‘But you see, I couldn’t bear him to end up looking back on his childhood — back on the past — the way his father did.’
And then, without another word, Laura rose to her feet and walked briskly towards the kitchen door, not looking back once: either to hide the tears that she had been withholding all this time, or simply because it had become too cold to sit in the garden for a moment longer.
~ ~ ~
William Cowper, The Task (1785):
Yet what can satire, either grave or gay? …
What vice has it subdued? whose heart reclaim’d
By rigour? or whom laughed into reform?
Alas! Leviathan is not so tamed.
THE WINSHAW PRIZE
OR,
NATHAN PILBEAM’S BREAKTHROUGH CASE
A ‘NATE OF THE STATION’ STORY
1
Scotland Yard were baffled.
Or rather, they did not yet know that they were baffled. But by the time Detective Chief Inspector Capes had finished reading the email, he would have a new case on his hands, and he would be baffled by it.
The email had arrived two hours ago, had been forwarded from computer to computer and eventually came to the attention of ‘Capes of the Yard’, as his colleagues insisted on calling him. Incidentally, why did they call him that, he asked himself, as he asked himself every day? It was a pathetic nickname. Totally without originality, and doing no kind of justice to his stature within the force. Why on earth couldn’t they call him ‘The Caped Crusader’? He’d been dropping hints about it for months. It was the perfect soubriquet, combining a subtle play on words with a clear gesture towards his almost superhero-like approach to police work. Why wasn’t it catching on?
Sipping his third black coffee of the day as he contemplated the stark injustice of this situation, he realized that his attention was drifting away from the email, which he was yet to read in fulclass="underline"
To Whom It May Concern
Forgive me for writing to you ‘out of the blue’ as it were. As a mere Trainee Detective Constable from the provinces, my name will not be known to you. However, two items of news from the London papers have recently caught my eye, and I wanted to make sure that their potential significance was understood by those in positions of authority at Scotland Yard.
The first of these items is the death by drowning of Michael Parr, a Caucasian male in his late twenties, on the southern bank of the Thames near Greenwich, on the 13th of last month. Mr Parr was, by profession, a stand-up comedian. The coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death.
The second is the death of Raymond Turnbull, another Caucasian male in his late twenties, after falling from a seventh-floor balcony at a block of flats in Acton Town, west London, on the 18th of this month. Mr Turnbull was also a stand-up comedian and, once again, the coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death.
It is my belief that neither of these deaths was accidental, and that the two fatalities are connected.
You may wonder why it is that I make this declaration with such assurance. I would be happy to explain my reasoning to you over a drink at any time and place that might be mutually convenient. In the meantime, you might acquire some insight into the methods that have already brought me some modest measure of notoriety by perusing the attached article, which was published in the features section of the February issue of Police magazine.
Sincerely
Nathan Pilbeam
*
PC Pilbeam lived in an unremarkable apartment building on Guildford’s north-eastern outskirts. It was a new block, set back from the road and securely gated. You had to enter a code to gain access to the paved forecourt and then another, different code to get into the building itself. He had a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor, which looked out over a pleasant but uninspiring communal garden. PC Pilbeam lived alone and used the second bedroom as his study.
This study was distinguished by the volume and variety of the books and paperwork with which Pilbeam had filled it. Two of the walls were covered from floor to ceiling with bookshelves, which overflowed not just with the expected volumes of Blackstone’s Police Manuals and Operational Handbook, but also a huge library of works devoted to history, politics, sociology, cultural theory, media studies, Marxist philosophy, semiotics, and queer studies. There were shelves filled with box files which contained back issues of journals dealing with the same subjects: PC Pilbeam was on familiar terms with most of the local postmen, who were forever arriving with copies of the latest issue of Prospect, Private Eye, the New Left Review, Sight and Sound, Monocle, Diva, History Today, Searchlight, Index on Censorship and Intelligent Life. He read them all, then filed and cross-indexed them on his computer using a complex spreadsheet of his own devising.
It was not that PC Pilbeam had a wide variety of hobbies or leisure interests. His ambition was to be the country’s leading expert in the field of criminal investigation, and every waking moment of his life was devoted to that aim. Ever since he was a young boy, and his grandfather had introduced him to the stories of Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, he had been fascinated by the art of detection. A modest upbringing in the suburbs of Portsmouth had given him plenty of time to nurture his obsession. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, while his friends and contemporaries fell under the sway of the internet, Nathan felt himself set apart: he was drawn, instead, to the library of books left behind by his grandfather, which after his death sat in unsorted piles, accumulating dust in a spare bedroom. Here, besides a large collection of detective stories, were the classic works of Marx, Orwell, Tressell and Shaw; essays by Chomsky and Gramsci; histories by Hobsbawn and Thompson; well-thumbed volumes bearing the names of Marcuse and Lukács, William Morris and Raymond Williams. Nathan devoured these books and was shocked that his own parents took so little interest in them, regarding them as little more than an annoying clutter which had been dumped on them to take up space in their house. His grandfather had been an autodidact, relying on the public library, the Workers’ Educational Association and cheap paperbacks from Pelican Books and the Left Book Club. Nathan decided that this was a path he would follow himself, and chose not to enter university, applying directly to the police force at the age of eighteen instead.
Nathan was now twenty-four. At the station in Guildford he was a popular figure, although his colleagues certainly regarded him as eccentric, and were prone to teasing him, both to his face and behind his back. In part this was prompted by the seriousness — not to say earnestness — of his manner. But his fellow officers were also both fascinated and amused by his approach to police work.
PC Pilbeam’s theory, developed over many years’ reading and thinking, was that every crime had to be seen in its social, political and cultural context. The modern policeman, he maintained, had to be familiar with, and attuned to, all the most diverse currents of contemporary thought. In a recent case of indecent exposure, for instance, he drew on the modish discipline of psychogeography (as pioneered by Guy Debord, and practised in the present day by the likes of Patrick Keiller, Iain Sinclair and Will Self), to prove that the accused could not possibly be the culprit, because the anniversary of his mother’s death would have prompted him to walk a different route home on the afternoon in question, away from the public park and through the interwar council estate on which she had grown up and spent her early life. He solved another case after reading an article by James Meek in the London Review of Books, about the coalition government’s infamous Bedroom Tax, a charge levied on council house owners with spare or unoccupied rooms. In order to avoid paying this punitive levy, some badly off married couples were pretending to be estranged and therefore to be making use of two separate bedrooms. By proving, in the case of one such couple, that this was a lie, PC Pilbeam unravelled the mystery of a burglary that had taken place in their home. If both husband and wife were indeed sleeping in the main bedroom, he argued, then the intruder’s point of ingress was likely to have been the spare bedroom, and not the kitchen as they — in their fear of being reported to the authorities — had insisted. Sure enough, the spare bedroom window frame was found to be covered in fingerprints, and the thief was swiftly apprehended.