‘Yes.’
‘Us?’
‘Yes.’
And then George understood what had brought them back. ‘Hang on,’ he said in disbelief, ‘you didn’t think I was offering to whack him over the head?’
The three conspirators threw glances at one another. Unmasked, they appeared younger still, and more awkward. Lisa stood, putting on her bomber jacket. ‘We fight back by filling in a complaint form?’
‘No. By taking Riley to court.’
‘That’s easily said. We’d pay and it would cost you nothing.’ Anji followed Lisa to the door while Beverly still slouching, looked George right in the eye. ‘They’d tear us to pieces.’
If precision matters, this was the moment when George lost his senses, when two teenagers stood at the door and a third was about to pull away ‘Yes. But they can’t do that to me.’
‘What’s it got to do with you?’
George wasn’t going to answer that question. ‘If I support what you say’ he persisted, ‘Riley will be convicted. There’s nothing they can throw at me. Nothing.’
‘What will it cost you, then?’
‘If it goes wrong, my job.’
‘Why do it?’
Again, he sidestepped the question. ‘It can’t go wrong.’
The next day George woke up profoundly grateful that Beverly had joined her pals at the door. But a week later — again at three or so in the morning — the buzzer had torn George out of a deep slumber. It had been a bad night, with a punch-up over queue-jumping He stumbled angrily to the gate with such a weight upon his eyes that he could barely see. He heard Anji’s voice:
‘We’ll risk it, if you will.’
In a stupor, George leaned his head on the bars. The wisdom of these kids, he thought. They trust only the person whose outlay matches theirs. The gate swung open for the last time; and George made more cocoa and toast.
‘If I do this,’ he said cautiously ‘will you go to the Open Door?’ They all shook on it while George’s gaze rested upon a tiger’s head that snarled behind Beverly’s other ear. It hadn’t been there last time.
Funnily enough, it was the tiger and the dragon who fled on the day of the trial. Anji and Lisa kept their side of the bargain. And then George was called. If he’d even sensed what might be waiting for him in the courtroom, he’d have joined Beverly on the pavement. In the corridor, Jennifer Cartwright grabbed his arm. ‘Where the hell are you going?’
‘Home.’
‘Where?’
‘Back home.’
‘Why?’
He didn’t reply.
‘Two girls have just had their heads kicked in.’ She was seething. ‘You can’t go home.’
George took the bus to Mitcham knowing that Anji, Lisa and Beverly wouldn’t be going to an open door in Fulham. That was George’s fault. In the long run, she’d been right, that policewoman.
Much later George had written in his notebook, ‘Who’d have thought that a question about my grandfather would have set Riley free?’ And it was only then that George realised that his downfall hadn’t begun at the night shelter’s gate, when he was a man, but with a secret, discovered when he was a boy.
And now, walking by the Thames, George asked himself where lay the praise and blame? That was a tricky one, because things couldn’t have been any different. Mercy or reward? Well, that was trickier still.
George followed the cobbled lane that ran between the warehouses and the hoists. He ducked through the mesh wiring onto a quilt of broken brick. A bitter wind swung off the Thames, pulling at his hair and stinging his nose. He stood upon Lawton’s Wharf, his long walk ended. He’d been homeless without knowing where he was going, but now he’d arrived — at the place he’d visited more frequently than any other. He spied a ladder built into the dock wall. He took off the bright new trainers he’d been given on Old Paradise Street and laid them to one side. Slowly he lowered himself into the river. His clothes gathered weight, and the cold clasped his legs and stomach. A painful thought passed across his mind: for Emily he was already dead.
16
Anselm went to bed with the accounts and receipts that had been sent to Inspector Cartwright. Even with his glasses on, he couldn’t make head or tail of a single column (at the Bar, he’d steered clear of cases that had numbers in them), so he put the documents on the floor and gave his attention to something more promising: a cornucopia of intractable problems. A lawyer’s habits made him divide them into two groups.
First, why had Elizabeth sent him to see Mrs Dixon without any clue as to what she might say? What was the point of leaving him powerless, and her powerful — in the sense that she could refuse to talk, which is precisely what happened? Why take another risk that could only harm her prospects of success — for just as George Bradshaw (predictably) had gone missing, so Mrs Dixon (not surprisingly) had refused to talk about her missing son. The only answer Anselm could muster was this: at the heart of Elizabeth’s bid to make good the past was a complete respect for the free choices of the other actors. There would be no cajoling, no forced outcomes.
The next group of problems was, for Anselm, the most intriguing. How did this second mission connect with the first?
What was the link between the missing boy and the bid to bring Riley back to court? While listening to Mrs Dixon, Anselm had noted the vowels resistant to life in the South; the northern intonation in the word ‘cake’ had survived completely intact. It had shone like a tanner in a heap of decimal currency. Who, then, was the missing lad? He’d been a good boy a good son. Reviewing the cornucopia as a whole, Anselm came to a sensible though uncomfortable conclusion: both of the matters that had been entrusted to him by Elizabeth were now well on the way to monumental failure.
Success, however, had come Anselm’s way earlier that evening, albeit from another direction. He had, of course, begun looking into Elizabeth’s past, while she had only expected him to move forward on her behalf. And initial results were interesting.
After leaving Mrs Dixon, Anselm paid a visit to Trespass Place, hoping that George Bradshaw had returned to his patch, but it was silent and bare; so, discouraged, he went back to Hoxton, where he found a bundle of faxed documents from Gray’s Inn. He leafed through them while his shepherd’s pie revolved in the microwave. The librarian had organised, in reverse order, various notices covering legal responsibilities assumed by Elizabeth. It was only when Anselm reached the final sheet that he appreciated his earlier, decisive mistake. It was obvious why this particular Glendinning hadn’t gone to Durham University. Looking down, he read again the list of names. It was a register of those called to the Bar by the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn on the fifteenth day of October nineteen hundred and fifty. The librarian had marked the relevant entry: Elizabeth Steadman.
Glendinning was, of course, her married name. Anselm had never known her as anything else. On marrying, most women barristers kept the names under which they began their careers because they carried their reputations. Elizabeth, however, had dropped hers and started all over again. Anselm sat down, suddenly excited because someone else had made the same gaffe as himself, only she didn’t have the excuse of not knowing any better. His thoughts becoming tangled, he picked up the telephone and called the Prior.
‘Sister Dorothy reeled off the history of Mr G, the frustrated inventor, and Mrs G, his uncomplaining wife.’ Anselm paused. ‘But she got the name wrong. It should have been Mr and Mrs Steadman.’
‘Teachers follow the fortunes of their pupils,’ replied Father Andrew confidently ‘Perhaps she learned of Elizabeth’s marriage and switched the names by accident.’
A monk can always contradict his prior. But it has a taste all of its own. ‘My first thought too,’ said Anselm warmly ‘However, she hadn’t had word or sight of Elizabeth in forty years. She shouldn’t even know the Glendinning surname.’