‘That rather depends,’ said Mr Wyecliffe. One of his hands covered the glass ball. ‘Who else might be handling the shovel, so to speak?’
‘I don’t know,’ barked Riley He’d asked himself day and night. If it wasn’t Prosser, there was no one. John Bradshaw had come with a question and a promise, but he never got an answer. Riley said, ‘There’s no one alive that I can think of.’
‘Anyone dead?’ The lawyer shook the globe.
Riley held his breath, feeling heat descend like a crown.
‘Don’t play around with me, Wyecliffe.’
‘I’ve never been more serious.’
Riley’s temples began to throb. ‘The dead?’
‘Yes.’
Riley couldn’t think straight. Only the living could reach him. He jerked his head, as though to shake off some flies.
‘Very well,’ said Mr Wyecliffe, with a long sigh of disappointment. ‘If you don’t have any more names — likely or otherwise — I cannot act. You’ll have to wait and see what they do with what they know.’
‘They?’
A figure of speech,’ replied the lawyer. Hooking his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets, he added, ‘That said, perhaps your correspondent has primed several people to act on his or her behalf.’ He examined Riley with something between pity and wonder. ‘You know, everything always comes down to facts.’
‘Facts?’ The change in subject threw Riley off balance.
‘Yes. Those known and those not known.’ Mr Wyecliffe waved his palms over the desk as if he were incanting a spell. ‘We lawyers assemble the known ones for the jury. You’d be surprised how many different pictures a clever hand can make out of the same pieces’ — he chuckled at the thought — ‘and if it were a game, I’d say that was value for money But after forty years in the courts, let me tell you something.’ He was no longer merry and the lights seemed to go dim. ‘No one can change the shape of a fact that makes sense on its own. It’s like a photograph.’
Riley tugged at his top button. Wyecliffe hadn’t changed subject at all.
‘Tell me the name of the man in the picture,’ said the lawyer soothingly.
‘I never said it was a man.’
‘Quite right.’ He nodded a compliment.
‘If I tell you, can you help?’
The scratching began again, high on his hairy cheek. He sighed and whispered, ‘That rather depends.’
Riley kicked back his chair and yanked at the door. Everything always ‘depended’. Wyecliffe had been like that last time, hinting and sighing and never looking surprised.
On Cheapside, Riley found his van clamped. In a frenzy he kicked the huge yellow bracket and tore the notice off the windscreen. He nearly cried. Someone was after him, and he couldn’t get away. Then, in a moment of sickening calm, the obvious hit Riley like a backhander: whoever it was already knew what John Bradshaw had wanted to know.
15
George wasn’t sure, but he probably followed the exact route back to the river that he’d taken when he’d first left Mitcham. As he walked, Nino’s story about right and wrong came to mind. Elizabeth had loved the ending, but George had never been able to catch the beginning. And now, after she’d gone, it had popped to the surface.
‘I’ve had a very odd dream,’ Nino said, while they sat on a bench near Marble Arch. ‘I was standing on a road between heaven and hell writing parking tickets. A reporter came along. “What are this lot waiting for?” I asked. “Nowt,” he replied. “They can’t go to heaven because they didn’t do anything good, and they can’t go to hell because they didn’t do anything bad. Hardly a scoop, but it’s still a good story.” He showed me the headline on his pad: “They lived without praise or blame.”’
Nino didn’t say anything else.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ asked George.
Nino became resolute, as if he had been quizzed about the value of double yellow lines. ‘Don’t be lukewarm, old friend. That’s the only route to mercy or reward.’
George had told Elizabeth, and she’d written it down, asking him to repeat every word.
But to what end? Where was she now? And where was he?
George crossed Blackfriars Bridge with a glance towards Trespass Place. On the north bank of the Thames he turned east, following the road to Smithfield and Tower Hill — the route to the Isle of Dogs, and a wasteland of padlocks and chicken wire. The river flowed oily and magnificent on his right; traffic swept along to his left. George’s mind tracked back to the night he’d pulled open a wrought-iron gate at three in the morning. He’d given no thought to praise or blame.
Three made-up girls stood shivering on the other side.
‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘I’ve a kettle and a toaster.’
He followed them down the alley to the door he’d left ajar, looking at their bare legs, the blue veins and the goose pimples. This was late November, the month of biting rain and short days, the month when shop fronts twinkled with the approach of Christmas. George made cocoa. He didn’t tell them that all the beds were taken, that they’d have to leave.
Let them have the length of a hot drink, he thought, it’s not much. George left them so he could make the usual telephone calls. Every project was full, although the Open Door in Fulham could see them at half eight: that was five hours away; five hours to lose heart. George had learned long ago that with some kids you only got one chance to offer them a hand, and even then they didn’t take it. But some did — that’s what brought him to the gate night after night: some did. While waiting for the toast to pop up, George overheard the first name: Riley and then he caught the second: the Pieman. When he appeared around the corner they stopped talking. He said, ‘After this lot, you’ll have to move on.’ There was no protest.
He followed them back towards the gate. Their shoes clattered on the flags like dropped marbles and George felt — as he’d often done — like an accomplice to murder. One of them — the youngest — had a tattoo of a dragon above one ear. Her head was shaved. The three girls must have been a good fifty yards up the pavement when George came running after them.
‘If you want to fight back, I’ll help you.’
Two of them stared; the other laughed. They backed away shrouded by rain.
That should have been the end of it. But a week or so later they’d returned to the gate, again at God knows what hour, wanting to know what he’d meant. George stood on one side, they on the other, separated by bars. There was so much that did not need to be said: about who they were, what they did, even the where, when and how: everything, really except for the why — those impossibly intimate histories that would not be reduced to a common badge.
George said through the bars, ‘What happened at the Open Door?’
‘Getting away is one thing,’ said the one with the dragon, ignoring the question. ‘But you said we could fight.’
He turned the lock and yanked back the gate.
George made more cocoa for Anji, Lisa and Beverly.
‘I believe you,’ he said.
About what?’ asked Anji. She spoke for the others; she was the eldest, a kind of leader at nineteen.
George saw the resentment in their eyes and their obstinate vulnerability. ‘I not only understand,’ he said heavily — for he knew this look; he’d felt the same once — ‘I’ll do something about it.’
Without invitation they started talking about Riley fighting one another for the right to give details of his appearance and habits. George listened with glazed eyes. This man, when a boy had been a kind of brother to him. In the years since, he’d often wondered if Riley was one of those for whom the helping hand had come too late, or if he’d turned away No doubt it was this heavy reminiscing that made George slow on the uptake. When the three girls stared at George, drained and expectant, he said, ‘I’ll call the police tomorrow.’
‘Police?’ Beverly asked, her mouth open, like that of her dragon.