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COPYRIGHT

Fourth Estate

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First published in Great Britain by Flamingo 2001

Flamingo is a registered trade mark of HarperCollinsPublishers Limited

Copyright © Hugo Wilcken 2001

Hugo Wilcken asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007106479

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007396917

Version: 2016-02-15

DEDICATION

For my parents

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

Praise

About the Author

About the Publisher

I

Christian’s wife was killed in a car crash yesterday. Apparently her brakes failed and the car careered into a shop front. The shop was open at the time but there were no other victims, just her. She died from asphyxiation, the seat belt crushed her windpipe. If she hadn’t been wearing her seat belt, she might have survived.

I wouldn’t say I knew her. I’d met her twice, maybe three times, when she’d come into the office looking for Christian. We’d probably said no more than ‘hello’ to each other. She was around thirty-five I’d say and quite good-looking – I wondered how she’d ended up with someone like Christian. Once, about a year ago, Christian asked me whether I wanted to go for a drink with him and his wife, but I had something else on so I turned him down. The invitation surprised me, because although we’ve worked in the same office for the past eighteen months, I have no particular rapport with Christian and I’ve never socialised with him. I was with him yesterday though, when they called about his wife.

There’d been a department meeting in the morning. The news had just come in about Jarawa’s sentence and we’re launching a major campaign for him. Jamie’s appointed me team leader with Christian and Joanne working under me. It’s my first big campaign so it’s important to me. After the meeting I got cuttings and print-outs from the library and looked over them until lunchtime, making notes and thinking. Then I went with Christian to the Italian sandwich bar on the corner. It’s the first time I’ve had lunch with him alone. I’ve never directly worked with him either, until now. Straightaway he told me that he was pissed off I was leading the campaign and not him. I could understand his disappointment: he’s about forty and I’m only twenty-nine. Besides, West Africa is ‘his’ area. Anyway I didn’t want any trouble so I said I hoped we could work as equals on this one. I proposed we divide the responsibilities evenly, while Jo, being younger and fairly inexperienced, could look after paperwork and legwork and co-ordinate the volunteers. My idea was that Christian could liaise with contacts in Africa while I handled government officials and the other human rights agencies. I’d also put in a visa application for him, although it was of course unlikely to be granted. The proposal pleased him. He’d wanted to be frank about the fact that he was pissed off, he said, but he knew he could work with me.

After lunch we started to flesh out our campaign strategy, in his office. We’d hardly sat down though, when the phone rang and Christian answered. It was a very brief conversation. He put down the phone and didn’t say anything. He went very white and stared at me. I said, what’s up? He said, she’s dead, she’s been killed. I automatically assumed he meant his wife – perhaps because I knew they don’t have any children. But thinking about it now, it might just as well have been his mother, or someone completely different. I didn’t exactly know what to say. He just sat there, with his bloodless face. After a while he said, so what am I going to do now? and rocked a little in his chair. Then I spoke … We had some sort of conversation, which I can’t remember now. He must have told me it was his wife, that she’d had a car accident, that it had taken place in Oxford, where he and his wife lived. I hadn’t known they lived in Oxford. It seemed a pretty long way for Christian to commute every day.

He looked so completely helpless that I suggested I drive him down to Oxford, to the hospital. I had plenty of things to do that afternoon, and no doubt someone else in the office would have done a much better job of looking after Christian, but he’d been with me when he’d found out about his wife, so somehow it seemed like my responsibility. He sat there in complete silence, still rocking in his chair and hugging himself. So eventually I stood up and said: come on, we’ve got to go, you can’t sit here all day. I sort of got him up and took his jacket off the hanger on the back of the door and helped him into it. He was like a zombie.

