. But I know a man who might be able to help — someone who knows the ropes.’ She moved across the room towards a door that led onto the Vault itself. In the middle was a round window. On the other side Anselm saw the blue haze of smoke. Dark figures crossed slowly as if wading through water. ‘When I mentioned what I knew of you,’ said Debbie thoughtfully ‘he was eager to meet you. Wait here.’

She opened the door and a low industrious hum spilled into the office. As he waited, Anselm absorbed his surroundings: a wall of box files, posters displaying information, an old school desk, a worn blue carpet… and a short, wiry man holding a staff like a curtain rail with an ornamental knob. He wore a green cagoule, his trousers were tucked into his socks, and he shouldered a backpack. His feet, in polished, split brogues, were splayed outwards. A thin, grizzled beard covered an oblong chin.

‘May I present Mr Francis Hillsden,’ said Debbie.

The traveller made a short bow with his head and shook Anselm’s hand. A pleasure, with respect,’ he said, keeping his eyes averted. They were blue and seemed to be smarting.

Debbie invited Anselm to speak as they pulled up chairs in a triangle. Mr Hillsden perched himself on the edge of his seat, gripping his staff as though it were a pole to a room below.

‘I am looking for a man in his sixties,’ said Anselm. ‘His name is David George Bradshaw I understand he is known as Blind George.’

‘By whom, if I might respectfully ask?’ His accent was soft, a cultured voice from the West Country. ‘I hope my interjection does not trouble you?’

‘Not at all,’ replied Anselm. A sense of déjà vu flashed like a weak light. ‘That’s his name among other homeless people.’

Mr Hillsden gave a brief nod as if he’d made a note of the reply ‘Mr Bradshaw has restricted vision?’

‘No. But he wears welding goggles. I don’t know why’

‘To hide his face?’ The suggestion was directed towards one of the posters on the facing wall.

‘Maybe… I’m told he keeps his own company’ Anselm felt uneasy as if he were hiding the part he’d played in the downfall of a man. ‘Until recently Mr Bradshaw stayed beneath a fire escape at Trespass Place. He was waiting there for a colleague of mine who unfortunately died. When I went to meet him on her behalf he had gone. I have an important message for him — in effect, that I will continue what they were doing in her stead.’

‘In the first place, I offer my condolences.’ Mr Hillsden’s eyelids twitched as if troubled by a particle of grit. ‘But secondly with respect, if this gentleman has withdrawn from the company of men, how might one ask questions as to his whereabouts?’

‘I don’t know’

A fair answer, if I may say so. Where is Trespass Place?’

Anselm explained, adding that while Mr Bradshaw might not be blind, his memory had been shattered; that he held time together with a series of notebooks — a detail that somehow seemed to define the man he was looking for.

‘A wise practice,’ observed Mr Hillsden. He became abruptly stern, glancing round as if he’d heard a voice of contradiction. He banged his staff twice and the severity dissolved. Twitching again, he said, ‘I don’t wish to intrude, but have you met Mr Bradshaw before?’

‘Yes.’

‘Frequently?’

‘Once.’

‘Would he remember you?’

Anselm was stung more by the innocence of the question than its pertinence. His face grew hot: Mr Hillsden was proceeding with him as he had once proceeded with Mr Bradshaw Neither of them had known what they were doing. ‘I hope not,’ said Anselm gravely not daring to look up. He let his eyes rest upon the shining brogues and the socks outside the trousers.

No one spoke after that. Mr Hillsden seemed to be deliberating. Presently he said, ‘My colleagues on the street tend to have what might be called a patch. Most of us do not stray from it. When we do, I’m afraid, it is usually for a serious reason. And when we move, it is not to another part of London, but a different corner of England. That, at least, has been my experience. He stood up, bringing Anselm and Debbie to their feet. ‘I’ll go over to the South Bank, though I fear the venture will be futile. But should I find him, the most I can do is invite him here. Without his express permission, I would not reveal his location.’

‘Of course,’ said Anselm. He had the peculiar sensation of standing before a High Court Master in an application for Wasted Costs. He reached into his habit pocket, aware that his coming gesture was ridiculous but necessary: ‘Please, may I cover your expenses?’

‘Thank you, but no,’ said Mr Hillsden graciously ‘I have adequate means which I am happy to place at your disposal.’ He looked down at his feet. Briskly he raised his head and for a split second his blue, watery eyes latched on to Anselm. ‘I understand you were once at the Bar?’

‘Yes.’

‘Which Inn?’

‘Gray’s.’

Mr Hillsden seemed to breathe in the sound. A ghostly calm changed his face. ‘Fantastic forms, whither are ye fled?’

He frowned as if trying to remember what came next. Anselm knew these words of Lamb, but he too was stuck. Suddenly Mr Hillsden swung to the door with the round window. Without hesitating, he strode into the heavy murmuring and the blue smoke, his stick tapping on the floor.

3

Riley stood at the foot of the stairs in an empty house in Tottenham. It was cold and damp and his heart was beating fast. He stared at the bottom step.

‘Who sent the photograph of Walter?’

His eyes moved to the chipped baluster, following the spindles up to the gloom of an unlit landing. The silence opened a door on those shouting voices, the scuffling of feet and whatever it was that ended up smashed on the floor. As a boy in the boxroom, he used to beg God to make it stop. And funnily enough, He did. Shortly afterwards things would go quiet and he’d say ‘Thank you, thank you,’ his head still under his pillow.

Riley set to work, lifting and dragging. He loaded up the tables and chairs, the mirrors and cupboards, a lamp stand and four candlesticks. His feet stamped out the memory of his childhood, but others from last week licked him. It was always like this. His head was full of noise. He played arguments like they were favourite records, changing the words for a bit of variety. It was exhausting, but anger made him feel alive. In a full-blooded row, he’d pass through a kind of barrier and float, hardly breathing; he’d think up things to say and pass them on, as if to someone else. It was a long way from the gratitude of a boy in the boxroom.

He worked feverishly Puffs of dust made him cough and spit. By the late afternoon he’d finished. The building had been stripped. Panting, he stood in the living room. Sweat touched the nape of his neck like a hand: who had posted the photograph of Walter?

He hadn’t looked at the picture since the day it had fallen from the envelope. But he could still see the man he wouldn’t call Dad, the man no one pushed around, the biggest man in the street. Walter had kept dumb-bells under the bed. He’d done press-ups. He’d boxed the air, snorting and whistling —he’d been a southpaw He’d smelled of liniment. Riley saw him only in the evenings because he got up at four o’clock to work at the warehouse. After he was made redundant he had to sell pies from a barrow He was known as the Pieman. And there wasn’t a picture of him left on the planet, except the one that had fallen onto the kitchen table. Riley couldn’t understand it. He’d burnt them all over forty years ago. Sweat crawled down his back. Who could have posted the photograph? There was no one he could think of. They were all dead.

Riley sat against the wall, hands resting on his knees. Rat droppings were scattered like tiny black seeds along the skirting board. The damp and the quiet closed in upon him.

Major Reynolds at the Salvation Army hostel had always worn a neatly pressed uniform. He had a pencil moustache like that of a Battle of Britain pilot and years of cornet playing had left a small indentation on his upper lip. A shiny square face and prominent black eyebrows completed the impression of military distinction. Riley never learned his first name. He was just ‘the Major.

When this quiet soldier saw the blade in Riley’s sock, he should have thrown him back onto the street. But he didn’t. Instead, he pulled the runaway into his office, threw the knife in the bin and said, ‘You’re a grown-up now.’

Riley smiled, like kids do when they’re nervous.

‘You’re a man.’

Riley’s eyes glazed, but he kept the smile.

‘And a man should think deeply’ said the Major, unperturbed. He folded his arms, and his dark eyebrows made a frown. He measured Riley up and down with a long, calculating gaze, as if to guess the size of his clothes.

The next day the Major called Riley back into his office. He stood with legs crossed, leaning back on his desk. He’d put in a good word to another trooper in the Army a manager at McDougall’s on the Isle of Dogs.

‘There’s a job if you want it,’ he said.

‘Doing what?’ He stared at the Major’s gleaming shoes. Even the soles were clean.

‘Stacking crates of self-raising flour.’

Riley had seen the ads everywhere. They made it out to be some kind of miracle when it was just a mix of chemicals. He said, ‘Nothing rises on its own.’

The Major narrowed his eyes, like a gambling man, wondering if there was another level to the remark. Uncertainly he said, ‘No, it doesn’t.’

Riley never went back to the Sally Ann. He worked hard. He learned how to operate a crane. He saved up. He bought a bungalow. And he bought Quilling Road. The idea was to rent it out and build up an investment, but it turned into something else. No, that wasn’t true. It was a choice; a rambling, complicated, murky series of impulses and actions, but, in the end, a very deep kind of choice; something cold and murderous. It was similar to being in one of his rages. It was as if he were watching himself, and he felt nothing at what he saw.

The docks were dying, but Riley survived. After he was made redundant, he found a job the same week at Lawton’s, where he met Nancy Dumpy Nancy with her hungry eyes. He first saw her from on high, looking down from his crane. He seemed to see her close-up for who she was. She walked timidly as if she’d been hurt. That’s when he first thought of selling Quilling Road. He seriously thought of packing up. But he didn’t. One lunchtime he went into the manager’s office intending to ask her out… because there was something about her that had stirred him, that had lit a small flame in his guts… But on the day when he opened his mouth, he’d asked her to stamp his card while he went AWOL to catch his rent. That sudden shift of intention, the deception of Nancy had thrilled him, as if it were a kind of arson. (Riley understood the excitement of a building on fire.) So that was another choice —an even deeper one, from a frozen place inside himself. Unlike getting married to Nancy. That happened as if it were inevitable. The courting went like a dream. He did everything that he’d seen in the films: aftershave, greased hair, a natty suit — the lot. He took Nancy to a big hotel, ordered high tea and paid with crisp bills fresh from the bank. He left a fat tip. He held out his arm for Nancy. On Brighton beach, he tossed his trilby into the wind. But when they got married, and they went home, and she was there first thing in the morning and last thing at night.., he felt sick. He didn’t know what to do in the day to day He scoured his past, lifting its slabs, jerking open its drawers, trying desperately to find something that would teach him what to do. But there was nothing there, except loathing and disgust, like a warm mist. And there before him, day and night, was Nancy Dumpy Nancy with her hungry eyes. She was a breathing accusation.

And then help came from a very strange quarter, although he didn’t see it that way at the time: a woman in black arrived on the wharf with a few heavies in uniform. Twenty minutes later he was arrested. From that moment, the focus of Nancy’s anguish shifted from who he was to what someone had said he’d done. And that gave him space. Not much, but space nonetheless.

Riley swept up the rat droppings and put the pan and brush back in a hallway cupboard. As he closed the door he heard that polished voice as if it were on the other side. He saw the scrubbed nails, the white cuffs, the starched trousers.

A man should think deeply; he should know himself.’

Riley had studied the Major’s cap-badge motto, ‘Blood and Fire’, in a panic, unable to comprehend why this man should care at all.

‘I know myself better than you ever will, Major. I’ve been places.., in here’ — he’d pointed savagely at his head, as if it were a distant continent — ‘that you’ve only heard about.’

‘I don’t mean what you’ve done. I mean who you are. The man behind the mistakes and the wrong turns.’ The Major leaned forwards, placing a hand on each knee, like the medic on a football pitch. He stared at Riley his eyes clean and unbearably merciful. ‘They’re not the same, you know’

They’re not the same. The strange words spiralled down forty years into an empty house in Tottenham. Riley’s mind grew dark — even his eyes seemed to drain of light. How could you separate a man from what he’d done? Like a flicker of flame in the grate, Riley remembered himself standing at the bedroom door, a boy in pyjamas, watching Walter punch and stab the air.

4

Anselm was drinking tea in a café ten minutes early for his meeting with Inspector Cartwright. Roughly ten minutes after the agreed time he saw a figure dodging between the cars on Coptic Street. A magenta scarf fluttered against a long black overcoat.

Anselm had first met Inspector Cartwright during the Riley trial. Afterwards he’d seen her once or twice smoking in the corridors of the Bailey. Their eyes had met; and Anselm, being the sensitive sort, had detected a measure of hostility. That expression, it seemed, had not left her face.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said sweetly sitting down, ‘three kids under five. Don’t do it.’

‘I’ll try not to.’ Each ear was weighted with a substantial holly-berry earring, irregular in shape, probably painful to wear and undoubtedly made by one of the under-fives. Her hair was a deep, rusty brown; it had been cut very short, leaving precise lines. ‘I think when we last met,’ she said kindly ‘you’d just opened the door to let Mr Riley out.’

