A Question of Guilt Read online

  Although Helen did not ration compassion because she mistrusted the object of it, and tended instead to overcompensate for dislike, she could not help the slight shiver of recognition at the familiar sight of the boy, his jeans and leather jacket an almost dated attempt at adolescent glamour, his hair, longer than before, elegantly hung over one eye. Other attempts at sartorial improvement included one ear-ring, but he shone with cleanliness, the white T-shirt spotless. Mother was less so, frayed around the edges, still fighting; whether with the boy or for him was difficult to tell, but both destined to draw the short straw, as on this morning, a pallid, unconvincing barrister who would do them no good at all. If anything was to be done to persuade the bench to the kind of leniency which would leave the boy without a record, Helen would have to do it herself. Not difficult once you knew how, to compensate for the shortcomings of the defence while acting as prosecutor, something she had done more often than she could have counted.

  It was a question not of what was said, but how it was said, in a quiet voice for the facts without drama or condescension.

  ‘… Edward admitted he carried the knife for his own protection, would have used it if necessary. Your Worships know that this is the full offence. However, it is not a large knife: it could be worse, and he did admit it. In all fairness the prosecution should add that it is within its own knowledge that this family have been subject to tragic circumstances through absolutely no fault of their own, and have attempted to make the best of it. Your Worships will understand if I do not elaborate on a sensitive issue, but whilst sentencing is no business of the prosecution, a matter entirely for the court’s discretion, may I venture to suggest that assistance would be more appropriate than punishment to a first offender who is no stranger to suffering?’

  ‘You mean probation, Miss West?’ beamed the Clerk, not slow to take a hint. ‘Conditional discharge?’

  ‘That is a matter on which the defence must address your Worships, of course.’

  Which he did, with uninspired hesitation. The result was more briefly written, with no column for fine or record, but one for conditional discharge and probation.

  Mrs Jaskowski was gathering bags as Helen emerged briefly from the room. She caught at her arm, a sudden awkward action, spontaneous, but regretted.

  ‘Thanks, Miss. You done more than our bloke.’

  ‘No thanks needed. Only fair. How are you getting on?’

  ‘Not so bad. You know about it all, then.’

  ‘Enough, Mrs Jaskowski. You can’t have had an easy time.’

  ‘No.’ There was nothing more to say. Edward, lurking in the background, reappeared at his mother’s side, the hair brushed out of the eyes, the leather belt adjusted. Helen spoke, and like Maria, almost wished she had not.

  ‘Adult court, next time, Edward. Won’t be so easy. Don’t forget to see the probation, will you?’

  He nodded and moved away, half shuffling, half swaggering behind his mother. Helen required neither gratitude nor appreciation: no reason to expect people to be grateful for fairness, but she could have wished, as an alternative to reward, that she had liked him more, or could hope never again to see his name on a list. Unappealing, man-shaped boy; he must be sick of the sight of her, appearing at the back of bad news in miserable courtrooms on the two occasions she had ever figured in his life. If the dislike was so transparent, so mutual, she could not be surprised, but Ed in his wake left a prickle of despair.

  ‘I don’t know why,’ Helen later told Geoffrey, ‘but it seems my doubtful privilege to keep stumbling into the dramatis personae of this case. It’s never happened before, but I keep colliding with them, saying I’m sorry.’

  ‘Bothers you, doesn’t it?’ He was sounding concerned, but amused.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’m seeing the entirely different perception you must have of any case when you know all the people, spent hours with them, not just chance meetings and a view of the dock. It makes me feel so ignorant. I do nothing, feel a fraud, as if the brunt of the work never hits me.’

  ‘Helen, that’s not quite right. You don’t have to go to bed with them to understand them.’

  ‘Well, in Mrs Cartwright’s individual case, I’m sure you do, but not to be recommended.’

  ‘Bitchy, but mild. What’s the matter?’

  ‘I feel particularly futile.’