We were caught up in a snarl at Marble Arch but got onto the motorway pretty quickly after that. We didn’t talk. While I’d been negotiating traffic on the way out of London the silence seemed normal, but then we were flying down the motorway and it felt like there was a void that needed to be filled. On several occasions I caught myself on the point of initiating small talk, more or less as a reflex action. But that would have been even less appropriate than the void. The car engine hummed so softly and evenly in the background that after a while I couldn’t hear it any more, and it seemed as if we were in total silence. At first I didn’t feel awkward but gradually an air of acute embarrassment invaded me. I thought of putting the radio on to break the spell, but in the end decided against it. It occurred to me that I’d been in a bit of a daze as we’d left the office, and that I’d forgotten to say to anyone where we were going or that we wouldn’t be back. I had my mobile phone with me though and I thought of calling, but then decided against that too. I couldn’t easily tell them about Christian’s wife over the phone – not as he sat there beside me, in any case.

I glanced over to Christian occasionally. He was as rigid as an Egyptian statue, hands symmetrically resting on his thighs, staring blankly at the number plate of the car ahead. He was sitting so still that he didn’t seem himself. Normally, Christian squirms in his seat and wrings his hands and agitates his body, like a schoolboy or a poor sleeper. It irritates me, that habit of his.

As I drove in silence, I thought about Christian. We’ve worked in the same department for a year and a half but he’s been at Africa Action much longer. I don’t dislike him, but on the other hand I don’t particularly get on with him either. Despite his age there’s something of the adolescent about him. With his lank, greasy hair, dirty jeans and John Lennon spectacles he looks like a seventies student. It’s as if he developed a look in his teens, then never changed it. He’s got a politically naïve outlook and he probably considers himself some kind of anarchist. That doesn’t stop him getting intensely involved in office politics – he thinks everyone’s always slighting him but ninety per cent of the time it’s not true. Then again, not to do him down too much, he does have his more positive side. He’s honest and friendly when he’s not being paranoid and generally you can reason with him. I suppose you could say he believes in the work as well.

Something’s happened to him over the past couple of months though, and everybody at the office has noticed it. He’s become more erratic. There’ve been days when he hasn’t turned up for work. Sometimes he looks like he’s been drinking or doing drugs. He’s been acting a bit weirdly with people too – the other day I heard him shouting at Fiona, when normally he’s the last person to raise his voice.

I missed the turnoff, but didn’t notice for a while. Eventually I turned round at a junction and joined the traffic going the other way. This business of overshooting the turnoff seemed to snap Christian out of his zombie phase. He started wriggling about in his seat. Then as we were hitting Oxford, he suddenly said: ‘They’re going to ask me to identify the body. But I don’t want to. As long as I don’t identify the body, she’s still alive.’ I didn’t really know what he was on about, but replied: ‘Don’t be stupid.’

He started looking around, glancing out the window, craning his neck strangely like a cat peering out of a cat-box. I also noticed that his hands were shaking quite a bit now. Just before we got to the hospital, he reached into a pocket of his suede jacket and pulled out a pack of rolling tobacco. Normally I’d have asked him if he could wait until we arrived, since I don’t like smoke in the car, but I let it pass. He was still peering out the window, and rolled the cigarette very quickly without even looking at his hands. His hands completely stopped shaking as he rolled the cigarette, then started shaking again immediately after, so that he had trouble lighting it. It reminded me of my dead grandmother, who’d had Parkinson’s but could still play the piano without fumbling a single note.

We got to the hospital. I told Christian to go into Casualty while I parked the car, but he wouldn’t. He just sat there, puffing away at his rolled cigarette – which kept going out, so he had to keep relighting it – and not saying a word. It annoyed me for some reason. I found a parking space, got out, and went round to his side to help him out. But still he wouldn’t budge. Finally he whimpered: ‘I can’t go in, I can’t go in.’ I said: ‘Of course you can,’ and tugged at his arm. At that he started to tremble, not just his hands, but his whole body, his face too. I thought he might cry as well, and I certainly wanted to avoid that. I didn’t want a scene, but on the other hand I could hardly force him into the hospital. I said: ‘Why don’t we just have a wander round, just take it easy?’ I’d noticed a small park in the hospital grounds, and my idea was to take a walk there. I thought it might sort of limber Christian up for the hospital.