And now,’ replied Anselm, ‘I hope to open another that will bring him back in.

Inspector Cartwright was, of course, wholly unaware of Elizabeth’s hope to ‘take away Riley’s good name’ and her contingency plan should death overtake the fulfilment of her project, so Anselm related what had transpired since the day he received the key.

‘Unfortunately’ he said, in conclusion, ‘I came to my responsibility a mite later than she anticipated. When I got to Trespass Place, George had gone.’

Inspector Cartwright had listened with fixed attention, a hand at intervals repositioning an earring. She glanced at the cake selection, saying, ‘I’ve already played a part in this business, only I didn’t realise it until now Would you hang on a moment?’ She waved at the counter and asked for a date slice. ‘Kids. I need sugar.’ The waiter returned with a small plate and a small cake. After reflecting for a moment she began to speak.

A few years ago a friend of mine put a file on my desk. He has an informant in the field called Prosser who trades in antiques at the bottom end of the market. He goes round the fairs and fêtes. He’s on a retainer to tell us what he sees and hears. Usually it’s handling stolen goods — stuff being moved on for cash without a receipt. Sometimes it’s drugs. It happens that he’d filed three reports on Riley’ She leaned on the table, one hand on top of the other. ‘Prosser said Riley was up to something, but he couldn’t pin it down. But he was sure that people came to Riley’s stall, handed over cash and left with nothing.’

‘A payment?’

‘Apparently.’

‘The same people?’

‘Not always, but often.’

‘Paying protection?’

‘We had him watched but he does nothing but empty dead men’s houses and sell on what they’ve left behind.’

Anselm called up the sorts of questions that were once basic to his trade: ‘Is the profit margin too high for his kind of business?’

‘No. And the accounts are perfect — all filed on time at Companies House.’

‘Is he funding a lifestyle beyond his earnings?’

The Inspector shook her head. ‘He’s got a tatty bungalow, no car and never goes on holiday. So we dropped it.’

‘But people still give him money for nothing?’ said Anselm.

‘Yes, they do.’

Anselm waited.

A couple of years ago I was at the Bailey for a trial,’ said the Inspector. ‘One morning I was in the canteen and Mrs Glendinning took a seat right in front of me. Without saying hello, she asked if I’d heard about the death of John

Bradshaw I said I had. And then, like a timetable enquiry, she said, “Will you get Riley in the dock for the killing?” I shook my head and she just made an ‘Ah,” as if a train had been delayed. And then she said, “I wonder if he’s gone straight?” That’s when I told her about Prosser, but she didn’t seem that interested.’

Anselm smiled to himself. With two straightforward questions, Elizabeth had learned what she wanted to know: the state of the police inquiry into John’s death, and whether Riley was still believed to be involved in crime. Armed with this information, she’d tracked down George and begun her scheme. In a reverie, Anselm saw afresh its crucial antecedents: her troubled visits to Finsbury Park and Larkwood, where she’d worked out the framework for her actions.

Inspector Cartwright tapped her plate with a teaspoon. ‘Hello.’ She seemed to be peering into a pipe. ‘I’m a police officer. Put your hands up.’

‘Forgive me,’ said Anselm, blinking. ‘I was distracted by a kind of vision.’

‘Really? What did you see?’

‘That Elizabeth drew you forward; as she drew my Prior; as she drew me.’

For a time neither of them spoke.

‘I suppose that makes us comrades,’ Inspector Cartwright said at last. She held out her hand. As their palms met Anselm saw Elizabeth leaning over a box of Milk Tray — when it had all begun. Her hair had fallen like a curtain. In his imagination, Anselm peered behind it, and caught her faint smile. ‘I’ve been tidying up my life,’ she’d said.

‘I never heard from Mrs Glendinning again,’ resumed the Inspector. ‘On the day she died, she left a message on my answer machine. She just said, “Leave it to Anselm.”‘

They both now understood what that meant. But Anselm wanted to know something else. ‘How would you describe her tone of voice?’

‘Supremely confident.’

Standing outside the café, Anselm said, ‘Out of interest, did you ever take the Pieman seriously?’

‘We ran the name past all our contacts in the field,’ said the Inspector, ‘and we pushed it through the computer, but nothing came up. When I interviewed Riley he wouldn’t answer a single question, but I kept coming back to that name.’

‘Why?’

‘I noticed it made him sweat.’

Anselm left Inspector Cartwright on the understanding that he would contact her as and when he heard from Mr Hillsden. Watching her walk down Coptic Street, Anselm recalled Lamb’s question to the old benchers of the Inner Temple: ‘Fantastic forms, whither are ye fled?’

5

One freezing morning Nancy had walked from Poplar to her shop. Dumped across the entrance was a pile of cardboard marked FRAGILE in red. She reached over with her keys, glancing down to keep her balance. That’s when she saw the finger poking out. She gasped, thinking it must be a body from a gangland war. She tapped the surface with her foot, wondering if the man had been cut up into bits, but the finger moved and a flap opened like a trap door and there was this man, his face black and hairy, his eyes hidden by goggles. She’d thought he must have been a fighter pilot from the First World War.

This man rolled onto his side, drawing up his knees. Then he felt his way up the door, using the handle to lift himself out of the cardboard… It was packaging for a fridge.

‘Am I in the way?’

‘Not at all, but you’re nearly in the road. Can’t you see?’

‘No.’

It was arctic and the man’s hands were a dirty blue. Cars whipped over the hump in the road, making them scrape and bang. Nancy said, ‘Won’t you warm up inside?’

‘May I?’

Mr Lawton used to say things like that. May I? She opened up and dragged the cardboard through to the back room. It wouldn’t feel right, throwing it out. When she came back he was standing inside, his hands on what Riley had called a figurine lamp — a woman with scarves all over and a light socket sticking out of her head. His fingers moved so gently building the thing in his mind, that it became beautiful.

‘I’m Mrs Riley.’

‘I’m Mr Johnson.’

Who would have believed it? Over the following months they became friends. He was her one secret from Riley And then he disappeared. In one sense it was for good, because a very different man eventually came back. He seemed frail and uncertain. He sat down with shaking arms.

‘What happened?’ asked Nancy anxiously.

‘I got my head kicked in.’ His goggles moved on a rumpled nose. ‘I can’t remember much of the present. This morning, last week… they’ve gone down the plughole.’

Nancy lit the gas fire, and she thought of the entertainment Uncle Bertie used to kick off when they were in Brighton. It was called ‘Silly Secrets’. Cheerily she said, ‘Shall we play a game?’

‘All right.’

‘You tell me a secret, and then I’ll tell you one.’ The idea was that people confessed to daft things they’d done. (Once, in a shop, Uncle Bertie had used a toilet, only to find it was part of a mock bathroom for sale.)

‘That’s not fair,’ said Mr Johnson. ‘I won’t remember and you will.’

‘I’ll tell no one.

Mr Johnson said, ‘I once had a son.’

Nancy covered her mouth. He leaned forward, vapour rising off him, his goggles full of condensation, and he talked about summers in Southport with the same longing that she had for Brighton. And Nancy waited, sensing that something awful had happened to his boy but he never said what. The next day Mr Johnson turned up and Nancy tipped out things she’d never said and thought she’d never say — how she’d met Riley the life she’d lost at Lawton’s, the children she’d never had.., the trial. And Mr Johnson listened, warming his grey-blue hands: a gentleman who would remember nothing.

Nancy glanced at the sputtering fire. On her lap was a plastic bag. She’d found it a couple of weeks ago when she went into the back room to pick up her shopping. It was full of notebooks, each neatly numbered on the front. They belonged to Mr Johnson, the gentleman who could remember nothing. Nancy had waited for him to come back, but he’d vanished in the mist, just like Riley on his way to Tottenham. She glanced towards the door… and reached into the bag. It was wrong, she knew, but ever since that barrister had died, the trial had returned. Sensations from that time had been prickling her like pins in a doll. The only way to numb the pain was to fill her mind with something else, and the puzzle book was full — she rooted around for number one. On the front was written ‘My Story’.

Her mouth was open and her hair tingled. This wasn’t right.

I call myself George.

She hadn’t known that. He was just Mr Johnson.

I’m a Harrogate boy a Yorkshire lad. There’s a little lane that runs by a bowling green and a tennis court of orange grit. On the other side are houses with mown lawns. At the end of the lane there’s a clump of trees and a fence with a gate. It seems that the sun is always shining here and the flowers are taller than me. Foxgloves, I think they’re called. But my earliest memory of this place is in the rain. My mother had made a canvas shelter for my pram.

Nancy snapped it shut. This was wrong. But she reached in and opened another number, wondering what had happened to Mr Johnson when he’d grown up.

I’d seen her quite a few times, and always at night. She stood beneath a street lamp, hands behind her back like Dixon of Dock Green. The most amazing thing was her white headdress. It was like a tent without guide ropes.

The doorbell sounded.

Nancy dropped the book, composed herself and presently sold a mirror to Mr Prosser — a dealer in quality second-hand. He was always mooching around, asking how her man found such good stuff. She told him nothing. When he’d gone she tied a knot in Mr Johnson’s bag and pushed it into the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet.

But that left her exposed. She fell back in her seat, eyes clenched and hands over her ears. In that inner darkness, she sensed the patient ‘attendance’ of Mr Wyecliffe. It was a word he’d often used. She’d thought he was a sorcerer. How else did he pull off the impossible?

After being charged, Riley was hauled before a porky magistrate with a runny nose, who, between sneezes, sent her man to Wormwood Scrubs on remand. But Mr Wyecliffe got him out within a week. No special keys or dodgy chains. ‘Just words, well used, ma’am,’ he said, waving a grey handkerchief. ‘All that requires my attendance now is the trial.’ He sniffed and blinked, as if he hadn’t worked out how to do it yet.

The solicitor had brought Riley home and stayed for a ‘preliminary conference’. They sat in the living room, drinking Uncle Bertie’s ‘poison’. Riley was humiliated and speechless and couldn’t look in Nancy’s direction. He was quaking.

‘We’ll use counsel,’ said Mr Wyecliffe significantly to break the silence. ‘I’ll get the best.’

‘I know who I want.’ It was the first thing Riley had said. He glanced at a spot near Nancy’s feet and asked for some sandwiches.

When she came back, Mr Wyecliffe was making notes, and Riley appeared deathly calm. The shaking had stopped. He spoke under his breath while the solicitor stuffed his face as if he’d had no breakfast. Her man stared at the carpet and said, ‘How the hell am I to know what the tenants get up to? I’m hardly ever over there. Ask the wife.’

‘I will, in due course,’ promised Mr Wyecliffe. ‘In the meantime, might I have another sandwich?’

Nancy gave him hers.

It turned out the tenants had all been in arrears. Eventually Riley had shown them the door. That’s why they’d set him up, he said.

Mr Wyecliffe nodded slowly stubbing the crumbs on his knee. Licking his fingers, he said, ‘But what of Bradshaw? He’s your real problem.’

‘I’ve thrown his girls onto the street. Now he’s trying to make me pay.’

‘That’s a guess.’

‘Why else would he lie?’

‘Bradshaw is of good character.’

‘So am I.’

‘Indeed.’ After a moment, as if he’d just finished reading the instructions that had come with a gadget from Japan, Mr Wyecliffe said, ‘Okey-dokey Bradshaw is the pimp.’

Nancy had hated the sound of that p-word. It had been used in her own living room, leaving a heavy stain on the air that she couldn’t wipe away It was still there, even though Riley had been acquitted, even though all those terrible people had been lying. Something ghastly had entered her home. It was like waking to a burglary. The tidying up made no difference.

Thoughtfully Mr Wyecliffe said, ‘The claptrap about the Pieman allows them to say very little about you, makes the story shorter, easier for three of them to learn by heart’ — he looked at his empty plate, his features tangled up in his beard — ‘but counsel will not advance a guess at trial.’

Riley leaned back, genuinely calm now — Nancy could tell. ‘Who said anything about guesses?’

Mr Wyecliffe put his papers in his tatty briefcase and said, ‘I ought to observe that no one can save you from the truth or a lie that hangs together. It is a sad fact of life, but the two are often interchangeable.’

‘Just get me Glendinning.’

Nancy held back the tears; and her man watched her, approving of the struggle, relieved by it.

