Die of Shame (26 page)

His visitor does not need to be shown the way a second time and sits down as if they are old friends; begins to talk about the weather, the hassle coming through prison security, the long drive up from London.

‘We’ve only got an hour,’ he says. ‘We can piss it away with chit-chat if you want. No skin off my nose.’

‘Sorry.’ The visitor takes the notebook and pen out, lays them on the table and flicks through the pages. ‘You must be counting the days now.’

‘Ever since I came in.’

‘I bet. So why didn’t you do something about it?’

‘Such as?’

‘Making it a bit easier for the parole board.’

‘Yeah, well.’

The visitor looks at him. ‘What you said last time, about not being sorry, what did you mean by that?’

A shrug as the tobacco tin comes out. ‘That I wasn’t.’ He snaps off the lid. ‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t suppose you fancy telling me why?’ The wait for a response is not a long one. ‘Thought not.’

‘All this going to help you get a law degree then, is it?’

‘Hopefully.’

‘Funny old job, a lawyer,’ he says. ‘Defending people who you think might be guilty or else trying to put innocent people away.’

‘Not much doubt where you were concerned though, was there?’

‘Suppose not.’

‘I’m actually far more interested in why people do things,’ his visitor says. ‘Motives.’

He says nothing.

‘Money, sex, jealousy, hate… love.’ The visitor watches as the prisoner begins to assemble a cigarette. ‘There’s loads of reasons, but they’re probably the big ones.’

He looks around, fingers working at the tobacco. ‘All sorts in here.’

‘Yeah, but I don’t reckon losing your rag because someone spills your drink or looks at you the wrong way comes very high on the list, do you? I should think that puts you in a minority… if that’s what the reason was.’

‘Told you last time, I can’t remember.’

‘Can you remember what actually happened? You taking that iron bar out, starting to hit him with it.’

‘Not really.’

‘Did you enjoy it?’

‘
What?
’

‘Well, you said last time he was asking for it.’

‘I don’t remember saying that.’

‘Deserved everything he got, you said.’

‘I was talking bollocks, making conversation, that’s all.’ He lifts the tin and smacks it back down on the table. ‘Look, I just want to put it all behind me and get out of here, all right? Start again.’

The visitor nods, says, ‘Course you do,’ and sits back. ‘Anyone waiting for you when you come out?’

‘Yeah, course.’

‘I don’t mean your mum and dad or whatever. I mean anyone special.’

His face changes, as though he’s trying to suppress a smile, and the visitor sees it.

‘Maybe,’ he says.

‘Funny.’

‘What?’

The visitor seems confused and starts looking back through pages in the notebook. ‘Nobody in your family mentioned a girlfriend or whatever. You know… when I talked to them on the phone. Someone secret, is it?’

He picks up his tobacco tin and pushes back his chair. ‘I think I’ve had enough of this.’

‘Was it really one of those big motives, after all?’

‘This has got sod all to do with any university, has it?’

The visitor starts to reel off that list of motives for murder again, a finger raised for each one. The prisoner gets to his feet, but hard as he tries, he cannot stop the blood rushing to his face when his visitor reaches the last one.

Love…

‘You did the right thing,’ Weston said.

‘Yeah?’

‘Absolutely.’

The small tapas bar in Crouch End was a place Tony had eaten at often, usually with Nina and Emma, but it had been a long time since they had all been there together. Several years, now he came to think about it. It had been a favourite of Emma’s when she was younger; the staff making a fuss of her, plying her with fizzy drinks and giving her pictures to colour in while they were busy preparing the plates of chorizo and
patatas bravas
she always insisted on eating. Tony had ordered both dishes for himself today and when the waiter had asked after Emma, Tony had promised that he would say hello to her for him.

‘I don’t know why you’re wasting time worrying about it.’

‘I’m not worrying.’

‘We’re professionals, Tony, and that’s the way professionals behave.’

Tony nodded at his lunch companion and took a mouthful of the spicy potatoes. He imagined Emma at the table with them, as she was now, cutting each potato into a dozen tiny pieces, and he found himself wondering whether he and Nina had somehow made an unspoken agreement to avoid the place. The memories of their daughter, before things had become difficult.

‘She definitely wasn’t happy about it though,’ Tony said. ‘The copper. She probably thinks I was just stringing her along. Making her jump through hoops.’

‘Who cares? Jumping through hoops is part of her job. You were protecting your clients and that’s always our primary concern. Right?’ The man opposite Tony – tall and smartly dressed – took a sip of water, then leaned across to touch his glass to Tony’s.

‘Cheers, Greg,’ Tony said. ‘Thanks.’

He and Greg Weston had met sharing a room in rehab. They had attended methadone clinics and group sessions together, then started out on the very path Tony had talked to Heather about the week before her death and taken the decision to train as therapists at the same time. Both had now been working for fifteen years, and both specialised in addiction recovery and relapse prevention, but they were very different practitioners.