Then I had another idea: ‘Listen, I’ve got a tiny bit of dope on me, enough for a joint. We could have a joint first, then go into the hospital after. What do you say?’ I had this scrap of dope left over from the bag Stephen Pusey had given me. It’d been sitting in the glove box for the past month or so and I’d almost forgotten it was there.

We walked over to the park. It was a depressing affair with weed-ridden flower beds, gravel, visitors pushing patients around in wheelchairs. Christian was walking very slowly and I had my hand under his armpit, as if he too were a patient. It must have looked ridiculous since he’s quite a bit taller than me. We sat down on the only free bench and I got out the bag and handed it to Christian: ‘Here, you roll it, you’re probably better at it than me.’ I watched with fascination as Christian’s twitching and trembling stopped once more during the few moments it took him to roll the joint. Then he lit up and drew heavily on it, before passing it on to me wordlessly. I took a small drag and hardly inhaled – I didn’t want to let Christian smoke by himself but I did have to drive back to London. Nonetheless I could feel my muscles relax from that one half-drag. It was having an instant effect on Christian as well. The trembling didn’t exactly stop, but it kind of slowed down and got less intense. I passed the joint back and he smoked the rest of it over the next few minutes, staring into the gravel and muttering ‘Ah well, ah well’ from time to time.

He smoked the joint right down, then after a final drag he tried to throw the end onto the ground. But it stuck to his fingers and he couldn’t shake it off, so he rubbed his hands together and the remaining paper and crumbs of tobacco blew away in the wind: ‘Damn, I burnt my finger!’ and he put his finger in his mouth. That occupied him for a moment and then he looked up. I could see from his eyes that he was pretty out of it. He was gazing at the bench opposite us, which was next to a fountain that didn’t work. On the bench sat an extremely old woman with a blanket round her shoulders in spite of the warm weather, and a middle-aged woman, probably her daughter, who was shouting at her: ‘I said, Eileen and Jack are moving to America!’ But the old woman was paying no attention whatsoever – she was making a strange clicking sound with her teeth. Christian turned to me and said: ‘Look at those two women. The sick one’s not paying a blind bit of notice to what the other one’s saying. It’s pretty funny!’ He started laughing and then so did I. I said: ‘You’re right, she couldn’t give a damn!’ and we both laughed again. After we’d finished laughing, Christian put his hand on my shoulder and said: ‘You’re a friend. You know that?’ He seemed choked with emotion and looked again as though he might cry. I said: ‘Of course. Of course I’m a friend.’ He stared at me with his dilated eyes: ‘You know I have to tell you something very, very important. I have to tell you. It’s a terrible thing.’ I said: ‘No, you don’t have to tell me anything.’ He insisted: ‘Yes, there’s something I have to tell you. It’s very important.’ I repeated: ‘No, you don’t have to tell me anything.’

I walked him to Casualty. At the reception desk I filled in a form for him, then a nurse, an Irish woman, showed us to a dismal waiting room. I asked how long we would have to wait, she said she didn’t know. We sat there in silence for a moment, next to each other. The seats were made of orange plastic and the brown carpet had cigarette burns in it. I resisted the temptation to pick up and flick through one of the dog-eared women’s magazines that lay on a smoked-glass table, it didn’t seem the right thing to do. There was a young couple in the waiting room too, but then they left and we were alone. I was wondering when it would be opportune for me to leave too. Could I go now or should I wait until Christian had seen the doctor? Or should I drive him back home after he’d seen the doctor? Should I try to get hold of one of his relatives, his wife’s parents for example, or had the hospital already done that? It was a novel situation and I didn’t really know what was expected of me.

Suddenly Christian started talking. Not about his wife, and not about the ‘important thing’ I’d stopped him telling me in the park, but about Jarawa. He said he thought this new campaign for his reprieve was a total waste of time. There was a peculiar violence to his voice and I was a little taken aback by this sudden outburst.

I said: ‘I don’t agree, I don’t agree.’

He shook his head: ‘He’s a dead man. They won’t stop now. It’s in the logic of things. They’ll kill him like the ones before.’

