A Question of Guilt Read online

  Some suppressed intuition was telling her Geoffrey Bailey would find this space cluttered and dark, another instinct asking her why she should think any such thing. No more than a fear that he would not see it for what it was. Insecure but private, secluded from view by a garden which was Helen’s pride, if not always her joy; hidden behind a huge wall which separated it from the school playground beyond. She loved the garden, battled with it ineptly, and if ever home by day even loved the midday screaming of playtime, repeated on the two evenings a week when other children used the same ground for football practice beneath floodlights which cast a flattering glow against her windows while muffled whistles and shouts broke the silence of the garden. No wonder the place had been the cheapest thing in a posh road, but Helen had known she would enjoy all those comforting untroublesome sounds of human life so safely removed from her own privacy by the wall, cheerful in the close distance. The rooms at the back were avenues of light from the south-facing garden; bright kitchen, bathroom, tiny study and bedroom beaming sunshine whenever sunshine appeared. On the street side were the two large rooms which were so dark by comparison she gave up the effort of pretending they were light, painted them in definite colours, strong fabrics at the windows, dark patterned cushions on a plump settee, pieces of old polished mahogany to catch the light of a winter fire. Hotch-potch rooms in the end, real fire, full of bits and pieces, too many patterns, dozens of pictures: a bit like a junk shop without the crowding, as full of detail as Geoffrey’s was empty but as tidy as her office was not. Hundreds of books, but not as many as there would have been if she had not lent them out and forgotten who had them. She liked possessions as temporary friends: not like Hugo who adored them, carried them with him like an Indian prince with his rubies, always terrified of loss.

  Loved Hugo, yes. She saw herself in the bathroom mirror, wondered briefly if he had ever missed her face, even once. Would not have missed him for worlds of worthier men, but wished she had not learned betrayal as thoroughly, or been left as empty. Recovery had worked a slow but sure passage over two long years.

  Bed. Blissful friendship of the duvet and a tattered Maigret novel. Monsieur Maigret, psychic detective, would have understood Mrs Cartwright, the bad, sad Jaskowski, and the silly vanities of Bernard. Geoffrey Bailey would like this book if he had not liked it already: she would give it to him and he would say if he had read it already. No, he might fail to appreciate that. There was an intimacy in lending books which was open to misinterpretation. Better not. Policemen and lawyers should be allowed to breathe their different air, each uninfected by the other.

  In a different home in a different street, Eileen Cartwright felt the liberty to examine her own reflection in the mirror after she had polished the bathroom. One day soon they would take her away, and they would not find her in a dirty house.

  Even the bathroom was full of memories. A very ordinary bathroom, fitting scene for the demise of such an ordinary man, following in the wake of a sleepless night for Francis, sleepless only because she had been so wakeful, and, watchful as he was those days, he ignored the hints of pain. Intense pain as he stood poised before the mirror, razor in hand, understanding the taut band compressing his chest, only sufficient time to reach for the pills in the cabinet before his knees buckled and he began to slip methodically to the floor. Curled like a foetus, he scrabbled at the top of the small brown bottle which would not respond to the weak grip of his fingers, would not turn or lift. The voice he had used to call for his wife sounded deafening in his ears as he used the rest of his strength to smash the bottle against the side of the bath, watching the presence of blood with surprise, his smeared and slippy fingers refusing to grasp one sugar-coated pill of the dozen scattered on the floor. Surely he saw her bulky figure through the glass of the door, and saw her hand, more efficient than his own and free of blood, turning the handle.

  ‘Eileen … help me. Please. Pills …’

  Fingers as well as his limbs had lost control. The hand beckoning hers flapped in a feeble effeminate gesture. Dimly he watched her stoop, saw her rise again in the bathroom mirror, expanding to a height which seemed enormous before she bent towards him. Delirium, perhaps, but she seemed to be smiling, offering him a shard of glass. The glass of her spectacles was clean and shimmering: the glass of the shard was unmistakably brown from the bottle. The final memory was dimmer still. He had shaken his head, watched her rise larger than ever, receding away from his open mouth. Then there was her shadow again, growing distant on the far side of the glass door, closing it gently behind her as she retreated from his soundless scream.

