A group of adolescent boys are watching from beneath a yew tree. They are sizing up the girls and poking fun at them.
Every time I look at the girls I imagine my Chloe. She’s younger. Six now. I missed her last birthday. She’s good at ball games. She could catch by the time she was four.
I built her a basketball hoop. It was lower than regulation height so she could reach. We used to go one-on-one and I always let her win. In the beginning she could hardly sink a basket but as she grew stronger and her aim improved, she landed maybe two shots in every three.
The hockey game is over. The girls are running indoors to change. Shelly with the sunshine smile runs across to flirt with the boys and is shepherded away by the sports mistress.
I squeeze my fingers around a chalky stone and begin scratching letters on the stone capping on the wall. The powder sinks deep into the cracks. I trace the letters again.
CHLOE
I draw a heart around the name, punctured by a cupid’s arrow with a triangular point and a splayed tail. Then I close my eyes and make a wish, willing it to be so.
My eyelids flutter open. I blink twice. The sports mistress is there, holding a hockey stick over her shoulder with the colourful towelling grip squeezed in her fist.
Her lips part: ‘Get lost, creep- or I’ll call the police!’
14
There are moments, I know them well, when Mr Parkinson refuses to lie down and take his medicine like a man. He plays cruel tricks on me and embarrasses me in public.
There are thousands of involuntary processes in the body that we cannot control. We cannot stop our hearts from beating or our skin from sweating or our pupils dilating. Other movements are voluntary and these are abandoning me. My limbs, my jaw, my face, will sometimes tremble or twitch or become fixed. Without warning, my face will lock into a mask, leaving me unable to smile in welcome or to show sadness or concern. What good will I be as a clinical psychologist if I lose my ability to express emotion?
‘You’re giving me the stare again,’ says Ruiz.
‘Sorry.’ I look away.
‘We should go home,’ he says gently.
‘Not yet.’
We’re sitting outside a Starbucks, braving the chill because Ruiz refuses to be seen inside such a place and thinks we should have gone to a pub instead.
‘I want an espresso, not a pint,’ I told him.
To which he countered, ‘Do you try to sound like a hairdresser?’
‘Drink your coffee.’
His hands are buried in the pockets of his overcoat. It’s the same rumpled coat he was wearing when I first met him- five years ago. He interrupted a talk that I was giving to prostitutes in London. I was trying to help them stay safe on the streets. Ruiz was trying to solve a murder.
I liked him. Men who take too much care of themselves and their clothes can appear vain and over-ambitious but Ruiz had long ago stopped caring about what other people thought of him. He was like a big dark vague piece of furniture, smelling of tobacco and wet tweed.
Another thing that struck me was how he could stare into the distance even when sitting in a room. It was as though he could see beyond walls to a place where things were clearer or better or easier on the eye.
‘You know what I can’t understand about this case?’ he says.
‘What’s that?’
‘Why didn’t someone stop her? A naked woman walks out of her house, gets in a car, drives fifteen miles and climbs over a safety rail on a bridge and nobody stops her. Can you explain that?’
‘It’s called the bystander effect.’
‘It’s called apathy,’ he grunts.
‘No.’
I tell him the story of Kitty Genovese, a New York waitress who was attacked outside her apartment building in the mid-sixties. Forty neighbours heard her cries for help or watched her being stabbed but none of them called the police or tried to help her. The attack lasted thirty-two minutes. She escaped twice but each time her assailant caught her and stabbed her again.
The caller who eventually raised the alarm phoned a friend first to ask what he should do. Then he went next door and asked a neighbour to make the call because ‘he didn’t want to get involved.’ Kitty Genovese died only two minutes after the police arrived.
The crime caused a massive outpouring of anger and disbelief in America and abroad. People blamed overcrowding, urbanisation and poverty for creating a generation of city dwellers with the morals and behaviour of rats in cages.
Once the hysteria died down and proper studies were done, psychologists identified the bystander effect. If a group of people witness an emergency they look to each other to react, expecting someone else to take the lead. They are lulled into inaction by a pluralistic ignorance.
Dozens of people must have seen Christine Wheeler on Friday afternoon- motorists, passengers, pedestrians, toll collectors, people walking their dogs in Leigh Woods- and they each expected someone else to get involved and help her.
Ruiz grunts sceptically. ‘Don’t you just love people?’
He closes his eyes and exhales slowly as if trying to warm the world. ‘Where to now?’ he asks.
‘I want to see Leigh Woods.’
‘Why?’
‘It might help me understand.’
We emerge out of Junction 19 and take back roads towards Clifton, winding between playing fields, farms and streams that are brackish and sullen as the floodwaters recede. Small sections of the blacktop are dry for the first time in weeks.
Pill Road becomes Abbots Leigh Road and the gorge drops dramatically away on our left behind the trees. According to local legend it was created by two giant brothers, Vincent and Goram, who carved it with a single pickaxe. The giants died and their bodies floated down the Avon River to form islands in the Bristol Channel.
Ruiz likes the legend (and the names). Maybe it appeals to his sense of the absurd.
A sandstone arch marks the entrance to Leigh Woods. The narrow access road, flanked by trees, leads to a small car park, a dead end. This is where they found Christine Wheeler’s car, parked amongst the fallen leaves. It is not a place that she would necessarily know about unless she were given directions or had been here before.
Thirty yards from the car park is a signpost pointing out several walking trails. The red trail takes an hour and covers two miles to the edge of Paradise Bottom with views over the gorge. The purple trail is shorter but takes in Stokeleigh Camp, an iron-age hill fort.
Ruiz walks ahead of me, pausing occasionally for me to catch up. I’m not wearing the right shoes for this. Neither was Christine Wheeler. How naked and exposed she must have felt. How cold and frightened. She walked this path in high heels. She stumbled and fell. She tore her skin on brambles. Someone was issuing instructions to her, leading her away from the car park.
Fallen leaves are piled like snowdrifts along the ditches and the breeze shakes droplets from the branches. This is ancient wood-land and I can smell it in the damp earth, rotting boles and mould: a cavalcade of reeks. Occasionally, between the trees I glimpse a railing fence that marks the boundary. Above and beyond it there are roofs of houses.
During the Troubles in Ireland, the IRA would often bury arms caches in open countryside, using line of sight between three landmarks to hide the weapons in the middle of fields with nothing on the surface to mark the spot. British patrols searching for these caches learned to how to study the landscape, picking out features that caught the eye. It might be a different coloured tree, or a mound of stones or a leaning fencepost.
In a sense I’m doing the same thing- looking for reference points or psychological markers that could indicate Christine Wheeler’s last walk. I take out my mobile and check the signal strength. Three bars. Strong enough.
‘She took this path.’
‘What makes you so sure?’ asks Ruiz.