  ‘You mustn’t. There’s enough grief without that. It’s right that you have your role, and the likes of me, mine. A silly, convoluted pattern, but versions of the truth often improve through translation, objectively assessed: that’s where you come in, an assessor, it’s better you don’t know the people. By better, I mean, more exact in the long run. Does that make sense? Distance refining the understanding of the facts?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said doubtfully, sipping her wine, unconvinced. Geoffrey finished his own.

  ‘I wish you hadn’t met the boy.’

  ‘I don’t wish that. I wish he didn’t have to suffer so much of whatever it is he has to suffer. Dislike, hatred. Something of the kind. He has it, like bad breath. It’s almost tangible.’

  ‘Don’t refine understanding too far. It doesn’t bear so much. And Helen, that’s enough. Six months delay, and we can’t talk about this case for six months. I’m only here to distract both of us. I thought since you sometimes feel safe enough or desperate enough for the occasional post-work grumble in a pub with me, perhaps you’d like to come home for supper. I guarantee a slightly better stocked larder than yours.’

  She smiled, struck by a vision of her refrigerator, empty of anything more than four eggs and a stale loaf, all she had to offer herself or anyone else. A fridge like that, with a supply of wine and potato crisps by the sackful was a way of life. Helen hesitated, tempted to enter the shelter of his provision, curious, but careful.

  ‘Well …’

  ‘I’ll run you home afterwards. You look as if you need an early night.’

  Light touch of reassurance, gently and adroitly given, for the benefit of them both. Armed with it, favoured by it, they finished the wine, and left the artificial sawdust for homelier scenery.

  All of them old, people like that, Ed thought; lawyers and such, magistrates and coppers. They did not, as a matter of course, give him anything on which to rely. What did they expect from him? Duty, gratitude, or something of the kind he supposed. Not that he thought much of them at all. Ed abandoned his mother on the courthouse steps, not rudely, but finally, went home and lay on his bed with his music connected to his ears. Ed was always plugged in by the ears; it was a new source of contempt that no one should question the source of the expensive stereo or the tapes which supplied it. He ambled round his city corners to the aggressive clash of rhythmless sound: he twitched to it in the Underground or on foot: on the bus, or in a shop, he listened to the music, his face vacant enough to discourage conversation, his step tuned to the beat of drums and shrill instruments. Ed provided the words, turning up the sound whenever irritated in order to irritate in retaliation. In such battles he had no equals. ‘He’s very fond of music,’ Mary would explain to those upon whom the presence of her sulky nephew was inflicted by virtue of his unwelcome presence in her house. ‘Take no notice.’ What had been first a kind of plea for attention had become an end in itself.

  He did not want them to notice in order to understand, or take him to one side and bore him to death with the very attempt to do anything so impossibly stupid, so insulting, almost as bad as their saying they would pray for him. Don’t make me laugh, Uncle, you bloody hypocrite. It was more of a throwing down of a gauntlet – stop me if you dare, I only live in your house, I didn’t ask to. More fool you for being dutiful, don’t ask me to respect it, why should I? And in case you were thinking of treating me like a son, I hate you, don’t dare do it.

  Another way of defining that territory which was to be his: the territory of himself, what he wore, where he went, what he did, all to remain unimpeachable, as well as his territory over Peter. ‘Peter does
n’t like fish,’ he would say, spokesman for the child’s tastes, and Peter did not eat fish. ‘Peter is not going to school today,’ and Peter was not forced because of this strange parenthood in parenthesis. Lonely Peter was bound to his brother by thin steel threads of sheer adoration and loneliness, tempered by fine, but flawed intelligence, a pawn in everyone’s game whenever he was not ignored, which was most of his life.

  To Edward, he was not a useful tool: he lost his memory for instructions so easily, he was a dreamer, a bungler, a creature of artless sweet nature, with all the stupidity of innocence. To his aunt and uncle beset by many children, the contest for Peter was easily relinquished, Edward’s challenge to their authority over either of them not so much battled and won, but never grasped, nothing but a cold and quiescent war where cease-fire was agreed before a single blow had been struck.