‘No. This is different, because the others had as much blood on their hands as their executioners.’

Christian was watching me intensely as I spoke. My words seemed to ignite something in him: he started getting all excited and worked up. That’s not the issue, that’s not the issue, he said. Didn’t I see that it was no longer about saving one man or another? Didn’t I see that in the long term it was immaterial whether one man died or not, that the question wasn’t there, it was elsewhere? Not the death of one man … He ranted on for a while, stumbling over his words, but I didn’t really understand what he was driving at, or perhaps I simply wasn’t listening. I wondered why Jarawa’s fate suddenly seemed so important to Christian, when his wife had just died. Perhaps it was the dope, or maybe it had something to do with the shock.

The nurse came out. At first Christian didn’t notice, though. He’d got so involved in his tirade and was staring at me in this very intense way. Finally she interrupted to ask which one of us was Mr Tedeschi. Christian went silent and the blood drained from his face again. He made a feeble signal with his hand, then got up and shuffled along behind the nurse. He somehow looked absurd. He looked like he’d just been called up to the headmaster’s office or something. He certainly didn’t look like his wife had just been killed.

I glanced up at the ugly, functional clock hanging on the wall. It was ten to three. I wondered again whether I could go now. I wondered whether from here on, the hospital would deal with Christian, call his family, take him home, etc. But then the nurse came out again and asked me whether she could have a word with me. Without waiting for a reply, she sat down in Christian’s seat and leant towards me so that her knees almost touched mine. She had very dark blue eyes that were almost black, like Marianne’s. Was I a relative or perhaps a close friend of Mr Tedeschi’s, she asked me. I said I was a friend. Perhaps you’d like to know what exactly happened, she said. Then she started giving me all the details about Christian’s wife’s death – the failed brakes, the seat belt, and all the rest. I listened, then at one point said: ‘But should you be telling me all this?’ She looked at me with surprise. After a moment’s silence, she asked me if I knew Christian’s family at all, whether he had any brothers or sisters, were his parents still alive, and if so did I know how to get in contact with them, because ‘what Mr Tedeschi will need now is a lot of support from his family’. I told her I knew absolutely nothing about Christian’s family, only that he had no children. I see, she said, and looked at me sourly. I said I was sorry I couldn’t help her but she continued to frown. She was acting as if she’d been flirting with me and I’d rebuffed her or something. I almost felt like saying: ‘It wasn’t me who killed his wife.’ Finally she said thank you, then got up and left.

I waited. Through the ventilators I could hear a doctor murmuring: ‘It shouldn’t hurt,’ and the reply: ‘It hurts, Jesus!’ I picked up a magazine and flicked through it, then started reading an article about wartime experiments on concentration camp detainees. There were photos as well. It was quite interesting, but finally it repelled me and I put the magazine down. I was tired. I even started to doze a little but then I heard shouts. It sounded like Christian’s voice. I heard a woman trying to remonstrate with him, but he cut her off with more shouts. A door opened somewhere. I heard the woman say: ‘Mr Tedeschi, Mr Tedeschi!’ Christian was shouting: ‘I won’t let you do it to me, why do you want to do it to me?’ After that there were footsteps, and the intermingled voices of two men: ‘No one’s going to make you do anything, no one’s going to make you do anything.’ A door shut, then opened, then more footsteps, then silence.

A woman with an open white coat appeared in the waiting room. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, and had prematurely grey hair, which she made no effort to hide. Her face wore a vaguely troubled expression. Looking my way, she asked: ‘Are you Mr Tedeschi’s friend?’ I replied that I wasn’t exactly his friend, more his colleague. She appeared to think for a moment, then asked me to come into her office.

