The Witness at the Wedding

Twenty-Four

Jude had her own research methods too. As part of her varied work portfolio, she still did occasional discussion sessions at Austen Open Prison, which was a little way along the coast from Fethering. They were called ‘New Approaches’, discussion groups involving a shifting repertoire of prisoners, with subjects ranging from alternative therapy through guilt and morality to life skills and philosophy. Many of the attendants were lifers – which meant murderers – spending the last few years of their long sentences in an environment which was supposed to be more like the outside world than a high-security prison. These sessions had been organized by Austen’s Education Officer, Sandy Fairbarns, someone who, though they’d never met outside work, Jude regarded as a friend.

Her next ‘New Approaches’ session was scheduled for the Tuesday after Gaby had received the call from Michael Brewer, and Jude had set her plan in motion with a call to Sandy Fairbarns that morning.

“I have found someone,” Sandy announced immediately Jude arrived at the Austen main entrance prior to her session. “Name’s Jimmy Troop. He came across Michael Brewer in Parkhurst, and he’s prepared to talk to you.”

“Does that mean I’ll need one of those – what are they called? V something?”

“VO. Visiting Order. Yes, you’d have to get that if you did it in normal visiting times. But there’s another way.”

“Really?” They were walking towards the education building, between the pale yellow one-storey blocks that housed Austen’s inmates. The borders that fringed the path were beautifully kept, a regimented profusion of marigolds, alyssum, blue and red salvias and lobelias, which bore testimony to the painstaking horticultural skills of the prisoners.

Sandy grinned. “I’ve checked it out with the guard who’s on the education block this afternoon. You can have a quarter of an hour with Jimmy after your session.”

“Brilliant. And he’s agreeable?”

“Jimmy is extremely agreeable. Very cultured and amiable man, Jimmy. One of nature’s gentlemen.”

“Ye-es. Except presumably at some point in his life, he did murder someone.”

Sandy Fairbarns gave her a look of mock-reproach. “Really, Jude. You mustn’t let yourself be prejudiced by things like that.”

The session Jude conducted that afternoon followed the pattern of her previous ones. About a dozen prisoners attended. Some were there for the first time, some were regulars. And some regulars whom she’d been expecting weren’t there. They might have been released, they might have got bored, they might have found a game of football a more attractive option; inside a prison you could never know. Jude no longer went into the education block with any expectations of who might be there; she worked with the attendance she had.

Perhaps influenced by her recent conversations with Gita Millington, Jude started that afternoon with the issue of self-esteem, the roots of confidence and the threats to it. As ever, the topic mutated into something else, this time the issue of aggression, in both its internal and external manifestations. And as ever, after a jerky start, the dialogue developed, the inarticulate became more fluent, and the shy encountered subjects on which they could not keep silent.

Even before he gave his name, Jude would have recognized Jimmy Troop from Sandy’s description. He was in his early sixties, a tall thin man whose thick brown hair was white at the temples. Even though dressed in prison denims and trainers, he carried the air of a man in tailor-made suit, highly polished brogues and Garrick Club tie. What crime had brought him to his current circumstances, and how someone of his background had survived the considerably tougher circumstances of other prisons, though intriguing questions, were ones to which Jude never expected to find the answers.

In that afternoon’s debate Jimmy Troop was extremely articulate, but did not allow his superior education to upstage the contributions of his rougher colleagues. Jude was interested to observe the respectand positive affection with which he was treated by his fellow inmates.

The two hours of ‘New Approaches’ flashed by, and, on a nod from the guard who sat in the corridor outside their classroom, Jimmy Troop lingered as the other prisoners filed out. This was always a moment of transition. The articulacy – and even intimacy – of the recent discussion suddenly dissipated as the reality of prison life reasserted itself. The men became awkward, their farewells to Jude clumsy or often nonexistent.

“Well, I’m very honoured,” said Jimmy Troop, when they were alone in the room. Whatever else prison might have done to him, it hadn’t diminished his patrician charm. He still remembered how to treat a lady.

Jude went to close the door.

“No, I wouldn’t do that.” She stopped at Jimmy’s words. The guard sitting on the landing didn’t look as if he cared much whether the door was open or closed. “Kind of thing that gets misinterpreted in a place like this,” the prisoner explained. Jude moved away from the open door and sat down, facing him. “Not of course that you wouldn’t be safe with me – I know what befits a gentleman – but there’s always the risk of making the other fellows jealous.”

Once she was safely seated, he sat down and smiled a rather wistful smile. “Mind you, I’m not sure that I would be much threat to a lady these days, anyway. The years pass, you know, and it’s rather a while since I had the opportunity to put it to the test.”

“Still, you’ll be out soon, won’t you?”

“Yes. Yes…” he agreed, but not as though he regarded freedom as an unmixed blessing. Quickly shutting off introspection, he went on, “Still, we mustn’t waste our time. I have been granted a bonus quarter of an hour of your delectable company – ” The compliment was played with light irony – “while you have a quarter of an hour of detailed brain-picking.”

“Sandy did tell you what it was about?”