  So complete was the bloodless rout, so preoccupied the adults and so intimidated, that even the most obvious questions were not asked with any regularity. When Uncle Peter had begun with a paternal quiz, a heavy-handed, well meant, badly executed duty: ‘Now, Ed … we must think of a job for you,’ the answering eyes were uncomfortably blank. ‘So you leave school. What do you want to do? What do you want to be, Ed?’

  ‘Don’t know.’ Those were the days when he still answered at all. ‘A detective, I think.’

  Uncle Peter was confused and outraged. ‘All this we had, all this heartache with the uniforms, and you want to join the police?’

  He was incredulous, Ed similarly so, that the man could be so dense. The glance of pale scorn arrested Uncle Peter’s half-complete gestures of protest.

  ‘Not that kind of detective,’ he muttered. There was nothing else to say. Ed’s words had been given with the backwards glance of leaving the room, closing the one and only discussion on the subject. After that, further debate was superfluous even had either party wanted to risk it. Ed would have done: Uncle Peter did not.

  Formative years for Ed to practise all kinds of warfare. His tenth birthday found him setting a record: running the length of the dank corridor below Bevan House with a stick, smashing all fifteen neon ceiling lights without pausing for breath. He believed in learning how to be the best, and the Hackington estate was a hotbed of education for truanting children. It might have been designed for games with its interconnected units built round a square, so that children as well as adults could run from one to the next without effective pursuit, and the sound of domestic quarrels or lovelorn catcalls reverberated from one small tower to the next, echoing in the lift shaft, long since vandalised beyond repair. In the middle of the squalid square stood the garages, a centrepiece in concrete, ugly as sin and even more colourless than the surroundings. Those privileged enough to possess one of these kept it locked, but anything free the children inevitably found.

  The first time Ed had sampled the delights of Driller Killer and other sadistic visual horrors, he had been in one of the Hackington garages with the video Tysall’s son had borrowed from home, and the tapes Tysall’s brother had purloined from the pub. Lying on the stone floor in his parka, fighting down nausea in the dark as the electric drill spun its way into the head of the victim, Ed had determined to keep his eyes on the screen while weaker Tysall failed, and after a few more sessions of acid thrown at babies or bodies slowly split by the chain-saw, eleven-year-old Ed could watch it all with enjoyable impunity, absorbed into the screams and blood-coloured images, far more fun than that detective stuff he watched on telly with Dad. It was when Ed began to suspect that the stomach of the man would have been as sharply revolted as his own appetite was increased by the more brutal images absorbed in the garages, that he began that slow decline towards despising him. Not the whole story, but the beginning. Most was his father being the kind of servant Ed so despised, and Stanislaus could never have been anything else.

  ‘Can I come with you, Ed … Please let me come with you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s late and it’s cold.’

  ‘No it’s not, and I’m very warm. Why not?’

  ‘Because you can’t. Nothing doing for little boys. Next time, perhaps.’

  ‘Promise?’ A note of slight relief.

  ‘Promise. Go to sleep.’ Useless to threaten to tell Aunt Mary. Peter knew that whatever else he did, Ed would despise him for that.

  There was nothing doing for little boys, but more to learn on the Hackington and in all its surrounding streets with their new-found riches the older you grew, provided you never grew too old for all the nimbleness involved. Bigger thieves grew tall from little, never innocent, acorns. On the dreadful first, Ed surprised himself by his pounding heart, his own deafening footsteps as he neared the enemy car, the tinkling of the broken quarter light sounding like an explosion. Then there was the arm, shaking like the rest of him, thrust through the window, nerveless fingers fumbling with the handle, door open, contents of back seat scooped without examination, and he on his toes, running faster than he had ever known how to run, dropping things from the awkward bundle, realising he had not even planned where next with his armful of incrimination, finally stopping in a churchyard to leave it all there. Amid the exhilaration which rose as the panic subsided on his selfconscious stroll home, came the treacherous realisation of waste; all that effort, for what? Two coats, a couple of scarves and a briefcase, left warming the dead against the church wall, and him cursing himself for a great big fool.