I followed her down a corridor, then into a windowless, airless room. As I sat down, she began to speak in those modulated, ‘reasonable’ tones that only priests and doctors use. The problem, she said, is that Mr Tedeschi is extremely upset, naturally, and he’s not acting very rationally. We’ve given him a sedative and he’s lying down at the moment … What we really need to do is inform his wife’s relatives … Unfortunately, Mr Tedeschi was too upset to help us. I said: ‘I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you as well, since I don’t know any of his wife’s relatives.’ I added that I didn’t even know if her parents were dead or alive. I see, I see, the woman said. She seemed to ignore me for a moment and I wondered whether the interview was over. All of a sudden she continued: ‘But you did know Susan Tedeschi?’ I said I’d met her on two or three occasions, yes. She got out something from a desk drawer and handed it to me. It was an international driving licence, in the name of Susan Tedeschi. I looked at the murky photograph. It certainly looked like Christian’s wife – a much younger version of her – but then again I don’t know if I’d have recognised it as her if her name hadn’t been on the licence. The doctor asked: ‘Is that her?’ I replied that I thought it was, adding that the driving licence was in her name, at any rate.

The doctor then introduced herself, which seemed odd because normally you either introduce yourself at the beginning of an encounter or not at all. After we’d exchanged names, she started talking about Christian’s wife again. She spoke very slowly, as if to a child or a foreigner. She said the problem was that as Mr Tedeschi was ‘incapacitated’ for the moment, they really needed someone to identify the body. Since Mrs Tedeschi’s maiden name was Smith, it was going to take a while to track down her family. Would I perhaps be prepared to ‘step in’? Before I had the chance to respond, she quickly added: ‘Perhaps I can get you a cup of coffee?’ I replied: ‘No, I never drink coffee in the afternoon.’

There was an uncomfortable pause. I was starting to feel a little sticky on account of the heat and the stuffiness of the room. I was also wondering whether I should tell the doctor that Christian had already had a joint before they’d given him the sedative. But in the end I said nothing. The doctor continued: ‘It would only take a minute or two. We can go right now if you like, and get it over and done with immediately.’ I couldn’t think of a reply so I remained silent. I didn’t particularly want to identify the body, nor could I think of any reason why I shouldn’t. The doctor sensed my hesitancy: ‘I saw her myself when she came in. I can fully assure you she looks perfectly all right. You’ll just have to see her face for a couple of seconds, that’s all. Her eyes will be closed. She sustained no head injuries whatsoever.’ Then she stood up and said: ‘Really, we’ll get it over and done with right now, then you won’t have to worry about it any more,’ and she started moving towards the door.

We went down a lift and got out somewhere below ground level. We were in a harshly-lit corridor with no natural light at all. As we walked, I wondered whether morgues were always underground. If so, perhaps it was because it had been a means of keeping bodies cold, before the invention of refrigeration I mean. Or perhaps it was for a more metaphorical reason. In any case, it was a stupid thing to waste time thinking about, since I didn’t even know if morgues were always underground. The woman led me through more corridors. There seemed to be a maze of them and I quickly lost my sense of direction. Electrical wiring and water pipes hung down from the low, dusty ceiling. At one point, I said: ‘But really, I only knew her very slightly. Perhaps I won’t even recognise her.’ I really thought I might not. ‘That’s no problem,’ answered the woman, ‘all you say then is that you don’t recognise her, and that’s the end of it.’ I said: ‘Then what’s the point?’ – but we’d already arrived at the room.

She was lying on a trolley, with two white sheets draped over her. There was a morgue assistant there, a young guy with tied-back hair and a goatee beard, perhaps a student. We’d interrupted a game of solitaire he’d been playing at a desk on the far side of the room. He wheeled the body over to us, then removed the sheets from her face with great delicacy, as if he were a beautician about to give someone a facial. I stared. I’d never actually seen a dead body before. Alex once told me he’d been so anxious the first time he was confronted with a corpse in anatomy class that he’d gone to the toilet afterwards and thrown up. Staring at the face, I didn’t feel anything in particular. A long, faint scratch mark crossed her high forehead diagonally from left to right, like a line drawn across a page to strike it out.