Tony knew his colleague to be somewhat more beholden to orthodox psychotherapeutic theory than he was. That was the assertion, anyway. A few years before, he had visited the office that Weston rented in Marylebone and been shocked at the number of heavyweight textbooks lining the shelves. Freud, Jung and Adler, obviously. Yalom, Frankl, Laing and a good many more Tony had never even heard of. He still suspected that most of them were unread, there to impress clients just as they had impressed him, but he was always left with the feeling that Weston believed himself to be rather more serious in his approach to the job. They would meet up a few times a year, for lunch usually, like today, and Tony would always come away with the impression that his friend thought him a fraction too theatrical in his methods. A little less rigorous than he should be. It irked him; both the judgement and the fact that it bothered him so much.

‘He’s just jealous,’ Nina had told him once. Back when she took the trouble to make him feel good about what he did. ‘Because you have such a good rapport with your clients and he’s too busy being up himself.’

Tony knew that she had a point, but today, as usual, it had begun to niggle before they had even sat down at the table. The truth was, Tony had only told Weston about his refusal to hand over notes to the police because he thought it might redress the professional balance between them a little.

‘So, do you think it would help her? The notes.’

‘No idea,’ Tony said. ‘I don’t really know what she’s hoping to find.’

‘The dead girl’s last session, you said.’ Weston carefully cut off a small piece of Spanish omelette. ‘Her shame story.’

‘I suppose.’

‘What was it?’

Tony looked at his colleague. It had long been understood that such discussions between them were strictly in the interests of improved practice and thus were in no sense a breach of client confidentiality.

So, Tony told him.

‘Hell of a story,’ Weston said.

‘Yeah.’

‘A confession, in every sense.’

‘Certainly a notch or two above what the others had come up with. I mean the childhood abuse stuff we had the week before was nothing you and I haven’t heard dozens of times, right?’

‘What happened afterwards?’

‘It was like a grenade going off,’ Tony said. ‘That silence when she’d finished, you know? You could still sense the… carnage, though.’ He described the reactions of others in the group that night and some of what he had been told had happened in the pub later on.

‘Well, I can see why the copper thought it might be interesting.’

‘Maybe.’

‘The girl
was
murdered the same night.’

‘Still, not sure it’s going to be a great deal of help.’

‘I suppose it depends how good a copper she is.’

‘Oh, I think she’s probably very good,’ Tony said. ‘Got a few issues of her own though, mind you.’

‘Really?’

Tony waved the question away. He wasn’t there to talk about Nicola Tanner. They ate in silence for a minute or so.

‘Anyway.’ Weston grinned. ‘You can put all this behind you when you’re off swanning about with your rock star pal.’

Tony looked up, shook his head like he hadn’t quite understood.

‘That’s quite soon, isn’t it?’

Another bone of contention. The implied assumption that Tony would only ever be a lightweight, because he wasted his expertise, such as it was, on showbiz types who could afford to pay him exorbitant fees.

‘It’s hardly swanning about,’ Tony said.

‘I’m only winding you up,’ Weston said.

‘I treat all my clients equally, you know that, whether they can play the guitar or not.’

‘Don’t be so touchy.’ Weston popped an olive into his mouth, shook his head. ‘You seem a bit rattled, mate. Seriously, are you OK?’

Tony ignored him. ‘Anyway, I’ve got plenty on before that. I’ve got one-to-ones coming out of my ears and they want me to speak at a new residential centre in Brighton.’ He swallowed, took a sip of water. ‘And I think I’m going to reconvene the Monday night recovery session.’

‘Really?’

Tony nodded.

‘The dead girl’s group?’

‘Heather’s group, yeah. What’s left of it.’

‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’

Up until that moment, Tony had been far from sure. He had been concerned that bringing them all back together after what had happened six weeks before might do some of them more harm than good. But the arrogance of Weston’s question and the condescension in the smile as he asked it had made his mind up.

‘It’s time,’ Tony said.

He watched Greg Weston get on to his bus, then turned to head in the opposite direction. It was a nice enough day and he decided to make the most of it by walking home. Nina was at work and he had no appointments until early evening, so there was nothing to rush back for.

He would call each member of the Monday night group on the way.

He headed south to begin with, then picked up the Parkland Walk on Crouch End Hill. Four miles or so, this was the route of an old railway line from Finsbury Park to Alexandra Palace, the development plans abandoned almost eighty years earlier at the outbreak of the Second World War. Now, the old trackbed was a popular haunt of ramblers and dog-walkers. A peaceful green corridor twisting through the hilly parts of Haringey and Islington, home to a huge variety of wildlife and dotted with crumbling bridges and half-demolished platforms and station buildings.

Tony began to walk north, the cutting opening out ahead of him, and wondered why he didn’t walk a damn sight more than he did these days. It had always been something he’d enjoyed, that had invigorated him and kept his head clear in those first few years clean.