Waiting for the day of the trial was awful, if only because of the unimaginable shame. At such times, your mum and dad were meant to rally round, but Nancy’s had drawn the blinds good and proper — they’d never liked her man, never. And Riley had no one. Even Mr Lawton went peculiar. He’d always been one for having a good grumble first thing — about the downturn and closures — but he went quiet, all stern, and turned his big tweedy back on her when he had to speak. Everyone had crossed to the other side of the road. One day she looked up and saw Babycham’s permed head against the frosted glass of the door. They hadn’t spoken for ages.

‘Look, Nancy’ she said, after checking the boss was out, ‘we’ve known each other since we were this high. Fair enough, we’re not as close as we used to be, but I don’t hold no grudges. We all make our own choices, and you’ve made yours. But still I owe it to you to speak plain. Why do you trust him?’

Nancy was knocked sideways. Not just because she’d implied, all brazen, that Riley was in the wrong It was that word, ‘trust’. Nancy had never quite clocked the obvious: her man was for saying he trusted her when, in fact, it was she who was trusting him.

‘Run for it, girl,’ Babycham said. ‘We’ll all rally round, honest. We’ve had a meeting.’

Confused, angry and feeling sort of cold and stripped, right down to her pants, Nancy gasped, ‘Clear off.’ Finding some breath, she added, ‘Riley always said you were full of wind and bubbles.’

When it grew dark Nancy locked up the shop and walked home along the towpath by Limehouse Cut, past barges and boats moored at the banks of the canal. On the way she found a brick for the herb bed. She dropped it on the pile, had a boiled egg and watched a programme on Liberian shipping regulations. After the news she went to bed and, dozing fitfully waited for Riley.

The room was pitch black when he climbed into bed.

‘Nancy?’ He waited, and whispered again. ‘Nancy?’

She didn’t so much as turn a hair. After a moment he reached over and, for minutes on end, he stroked her nose, her lips… each feature on her face, just like Mr Johnson had done with the figurine lamp. Then he shrank back as if he’d done something wrong.

It was often like this. When Riley had done a clearing he didn’t come home until after midnight — she didn’t know where he’d been, or what he’d done, and she didn’t care — but he’d come to bed with these trembling hands. No one had ever touched her so exquisitely (it was a word she’d heard a doctor use to describe intense pain, but when she’d looked it up in a dictionary, she’d thought of these secret moments).

Nancy fell asleep, savouring the aftermath of this mysterious, most secret affection. Beside her Riley started to moan, and downstairs Arnold was running as fast as his little legs would carry him.

6

‘You’ve received another letter from Mrs Glendinning,’ the Prior repeated.

Anselm had just finished his breakfast when he was called to the phone. The envelope was marked ‘PRIVATE and URGENT’, which prompted Sylvester — in a rare burst of competence — to summon the Prior, who’d recognised Elizabeth’s handwriting.

‘But who posted it?’ asked Anselm.

‘Another friend, I suppose,’ said the Prior. ‘Shall I read it out?’

Anselm glanced nervously at his watch. An adult life determined in its first half by court engagements and its second by bells had made Anselm (like many barristers and monks) slightly neurotic about time. ‘No thanks,’ he said. ‘Will you fax it through? I’ve got an appointment in Camberwell.’

The community superior led Anselm through baffling corridors that only an architect could have devised, past various photographs of the congregation’s personnel. Anselm noticed the alteration in headdress over the years, from a spectacular construct of starched linen to a simple veil. Entering a walled garden, Sister Barbara pointed towards a path flanked by chestnut trees. At its end, in a wheelchair, sat an elderly woman who wore a woollen hat remarkably similar to a cushion.

Like any sensible interrogator, Anselm had researched his witness in advance. From his initial telephone enquiry, with supplemental details from the superior, Anselm had learned a great deal. Sixty years ago, upon the outset of her religious life, Sister Dorothy had run a London hostel before being installed as matron at a private school in Carlisle. She had been very happy but her life was to typify the precedence of service over personal inclination. Following a short stint as a prison chaplain in Liverpool, she’d been sent to work as a nurse in Afghanistan. Seventeen years later she’d come home to have her wisdom teeth removed. She never went back to her mountain dispensary. Her one souvenir was an Afghan pakol, the hat that became her trademark.

Anselm approached her, his feet crunching the gravel.

As soon as he was within earshot, Sister Dorothy said, ‘I didn’t know she’d died until you called.’ Her voice was clear but slightly laboured. As Anselm sat on a bench, she added, ‘So you’re an old friend?’

‘Yes. We were in chambers together.’

‘Tell me, was she happy?’ She spoke with the aching concern of an old teacher.

‘Very much so.’

‘Successful?’

‘Oh yes.’

The nun smiled and sighed. Threads of shadow thrown by branches swung across her face. ‘Well, well, well,’ she sang quietly. Her skin had the transparent whiteness of old age, with a multitude of deep lines. A dint in the profile of her nose revealed a badly healed fracture, sustained (he’d been told) during a prison visit.

Anselm spoke of Elizabeth’s professional reputation, of her marriage and her son, while Sister Dorothy listened eagerly not wanting to miss a single detail. In due course, and adroitly Anselm observed, ‘And yet, after all those years together, I knew very little about her past.’

He waited, hoping. In fact, he prayed.

‘Did she ever show you the photograph?’ She spoke distantly one hand raised, as if she were pointing to a wall.

Anselm leaned forward, elbows on his knees. ‘I don’t think so.

‘The photograph of the family?’ continued Sister Dorothy surprised that her visitor was unsure of her meaning.

‘No,’ replied Anselm, trying not to sound too interested.

‘Well, well, well,’ sang Sister Dorothy to herself. She studied Anselm, like one about to break a confidence. ‘The photograph tells you everything… It’s all there in black and white… a happy family on a Sunday afternoon some time in the 1940s.’

The part of Anselm’s character that trusted in the dispensations of Providence made an exclamation of gratitude. He waited, though he was impatient to learn the history that Elizabeth had kept to herself.

‘On the right is her father,’ said Sister Dorothy Wrinkles crowded her eyes as she called up the portrait. A tall, thin man with a waxed moustache and shiny black hair. He wore wing collars every day of his adult life. A man fifty years out of his time.’ She threw Anselm a glance. ‘Did she tell you about him?’

‘Not in any detail,’ replied Anselm. In fact, Elizabeth had never mentioned him.

‘He was an unhappy insurance salesman based in Manchester. After he’d sold his quota of premiums he locked himself in the attic trying to invent an electronic smoke detector. Several times he nearly burnt the house down. He never gave up. He thought if he could only pull it off, the industry would name a policy after him.’

‘He didn’t succeed?’

‘No, he did not.’ She paused, looking towards a high wall covered in ivy. ‘But he made a fortune.’

Anselm pictured a man with the shade of Elizabeth’s face.

‘To the left is her mother,’ continued Sister Dorothy like a museum guide. A seamstress from Chorley She’s wearing a polka dot dress with enormous buttons. Hair like Maggie Thatcher. A happy house-proud woman whose only joke was that she’d like to invent a fire extinguisher.’

And Elizabeth?’ asked Anselm.

‘She is in the middle. A late and only child. A beaming girl of ten in ribbons and bows. It was an age, she once said, that seemed perfect in every way She was young enough to appreciate that she was a child, and old enough to consciously enjoy it.’ Sister Dorothy swung Anselm a glance. ‘That is the photograph of the Glendinning family.’

‘How did the inventor make his fortune?’ asked Anselm roguishly.

‘By dying,’ she replied.

Elizabeth was born when her mother was nearly fifty, explained Sister Dorothy Her father was already in his early sixties. It was a late match, and a contented one. They had found companionship after having long accepted that loneliness would take the greater portion of their days. Elizabeth’s coming was a boon and, like many booms, unforeseen. But the unforeseen was to lay its heaviest hand upon the child. The year after the portrait was taken, her father came down from the attic grumbling about a trip switch. He turned on a wireless, sipped a glass of milk, closed his eyes and promptly died — as if he’d blown the fuse box. The doctor said he’d reached a fine old age. The fellow might not have had a policy named after him, but he did take one out on his life: his nearest and dearest were amply provided for. A year later Elizabeth’s mother died from septicaemia arising from a trivial leg injury Her father, however, had taken out another, even larger, policy and Elizabeth, at fourteen, found herself without either parent but the beneficiary of a very healthy trusted income.

‘People are odd, aren’t they?’ observed Sister Dorothy shaking her head. ‘Elizabeth’s father had filled in all these forms, but he hadn’t made out a will. She had no legal guardian. And there were no relatives chomping at the bit. So the court had to get involved. In the end, it was a judge who sent Elizabeth in our direction.’

The congregation ran a boarding school in Carlisle. (Where, deduced Anselm, you were matron.) So Elizabeth became a pupil, but not without a period of considerable adjustment. The first years after the death of her parents were marked by rebelliousness and grief. She started coming to the dispensary when there was little if anything wrong with her. Headaches. Stomach aches. Splinters. But Elizabeth began talking to this young nun whose veil kept crashing into cabinets and doors —Sister Dorothy would never get used to the contraption.

‘But she did very well, in the end,’ she said proudly ‘When she went to university, I gave her The Following of Christ.’

In a curious way Anselm felt stumped. He couldn’t tell her —as he’d intended — that Elizabeth had cut a hole in its pages. At a stroke, everything to do with the trial had been closed down. He did not feel capable of revealing that the book, her gift, had been permanently damaged. A question left his mouth before he could admire its excellence. ‘When did you last see her?’

‘Forty years ago.’ Sister Dorothy spoke vaguely as if she were drifting towards sleep. She’d closed her eyes. Anselm watched for several minutes. Then he tiptoed away altogether sure that the nun in the brown pakol had had enough.

It was only when Anselm was trotting down the stairs to the Underground that he felt the entire interview had been incongruous — but he couldn’t reduce the insight to any particulars.

When he got back to Hoxton he found two sheets of paper outside his bedroom door. The first was the fax from Larkwood. The second was a message asking him to call Inspector Cartwright.

Anselm read the letter from Elizabeth by the light of a window.

Dear Anselm,

I would be very grateful if you would visit the following lady:

Mrs Irene Dixon

Flat 269

Percival Court

Shoreditch

Mrs Dixon may not know that I am dead, so please explain, if needs be. Thereafter, listen rather than speak. I suggest you arrive unannounced.

Farewell, Anselm. You have helped me more than you can know.

Warm regards,

Elizabeth

Anselm let his hand drop. This was the final letter, he was sure. He thought of Elizabeth the rich orphan who hadn’t quite gone, who wouldn’t let go, even in death. Subdued, he rang Inspector Cartwright.

‘You won’t believe this,’ she said, ‘but I’ve received a letter from Mrs Glendinning.’

They arranged to meet in half an hour. Feeling more and more like an ass in a bridle, Anselm set off on this next unforeseen errand. Perhaps it was the act of retracing his steps to the Underground that brought home another veiled truth: the old biddy in the woolly hat had taken him to the cleaners — but he didn’t know how, and he couldn’t guess why.

7

At breakfast, Nancy said that Prosser had been sniffing around again.

Riley looked up, put his tea down and went bonkers. He grabbed a plate and sent it to the wall, like a frisbee. The pieces went everywhere. Arnold tore from his wheel and Nancy ducked as if it were an air raid (as a teenager she’d hidden in the Underground while London got trashed by the Nazis).

‘I’m sick of him,’ shouted Riley His mouth curled like a boxer’s, and he huffed and puffed, pacing the ring in his head. ‘He’s always watching me, chewing that cigar.’

Riley looked for something else to throw, but Nancy had cleared the table.

‘I’ll speak to Wyecliffe,’ vowed Riley.

‘When?’ said Nancy dropping a cup. ‘What for?’

‘I’ll go tonight,’ he seethed. ‘And he’ll bang a writ on Prosser’s nose.

That sounds very legal, thought Nancy not quite knowing what it meant.

Buoyed up and punchy Riley set off for work, his boots crunching on the crockery.

When Nancy duly opened her shop that morning she went straight to the filing cabinet. She untied Mr Johnson’s plastic bag and pulled out the first volume that came to hand. She sat by the fire, aiming to read, to drive out the memory of that lawyer in his stuffy twilit room. But he was too strong. Nancy let the book drop on her lap. She could almost feel his breath and smell the nuts.

A few weeks after the ‘preliminary conference’ at the bungalow, Mr Wyecliffe sent Nancy a letter ‘requiring your kind attendance’.