  Eileen gave the mirror one last wipe. He had been writing his book: that was where the love had gone. Then he had died. Not her fault. She had spent the day after the funeral cleaning her wares with untroubled conscience, just as she had spent the day after her father’s sewing lace. Such restoration mended the world: her rooms stank of the cleansers which helped make her small fortune. White spirit and fine steel wool for removing the years of grime from small wooden pieces; white spirit for dipping jewellery and making diamanté gleam; white spirit for wine stains on lace. The scent of it hung about her, a sharp hospital smell, Eileen’s own symptom of a clean, hygienic life.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘Oh, I am not liking this: you know I am not liking this …’

  ‘No, Stan, I can see you aren’t. You sound foreign when you’re upset. Calm down now, lad. It’ll all be over soon.’

  Cool and weary sympathy from the gaoler, not unkind in his reserve, keeping his voice low. Every one of them a lad. Stan here had been very excited. The valium had helped, but it probably wasn’t enough. The prison doctor normally administered it with a shovel, but even he didn’t seem to have taken account of Jaskowski’s size. He was big, that was all, not fat or anything: quite a good-looking man in a way, like an extra-large bear, with his ugly neat hair sticking out over his wide forehead, with the very black eyebrows bushed above the piercing blue eyes giving him a kind of unconvincing fierceness. His hands were stubbily large and soft, the back of one more densely covered with dark hair than the other, and as they moved restlessly, looked fitter for gentle manual labour than savagery. Nothing sinister about Stanislaus: more like an out of place and gentle farmer, a man raised to raise children and build a roof over their heads. In one sense, Stan had done that, although lately the council had been providing the roof which was an improvement on some of the various other roofs he had known.

  Perhaps not all of them, there being good memories, and bad.

  ‘Stanislaus! Come back soon, and don’t bring that damned magpie in the house …’

  The first memory, a camp set in all those acres of parkland, where Mam and Dad had taken such pains with the coal-fired Nissen which had been their first English family home. Heavily decorated, the tiny plot of land outside planted with flowers as well as cabbages, all in an effort to create the permanence of a home around a flimsy, draughty dwelling. Only later, after they had moved away to a proper house in London because of all the relatives and the work, could he see, because he was told so often, what they had done, those stubborn Polish refugees. Made a village out of necessity, insisted on thriving in it with rabbits and cats, pink-painted, jerry-built houses, gardens in the wilderness, and christening parties which lasted days. Only this son of theirs, when told of the hardships, and he was told all the time, did not see why he should spend the whole of this life being grateful. He had liked it, the camp and the empty green fields, and the pit where Dad worked. ‘Why do we have to leave?’ he asked, and Mam had slapped him.

  By the time Family Jaskowski was found in the metropolis, living far worse in a way, expecting better and labouring harder than a chain gang, they were achievers all, except the dreamer. ‘You’ll never do nothing, Stanislaus: Why aren’t you more like your brothers?’ Familiar refrain, always in English, although Mam never spoke the English so good, and rarely at home. It added weight to the despairing scorn to say it in English. Why
couldn’t he be more like the eldest, Peter, the best of them, foreman clerk, fierce Catholic? You could take a problem to Peter: he was always ready with advice, and his wife even readier with tea and sympathy, moral spine to the family, steady earner. They had come a long way from the Nissen huts in the valley and the Red Cross boat from Poland, such a long, long way.

  But for one cross taken away, said Mam, God gives us another. Gethsemane was an everlasting climb: you mustn’t think you’d made it ever, since you never really did, even with the central heating, the church, the cousins, the new babies, as long as you had Stanislaus sitting on your new chair in his silly shoes, waving his big daft hands, and telling you another wild get-rich-tomorrow scheme. Work’s the answer, my boy … you’ll find out. Build up gradual; don’t you see your brothers, boy? They didn’t expect something for nothing: they didn’t chase girls, and spend everything on a stolen car. The police coming here, the shame of it. Go slowly, Stanislaus, and look for a nice girl like Peter’s wife; she has nice cousins, you know. Ask her to introduce you after church. Stop saying you’re going to have the biggest house in the world. You’re nothing. Too lazy for anything. Oh, Peter, what do we do? Such a dreamer that boy. You speak to him. He won’t listen to me. Says he has better things to do. What better?