“And who it was about, yes. Michael Brewer. I read everything in the press about the Janine Buckley murder – in happier times – little thinking that I would one day find myself in the same situation as its perpetrator. I joined him later. I wasn’t given such an extensive sentence for my own…peccadillo.” He pronounced the word lightly, but without real humour. “Very well. What can I tell you about my fellow-participant in Her Majesty’s pleasure?”

“Michael Brewer was released last year, having served his full thirty-year sentence.”

“I suppose he would have been. I haven’t done the arithmetic, but, yes, that would be about right.”

“Since his release, though, no one’s seen him. He hasn’t turned up for any of the scheduled meetings with his probation officer.”

“Ah.” Jimmy Troop nodded.

“You don’t look surprised.”

“No, dear lady. I got the impression that Michael Brewer – a few people in Parkhurst called him Mick, but I never attained that level of intimacy. Anyway, I got the impression that he was of a reclusive nature, so after thirty years of enforced human society, I think hemight well have got away from people as soon as he had the opportunity.”

“How well did you know him, Jimmy?”

The man shrugged his thin shoulders. “Relationships in prison are mostly tangential. Oh, you hear stories of love affairs and things. In my experience, not a lot of that went on. Generally, there are some people you never speak to – and never want to speak to. The occasional – very occasional – real soul mate, and the vast majority with whom one might exchange a word at a meal time, or during exercise.”

“And for you, Michael Brewer fitted into that ‘vast majority’ category?”

He nodded, then smiled wryly. “I hope you don’t mind my saying, Jude – It is Jude, isn’t it?”

She confirmed that it was.

“Then I hope you don’t mind my saying what a rare pleasure it is for me to sit and talk to an attractive woman?”

She giggled, playing along with his gallantry. “It’s a fairly rare pleasure for me to sit and talk to an attractive man.”

She had got the tone just right. With another wry smile, he thanked her. “But enough of this flirtatious badinage. The sands of our quarter of an hour are trickling away. What can I tell you about Michael Brewer?”

“Would you describe him as a violent man?”

“Given the nature of his crime, he was always going to have that reputation.”

“But any signs of violence inside the prison?”

“No. He kept his nose clean. A model prisoner.”

“Any vices, habits, hobbies?”

“He played cards. Well, no, that’s probably the wrong thing to say – playing cards implies that you play them with other people. Michael Brewer just played patience. Endlessly, round and round. Always had a pack of cards with him. I think he must have known a variety of versions of the game. You’d go mad just doing the same thing time and again.”

“Or maybe the appeal of the game was doing the same thing time and again?”

Jimmy Troop thought about this for a moment, then nodded. “You could be right. A good name for a prisoner’s game, isn’t it? Patience?”

For the first time in their encounter, a shadow of pain crossed his face. But his customary urbanity was quickly reasserted.

“Anything else I can tell you about my fellow inmate?”

“I heard that he always protested his innocence of Janine Buckley’s murder.”

Jimmy Troop spread his hands wide. “Show me the prisoner who doesn’t protest his innocence. Oh, there are the hard ones who boast all the time about the crimes they’ve committed, and a good few crimes they’ve only committed in their imaginations, but for most of us the image of innocence is very potent. You’d wake up in the morning from a dream that you hadn’t committed your crime, a seductive dream, a very real dream, and then you’d look around your cell, and the unarguable reality would hit you…” Hepaused, again straying dangerously close to personal territory, then, with a patrician smile, moved on. “Sorry, you were asking me about the violence in Michael Brewer.”

“Yes. You think it was still there?”

“Very definitely. He wasn’t demonstrative, but there was a lot of anger bottled up inside him. He had scores to settle.”

“To settle when he was finally released?”

“I would assume so, yes.”

“He never told you what those scores were?”

An apologetic shake of the head. “As I say, I wasn’t one of his close associates. And I’d have been surprised if he had confided that kind of information even to a close associate, assuming that he ever had any.”

“Did he mention where he might go when he was released?”

“He always spoke fondly of Sussex. Brighton area, Worthing, round there.” Jimmy Troop looked out through the metal-framed windows to the grey-blue humps of the South Downs. “Pity he wasn’t sent here to Austen. He’d have liked it.” A second thought came to him. “Though maybe he would have found it even more frustrating, being so close to where he wanted to be. Maybe he’d have done a runner. Not difficult to get out of a place like this.”

“Jimmy, from what you know of Michael Brewer, which I know isn’t a lot, but going on your instinct, do you think he’d be capable of committing another murder?”

The gentleman in denim laughed, then fixed Jude’s brown eyes with his and said, with total seriousness, “Oh yes. But then we’d all be capable of that, wouldn’t we? It’s committing the first one that takes us by surprise.”

As he spoke the words, he seemed to open a window on to a vista of infinite pain. But only for a second. The mask of languid charm was quickly put back in place, as he looked up to see the guard on the landing tapping his watch.

“Dear lady, I fear our most enjoyable quarter of an hour is at an end.” Jimmy Troop rose from his seat, the complete gentleman. “I’d offer to see you to the gate, Jude – ” he gave a self-depreciating shrug – “but, sadly, circumstances do not allow me to do that.”