She thought solicitors weren’t meant to have beards and yet his was like an old toilet brush. She hadn’t liked him. Not because he’d been hungry when he should have lost his appetite, and not even because of the grilling he’d dished out (he’d leaned across his desk, tugging at his hairy chin, not taking no for an answer, digging around in her private life: it was like he was after something, but wouldn’t say what). No, she didn’t like him because she’d said too much. Part of her had gone missing. The room had been dark, the windows jammed, and he’d just bitten his way through her life, as if it were another sandwich. And another thing: his eyes were too close together.

Mr Wyecliffe had said, for openers, ‘What you now tell me is completely confidential.’

‘Then how does it go in my statement?’

That knocked him one. He wasn’t used to women with minds of their own. But he explained himself. He was the professional. He needed to know everything. ‘Just imagine I’m doing a jigsaw out of sight. You’ll wonder why I pick up this bit or the other. Don’t think about the broader picture: leave that to me.’ Nancy supposed that that was why lawyers earned so much money —they could see things the rest of us couldn’t. And then Mr Wyecliffe got started in the middle of nowhere, and wouldn’t let go. ‘I suppose your husband goes out with the lads every now and then?’

‘Never. He stays at home. ‘All the time?’

‘Well, apart from work and that –’

‘Every evening?’

‘Yes, unless he’s doing overtime.’

‘Do you ever get unexpected phone calls from a strange man?’

‘Of course not.’ She folded her arms tight across her chest. ‘Why would I?’

‘Wanting to speak to your husband?’

‘No.’

‘Does Mr Riley make calls to anyone you don’t know?’

‘We’re husband and wife.’ Nancy had been getting more unsettled than cross, because the questions were like digs in the side, but she was proud to throw that one back. They were man and wife. Till death us do part. For better or for worse.

‘Is that no?’

‘Yes.’

Mr Wyecliffe nodded like her Uncle Bertie would after he’d checked the odds at Ladbrokes. ‘Just as I expected.’ He chewed a pencil, smiling at Nancy his eyes too deep in his head. Not a word had been written down.

‘So your husband does lots of overtime?’ ‘He works for his living, yes.’

‘Indeed. This overtime. Is it always on the same days?’

‘Not now, what with the downturn on the docks.’

‘Of course. But it’s frequent?’

‘We find out as and when. Mr Lawton’s been very lucky so yes, there’s always a lot to be done. The boss has to keep ahead of the game. And my husband’s always there, ready to help. He’s one of his best workers. Never missed a shift.’

‘I don’t doubt it. Any cash in hand?’

Nancy felt the coming of a blush. ‘No.’

Mr Wyecliffe swivelled the pencil, biting into the wood. He said, ‘Do you collect the rents with him?’

‘Why should I?’

‘Ever met the tenants?’

‘No.’

Once again, the solicitor looked like Uncle Bertie with the Racing Post. ‘Very sensible,’ he said. ‘Let ‘em rest in peace.

‘Exactly.’

Nancy wanted a breather, but Mr Wyecliffe seemed to have her trapped. He said, ‘How often does your husband visit the property?’

‘Well, I don’t know, once or twice a week, if anything needs doing. He does all the maintenance himself. Keeps the costs down.’

‘Very sensible. Just let me try some names.

Nancy thought she’d suffocate if he went on like this.

‘David?’

‘No.’

‘George?’

‘No.’

‘Bradshaw?’

‘No.’

Mr Wyecliffe looked at the pencil as though he was a film star with a cigar, and Nancy saw that the lead had snapped. He started chewing the dry end. ‘Is Mr Riley in debt to anyone?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Then why the overtime?’

‘We’d like a house to match yours.’

A noble objective that would, however, bring considerable disappointment.’

Suddenly the little man got up and opened the door. He returned and put a plump little hand on her shoulder, ‘Sorry, but the ventilation system is somewhat primitive.’ He looked at her in a funny way as if he were hungry again. ‘One more name, of a sort.’ Nancy closed her eyes. Quietly he asked, ‘Have you ever heard of the Pieman?’

Nancy gripped the sides of her head as though it might fall in two. ‘Never.’

‘Is Mr Riley frightened?’

Frightened? What a thing to have asked. Her man was scared of no one. A flash of heat spread across her chest, face and scalp — that was the menopause, telling her she’d never have a baby that it was too late. So the doctor had said. Strange even to her own hearing, she replied, ‘Yes.’

‘What of?’

Nancy didn’t want to say It sounded daft. If she’d been asked was her man angry, she’d have said, ‘Oh yes,’ and that would have been that. But this question had stirred a new kind of thinking deep inside, somewhere other than her head — it wasn’t really thinking; she didn’t know what it was, but it happened in her lungs, and lower down, in the stomach. ‘Well,’ she said, feeling weak, sheets of fresh sweat unfolding, ‘he was scared by the hunter in Bambi even though you never see him.’

Mr Wyecliffe nodded like the doctor, showing no surprise.

Nancy continued, blinded by salt and mortification, ‘And he doesn’t like the new queen in Snow White.’

Mr Wyecliffe kept nodding, his eyes closed. Then he asked, ‘What does he think of the little princess?’

And that was where Nancy went too far — without understanding why except in her guts. She replied, ‘He hates her.’ She’d never liked the h-word. It was hard and sharp and somehow dark.

The sweating had stopped and a chill had struck her. Nancy sat with her arms folded tight, feeling like she was in the altogether on the ice-rink at Hammersmith. These humiliating flushes could go on for years, apparently So the doctor said. Nancy reached for a hankie.

‘I don’t think we’ll be calling you as a witness.’ Mr Wyecliffe put his pencil down. And Nancy knew — because she wasn’t daft — that he’d never intended to call her in the first place.

The cars struck the bump and swept past Nancy’s door. Blinking uncertainly like she’d just landed, Nancy handled the book on her lap. It fell open naturally in the middle. A spill of coffee or tea had made the ink run and the paper was ribbed and sticky.

… and her hair was pulled back ever so tight. Like all female staff at the Bonnington, she had to wear a black dress with a white frilly pinafore. It made her look like a servant in The Forsyte Saga. I watched her walk down the corridor pushing a trolley of sheets. That was the first time I saw Emily. And I said to myself, ‘I shall marry this woman before the year is out.’ I eventually found the manager’s office. Sister Dorothy said he would be rude and she was right, but she’d also said keep your eye on his smile, which I did. He said, ‘Young man, all you have to do is carry bags, don’t speak unless you’re spoken to, and don’t loiter for a tip. This is London not New York.’ I was what an American businessman once called ‘the bell hop’ — presumably because I came running when I heard a ding from the reception desk.

Unfortunately Emily had no interest in me.

Nancy was forcefully present to herself now Eagerly she turned the page but it was stuck to the next few with something like jam.

and there he was lifted high in the air by a nurse. I said, ‘Oh my God, I’m sorry,’ because I thought I’d gone into the wrong theatre. But then I saw Emily on the bed. And then I realised that the baby in the air, on his way to the scales, was my son. I’d missed his birth by seconds. I don’t remember a sound, not a cry.

Nancy slowly closed the book here, at the point that most interested her. This had to be the son who would one day be lost, the boy who’d run along the pier at Southport. Out of respect to Mr Johnson, she would read no further, because in all their many conversations, he’d never told her what had happened.

I’m a dreadful woman, thought Nancy Mr Johnson had his own tragedy and yet she escaped from hers into his, as if his story wasn’t real.

8

George rose, picked up his remaining plastic bag and left Trespass Place. As he passed beneath the arch at the entrance he knew he’d never come back. The waiting was over.

Many people think that the homeless live on the whim of the moment. One minute they are there, in a doorway — as they have been for months — the next, they’re gone. In fact, these movements are decisions. Moving on is a kind of obedience —just like leaving home in the first place.

When George found Trespass Place all those years ago, Nino had said that life on the street is like walking round the world. ‘It’s a turning away; but it can become a turning back.’ George had instantly understood the first part, for his arrival beneath Blackfriars Bridge had been an attempt to flee a single conversation.

After the trial, George hardly left his armchair in the sitting room. He faced the window and the treetops of Mitcham. John was fourteen. Of late, he’d taken to roughing up his hair with gel. His skin was raw, as if he scrubbed his cheeks with a nail-brush. He kept coming into the room. He’d sit on different chairs as if he were trying to get a fresh angle on his father. He reminded George of those lifeguards at the swimming pool. They had a way of staring at people who might be in difficulty. They were always young and athletic and confident. John was a small lad, though, with thin arms and long fingers.

One day John was sitting on the rest of an armchair, knotting his fingers together. He was like a man preparing to jump. Countdown was on the television and a cheery presenter was adding up numbers faster than George could think. He felt John leaning towards him.

‘Dad, I believe everything you said in court.’

The local media had pulled George to pieces. The CPS was considering a prosecution — for some unspecified offence.

‘Thanks.’ It sounded trite, but his heart had banged against his chest with a kind of gladness.

‘You mustn’t blame yourself, Dad,’ said John. He messed his hair up even more, gathering confidence. ‘It doesn’t matter that Riley got off. He was just a dogsbody. The police always get hold of the ones that don’t matter… That’s not your fault.’

George allowed himself to look at his son. It was hard, because of the lad’s earnestness, the passion to save his father.

‘I wonder who the Pieman might be?’ asked John coldly.

The lad had been thinking hard, and he’d come to some conclusions. He’d decided who the real criminal was, the one the police hadn’t arrested. George looked back to the television as the scores were being read out. George, unthinking, said, ‘You’d have to ask Riley’

The remark must have landed like a pip in the mind’s soil, because the boy didn’t do anything for years.

When George had walked out of his own front door, he’d been turning away from that remark during Countdown. He’d also turned away from the ocean of memories that Emily evoked. But no sooner had he met Nino, than the old man set him on course to face them again — and not just in passing, but with all the detail he could summon to the pages of his notebooks. The turning away however, had been essential.

And now, with a similar kind of fortitude, he left Trespass Place, and ‘a royal scheme to bring down the…’ or something like that; Elizabeth had often used towering phrases to describe what they were doing. And he’d known why: she, like George, had never accepted that Riley could not be brought to court for the killing of John. All that — a trial and its aftermath — belonged at a still point on the surface of the earth. George moved on, a plastic bag swishing against his leg.

George must have been walking for about half an hour when he noticed he was heading south, way off his patch. He never went south. Mitcham lay down there. He wondered where he was going; and he thought again of Nino, and what the old man had said when they’d left the spike, the morning after the Pandora tale. ‘The street is the place of stories,’ he’d intoned, leaning on a wall by Camden Lock. ‘Stories of how you got here, and how you might leave.’ But he’d said something else —and it had frightened George: ‘There are stories of how you might stay’

George didn’t want that. All at once, his pace quickening, he wanted to tell the extraordinary story of a man whose turning away had brought him back to where he’d started from: the tale of a man who’d finally made it home.

9

‘You can leave everything behind,’ the Major said, ‘but it’ll cost you more than you’ve already paid.’

He’d come to the court off his own bat, or so it had seemed. He wore his cap as if he were on parade. For the first time, Riley noticed the old shine on the cloth, and the frayed lapels. The trial was about to begin. The witnesses were lined up. The barristers were dressed in all that black. The Major had drawn him into a tiny conference room. Guilt had been assumed, which cleared the air like disinfectant.

Riley played the fish. ‘Why should I do that?’

‘For yourself,’ he said, as if that were something worthwhile. And so that you can stop hurting everyone around you.’

Riley glanced over his shoulder. The conference room had large, misty windows from floor to ceiling. On the other side he could see Wyecliffe. He was like a man at prayer.

‘You can still turn around,’ the Major continued, full of entreaty. Anything else is an illusion. If you do, I’ll help you. I doubt if anyone else has the inclination.’

Riley laughed in a way that embarrassed him, because his voice squeaked. He saw the lips of the Major harden; the red indentation of a cornet mouthpiece blanched and vanished. He said, ‘I needed saving then, not now’

That was meant to strike a nerve, but it didn’t. The Major was more switched on than Riley had supposed.

‘We always need saving now,’ he said. ‘Just stop running.’

Riley shrank more from the repelling compassion than the idea. ‘I did. And I turned. Now I do the chasing.’

That hit the spot. The sight of the Major’s loathing thrilled him. But the man in uniform still wouldn’t give up — Riley could see it in his eyes — he was holding out for redeeming features; what Wyecliffe called ‘mitigating circumstances’ for why Riley did what he did. And Riley thought, There weren’t any But the Major wouldn’t have it. He refused to believe that anyone could be rotten at the core — that a man might even want it. But who else was to blame? Riley’s mother? Walter? None of them. Riley was sick to the back teeth of sympathy that gobbled up his identity. The making of allowances — it was daylight robbery. Of course, the family stuff could be used to his advantage in a court, if he’d only plead, if he’d only grovel. But hold it there —Riley felt pride burn the lining of some canal in his guts — I have self-respect. I’m me. In the end, I’m pretty much self-made. He suffered a spasm of sour excitement: this was the one thing no one could harm or take away: the core of himself, the inedible part. A bitter fruit had grown from the dirt of his choices. No one — and he meant no one — was going to give that back to his mother.

