LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘Well, they’re right, aren’t they?’ George commented.

      ‘But he’s there to help put things back together, as well. He’s not out to rob them, but that’s what they think.’

      ‘So you want to be popular, John? Is that it?’

      ‘Not –’

      ‘He doesn’t want to be popular,’ Alice interrupted. ‘He wants to be in a different part of the process.’

      ‘John deals with the aftermath, I deal with the aftermath. We’re latecomers, both of us.’

      ‘You know what I mean,’ retorted Alice, an undertone of impatience in her voice.

      Sipping his champagne, George cast a quick sidelong glance at Alice, an approving glance that was intended to go unobserved. ‘You mean catching the bad men.’

      ‘That makes it sound silly. But if you want to put it that way, yes.’

      George nodded and said nothing, and surveyed the garden with an expression of mild perplexity.

      ‘It’s a bit late in the day for a career switch,’ said Alice. ‘Is that what you’re thinking?’

      ‘No. Not at all. It’s not too late.’

      ‘So what is it? Tell me.’

      Lowering his glass, George turned to regard the insistent and beguiling Alice for an extended moment, meeting her eye. ‘Look, Alice. John,’ he said at last. ‘It can be tough, I know, what you’re doing now. Going to see people whose homes have gone up in smoke. Calling at a flat that’s been torn apart. Things that can’t be replaced, gone for ever. It doesn’t make you feel good. It can be distressing. I know. But it’s nothing,’ he told her. ‘Take my word for it, it’s nothing,’ he repeated, facing the garden rather than us, and Alice’s face took on an attentive and slightly fearful and quietly resolute expression, an expression like that which, later, would sometimes appear when the Reverend Beal was on the top of his form, expounding on the ineffable mysteries of God’s love. ‘How long have you been married?’ he asked, as if suddenly starting an interview.

      ‘Going on four years.’

      ‘You seem happy, leaving the job aside for the moment. You and John. You seem very close. Not all couples are. Tell me if this is none of my business.’

      ‘Yes, we’re happy,’ Alice replied. ‘John?’

      ‘Happy. Confirmed.’

      ‘Good,’ said George, in full sagacious mode. Father of two teenaged girls, high-flying officer of the law, he drew a long breath and took a last sip of champagne before going on. ‘Look, it’s a terrific job, don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t do anything else. But the things that people are capable of doing to each other,’ he went on, directing a scowl at the floor. ‘I don’t think anything could surprise me any more. The madness that comes over people. The vicious idiocy. It’s unimaginable,’ he said, turning away, and he wandered off to find a fresh bottle.

      The words of this conversation are the gist of it, a reconstruction, not a copy, but those last three phrases were what was said by Detective Inspector Whittam, verbatim. He poured our drinks, chinked glasses. Smiling at the garden of his big new house, he said: ‘let me tell you about the day I lost my virginity.’

      For more than thirty years these two brothers had lived together, migrating from one pocket of slum accommodation to another in various east London locales before settling in a caravan in the breaker’s yard that they ran in Bethnal Green. In the evenings they drank together in a pub across the road from the yard. At six o’clock every evening they’d take their places at their table in the corner and there they would remain until eleven, downing pint after pint after pint, like drinking machines. You’d get a nod out of them, if you were lucky, and hardly a word passed between them. One night, though, they went home and had an argument, over a game of cards. Brother A brought the disagreement to a close by going to bed: his berth was at one end of the caravan and his sibling’s was at the other. While Brother A was asleep, Brother B came into his cubicle and struck him a few times – maybe twenty-five times – between the eyes, with a torque wrench. This done, Brother B closed the door and retired to bed, leaving the body of Brother A where it lay. Every evening, through September, October, November, December, Brother B went to the pub across the road. Silent as a bollard he sat next to the void that had been his brother’s place, and at night he went home to sleep in his bed, separated from the mouldering corpse by a few feet of space and a very thin wall. ‘Gone away,’ he replied, if anyone asked, and that was enough to satisfy anyone who could be bothered to enquire as to the whereabouts of the absent man. A few people noticed a smell hanging around the piles of car parts, a sewer smell that was emanating from the vicinity of the caravan, but hygiene had never been the brothers’ strong point and nobody was inclined to make an issue of it. So the remains of Brother A were left to dwindle undisturbed until Christmas Eve, when some unexplained mental event induced Brother B, as last orders were called, to mutter to the woman sitting at the next table, a woman who had never been in the pub before and just happened to be there because she was visiting her nephew and his new wife, ‘Get the police.’ Thinking they were in the presence of a psychiatric case, and a dangerous-looking psychiatric case at that, the woman edged away. ‘Get the police,’ he repeated, louder, and then he started shouting. ‘Get the fucking police. For fuck’s sake get the police.’ He burst into tears, but carried on drinking his pint until the police arrived.

      The detectives, young George Whittam among them, entered the caravan to find this thing that was halfway to being a mummy, dressed in brown pyjamas, lying on the foulest mattress in Western Europe. ‘It was really something special,’ George marvelled. ‘Most of him had drained away into the mattress, and there were so many dead flies, you could have filled a bath with them.’ We listened to his cautionary tale. He described the scene for us so vividly, with such relish: the stink when they opened the door; the brown mulch of a bed with the sticky rind of a corpse lying on it; the demented drunk man stamping on the heaps of flies as if it had been the insects that had killed his brother. We listened and we felt that we were almost there in the caravan with George Whittam, the young constable, as he stared at the bed and tried to stop the shake in his hand. But a case like the deranged brother must come along once in a decade, we told ourselves. There’s an element of bravado in the telling of the story too. ‘The man who looked on darkness and is not afraid,’ joked Alice afterwards, on our way home. And the brothers were from London, after all. London’s a different world. Life down here is more sedate. It’s not murder or GBH every day of the week. And the satisfactions of justice will outweigh whatever unpleasantness may lie in store. We can handle whatever happens. We love each other. We are happy.

      So the decision was made and the reaction to George Whittam’s warning was nothing more than a pause, a hesitancy that was soon overcome. But George was right. You can’t completely imagine it, and what it does to you is unimaginable – or, to be more precise, we didn’t imagine what it would do to us. When you deal with violence and its consequences every week, when every day you’re talking to people you know are lying to you, then perhaps it’s inevitable that you become a different person. In the beginning it’s a performance: you play the part of the hard man, the man with no illusions, the cynic. You learn quickly how it’s done. You observe and imitate, but at the outset there’s a difference between the role and the real person, between who you are being and who you are. Here’s a picture of a girl, can’t be older than eighteen, a prostitute, slashed so badly by her punter she was having to hold one side of her face in place when she crawled out of the park on her knees. ‘Poor kid,’ you say, and you pass the picture on without another word, but your eyes are prickling and you’re hoping that the bastard gets sentenced by a judge whose values come straight out of the rule book of Genghis Khan. A couple of years on there’s the blistered beetroot face of Evie Challoner, whose boyfriend has doused her with a kettleful of boiling water to make her ugly, so her ex-husband, who wants her back, won’t want her back any longer. At this you shake your head, and the weary shake of the head isn’t too far from

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