  Years passed in manoeuvring Stanislaus into defeat. Marriage to the prettiest of his sister-in-law’s cousins was only a preliminary to the most consistent love affair of his life, with his firstborn, Edward. For this son he worked harder, morning, noon and night, so that his family and the wife of his bosom breathed easier, until he was sacked for stealing booze from the warehouse. They nagged. He struck back, the real rebellion, cowing them all with his fury before he acquired the loan of that terrible shop full of old chairs he called antiques. God might forgive him, but Mam did not: first a thief, then a scavenger trading in leftovers, not even a colourful way to Hell.

  But Stan believed, just as his small son Edward believed. ‘Better times are coming soon, my little man; want to come out in the van with me?’ Edward leapt at the chance to roll round the markets with Dad, chunky boy and chunkier man, proud of one another. Having Ed made Stan swagger big, boastful and larger than life. Stan had always wanted to be brave, but only Ed could make him feel he ever was, and not even Ed could save him from the bailiff. By the time that man had come and gone, Stanislaus felt anything but brave with the weight on him of three children, the scolding world, and nothing else to show for forty years but dreams.

  Indestructible nevertheless, since Stan would never lose the habit of dreaming, and when times were hard he simply changed the nature of the dreams. If not rich, he would be romantic. So what did he choose? Self-styled private detective: I ask you, said Mam, Stanislaus, detective, and him as clever as a dog? No joking, please, said Peter, afraid of another rage, let him be: I’ll persuade him somehow. A tribute to Uncle Peter’s interference, Stan becoming a hospital porter with the detecting stuff confined to a smaller part of his life, although not even Peter could persuade him to leave Edward out of it. How could he leave Ed at home when the boy wouldn’t stay without him, even if it wasn’t the boy who had the brain to suggest it?

  ‘I love that boy better than the world, you know,’ Stan’s confession as well as his boast. ‘Only there’s times he worries me: too sharp, you know, he’ll cut himself.’ It was a fear, although one he could hardly own. Ed ran rings round him and he knew it, but worse than that, seemed to have inherited all his father’s fickleness with none of the inhibition; all mixed up with a terrible bitterness. Stan might have loved the idea of riches, but he could not hate the rich or anyone else for that matter, bowing to them rather than scowling. Not like Ed, the boy with the blank and unscrupulous face, whose pellucid eyes observed so much and revealed so little, while his nonchalant slouch hid the fists of rage curled inside the pockets of his fur-lined parka.

  ‘Oh, I am not liking this.’

  Stanislaus had always been a man from whom sweat sprang with ease. Transferring to his cell, handcuffed on either side, he could be excused this moisture which steamed through the underarms of his winter suit and left him rancid with fear despite the meticulous washing and shaving he had been allowed. When he thought of Ed, the drops of perspiration rolled stinging into his eyes, horror for them both, incredulous that he had passed all tests so far, and never mentioned Ed to anyone who would like to know, even Mr Bailey. Supposing they had found out about Ed knowing Mrs Cartwright, about his awful, silent presence at those first two meetings? About him giving Ed the things from her car, or even worse, seen the rest of it, including everything Ed knew, since he, Stanislaus Jaskowski, had been stupid enough to tell him?