‘If you plead guilty,’ the Major said mechanically ‘I might be able to say something on your behalf.’

Riley glanced at his cap-badge motto, ‘Blood and Fire’, as he’d done when they’d first met. Back then, the Major’s compassion had made Riley panic. What had happened? He felt nothing now He simply observed the man’s hopes and intentions. On the face of it, he’d come to wangle a confession out of Riley urged on, no doubt, by Wyecliffe, who was standing outside, biting his nails. But the Major had his own reasons. He believed in the Lord of how things ought to be, of how they might yet turn out. Riley stood, bringing the interview to a close. He looked down from on high, with a remote, godless pity. The old soldier didn’t seem to hear the tune of his own march: you couldn’t save a man against his will.

Riley walked out of that tiny room and never saw the Major again. Within minutes, he was in the dock. It was only then, sitting in that box, flanked by guards, that he realised he’d made another choice; that he could still have put his hands up without blaming anyone but himself. It was an example of his actions being one step ahead of his thinking. He hadn’t given a second thought to pleading guilty because, in a feverish way he was looking forward to the trial, to what might happen. No one could possibly know it, but Riley had set up a reunion, and he didn’t want to miss it, even though for him, personally the court process was an unimaginable ordeal. He wanted to see what George would do when he saw Riley’s advocate.

Riley was not disappointed. The trial ended exactly as he had expected, but not in the way he’d foreseen. That David/George trick had been baffling.’ If Riley had been the Major, he’d have thanked God.

On the day of the acquittal, Riley pulled Nancy into the sitting room. He’d sobered up, so to speak. The fever had passed, and he saw with terrible clarity that Nancy had been an observer for years. And when it had been spelled out, she’d fled from the courtroom, just like George.

‘Do you trust me?’ He stood in front of her, holding her arms, as if she might slap him.

‘I do.’

Nancy’s eyes revealed a hard decision. Their light was gone, as if a screen had fallen to stop a smash-and-grab. She seemed older and cut off from him — giving away to Riley that they’d never really been attached.

I do. It was like getting married all over again. It was a second chance.

On the strength of that vow Riley put Quilling Road up for sale. Then he drove to a place he hadn’t seen since the age of eleven: Hornchurch Marshes. He walked down a path of flattened grass until he reached four rectangular ponds, laid out neatly like a window, with a frame made of bricks. It was known as the Four Lodges. His breath grew tight, hurting his chest. Nothing had changed. He wept uncontrollably looking at the men on stools and the clouds of midges.

10

Anselm passed through the ornamental gates of Gray’s Inn Gardens. Here, as a young man, he’d dreamed of standing in the Bailey of being an old hand, a grumpy legend in a tattered gown. Lying on the grass, he’d cross-examined imaginary foes, breaking them with imperial courtesy Phantom judges had looked on, mystified by such talent in one so young. Not much later, he’d found himself walking the same gravelled lanes, with their unexpected turns, thinking of a flickering space above a nave, and an attentive silence.

‘Good afternoon, Father,’ said Inspector Cartwright pleasantly.

Anselm looked to his right, quickly as if he’d been caught. She was sitting legs crossed on a bench eating crisps. On her lap was a manila envelope. Her ears still carried the weight of a child’s affection.

‘Have a look at these,’ she said. ‘Mrs Glendinning is either playing a game or she’s being very careful.’

Anselm sat beside her, one hand searching an upper pocket for his glasses. Relieved by the unaccustomed sharpness of things, he withdrew a bundle of papers from the packet. To leave him undisturbed, Inspector Cartwright wandered a short distance away.

In fact there were four bundles, each stapled into a kind of booklet. The first was entitled ‘Nancy’s Treasure’, the second ‘Riley’s Junk’. Both of them comprised annual returns, covering three successive years, as submitted to Companies House. Nothing had been flagged or underlined. Anselm flicked through the other two enclosures. Each was made up of photocopied receipts. Again they were labelled with the different business names; again the pages unmarked. He glanced at the dates, noting that each pamphlet spanned the same period framed by the formal accounts. Puzzled, he checked the envelope again and then said, ‘Isn’t there a covering letter?’

Inspector Cartwright licked salt off two fingers and said curtly ‘No.’ She dropped the crisps packet in a bin and came back to the bench. She modified her answer. ‘Well, there was a signed compliments slip. The explanation of the figures must be with George Bradshaw’

‘But why separate the evidence from its meaning?’ mused Anselm.

‘My guess is that Mrs Glendinning didn’t trust the person she asked to send it.’

‘Then why approach whoever it was in the first place?’

‘Maybe he or she — like you and I — was involved in the original trial.’

Anselm took off his glasses and returned to a universe that was faintly and agreeably blurred. ‘But why send the packet at all? Why not give the lot to George Bradshaw?’

Inspector Cartwright replied instantly: ‘Maybe she foresaw that a man with half a memory might get lost before he was found.’

That sounded rather biblical, a thought that might have slowed Anselm down, but he was suddenly close upon Elizabeth’s heels and his mind lurched forward. ‘Which means that the figures you’ve received should speak for themselves.’

‘I agree, but they don’t — at least not to me. I’ve seen the Companies House stuff already so I assume the trick is in the receipts.

Anselm turned the pages with an air of deep concentration. In fact, without his glasses, he couldn’t quite make out the numbers. He grimaced significantly.

‘Would you examine them?’ asked Inspector Cartwright, checking her watch. ‘You might have one of those visions.’

After she’d gone, Anselm wondered why he hadn’t told Inspector Cartwright about the letter he’d received himself. There had been nothing to suggest that the visit to Mrs Dixon should be confidential. But he knew that he should say nothing. Why? He took a pleasant path between the Georgian buildings where, as a student, he’d dreamed of greatness, and he came to the strange conclusion that he was entering Elizabeth’s mind; that he was beginning to sense her will, if not the reason for her calculations.

At High Holborn Anselm bumped into a nun who wasn’t looking where she was going. Struck by a sensible idea, he turned round and went back to Gray’s Inn. Not knowing quite where to place his enquiry, he went to the library situated on South Square. A short woman behind the main desk, it transpired, was used to helping those who were baffled.

‘The archives of the Inn are extensive,’ she said, ‘and not everything has been stored on computer. We’re working backwards.’

‘Of course,’ replied Anselm. ‘You should never start at the beginning.’

He’d meant to be agreeable, but it came out dreadfully Being wise in small respects, he said nothing more. And she, being perceptive, smiled.

‘The point is,’ she resumed, ‘material on Mrs Glendinning could be anywhere. If you leave me a contact number, I’ll dig around this afternoon. In the meantime, I suggest you have a browse through some back numbers of Graya.’

This publication covered various happenings in the lives of the Inn’s membership. It was an obvious place to look. Anselm wrote down the Hoxton fax number and then settled himself at a table adjacent to the relevant volumes. For over an hour he chased any reference to Elizabeth. He found a small piece upon her becoming a QC, and a longer biographical item following her appointment as a deputy High Court judge. All the background material coincided precisely with what Sister Dorothy had said: birth in Manchester, schooling in Carlisle, university at Durham.

Anselm, however, was disappointed, for he trusted his unruly intuitions. And they had been ruffled. Something wasn’t quite right. Standing in a phone booth outside the library, he rang the administration section of Elizabeth’s former university. He related the details gleaned from Graya. Almost simultaneous with his speaking, he heard a soft tapping followed by the bang of the return key and then a pause.

‘Sorry,’ said a man evenly ‘No one called Elizabeth Glendinning attended the university between those dates.’ The tapping began again. ‘In fact, we’ve never had a student by that name.

Anselm crossed Gray’s Inn Square as if Father Andrew were by his side. Find the child who grew up to wear a gown that was too heavy f or her shoulders.

Neither of them had considered switched identities, or a burned history.

11

The closer George came to Mitcham, the heavier his body became. He pushed himself along his own street, past the lit windows of Aspen Bank. The televisions were on and the curtains were drawn against evening. Opposite George’s home, across a patch of grass in shadow, was a children’s play area. A low fence and a tiny gate gave it a sense of shape and importance. George sat on a merry-go-round, one leg trailing on the asphalt. He watched Number 37 as though it weren’t really there; as though it might vanish if touched. Emily was upstairs. George could see her shadow, thrown large across the chimney-breast wall. She was moving about quickly.

A quite extraordinary stillness settled upon him. It was a solemn moment — one he would like to have shared with Nino: his life on the street was about to end; he’d walked around the world and made it back to his point of departure. With a shove of one foot, the merry-go-round began to spin, wobbling gently on its axle. George saw his home, the trees, the distant tower blocks, the lights on Aspen Bank and then his home again. Round and round he went, slowly building up the courage to cross the patch of grass and the empty street.

The light upstairs went off.

The light downstairs came on.

George dragged his shoe as a brake and the merry-go-round clinked to a halt.

The front door of Number 37 opened and Emily stepped onto the garden path. She walked a few steps, threading a handbag along one arm. Her hair was different, but the movements of her body its tiny hesitations, were the same.

George stood up and quietly cried, ‘Emily’ He couldn’t get his mouth and lungs to work. He was spent. He could only lift and drop his feet.

Suddenly the light from the open door was blocked. A large man appeared, jangling a set of keys. He angled them to the light, to find the one he was after.

‘Have you got everything?’ he said wryly.

Emily nodded. She was looking up at the stars.

George couldn’t stop his legs. His eyes swam and his hands were joined. He was still in shadow and about to enter the pale orange light.

The door banged shut and the big man placed a heavy arm around Emily His keys jingled again and two headlights flashed. George stepped off the grass but veered aside with a groan. He tripped on a paving stone but kept his balance, heading back along Aspen Bank — the way he’d come, a few minutes earlier, and the way he’d gone a few years before.

An engine coughed and tyres began to turn. A few moments later they drove slowly past him and for an instant George saw his wife. She was straining forward in the passenger seat, her face framed in the wing mirror. But he couldn’t read the expression because the car moved on, gathering speed. He watched the indicator blink at the end of the road and then he was alone.

Where do I go now? he thought. Nino had said nothing about this sort of thing.

12

All those years ago, Mr Wyecliffe had called to tell her the good news.

‘We’ve won,’ he exclaimed, and his beard scratched against the receiver.

Feeling sick, she waited on the doorstep for her man. When he arrived, he wasn’t smiling and he said nothing about how the case against him had fallen to bits. He just pulled her into the sitting room and asked her if she trusted him. Staring back, she said, ‘I do,’ with all her soul and with all her might, and he quickly kissed her on the cheek, as if there were people waiting to clap. Then he drove off.

Riley put Quilling Road on the market. He decorated the bungalow He quit his job. Within the week, Mr Wyecliffe was in the sitting room dishing out advice over a spam fritter: ‘You might give constructive dismissal a run.

Riley did. He took Mr Lawton to court for sacking him. It was another triumph and the company had to pay him thousands. Nancy never got her head around that one, but Mr Wyecliffe knew his onions. No one seemed to realise that this second victory was Nancy’s loss. She could hardly stay on as Mr Lawton’s bookkeeper. She handed in her notice. Mr Wyecliffe deemed it ‘prudent but outside the compass of economic redress’.

With all that money her man bought a shack on a bed of crushed cinders opposite a crummy fish and chip shop.

‘What do you want that for?’ asked Nancy.

‘We’re going into business,’ said Riley as if they were emigrating. He was edgy. It was as though he were destroying everything behind him.., except for Nancy He didn’t even ask her what she wanted. She was part of him, like his hands or feet. They were man and wife.

As for Riley he bought a big van without windows. He lined it with thick plywood — floor, roof and sides — and he put up shelves and straps. He put an advert in the local papers offering to clear houses. And he made good. In fact, two years on he’d had to rent some garages for storage. If you came with a voucher from the Salvation Army you could take what you liked. He was a good man, was Riley in his own way.

So that was where all the pieces landed after her man came back from the Old Bailey Day in, day out, Nancy sat by a gas fire, working her way through a bumper book of puzzles. It was a long way from the banter with Babycham at Lawton’s. That was when she’d started thinking of a house by the sea in Brighton, going back to the place of childhood holidays on the pier, back to the bright lights of the Palace, to the magicians and the rousing bands. But her man wouldn’t hear of it. They had a new life: Riley on the road, and Nancy in the shop. He had to keep moving, and she had to keep still. If this is what it means to win a trial, she often thought, I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose.

