‘But what about torturing animals?’
‘You shouldn’t do that. But you said it was a long time ago. So: don’t do it again.’
There was a pause. He looked confused. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘What about “goodbye”?’ said Frieda.
Seamus left and Frieda went and stood by her window, her eyes resting on the site across the street. Once there had been houses there, before a wrecking ball had swung through their walls, smashing them into dust, and diggers and cranes had moved in among the rubble. For a while, it had been a construction site, with Portakabins and men in hard hats drinking tea. Boards had gone up round the perimeter, announcing the imminent arrival of a brand new office block. But then work had stopped: this was a recession after all. The men had left with their diggers, though one stumpy crane still stood in the middle of the space. Weeds and shrubs had grown up where the rubble had been. Now it was a wild place. Children played there; homeless people sometimes slept there. Frieda occasionally saw foxes roaming through the brambles. Perhaps it would stay like that, she thought, reminding people that even in a great city like London some things have to remain uncontrolled, unpredictable, sending up nettles and wild flowers and even a few stray vegetables, the stubborn survivors of gardens that had been demolished.
No. She couldn’t help Seamus Dunne, although the image of him cutting his father’s hair remained with her, the bright blades opening and closing in her mind.
Dearest Frieda, I do understand that you can’t make any plans just now. Just don’t make plans without me, OK? I went to see some very purple paintings today. And I bought some pots of herbs for the balcony – though I don’t know if they will survive the cold wind that cuts through this city like a knife. I think you could grow to love it here. You could certainly lose yourself in the crowds and the strangeness. There are days when I fancy I glimpse your face among the crowds. A certain lift of your chin. A red scarf. My heart turns over. Surrounded by people I like, I am lonely here without you. My love, Sandy xxxxx
TEN
Jim Fearby never gave up: his doggedness was his gift and his curse. He couldn’t help it, he was made that way.
When he was ten and on a school trip, he had seen a demonstration of how to light a fire without a match. It looked simple the way the man in the combat jacket did it – a board with a notch cut into it, a long stick, a handful of dry grass and bark, a minute or so of rolling the spindle between his two palms, and there was an ember catching at the tinder nest, which he gently blew into a flame. One by one the class tried to do the same, and one by one they failed. When Fearby got back home, he spent hours rolling a stick between his palms until they were sore and blistered. Day after day he squatted in their small garden, his neck aching and his hands throbbing, and one day an ember glowed beneath the tip of his stick.
Fearby’s mother, who was now long dead, had always declared rather proudly that her son was more stubborn than anyone she had ever met. His wife called it bloody-mindedness. ‘You’re like a dog with a bone,’ she would say. ‘You can never let go.’ Fellow journalists said the same, sometimes admiringly, sometimes with incredulity or even contempt, and recently with that shake of the head: old Jim Fearby and his notions. Fearby didn’t care what they thought. He just rolled his spindle, waited for the ember to catch and grow into a flame.
It had been like that with George Conley. No one else had cared about Conley, barely thought of him as a fellow human being, but he had struck a spark in Fearby, who had sat through every single day of his trial. It was his passivity that touched him: Conley was like a beaten dog just waiting for the next blow. He didn’t understand what was happening to him but neither was he surprised by it. He’d probably been bullied and jeered at all his life; he no longer had the hope in him to fight back. Fearby never used words like ‘justice’ – they were too grandiose for an old hack like him – but it didn’t seem fair that this sad lump of a man should have no one to fight his corner.
The first time Jim Fearby had visited George Conley in prison, way back in 2005, the experience had given him nightmares. HMP Mortlemere, down in Kent on the Thames Estuary, wasn’t such a bad place and Fearby wasn’t sure what it was that had particularly got to him. There were the resigned, tired faces of the women and children in the waiting room. He had listened to their accents. Some of them had come from across the country. There was the smell of damp and disinfectant, and he had kept wondering about the smells the disinfectant was covering up. But, almost embarrassingly, it was mainly the locks and the bars and the high walls and the barbed wire. He had felt like a child who had never properly understood what a prison was. The real punishment is that the doors are locked and you can’t go out when you want to.
During the trial, pathetic little Conley had been bemused, almost numb, in the face of so much attention. When Fearby had met him for the first time in prison, he was pale and utterly defeated. ‘This is just the beginning,’ Fearby had told him but he seemed barely to be paying attention.
Fearby had seen on his road map that Mortlemere was next to a bird sanctuary. Afterwards he had parked his car and walked along a path by the water, mainly so that the cold northerly wind could blow the rank prison smell off him. But even so he couldn’t seem to shake away the stench, and that night and for many nights afterwards, he had dreamed of doors and steel bars and locks and lost keys, of being shut in, of trying to look out at the world through glass so thick that nothing was visible except blurry shapes.
In the years since, in the course of writing articles and finally his book, Blind Justice, he had visited Conley in prisons all over England, up in Sunderland, down in Devon, off the M25. Now, visiting him at HMP Haston, in the Midlands, Fearby hardly noticed his surroundings. The parking, the registration, the entrance through multiple doors, had become routine, irritating rather than traumatic. The prison officers knew him, they knew why he was there and mainly they were sympathetic to him – to Fearby and to Conley.
Over the years Fearby had heard of inmates who had used prison as a sort of school. They had learned to read; they had studied for A levels and degrees. But Conley had only got fatter, paler, sadder, more defeated. His dark hair was greasy and lank, he had a long ragged scar down from the corner of one eye, the result of an attack while he was queuing for lunch one day. That had been early in his sentence, when he was the subject of constant threats and abuse. He was jostled in the corridor; his food was interfered with. Finally he was confined to solitary for his own protection. But gradually things changed, as questions were raised, as the campaign began, largely inspired and then sustained by Jim Fearby. Fellow prisoners started to leave him alone and then became positively friendly. In recent years, even the prison officers had softened.
Fearby sat opposite Conley as he had so many times before. Conley had become so fat that his bloodshot eyes almost disappeared in the fleshy slits in his face. He compulsively scratched at the top of his left hand. Fearby made himself smile. Everything was good. They were winning. They should both be happy.
‘Did Diana come to see you?’ he asked.
Diana McKerrow was the solicitor who had taken over Conley’s case for the latest appeal. At first Fearby had worked closely with her. After all, he had known more about the case than anyone else in the world. He knew the weak links, all the people involved. But as the case had proceeded, she had stopped phoning him. She had been harder to reach. Fearby tried not to mind. What mattered was the result, wasn’t it? That was what he told himself.