  Technique was there for its own perfection: discipline counted, size helped, and companions never. Winter was best, with fewer bodies in the streets and too cold for accurate observation. Easy. Don’t take it if it isn’t useful; leave the tat for somebody else. Lucrative late nights and lazy days, and still Dad didn’t notice. But even so, with his growing hoard in the garages, credibility with buyers and his dangerous self-respect, burglary was a frightening departure, a renewal of the old sweaty palms. Inside a block of flats, he treated the task like a workman, knowing from life in his own monster tower how little regard there would be for the noise, less for the result. Grateful he was if he had thought of it, for people’s endless need for easily stolen goods. He wondered at their constant craving for such things, did Edward. He himself needed nothing he stole, or not with such critical need, one of many reasons why he so excelled.

  Kids’ stuff, all of it, crap for kids; his own words until he qualified for what he called the proper houses and learned all the rest, took in through his skin that septic hatred which grew with his size. Sentiments absent from the initial fumblings around flats as ordinary as the one from which he had embarked, but hatred found in the houses he came to know after these; houses with solid wooden doors, easier targets after practice, occupied by an alien breed who took holidays, abandoned ship for whole weekends, had predictable lives, and left exposed to him the treasure trove of their houses, from which, in the beginning, he could find nothing to steal.

  He hated them for having nothing to remove, with their cash buried in the brickwork, sunk into immovable carpets, solid furniture, and thousands of books he would never begin to read. Edward knew he observed whole lives and casts of thought light years beyond his grasp or comprehension, all of it enviable and frightening. No word or action of his own could describe the loathing. As a grown child utterly frustrated by knowledge he could not share, Ed understood with complete clarity all the defecating, spoiling breed of juvenile burglars, who would have cut the paintings with Stanley knives, aerosolled the walls with obscenities, fouled like dogs on the carpet, saying in obscene gesture what they could not say in words, envy and hate thrown at the old lie of equality. Ed understood it all right, felt it rise in his own throat like the vomit of despair, the bloody pitiless unfairness of it all, but did not react in the same way, his hatred too acid and extreme for temporary relief. He wanted to spit in their food, murder their animals, but did not. Instead he planned his own route and began to follow his plan. Ed would not bow to this, or serve it, and
in finding these houses, he left behind his father.

  ‘You’re different, Edward,’ she had told him, and he preened at the flattery. ‘Most people fall into this. Thieves by habit, see? Not you. You’ve planned it, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good boy. And you understand, don’t you, that a first class criminal must have no scruples, none at all, must regard every law with equal disrespect? It’s no good doing it otherwise. There has to be no person you wouldn’t bribe, no weak links, and no being sorry for anyone at all.’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’

  ‘Well then, you’ve got to educate yourself to the top of the tree. That means trying everything, and I mean everything.’

  ‘Yes. Before I’m twenty. Beginning now.’

  ‘That’s it, Edward. You’ve got the idea.’

  On balance he was pleased, even with his mistakes: even if he had been caught that one and only time, burgling Eileen’s house. By Eileen herself. Following from such nightmare, he could never be afraid of anything as banal as a policeman. Not bad, his humility on that arrest, and his ingenuous version of truth, he thought. Try everything. She might have been proud of him had she known of it, and known of his purpose. Ed slept, not without dreaming. You bastard, Dad, you stinking daft bastard, you sodding feeble liar.

  ‘I love it here,’ said Helen. ‘Can’t help saying it again and again, can’t help thinking it either. I like all the bits and pieces, but I’d like it even without them, but not as much. It’s not a surprise. When we came upstairs, I wondered where you were taking me.’

  Geoffrey smiled, pleased the impression should have been so much better than he had hoped. Like me, respect me, like my home had seemed a workable formula since his home, after all, was his closest and most consistent friend, the only one for whom he sought approval.

  ‘I’m glad you like it,’ was all he said. ‘Perhaps you’ll move out of a basement, and copy me. Live on top of the world, drowned out in summer by the smell of the river.’