A few months later, feeling guilty but resolved, Nancy bought Stallone, her first hamster: guilty because she was satisfying an ache in her heart; resolved because Riley couldn’t heal the injury. He had, after all, caused it. As she stood at the counter, with her new friend, a cage and a bag of dried corn, she didn’t even feel humiliated. On the contrary, she almost trembled with excitement, because something so small, so unnoticed, was going to receive the simplicity of her affection. The complex stuff would go to her man.

The trouble was, Riley was no fool. He sensed the division of Nancy’s warmth. And he was jealous… jealous of a hamster. Nancy would have enjoyed being the nub of competition if she hadn’t known, deep down, that the situation was pitiful. It was also, in practice, distressing because unfortunately hamsters don’t last that long. (Stallone made it to three, but Mad Max and Bruce dropped tools at two and a half.) And you can’t let on that you’re grieving, not without looking a fool. Pretending she felt nothing, she’d attend to the burial and then pop down to the pet shop for another one. It was unseemly. But there was nothing else to be done.

Riley watched the hamsters come and go without saying anything — except once.

After Nancy found Bruce on his side, she said wistfully ‘Aww. Where’ve you gone?’

‘Nowhere,’ said Riley from a rocking chair in the next room. ‘What do you mean?’ said Nancy sharply She didn’t like this kind of talk.

‘We came from nowhere, out of nothing, and we end up nowhere, back to nothing again,’ he replied, like an old-timer whittling wood, ‘and in between we’re alive.’

Nancy glanced at Bruce, wanting him to survive in another place… along with Uncle Bertie, her mum and dad, everyone she loved… even though none of them had been on speaking terms.

‘What’s the point?’ asked Riley quietly.

There was an odd excitement about him, and Nancy wondered what he could do — what anyone might do — if it were true, if you didn’t have any beliefs that made sense of being alive (not necessarily the whole package, of course, but at least the wrapping). But that was Riley He didn’t really mean it. He said one thing and did another. He loved Nancy — though he’d never said it, though he couldn’t show it.

Riley stomped off to work and Nancy went and bought Arnold. Thinking of her man, she said (not for the first time), ‘How did he end up like that?’ But she asked the question mechanically without any real interest in the answer. It wasn’t important to her. If there were a book called The Secret to Graham Riley, she wouldn’t have bought it. The contents would have nothing to do with why she actually loved him.

And why did she love him? There weren’t answers to questions like that. If there’d been a list of ‘reasons’, Riley’s conduct would have torn it up years ago. Lists were for the likes of Mr Wyecliffe. Ultimately nothing could explain why his constant testing of Nancy’s attachment had opened her heart rather than closed it. It was very simple: what she saw she loved. Babycham hadn’t been able to understand her —and she’d said so (she’d always spoken her mind). Sitting in the Admiral on a Friday night, at one of their last gatherings as a group, Nancy had struggled to find the words, fiddling with her glass. She’d blushed and a slot machine went ding. Finally she’d said that to see Riley as Nancy saw him, you needed Nancy’s eyes.

13

Anselm walked from Hoxton to Shoreditch, and to a tower whose hotchpotch of lit windows rose like Braille against the night sky Here and there, laundry dangled across a balcony The lifts were out of order, so Anselm trod cautiously up a concrete stairwell, past confessions of love and hate, persuaded that the whole damp edifice was being sucked into the ground.

Mrs Dixon peered above a door chain. She was stooped and suspicious, squinting through large glasses. ‘Are you from the Council?’

‘No,’ replied Anselm gently ‘I’m a friend of Mrs Glendinning.’

The door closed, and the latch rattled and slid. It opened again, letting loose the sweet and sour of meals on wheels.

‘When’s she coming back?’ said Mrs Dixon anxiously ‘I’ve missed her … The stories, the cakes and all that …’

Mrs Dixon fell back into an armchair before a crowded coffee table. A dinner plate with swirls of gravy lay in the centre. A button nose and pink cheeks suggested a rag doll. Her hair was curled and faintly blue.

Anselm said, ‘I’m here to tell you that Mrs Glendinning won’t be coming any more. I’m very sorry.

Mrs Dixon lined up her knife and fork. ‘She’s dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘Her heart?’

‘Yes.’

Anselm sat on a wicker stool. Unsuccessfully he tried to picture the exchange of confidences. Glancing around, he noticed there were no pictures or clocks, no postcards propped on the mantelpiece. Streaks of Polyfilla split the ceiling like forked lightning dried out. A settee from a missing three-piece stood adjacent to the coffee table. Elizabeth must have sat there, relating what the consultant had said, before going home to gin-and-it with Charles and Nicholas.

While he was half-French, the part of Anselm that was English emerged forcefully in moments of strong emotion. ‘Can I make you a cup of tea?’ he said warmly.

Mrs Dixon shook her head. Her mouth worked and she rearranged a salt cellar, a napkin ring and a side plate. ‘She was my friend, you know’

Her face crimped with emotion, as if there was something she wanted to say. Finally she blurted out, ‘I’d been here for so long on my own and then she came along out of nowhere.’

‘When did you first meet?’ he asked ingenuously.

‘Just over a year ago,’ she replied, finding a hankie in a sleeve. ‘I’d been on to the Council about being lonely you know. But it feels like I’d known her all my life.’ She became fervent. ‘Do you know what I mean?’

‘Yes.’ He looked across at Mrs Dixon, remote behind her table, eyes tightly closed with a tissue at her mouth. Her hand dropped and a lip twitched. She coughed. ‘Did Elizabeth tell you about me?’

‘No,’ admitted Anselm. ‘She simply asked me to come here if she died.’

‘Wasn’t there any other message?’

One of her legs began to bounce on its toes. Anselm watched it, and he frowned.

‘Didn’t she … say anything about my lad?’ Her eyes fixed on him.

‘Who?’ asked Anselm gently.

‘My son.’ Mrs Dixon began to shuffle forward, her hands fidgeting. ‘He went missing years ago, as a boy and Elizabeth said she might be able to find him, what with all her contacts and all that … I’ve never known what became of him … He was a good boy you know …’ The desperation had changed her face. She was someone entirely different. Her voice became metallic. ‘Did she leave a message for me?’

Anselm moved to the sofa, within reach of this frightened, vulnerable mother. ‘In a way yes.’ He spoke quietly ‘Elizabeth asked me to listen to you.’

‘What?’

‘Elizabeth thought you might like to talk to me,’ he replied gently.

‘But I don’t have anything else to say’ said Mrs Dixon, shrinking back in her chair. Confusion and caution changed her features once more. ‘Has she told you anything?’

Anselm didn’t reply He searched her face, willing her to release what she was holding back.

‘Did she tell you?’ Mrs Dixon’s voice quaked and rose.

The lawyer in Anselm would have done anything to discover what Elizabeth might have told him, but something like mercy made him say ‘I know nothing. But you can tell me anything in complete confidence.’

Mrs Dixon looked as if she had been manacled. With sudden dignity, she said, ‘Would you go now, please, I’m all upset. I never thought she’d not come back and I’m too old for this … Look, just go, go …’

Anselm explained that she had nothing to fear; that he would leave immediately and never come back; that he’d write his telephone number down, in case she changed her mind.

‘After I’ve gone, please remember, I was sent by a friend — yours and mine.’

In the hallway Anselm paused before a creased picture in a frame painted gold. It was one of those nineteenth-century images found in sacristies and second-hand shops: a man with beautifully sculpted muscles bearing the cross of Christ, his head raised high, to something dark and wonderful in the watching clouds.

‘Simon of Cyrene,’ said Mrs Dixon. Her composure was still fragile. ‘It was my mother’s.’ As Anselm stepped away she said, ‘Ask the Council to send someone else, will you?’

14

Riley sped along Commercial Road, up Houndsditch and into the City. He parked in a loading bay on Cheapside, near Wyecliffe and Co.

‘How very nice to see you,’ said the solicitor, stretching a moist hand over columns of paper. His face was dark and grey and hairy; his eyes glittered. It had been years since Riley had entered this room, but Mr Wyecliffe seemed to be expecting him. ‘Do take a seat. How can I help you?’ He was a silhouette against a jammed sash window Like the Four Lodges, nothing had changed. Not even the air. It was like a warm tomb, but Riley was shivering.

‘Someone’s after me,’ he blurted out.

‘I often have the very same sensation.’ He picked up a glass ball with a log cabin and some reindeer inside. He shook it and snow began to fall.

‘I’m serious,’ snapped Riley.

‘So am I,’ Wyecliffe intoned, leaning forward, his chin resting on stubby fingers. ‘Tell me what brought you back to this worrisome place.’

That was Wyecliffe. He referred to things but never said them. Riley had last come here when Cartwright was trying to pin the death of John Bradshaw on him. He’d been sick with fear.

A guy called Prosser keeps hanging round Nancy asking questions.’

‘First name?’

‘Guy.’

Mr Wyecliffe scraped his moustache along one finger. ‘So what?’

‘So what?’ breathed Riley ‘He wants to know where I get my stuff from, as if the business wasn’t clean.’

‘Is it?’

‘Completely.’

‘Well then,’ said Mr Wyecliffe reassuringly ‘there’s nothing to worry about.’ He paused. ‘Mr Riley we’ve known each other a very long time. Just hand over the other pieces, I’ll look after the larger picture.’

‘Someone’s trying to scare me,’ he whimpered.

‘In what way?’

‘I received a letter.’

‘Saying what?’

‘Nothing.’ Riley couldn’t say any more, but he needed help. ‘It was just a photograph.’

‘Of whom?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Riley his voice rising. ‘I thought it might have been Prosser, that’s all.’

‘Most unlikely’ observed Mr Wyecliffe confidently ‘Someone clever enough to let a photograph speak for itself doesn’t blow their cover by asking stupid questions.’

Pushed by fear, Riley almost let slip what he’d held back for most of his life. ‘I just want to know if you can stop someone digging around.’

‘That rather depends,’ said Mr Wyecliffe. One of his hands covered the glass ball. ‘Who else might be handling the shovel, so to speak?’

‘I don’t know,’ barked Riley He’d asked himself day and night. If it wasn’t Prosser, there was no one. John Bradshaw had come with a question and a promise, but he never got an answer. Riley said, ‘There’s no one alive that I can think of.’

‘Anyone dead?’ The lawyer shook the globe.

Riley held his breath, feeling heat descend like a crown.

‘Don’t play around with me, Wyecliffe.’

‘I’ve never been more serious.’

Riley’s temples began to throb. ‘The dead?’

‘Yes.’

Riley couldn’t think straight. Only the living could reach him. He jerked his head, as though to shake off some flies.

‘Very well,’ said Mr Wyecliffe, with a long sigh of disappointment. ‘If you don’t have any more names — likely or otherwise — I cannot act. You’ll have to wait and see what they do with what they know.’

‘They?’

A figure of speech,’ replied the lawyer. Hooking his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets, he added, ‘That said, perhaps your correspondent has primed several people to act on his or her behalf.’ He examined Riley with something between pity and wonder. ‘You know, everything always comes down to facts.’

‘Facts?’ The change in subject threw Riley off balance.

‘Yes. Those known and those not known.’ Mr Wyecliffe waved his palms over the desk as if he were incanting a spell. ‘We lawyers assemble the known ones for the jury. You’d be surprised how many different pictures a clever hand can make out of the same pieces’ — he chuckled at the thought — ‘and if it were a game, I’d say that was value for money But after forty years in the courts, let me tell you something.’ He was no longer merry and the lights seemed to go dim. ‘No one can change the shape of a fact that makes sense on its own. It’s like a photograph.’

Riley tugged at his top button. Wyecliffe hadn’t changed subject at all.

‘Tell me the name of the man in the picture,’ said the lawyer soothingly.

‘I never said it was a man.’

‘Quite right.’ He nodded a compliment.

‘If I tell you, can you help?’

The scratching began again, high on his hairy cheek. He sighed and whispered, ‘That rather depends.’

Riley kicked back his chair and yanked at the door. Everything always ‘depended’. Wyecliffe had been like that last time, hinting and sighing and never looking surprised.

On Cheapside, Riley found his van clamped. In a frenzy he kicked the huge yellow bracket and tore the notice off the windscreen. He nearly cried. Someone was after him, and he couldn’t get away. Then, in a moment of sickening calm, the obvious hit Riley like a backhander: whoever it was already knew what John Bradshaw had wanted to know.