Are you sure that’s a good idea?
 

Tony looked across at the grey peaks of Hornsey Ridge rising away to his right. Did working with a rock star once in a while make him any less good at what he did? He might not have read most of the books gathering dust on Greg Weston’s shelves but he knew the ridge’s layer of blue clay was the stratum beneath the city in which the underground was built. He knew these hills were called the Northern Heights and that Muswell Hill was largely formed by glacial debris, the terminal moraine of an ice-sheet that had once covered most of the country.

So, fuck you, Greg.

The dead girl’s group?
 

He stopped on the narrow bridge above Northwood Road, a single line of traffic crawling beneath him, and called Diana.

‘That’s wonderful news,’ she said. ‘Will the others be coming?’

‘You’re the first person I’ve called,’ Tony said. He could hear a dog yapping in the background. Diana shouted at it to be quiet.

‘Thank you. For carrying on, I mean. I wasn’t sure you would.’

‘Oh, I was always going to continue with the sessions. It was just a question of when, that’s all.’

‘Well, you’ve made my day,’ Diana said. ‘Oh, and just so you know, things are still OK, touch wood. It’s been a few weeks, but they’ve all been good weeks…’

The next call went straight to voicemail, but Robin rang back before Tony had reached the other side of the bridge. He sounded equally enthusiastic.

‘I’m sorry for calling you at work,’ Tony said.

‘No problem,’ Robin said. ‘Best news I’ve had in ages.’

‘That’s nice to hear.’

‘I’m going to plenty of other meetings, obviously, and I know we had some ups and downs, but that group was special.’

‘I’ll see you at the session, then.’

‘Got plenty of biscuits in?’

‘Of course.’

‘Heather would have wanted us to carry on. Don’t you think?’

The ground on either side of the path rose rapidly as Tony walked on, and a few minutes later the portals of what were once the Highgate tunnels came into view. In the decades since the closure of the line nature had stepped in to reclaim the land and now a tangle of dark roots twisted up through the collapsing brickwork. Cherry, rowan and hawthorn trees lined the trackbed and Tony had seen a family of muntjac deer at this very spot a few years before. He remembered holding his breath, reaching gingerly for his phone, desperate to get a picture for Emma, but the animals had gone before he’d had the chance.

‘I’ll be there,’ Caroline said. ‘But don’t expect me to be in a good mood.’

‘Everything OK?’

‘Oh yeah, apart from being sacked everything’s brilliant.’

‘Sorry to hear that,’ Tony said.

‘Stupid cow said it was because of the police coming in, but she was just looking for an excuse, if you ask me. Not good for business, is it, having someone like me sitting at a till? Like a fatso at the checkout is going to stop people buying cakes.’

‘Sounds to me like you might have a case for unfair dismissal.’

‘Probably,’ Caroline said. ‘Can’t be arsed.’

Striding on towards Queen’s Wood, on a trail that would eventually bring him out on Muswell Hill Road, he arrived at another bridge, or what remained of it. He could smell mould and piss. Those bricks not lost beneath a wall of ivy were decorated with brightly coloured swirls of graffiti.

Leering faces and illegible messages; stars and smiley faces.

Doesn’t matter what the reason was. Just happy that you decided to come
…
 

Tony stood in the shadow of the overhang, sweating slightly and suddenly aware of how spooky the place could be. He remembered telling Emma the tale of the dreadful Goat-man, a figure from urban myth who was supposed to haunt these unlit pathways which local kids dared one another to walk at night. She had been frightened and upset, and it had taken him a good while to convince her that it was just a stupid story.

He wasn’t expecting Chris to answer his phone, not when he saw who was calling, so he thought through his message for a minute or two before ringing and leaving it.

‘Chris, it’s Tony. I know things were a bit difficult for you at the last session and I hope you understand that you didn’t really give me a great deal of choice. But I wanted to let you know that the Monday night group’s starting up again, week after next probably, and I’d really like you to be there. Fresh start, OK? I hope you’re doing well and don’t worry, it’s fine if you don’t feel like you want to come along. If you do… great. Call me either way.’

Moving out of the semi-dark, Tony started slightly when he saw a figure crouched against the wall at the far side of the bridge. When he stepped closer it was clear that it was no ghostly Goat-man, and though there were no needles to be seen on the floor Tony did not need telling that the man was high: rocking slowly, his shaved head lolling, like he kept waking for a second or two before nodding off again.

Winos and drug addicts made good use of the place too. The so-called Friends of the Parkland did their best to move them on, to keep the place ‘clean’, but still, junkies were a lot more common than muntjacs.

Tony thought about Chris.

He really hoped he would make it to the meeting, but he wasn’t holding his breath. It would be understandable if Chris wanted to forget all about the group and the people in it. To pretend that the events of that last Monday evening had never happened.

For very different reasons, Tony wanted to do exactly the same thing.