  Be quiet, Stanislaus. It is only you who talks too much. The boy will be quiet for his own good, but of all my badness, this is the worst badness. To have let him meet that woman, and to tell him about the money, the plan, looking for him to look up to me, you know? How could I be as stupid as that, push such risk on him? Only I needed to talk, and he said why not? It’s only one rich woman, he said: it doesn’t matter, they are all like vermin, you know? I didn’t think so, but he thought so. He is not like me; he was not so afraid of Eileen. They could talk with their eyes, those two. She tells me, ‘Your son is a bright boy, I don’t mind him listening.’ I think to myself, she likes him, and it’s good for a boy to be liked by some woman with money, even if she is bad. But I shouldn’t have; I shouldn’t have taken him with me then, only I’m glad at least he didn’t go with me to her home for the money, or with me on the killing trip. By then, I am frightened of them both, Ed, and Mrs Cartwright, only I couldn’t tell Mr Bailey any of that. A grown man frightened of his son, you know? She will kill my others if I spend her money and do not do the work she wants, all of them except Ed. He thought I was a coward, ‘You won’t dare to do it, Dad; you never dare do anything in the end.’ ‘Watch me,’ I said. ‘You will be proud of me and we will both be rich; of course I can do it.’

  Only make her go on like now, saying she she does not even know me. If she does not open her mouth, and say, ‘That man had a son whom I knew also,’ then I can stand it all. If I knew that he would never again go close to her, I could stand anything, you know? I love the boy, but I don’t know how bad he is, and it makes me want to pray. God help me until he is safe. I don’t think he loves me any more. Father in Heaven, he is as hard as that wall. As long as she says she never knew me, she cannot say she knows my boy. My boy? My son? Oh God, he is like the devil, and I love him, my monster son …

  Jaskowski, still muttering, irritated the gaoler. ‘Try and keep quiet mate, will you? Soon be over.’

  In the dock of the anonymous courtroom, the aching for the sight of a familiar face passed him, and he felt calmer after all in their absence. All out of his hands now, all of it, and all of them. He knew the outcome, hopeless enough to place him far beyond the reach of redemption, and there was huge relief in that. It was in part the retarded effects of the extra valium which so blurred his comprehension that he did not see Ed below his feet in the seat resting against the dock he occupied; might not have seen even without the drug slowing his mind and limbs to a quiet standstill.

  ‘Guilty, or not guilty?’ Of course it was guilty: it had to be guilty. Why did they ask? All he could say, everything he had been advised to say. He sat with his minders on either side, connected at the wrist, Siamese triplets, all of them large and empty, none of them showing a flicker of emotion. As the prosecutor recited the facts, it was difficult to know which of the three was the murderer.

  ‘… I did it, like I said to Mr Bailey,’ he had told his solicitor. That simple statement should have been sufficient to explain it all, but obviously it was not. Nothing surprised him anymore. He had been too well briefed for surprise, although there was little enough they could do for him but advise him and prepare him, like a corpse for a funeral. ‘I’ll give evidence against her. I want to do that; bad, bad woman,’ he had said when they explained he did not have any
obligation to help the Law which destroyed him, ‘but I don’t want my family involved.’ They had been kind. ‘But your family were not involved, were they?’ ‘Of course not …’ The vehemence of the protective reply surprised and relieved the lawyers. The man had a heart at least, and in the knowledge of how much better off he would be without it, they pitied him.

  Stanislaus could see nothing of the judge apart from his wig, but this judge with hands tied to a mandatory sentence was far less terrifying than the next who would watch him giving evidence, weigh his words whilst Eileen watched from the dock. ‘I’m afraid you’ll be on your own then,’ his solicitor had said. No more than now, perhaps: he would do it all the same. Bad woman. Stanislaus looked at the ceiling of the court, imagining it blue, finding that it removed his gaze from anyone in particular, tipped his head back and focused his eyes on the ceiling, he could escape. Back into the fields chasing rabbits, catching the hare, trying to teach his magpie to steal bright things in the hope that one day it would fetch him a diamond, and in all that time it provided no more than three treasured pieces of beer-bottle glass. Blue-grey sky of London, smelling the same smell he could smell on his own body now in the back of a borrowed car in a back street, straining his knees and thrusting between the legs of some moaning girl whose name he could not recall, not Maria; Maria had been too shy for that. Never again. He wished there had been many more women, and shuddered without real violence.

  Details from the report of the pathologist intoned by counsel, poured over and into his head. So dry, these paragraphs on body fluids, the beaten flesh on the bare bones of the tale, repeated at length. Injury must be specified, justice seen to be done, and they must all know why his life was over to all intents and purposes worth remembering.