15

George wasn’t sure, but he probably followed the exact route back to the river that he’d taken when he’d first left Mitcham. As he walked, Nino’s story about right and wrong came to mind. Elizabeth had loved the ending, but George had never been able to catch the beginning. And now, after she’d gone, it had popped to the surface.

‘I’ve had a very odd dream,’ Nino said, while they sat on a bench near Marble Arch. ‘I was standing on a road between heaven and hell writing parking tickets. A reporter came along. “What are this lot waiting for?” I asked. “Nowt,” he replied. “They can’t go to heaven because they didn’t do anything good, and they can’t go to hell because they didn’t do anything bad. Hardly a scoop, but it’s still a good story.” He showed me the headline on his pad: “They lived without praise or blame.”’

Nino didn’t say anything else.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ asked George.

Nino became resolute, as if he had been quizzed about the value of double yellow lines. ‘Don’t be lukewarm, old friend. That’s the only route to mercy or reward.’

George had told Elizabeth, and she’d written it down, asking him to repeat every word.

But to what end? Where was she now? And where was he?

George crossed Blackfriars Bridge with a glance towards Trespass Place. On the north bank of the Thames he turned east, following the road to Smithfield and Tower Hill — the route to the Isle of Dogs, and a wasteland of padlocks and chicken wire. The river flowed oily and magnificent on his right; traffic swept along to his left. George’s mind tracked back to the night he’d pulled open a wrought-iron gate at three in the morning. He’d given no thought to praise or blame.

Three made-up girls stood shivering on the other side.

‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘I’ve a kettle and a toaster.’

He followed them down the alley to the door he’d left ajar, looking at their bare legs, the blue veins and the goose pimples. This was late November, the month of biting rain and short days, the month when shop fronts twinkled with the approach of Christmas. George made cocoa. He didn’t tell them that all the beds were taken, that they’d have to leave.

Let them have the length of a hot drink, he thought, it’s not much. George left them so he could make the usual telephone calls. Every project was full, although the Open Door in Fulham could see them at half eight: that was five hours away; five hours to lose heart. George had learned long ago that with some kids you only got one chance to offer them a hand, and even then they didn’t take it. But some did — that’s what brought him to the gate night after night: some did. While waiting for the toast to pop up, George overheard the first name: Riley and then he caught the second: the Pieman. When he appeared around the corner they stopped talking. He said, ‘After this lot, you’ll have to move on.’ There was no protest.

He followed them back towards the gate. Their shoes clattered on the flags like dropped marbles and George felt — as he’d often done — like an accomplice to murder. One of them — the youngest — had a tattoo of a dragon above one ear. Her head was shaved. The three girls must have been a good fifty yards up the pavement when George came running after them.

‘If you want to fight back, I’ll help you.’

Two of them stared; the other laughed. They backed away shrouded by rain.

That should have been the end of it. But a week or so later they’d returned to the gate, again at God knows what hour, wanting to know what he’d meant. George stood on one side, they on the other, separated by bars. There was so much that did not need to be said: about who they were, what they did, even the where, when and how: everything, really except for the why — those impossibly intimate histories that would not be reduced to a common badge.

George said through the bars, ‘What happened at the Open Door?’

‘Getting away is one thing,’ said the one with the dragon, ignoring the question. ‘But you said we could fight.’

He turned the lock and yanked back the gate.

George made more cocoa for Anji, Lisa and Beverly.

‘I believe you,’ he said.

About what?’ asked Anji. She spoke for the others; she was the eldest, a kind of leader at nineteen.

George saw the resentment in their eyes and their obstinate vulnerability. ‘I not only understand,’ he said heavily — for he knew this look; he’d felt the same once — ‘I’ll do something about it.’

Without invitation they started talking about Riley fighting one another for the right to give details of his appearance and habits. George listened with glazed eyes. This man, when a boy had been a kind of brother to him. In the years since, he’d often wondered if Riley was one of those for whom the helping hand had come too late, or if he’d turned away No doubt it was this heavy reminiscing that made George slow on the uptake. When the three girls stared at George, drained and expectant, he said, ‘I’ll call the police tomorrow.’

‘Police?’ Beverly asked, her mouth open, like that of her dragon.

‘Yes.’

‘Us?’

‘Yes.’

And then George understood what had brought them back. ‘Hang on,’ he said in disbelief, ‘you didn’t think I was offering to whack him over the head?’

The three conspirators threw glances at one another. Unmasked, they appeared younger still, and more awkward. Lisa stood, putting on her bomber jacket. ‘We fight back by filling in a complaint form?’

‘No. By taking Riley to court.’

‘That’s easily said. We’d pay and it would cost you nothing.’ Anji followed Lisa to the door while Beverly still slouching, looked George right in the eye. ‘They’d tear us to pieces.’

If precision matters, this was the moment when George lost his senses, when two teenagers stood at the door and a third was about to pull away ‘Yes. But they can’t do that to me.’

‘What’s it got to do with you?’

George wasn’t going to answer that question. ‘If I support what you say’ he persisted, ‘Riley will be convicted. There’s nothing they can throw at me. Nothing.’

‘What will it cost you, then?’

‘If it goes wrong, my job.’

‘Why do it?’

Again, he sidestepped the question. ‘It can’t go wrong.’

The next day George woke up profoundly grateful that Beverly had joined her pals at the door. But a week later — again at three or so in the morning — the buzzer had torn George out of a deep slumber. It had been a bad night, with a punch-up over queue-jumping He stumbled angrily to the gate with such a weight upon his eyes that he could barely see. He heard Anji’s voice:

‘We’ll risk it, if you will.’

In a stupor, George leaned his head on the bars. The wisdom of these kids, he thought. They trust only the person whose outlay matches theirs. The gate swung open for the last time; and George made more cocoa and toast.

‘If I do this,’ he said cautiously ‘will you go to the Open Door?’ They all shook on it while George’s gaze rested upon a tiger’s head that snarled behind Beverly’s other ear. It hadn’t been there last time.

Funnily enough, it was the tiger and the dragon who fled on the day of the trial. Anji and Lisa kept their side of the bargain. And then George was called. If he’d even sensed what might be waiting for him in the courtroom, he’d have joined Beverly on the pavement. In the corridor, Jennifer Cartwright grabbed his arm. ‘Where the hell are you going?’

‘Home.’

‘Where?’

‘Back home.’

‘Why?’

He didn’t reply.

‘Two girls have just had their heads kicked in.’ She was seething. ‘You can’t go home.’

George took the bus to Mitcham knowing that Anji, Lisa and Beverly wouldn’t be going to an open door in Fulham. That was George’s fault. In the long run, she’d been right, that policewoman.

Much later George had written in his notebook, ‘Who’d have thought that a question about my grandfather would have set Riley free?’ And it was only then that George realised that his downfall hadn’t begun at the night shelter’s gate, when he was a man, but with a secret, discovered when he was a boy.

And now, walking by the Thames, George asked himself where lay the praise and blame? That was a tricky one, because things couldn’t have been any different. Mercy or reward? Well, that was trickier still.

George followed the cobbled lane that ran between the warehouses and the hoists. He ducked through the mesh wiring onto a quilt of broken brick. A bitter wind swung off the Thames, pulling at his hair and stinging his nose. He stood upon Lawton’s Wharf, his long walk ended. He’d been homeless without knowing where he was going, but now he’d arrived — at the place he’d visited more frequently than any other. He spied a ladder built into the dock wall. He took off the bright new trainers he’d been given on Old Paradise Street and laid them to one side. Slowly he lowered himself into the river. His clothes gathered weight, and the cold clasped his legs and stomach. A painful thought passed across his mind: for Emily he was already dead.

16

Anselm went to bed with the accounts and receipts that had been sent to Inspector Cartwright. Even with his glasses on, he couldn’t make head or tail of a single column (at the Bar, he’d steered clear of cases that had numbers in them), so he put the documents on the floor and gave his attention to something more promising: a cornucopia of intractable problems. A lawyer’s habits made him divide them into two groups.

First, why had Elizabeth sent him to see Mrs Dixon without any clue as to what she might say? What was the point of leaving him powerless, and her powerful — in the sense that she could refuse to talk, which is precisely what happened? Why take another risk that could only harm her prospects of success — for just as George Bradshaw (predictably) had gone missing, so Mrs Dixon (not surprisingly) had refused to talk about her missing son. The only answer Anselm could muster was this: at the heart of Elizabeth’s bid to make good the past was a complete respect for the free choices of the other actors. There would be no cajoling, no forced outcomes.

The next group of problems was, for Anselm, the most intriguing. How did this second mission connect with the first?

What was the link between the missing boy and the bid to bring Riley back to court? While listening to Mrs Dixon, Anselm had noted the vowels resistant to life in the South; the northern intonation in the word ‘cake’ had survived completely intact. It had shone like a tanner in a heap of decimal currency. Who, then, was the missing lad? He’d been a good boy a good son. Reviewing the cornucopia as a whole, Anselm came to a sensible though uncomfortable conclusion: both of the matters that had been entrusted to him by Elizabeth were now well on the way to monumental failure.

Success, however, had come Anselm’s way earlier that evening, albeit from another direction. He had, of course, begun looking into Elizabeth’s past, while she had only expected him to move forward on her behalf. And initial results were interesting.

After leaving Mrs Dixon, Anselm paid a visit to Trespass Place, hoping that George Bradshaw had returned to his patch, but it was silent and bare; so, discouraged, he went back to Hoxton, where he found a bundle of faxed documents from Gray’s Inn. He leafed through them while his shepherd’s pie revolved in the microwave. The librarian had organised, in reverse order, various notices covering legal responsibilities assumed by Elizabeth. It was only when Anselm reached the final sheet that he appreciated his earlier, decisive mistake. It was obvious why this particular Glendinning hadn’t gone to Durham University. Looking down, he read again the list of names. It was a register of those called to the Bar by the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn on the fifteenth day of October nineteen hundred and fifty. The librarian had marked the relevant entry: Elizabeth Steadman.

Glendinning was, of course, her married name. Anselm had never known her as anything else. On marrying, most women barristers kept the names under which they began their careers because they carried their reputations. Elizabeth, however, had dropped hers and started all over again. Anselm sat down, suddenly excited because someone else had made the same gaffe as himself, only she didn’t have the excuse of not knowing any better. His thoughts becoming tangled, he picked up the telephone and called the Prior.

‘Sister Dorothy reeled off the history of Mr G, the frustrated inventor, and Mrs G, his uncomplaining wife.’ Anselm paused. ‘But she got the name wrong. It should have been Mr and Mrs Steadman.’

‘Teachers follow the fortunes of their pupils,’ replied Father Andrew confidently ‘Perhaps she learned of Elizabeth’s marriage and switched the names by accident.’

A monk can always contradict his prior. But it has a taste all of its own. ‘My first thought too,’ said Anselm warmly ‘However, she hadn’t had word or sight of Elizabeth in forty years. She shouldn’t even know the Glendinning surname.’

It was hardly caviar, but the hiatus was delicious. Anselm said, ‘But why would Sister Dorothy lie?’

‘Perhaps, like you, she’d given her word,’ said Father Andrew distantly as though he’d turned to the fire. ‘And perhaps,’ he added, ‘that was the first of the many promises that have been sought and obtained.’

17

Riley took the bus home because the fascists who’d clamped him weren’t answering the phone. He came in the back way pausing to glance at Nancy’s bricks: she’d been collecting them all her married life. She rummaged in the grass by Limehouse.

Cut and brought them home one by one. Exhausted by the bout with Wyecliffe, defeated by the Council, and cold to his bones, he felt suddenly weak: affection stirred inside him like a shot of Bertie’s poison.

There was an irony about Riley and Nancy: prior to the trial, he’d pushed Nancy back, but she’d kept returning; after the trial, he’d wanted her to linger, but she kept away So when Riley told her what had happened to his van, she was very understanding; she said all the right things; but she was far off. She didn’t even ask what he was doing in Cheapside. Later, Riley lounged in his rocker, listening to a very different kind of chat. As Nancy cleared away the plates, she asked Arnold how he was getting on, whether he was tired of his wheel, whether he got lonely in his cage. Riley’s chair creaked as he moved more quickly as his envy grew.

After Nancy had gone to bed, Riley stayed up watching the fire decline. In the stillness of the night he took out the photograph of Walter from his pocket. Without looking he dropped it on the fading coals. He heard it snap into flame. When he glanced into the grate, all that was left was a curl of ash.

