‘Reassure me,’ I said.
‘All fine,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
‘If things turn nasty?’ This wasn’t the first time I’d said this.
‘They won’t.’
Two against one. Sensing we were about to make a great mistake, I started the engine and turned onto a slip road that brought us to a new miniature roundabout, and beyond it, an entrance marked by two red brick pillars and a sign, St Osmund’s Close. The houses were identical, large by modern standards, each set in a quarter-acre plot, with a double garage, and constructed of brick, white weather boarding and much plate glass. The closely mown and striped front lawns were unfenced, American style. There was no clutter, no kids’ bikes or games on the grass.
‘It’s number 6,’ Adam said.
I stopped, cut the engine and in silence we looked towards the house. We could see through the picture window into the living room and the backyard beyond, where a clothes-drying tree stood bare. There was no sign of life here or anywhere else in the close.
I was gripping the steering wheel tightly in one hand. ‘He’s not in.’
‘I’ll ring the bell,’ Miranda said as she got out of the car. I had no choice. I followed her to the front door. Adam was behind me, rather too far back, I thought. On the second ring of the ‘Oranges and Lemons’ door chimes, we heard footsteps on the stairs. I was now standing close by Miranda’s side. Her face was strained and I could see a tremor in her upper arm. At the sound of a hand on the latch, she took a half-pace closer to the door. My hand hovered near her elbow. As the door opened, I feared she was about to leap forward in some wild physical assault.
The wrong man, was my first thought. An older brother, even a young uncle. He was certainly large, but the face was gaunt, hollow in the unshaven cheeks that already showed vertical lines each side of his nose. Otherwise, he looked lean. His hands, one of which gripped the open door, were smooth and pale and unnaturally large. He looked only at Miranda.
After the briefest pause, he said in a low voice, ‘Right.’
‘We’re going to talk,’ Miranda said, but there was no need, for Gorringe was already turning away, leaving the door open. We followed her in and entered a long room, with thick orange carpeting and milky white leather sofas and armchairs arranged around a two-metre block of polished wood on which stood an empty vase. Gorringe sat and waited for us to do the same. Miranda sat opposite him. Adam and I were on each side of her. The furniture was clammy to the touch, the smell in the room was of lavender polish. The place looked clean and unused. I’d been expecting some variant of a single-man’s squalor.
Gorringe glanced at us and back to Miranda. ‘You’ve brought protection.’
She said, ‘You know why I’m here.’
‘Do I?’
I saw now that there was a scar, three or four inches long, a vermilion sickle shape on his neck. He was waiting for her.
‘You killed my friend.’
‘What friend is that?’
‘The one you raped.’
‘I thought you were the one I raped.’
‘She killed herself because of what you did.’
He leaned back in his chair and placed his big white hands on his lap. His voice and manner were thuggish, self-consciously so and not convincing. ‘What do you want?’
‘I heard you want to kill me.’ She said it jauntily and I flinched. It was an invitation, a provocation. I looked past her to Adam. He sat rigidly upright, hands on knees, staring ahead in that way he had. I shifted my attention back to Gorringe. Now, I could see the puppy beneath the skin. The lines, the hollow, unshaven skin, were superficial. He was a kid, possibly an angry kid holding himself together with his laconic blocking answers. He didn’t need to respond to her questions. But he wasn’t cool enough not to.
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I thought about it every day. My hands around your neck, squeezing harder and harder for each of the lies you told.’
‘Also,’ Miranda continued briskly, like a committee chair, working her way through a typed-up agenda, ‘I thought you should know what she suffered. Until she didn’t want to live. Are you able to imagine that? And then what her family suffered. Perhaps it’s beyond you.’
To this, Gorringe made no reply. He watched her, waiting.
Miranda was gaining confidence. She would have mentally rehearsed this encounter a thousand times, through sleepless nights. These weren’t questions, they were taunts, insults. But she made them sound like the pursuit of truth. She adopted the insinuating tone of an aggressive cross-examining barrister.
‘And the other thing I want is… just to know. To understand. What you thought you wanted. What you were getting. Did you get a thrill when she screamed? Did her helplessness turn you on? Did you get a hard-on when she wet herself in fear? Did you like it that she was so small and you’re so large? When she begged you, did that make you feel bigger? Tell me about this big moment. What actually made you come? When her legs wouldn’t stop trembling? When she struggled? When she began to cry? You see, Peter, I’m here to learn. Do you still feel big? Or are you really just weak and sick? I want to know everything. I mean, was it still good for you when you stood and pulled up your zip and she was lying at your feet? Still fun when you left her there and walked away across the playing fields? Or did you run? When you got home did you wash your cock? Hygiene might not be your thing. If it is, did you do it in the handbasin? Soap, or just hot water? Were you whistling? What tunes were you whistling? Did you think about her, how she might still be lying there, or making her way home in the dark with her bag of books? Still good for you? You see what I’m getting at. I need to know what pleased you about the entire experience. If you got a thrill not just out of raping her but out of her humiliation afterwards, perhaps I won’t have to go on thinking that the friend I loved died for nothing. And one more—’
In a loping movement, Gorringe was out of his chair at speed and bending towards Miranda with his arm swinging in a wide arc towards her face. I had time to see that his hand was open. It was going to be a slap, an extremely hard one, far more violent than the sort men in movies once gave to women to bring them to their senses. I had barely begun to lift my own hand in her defence when Adam’s rose to intercept and close around Gorringe’s wrist. The deflected sweep of his fast-moving arm provided the momentum that smoothly swung Adam to his feet. Gorringe dropped to his knees, just as I had, with his captured hand twisted above his head and about to be crushed, while Adam stood over him. It was a tableau of agony. Miranda looked away. Still maintaining the pressure, Adam forced the young man back to his chair and, as soon as he was seated, released him.
So we sat in silence for several minutes as Gorringe nursed his arm against his chest. I knew that pain. As I remembered, I had made more fuss. He had appearances to keep up. Prison culture must have toughened him. Late afternoon sunlight suddenly shone into the sitting room and illuminated a long bar of orange carpet.
Gorringe murmured, ‘I’m going to be sick.’
But he didn’t move, and nor did we. We were waiting for him to recover. Miranda was watching him with an expression of plain disgust that retracted her upper lip. This was what she had come here for, to see him, to really see him. But now what? She surely doubted there was anything meaningful that Gorringe could tell her. He suffered the failure of imagination that afflicted and enabled all rapists. When his weight was on Mariam, when she was pinned to the grass, when she was in his arms, he failed to imagine her fear. Even as he saw and heard and smelled it. The lifting curve of his arousal was not troubled by the idea of her terror. At that moment, she may as well have been a sex doll, a device, a machine. Or – I had Gorringe completely wrong. I had the mirror image of the truth. I was the one with the failed imagination: Gorringe knew the state of mind of his victim all too well. He entered her misery and thrilled to it, and it was precisely this triumph of imagining, of frenzied empathy, that drove his excitement into an exalted form of sexual hatred. I didn’t know which was worse or whether there was some sense in which both could be true. They seemed mutually exclusive to me. But I was certain that Gorringe didn’t know either and that he would have nothing to tell Miranda.