It was her all right. It was Susan Tedeschi. Or perhaps she called herself Susan Smith. I hadn’t even remembered that her first name was Susan until the doctor reminded me. And I’d thought I might not recognise her face, but I did. It transfixed me momentarily. I probably only looked for a few seconds, but it seemed much longer. They must have hosed down the body or something because her hair was all wet and combed back. It made her look more lifelike, as if she’d only just this minute stepped out of the shower. In other ways too she appeared much as she’d been in life, but there were subtle differences. Her skin was grey rather than pink, although that might also have been the effect of the fluorescent lights, which seemed to drain the colour out of everything else in the morgue. Another difference was the expression on her face. On the two or three occasions I’d seen her previously, she’d seemed quite meek. About the only thing Christian had ever told me about his wife was that once he’d arranged to meet her at a party, but she’d never turned up. Then on leaving, he’d spotted their car in the street opposite the house where the party was being held, with his wife sitting inside. Apparently she’d had some kind of panic attack.

In death, though, she looked anything but meek. Her face wore a stern, implacable expression and she seemed almost powerful.

I turned to the doctor: ‘Yes, that’s her.’ She seemed visibly relieved. The morgue assistant flicked the two sheets perfectly back into place in one smooth action, which reminded me of Christian’s skill in rolling cigarettes. Then he wheeled the body away.

‘Wait here a moment please,’ the doctor said, ‘I’ll be back in a second.’ She disappeared and I was left alone with the morgue assistant. He stood around uneasily, obviously not wanting to go back to his game of solitaire while I was still in the room. It was difficult to know what kind of small talk to make to a morgue assistant, though.

‘So what happens now? To the body I mean.’

‘Umm, they’ll probably do an autopsy.’

‘Really? How do they decide that? I mean, how do they decide which bodies they’re going to do an autopsy on?’

‘Well there’s all these categories. I can’t remember offhand. Accidents, suicides, deaths in custody …’

‘That’s interesting. I mean I never thought about what happens to the bodies. It’s strange.’

I waved my hand vaguely to encompass the morgue, the morgue assistant and the enormous fridges with metal doors like prison cells.

‘Well it’s pretty weird at first, yeah. But then you get used to it.’

I thought he’d stopped and I was about to say something else when he abruptly continued: ‘It’s the babies that are the hardest. They haven’t been given a chance. You’re holding it in your arms, you know it’s dead but you can’t resist the impulse to support its head, not to let it drop back.’

I stared at him, momentarily lost for words. Just then the doctor appeared at the door. Sorry to leave you waiting like that, she said, without explaining where she’d been or what she’d been up to. She hustled me out of the morgue and we made our way back through the maze of corridors to the lift. Upstairs, I had to sign a declaration and then I was free to go. What with Christian under sedation, there didn’t seem to be any point in hanging around any longer.

I made it back to London in fifty minutes. At first I thought I’d go straight home, then I changed my mind and went into the West End and parked the car in the underground car park at work. I thought I might find Jo and get going on the Jarawa campaign, we could at least rough out an initial press release for the London papers. But as I waited for the lift, it occurred to me that if I went into the office I’d have to talk about Christian and I didn’t want to do that. So I left the car park on foot by the car exit and started to walk aimlessly towards Covent Garden. I wasn’t really thinking about Christian. But his wife’s face was still in front of me, in a way, with its single scratch on the forehead. Eventually I decided to go for a swim. The private swimming pool where I’m a member was five minutes’ walk away, just off Shaftesbury Avenue.

It was an odd pleasure to open my locker and see my swimming and shower gear there, just as I’d left it last time. I changed quickly: I wanted to get into the pool as fast as possible. It was still only five fifteen, which meant that there was hardly anyone around yet – the pool doesn’t usually fill up until six or six thirty, when people start knocking off work. There was one old man who was swimming extremely slowly, doing one lap to my three or four. He was very hairy, his body and prominent breasts were covered in fine silver hair like some aquatic animal, and it seemed a big struggle for him to keep his head above water. Finally he got out – taking ages to climb up the little ladder – and collapsed breathlessly onto a poolside bench. The afternoon light splashed in through the skylights overhead.