Who posted it? Until that evening, Riley had confined his thoughts to the living, but the lawyer had turned to the dead. Who’d he been referring to? Or had he been having a dig, trying to tell him that he’d never believed him about John Bradshaw?

Suddenly Arnold started running in his wheel.

Years after the trial, Riley was doing a clearance when his mobile started the nerve-racking tune that he didn’t know how to change. He stabbed a button to make it stop.

‘Will you help me find the Pieman?’

Riley was stunned. ‘Who is this?’

‘Someone who knows you weren’t the only one to blame’

Riley couldn’t reply He sank onto a thing the relative had called a fauteuil.

‘If you tell me,’ said the young voice, ‘I can inform the police. I’ll be like a cut-off. And when they’ve found their own proof, they can act without bothering either of us. You’ve nothing to fear.’

In the corner, a budgie hopped from bar to bar, tinkling a little bell. He’d come with the job lot. ‘Who is this?’ said Riley again.

‘I’m the son of George Bradshaw’

Riley watched the bird pecking seeds, its green-and-yellow head jerking like it was being shocked at intervals from the mains. Riley said, ‘Who else knows that you’ve called me?’

‘No one.

‘Will they find out?’

‘No. I promise.’

Much later Riley concluded that some big decisions aren’t as simple as they might appear. Like a wall, they’re built from the bottom up. You stand on the top course, laying bricks, not daring to look at where you’ll end up if you carry on. Finally you’re too high and you can’t get down. And yet, from the outset, there was always a kind of knowing; and recklessly it was broken down into manageable bits, and put together.

It was therefore without having reached a decision as such, but irresponsibly that he said, ‘I need to think. Call me back in six months.’

The next day on impulse, Riley went to Lawton’s Wharf. Everything had been sold off or flattened. The whole place was falling into the dark-blue river. Suddenly moved, he stood on the cracked plinth that had held his crane and he searched the pale evening sky for Nancy’s window.

What was he going to do about Bradshaw’s son? He gazed at the wharf, sentimental for the days he’d never really enjoyed. His eyes settled on the DANGER sign attached to a barbed-wire fence that blocked access to the main quay Farther on he noted a line of plastic bollards. The timbers on the other side were black and green.

Four times over the next six months Riley came home late and told Nancy that his van had broken down. He complained about it to Prosser and the rest. He bought spare parts, kept the receipts and went through the motions of an unnecessary repair. He was getting higher and higher, never taking his eyes off what his hands and feet were doing.

Arnold’s wheel rattled and raced.

Riley had hoped that George’s boy would drop the matter but he rang back, as arranged. Wobbling, but keeping his nerve, Riley said, ‘Meet me on Lawton’s Wharf on Saturday night.’

Why there of all places? It wasn’t just because it was secluded and dangerous. Riley hadn’t thought it out, but his instinct wanted to stamp upon the world of fluffed chances, to wreck it good and proper. Accordingly broken down into bits: Riley left a fair in Barking at six, cursing the rain. Half an hour later he rang Nancy and told her that the van had stalled. At seven he cut down the barbed wire. At ten past, he set about the bollards. (They’d been filled with concrete, so one by one, he dragged them to the edge of the wharf and tipped them into the river.) Since the planking was rotten, Riley crept along a supporting beam, and was at the end of the platform by seven-thirty. At eight a figure appeared.

Riley never once looked directly at the boy He kept his eyes down and began a conversation that had no purpose because he was too high up to listen properly.

‘I only want to vindicate my father,’ said John Bradshaw The drizzle pattered on their shoulders.

‘Vindicate’. What a hauntingly strong word. This boy would never give up.

Fear played its part, for sure — not the kind that gripped Riley in his childhood, but something organic, a condition that he could feel all the time if he’d checked for it (like an irregular heartbeat). It pumped ink into his intentions — and he shoved with all his might … hoping and not hoping that it would happen; that he could console himself afterwards by saying he didn’t really mean it.

The boards cracked. A whole section of planking gave way and Riley was abruptly alone. There was a cry, but after the splash, there was no noise … none at all … just the slapping of the river and the patter of the rain.

Riley waited for half an hour, checking the side of the quay. Then he went home and thrashed Nancy at dominoes.

The following morning, as usual, he went to work. The weeks passed and he did the things that he always did. But just as Arnold’s whiskers got wet every time he licked the milk, so a kind of suicide happens with a murder. Sitting opposite the Major, Riley had been bitterly proud of his home-made identity. He’d sought no mitigation. He’d scorned salvation now, never mind the hereafter. But with the death of John Bradshaw all that posturing fell slack. He felt strangely sick of himself, in a new way and of the world. He tried to doubt that he’d shoved him. Some big decisions might be made up of small choices, but what Riley couldn’t work out was why in another world, he wouldn’t have chosen the end result in the first place. Why he recoiled from it in this one? And with that insight, Riley teetered towards an abyss of self-pity, for he wondered if he’d been acting freely if he’d ever been free; if he ever would be. Within a couple of months, after years of clean living, Riley began his new scheme.

And then, out of nowhere, came an envelope containing a photograph. The image sent Riley flying back to the times he’d done his best to forget. He was overwhelmed by his powerlessness — either to annihilate that face or to hinder whoever it was that had sent it. Stranded, he felt a need for Nancy far stronger than anything he’d known since the trial. It seemed incredible, but it was true: standing in his way was a hamster. It was humiliating.

The spool fell silent. Arnold had been running for ages. If he’d been a man on the road he’d have reached Penzance.

Riley went to the kitchen, bit an apple and threw it in a plastic bag. Still chewing, he opened the cage and dropped Arnold onto the fruit. Then he followed the lane that led to Limehouse Cut. The bins were out. A crowd of polystyrene pellets skittered along the pavement, white and vibrant in the darkness. He swished the bag across his trouser leg, like a boy with sweets from the corner shop — sticky things out of tall jars held out by Mrs O’Neill. She’d only ever been kind to him —but with a pity that had guessed everything, that had stripped him down to the contusions. ‘He has tempers.’ That’s what his mother had said of Walter. Tempers. It sounded like something Babycham would have ordered with lemonade and a cherry. ‘Not to worry, son,’ his mother once said. She wiped her own split lip as if she’d just finished her fish and chips. ‘You fell off your bike, all right?’ Her eyes had dried like a desert, centuries before.

When he reached the canal, Riley halted. The bag swung by his leg. Hesitating, he began to think. In a way Walter, John Bradshaw and Arnold belonged together. Each of them, in very different ways, had been so much stronger than Riley And with that terrible thought, he let go.

18

Despite expectations that he would sink quickly under the weight of wet clothing, George had remained afloat. An action somewhere between swimming and treading water led him away from his point of entry He felt a colder current around his feet; the smack of small waves made him spit. He was being pulled now, towards the full flow of the river. The final supporting pillars rose out of the shadows to meet the abrupt ending of the wharf’s run. George turned into the water.

In so far as this moment had received any planning, George had intended to give his final thoughts to John. To his surprise he found himself upon the tracks of his own childhood, running down a winding path, at the back of a string of council houses in Harrogate. It was a sunny day; the ground was ribbed and dry underfoot. To his right were fences and small gardens with sheds … windows framed white in walls of red brick … A shining cat lay sprawled upon warm slate; to his left there were trunks and branches, screening a tennis court of orange grit … and then a bowling green … a velvet stage for men in white coats with bald heads or big caps … He was skipping and hopping, for the sheer joy of being alive, feeling his heart ache with the strain. He was ten. And he wanted to stay that age for ever. At the end of the path was a thick patch of dock leaves at the base of a tree by his home. George began to sink, just as he remembered kneeling down, panting and curious, to taste a bright, crisp leaf as though he were a rabbit.

Something made of metal hit George on the head. Instinctively his arms flailed and he surfaced with a gasp. Bobbing in the water was a tin can. Looking up, he saw a boy sitting at the end of the wharf, his legs idly dangling. A small shaved head cut a fine serrated hole into the sky Suddenly he vanished. Rage ran hot through tired old veins. ‘The little brat …’ George was panting now Cold had seized him as though it were a weight. Panic gripped him. The boy appeared again at the edge of the wharf. George shouted for help. A thin arm swung out, and something angular swiftly cut a fine arc against the sky like a shooting star without light. It struck the water with a deep thud. The arm flashed again.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ yelled George. In a frenzy he shook off his coat. Enraged, he began moving towards the side. The boy relaxed, followed the swimmer’s progress, walking along the rim of the wharf, tossing chunks of broken masonry. They landed around him casually George hauled himself up the rusted ladder and collapsed, spewing water, onto the quay His teeth worked in unison with a vivid memory, and he began to weep. The sun was warm upon his neck, and he was a lad again, on his knees at the foot of a tree, tasting a leaf. It had been surprisingly bitter, when he had wanted it to be sweet. He arched his head, opening his streaming eyes: the boy was sauntering towards the perimeter fence, hands in his pockets.

George tried to shout, but nothing came from his throat. He clambered to his feet and stumbled after his persecutor. Several times he fell, cutting his hands and knees. The pain quickened him. Frantically George continued his ridiculous pursuit, driven by a senseless desire to express an elemental, livid gratitude. Beneath the radiance of a street lamp, the boy stooped, working his way through a hole in the netting. By the time George stood dripping in the road that ran adjacent to Mr Lawton’s fallen kingdom, the assassin had gone.

A couple of hours later George swayed beneath the fire escape and was stunned to find his bed made. As consciousness became pain and a deep, immense shivering, delusion eased away his last waking moment: he could have sworn he saw a figure coming down from the steps above.

19

When Nancy had gone to bed, leaving Riley in his rocker, she’d tossed and turned, annoyed by questions as if they were lumps in the mattress. Where was Mr Johnson? What should she do with his notebooks? Who was the man in the photograph? With this last, Nancy had, in fact, made some headway: it might be Riley’s father, she thought, because he never spoke of him. Or maybe his mother had sent it: he didn’t speak of her either. That was Riley He was so different, you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that he’d never had parents. She laughed at her own joke, changed sides and plumped her pillow. Listening to Arnold, she finally became drowsy.

Nancy woke up. Something in the house was slightly different, but she didn’t know what. Riley wasn’t beside her … but she could hear him in the kitchen. The back door opened and closed. A tug of sympathy took Nancy out of bed and to the window: her man couldn’t come to bed; he had to walk himself like a dog, until he was so tired that his mind couldn’t worry him. This is what British justice had done to her man — to a man who’d done nothing wrong.

She moved the curtain an inch or two. At first she couldn’t see anything. Some of the windows on the other side were lit round the edges … and the bins were out. Her breath steamed the glass. She gave it a rub with the sleeve of her nightie, and then she saw him. Riley was at the top of the street. She knew his walk, by the way his arms swung like loose ropes.

Nancy climbed back into bed and twenty minutes later, Riley slipped between the sheets. She didn’t stir and he didn’t move. Almost at once, he began snoring with his hands behind his head. Nancy couldn’t get back to sleep because she was distracted: something had been altered in the house, and she couldn’t put her finger on what it was.

20

In his sleep Riley was running down a dark corridor towards a window, its frame blurred by light. His footfalls were silent. All he could hear was the breathing of the Thing behind him. Blinded, he broke though the glass as though it were tracing paper. His stomach spilled out and he began to fall.

Even as he fell, he knew this was the old dream — the dream that had begun the day of his acquittal. And even as the stairs appeared, he recognised that this was the development — like a turning of the pages in his mind — that had started after he’d received the photograph. He was observing himself, and yet experiencing the rise of terror.

All at once the nightmare cut location. Riley was no longer falling. His stomach was in his belly He was walking along a small corridor in a silent terraced house. Upstairs there were three bedrooms. Outside, at the back, there was a small garden with a gate that led to three trees. He didn’t know why he knew all this, or why he was aware that the front door was green, or that the kitchen floor had been laid with fake marble. It was simply part of the sensation of being in this empty house. He moved slowly like an underwater diver. Sunshine lit the floating dust. To his right, through a doorway he saw an iron fireplace. The grate was clean. By the hearth were a pan and brush on a stand; the poker was missing. A kind of barking started in Riley’s guts — a juddering sensation brought on by the recognition of his surroundings: this was home. He noticed that he was not a man, and not a boy; that he was in between the two. Ahead and to the left he saw a hand on the carpet. It hung off the bottom step of the staircase. The bystander in Riley vanished. Riley became Riley in his entirety. Slowly bravely his eyes moved along the arm, up the shoulder and onto the matted hair.

A lifeless, loveless face looked back. So great was Riley’s horror at the sight of himself that he didn’t even scream.