It was hardly caviar, but the hiatus was delicious. Anselm said, ‘But why would Sister Dorothy lie?’
‘Perhaps, like you, she’d given her word,’ said Father Andrew distantly as though he’d turned to the fire. ‘And perhaps,’ he added, ‘that was the first of the many promises that have been sought and obtained.’
17
Riley took the bus home because the fascists who’d clamped him weren’t answering the phone. He came in the back way pausing to glance at Nancy’s bricks: she’d been collecting them all her married life. She rummaged in the grass by Limehouse.
Cut and brought them home one by one. Exhausted by the bout with Wyecliffe, defeated by the Council, and cold to his bones, he felt suddenly weak: affection stirred inside him like a shot of Bertie’s poison.
There was an irony about Riley and Nancy: prior to the trial, he’d pushed Nancy back, but she’d kept returning; after the trial, he’d wanted her to linger, but she kept away So when Riley told her what had happened to his van, she was very understanding; she said all the right things; but she was far off. She didn’t even ask what he was doing in Cheapside. Later, Riley lounged in his rocker, listening to a very different kind of chat. As Nancy cleared away the plates, she asked Arnold how he was getting on, whether he was tired of his wheel, whether he got lonely in his cage. Riley’s chair creaked as he moved more quickly as his envy grew.
After Nancy had gone to bed, Riley stayed up watching the fire decline. In the stillness of the night he took out the photograph of Walter from his pocket. Without looking he dropped it on the fading coals. He heard it snap into flame. When he glanced into the grate, all that was left was a curl of ash.
Who posted it? Until that evening, Riley had confined his thoughts to the living, but the lawyer had turned to the dead. Who’d he been referring to? Or had he been having a dig, trying to tell him that he’d never believed him about John Bradshaw?
Suddenly Arnold started running in his wheel.
Years after the trial, Riley was doing a clearance when his mobile started the nerve-racking tune that he didn’t know how to change. He stabbed a button to make it stop.
‘Will you help me find the Pieman?’
Riley was stunned. ‘Who is this?’
‘Someone who knows you weren’t the only one to blame’
Riley couldn’t reply He sank onto a thing the relative had called a fauteuil.
‘If you tell me,’ said the young voice, ‘I can inform the police. I’ll be like a cut-off. And when they’ve found their own proof, they can act without bothering either of us. You’ve nothing to fear.’
In the corner, a budgie hopped from bar to bar, tinkling a little bell. He’d come with the job lot. ‘Who is this?’ said Riley again.
‘I’m the son of George Bradshaw’
Riley watched the bird pecking seeds, its green-and-yellow head jerking like it was being shocked at intervals from the mains. Riley said, ‘Who else knows that you’ve called me?’
‘No one.
‘Will they find out?’
‘No. I promise.’
Much later Riley concluded that some big decisions aren’t as simple as they might appear. Like a wall, they’re built from the bottom up. You stand on the top course, laying bricks, not daring to look at where you’ll end up if you carry on. Finally you’re too high and you can’t get down. And yet, from the outset, there was always a kind of knowing; and recklessly it was broken down into manageable bits, and put together.
It was therefore without having reached a decision as such, but irresponsibly that he said, ‘I need to think. Call me back in six months.’
The next day on impulse, Riley went to Lawton’s Wharf. Everything had been sold off or flattened. The whole place was falling into the dark-blue river. Suddenly moved, he stood on the cracked plinth that had held his crane and he searched the pale evening sky for Nancy’s window.
What was he going to do about Bradshaw’s son? He gazed at the wharf, sentimental for the days he’d never really enjoyed. His eyes settled on the DANGER sign attached to a barbed-wire fence that blocked access to the main quay Farther on he noted a line of plastic bollards. The timbers on the other side were black and green.
Four times over the next six months Riley came home late and told Nancy that his van had broken down. He complained about it to Prosser and the rest. He bought spare parts, kept the receipts and went through the motions of an unnecessary repair. He was getting higher and higher, never taking his eyes off what his hands and feet were doing.
Arnold’s wheel rattled and raced.
Riley had hoped that George’s boy would drop the matter but he rang back, as arranged. Wobbling, but keeping his nerve, Riley said, ‘Meet me on Lawton’s Wharf on Saturday night.’
Why there of all places? It wasn’t just because it was secluded and dangerous. Riley hadn’t thought it out, but his instinct wanted to stamp upon the world of fluffed chances, to wreck it good and proper. Accordingly broken down into bits: Riley left a fair in Barking at six, cursing the rain. Half an hour later he rang Nancy and told her that the van had stalled. At seven he cut down the barbed wire. At ten past, he set about the bollards. (They’d been filled with concrete, so one by one, he dragged them to the edge of the wharf and tipped them into the river.) Since the planking was rotten, Riley crept along a supporting beam, and was at the end of the platform by seven-thirty. At eight a figure appeared.
Riley never once looked directly at the boy He kept his eyes down and began a conversation that had no purpose because he was too high up to listen properly.
‘I only want to vindicate my father,’ said John Bradshaw The drizzle pattered on their shoulders.
‘Vindicate’. What a hauntingly strong word. This boy would never give up.
Fear played its part, for sure — not the kind that gripped Riley in his childhood, but something organic, a condition that he could feel all the time if he’d checked for it (like an irregular heartbeat). It pumped ink into his intentions — and he shoved with all his might … hoping and not hoping that it would happen; that he could console himself afterwards by saying he didn’t really mean it.
The boards cracked. A whole section of planking gave way and Riley was abruptly alone. There was a cry, but after the splash, there was no noise … none at all … just the slapping of the river and the patter of the rain.
Riley waited for half an hour, checking the side of the quay. Then he went home and thrashed Nancy at dominoes.
The following morning, as usual, he went to work. The weeks passed and he did the things that he always did. But just as Arnold’s whiskers got wet every time he licked the milk, so a kind of suicide happens with a murder. Sitting opposite the Major, Riley had been bitterly proud of his home-made identity. He’d sought no mitigation. He’d scorned salvation now, never mind the hereafter. But with the death of John Bradshaw all that posturing fell slack. He felt strangely sick of himself, in a new way and of the world. He tried to doubt that he’d shoved him. Some big decisions might be made up of small choices, but what Riley couldn’t work out was why in another world, he wouldn’t have chosen the end result in the first place. Why he recoiled from it in this one? And with that insight, Riley teetered towards an abyss of self-pity, for he wondered if he’d been acting freely if he’d ever been free; if he ever would be. Within a couple of months, after years of clean living, Riley began his new scheme.
And then, out of nowhere, came an envelope containing a photograph. The image sent Riley flying back to the times he’d done his best to forget. He was overwhelmed by his powerlessness — either to annihilate that face or to hinder whoever it was that had sent it. Stranded, he felt a need for Nancy far stronger than anything he’d known since the trial. It seemed incredible, but it was true: standing in his way was a hamster. It was humiliating.