Human Remains

  “You finished?” said Lewis.

  I didn’t answer. The anger was still there.

  “This is an interview, Colin. While we appreciate your contribution, it would be very helpful if you could stick to the questions we’re asking. Do you think you could do that?”

  “If I must.”

  Lewis took a deep breath in, leaned forward slightly across the table toward me.

  “How do you do it?”

  I stared at him.

  “Come on, Colin, you’ve developed what must be a genius technique for getting people to kill themselves. How do you do it?”

  I raised my chin in defiance. “It has taken me a number of years of detailed study, Detective Constable Lewis. Explaining it would take longer than either of us has.”

  “Maybe you could give us a summary,” he said.

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Indulge me.”

  I breathed in, a long, deep breath through my nose, wondering how to start, wondering if I could phrase it in words the plod could understand.

  “They all wanted to end their lives. You must understand that: if they weren’t ready for death, whatever my ‘technique,’ as you call it, it would not have worked.”

  “So you’re not responsible for their deaths?”

  “Absolutely not. They took their own lives, every one of them.”

  “But you . . . helped them?”

  “I helped them with their resolve. My ‘technique’ is something I tailor to meet individual needs. Some of them were afraid of pain, so my discussions with them concentrated on pain relief, or the blocking out of those feelings, and also on the removal of fear. Because, as I’m sure you are aware, fear makes pain more acute. If we have no fear, pain is easier to bear. So I helped each of them with their specific requirements.”

  “Doesn’t hunger override all of this?” Topping said abruptly. “I mean, surely the human body needs food and water . . .”

  “Voluntary refusal of food and fluid is surprisingly common, you know,” I said. “I suggest you research it on the Internet. It’s also called voluntary death by dehydration, or VDD. Or I’ve seen it referred to as terminal dehydration. Once you pass a certain point, the body starts to shut down, and from then on it’s quite a simple matter. It doesn’t take long, and if you’ve dealt with fear, and the limited amount of pain, it’s quite a pleasant way to die. Depending on how fit you are, and whether there is any underlying medical condition, five to seven days is the average length of time, for most of which the subject is asleep, resting. It’s not at all violent; in fact it’s very peaceful. You just slip away in your sleep.”

  They were both staring at me.

  “If any of them had changed their minds about dying, they could have gotten themselves a drink of water. They were in their own homes. Some of them still had food in the fridge, in the cabinets. They could have changed their minds at any point. But they had chosen their path. All I did was make it easier for them to continue.”

  “Were you there when they all died?”

  “No. It was a private moment for them. Usually once they lost consciousness I left them alone.”

  “But you went back?”

  “I went back to make sure they had achieved their goals.”

  They looked at each other. I waited for them to ask if I went back again after that, because if they had asked that question I would probably have responded with an untruth. But, fortunately for me and my dedication to the truth, the notion of someone voluntarily spending time with decomposing human flesh was one that was beyond their comprehension.

  “Let’s go back to the phones you used, Colin. You have admitted that you used different SIM cards for each of the—er—people you met.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You suppose so?”

  “All right, then, yes.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “It was a way of keeping track of everyone I’d met.”

  “Seems a complicated way to go about it. Why didn’t you just save their numbers in the contact list on your phone?”

  “I don’t keep contacts in my phone. You may have noticed.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I just prefer to keep things separate. That’s all.”

  Lewis sighed, something I recognized as heralding an imminent change of direction.

  “Your phone has also been linked with”—he consulted his notes—“a further twenty-seven SIM cards, in addition to the ones we have already discussed. What can you tell us about that?”

  “I have no comment.”

  “Come on, Colin. Another twenty-seven SIM cards! It must be a real pain, having to fish them out and change them all the time. Isn’t that the case?”

  “Not really. I used the different SIM cards over a long period of time.”

  “And were they all used for the same purpose?”

  “To keep in contact with people, yes.”

  “Am I right in thinking there are another twenty-seven people out there who have yet to be located?”

  I smiled at him. “It does sound rather a lot, doesn’t it? Clearly you’re not so good at taking care of your communities as you think you are.”

  “Are any of them still alive, Colin?”

  “I wondered when you were going to ask me that.”

  “And? Are there any people out there still alive?”

  They both looked at me. Motionless in their seats, breathless. At last they’d asked me something interesting, something that might make a difference. And the time had come for me to lie to them for the first time.

  “No.”

  They both breathed out in a sigh. It was almost comical. And it felt as though they believed me, or maybe they just wanted to believe me so badly that their tiny minds could not compute any possible alternative.

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “There was one lady a few weeks ago, but I believe someone intervened before she had enough time.”

  There was a pause, paper shuffling. Under the table, Lewis kicked the cardboard box. “Right, so, going back to the phones. Have you always used this method to keep in touch?”

  “Yes.”

  “With your friends, as well as with those you—er—‘helped to choose the right path’?”

  “I don’t have friends, Detective Constable Lewis.”

  “I’m not surprised. You spend too much time meddling in other people’s lives, don’t you?”

  “Is that an actual question?”

  “Why do you do it, Colin?”

  He was trying to be friendly with me now, trying to break down the barriers that he perceived existed between us. The only barrier was the table. He’d constructed all these issues when in reality it was all beautifully, serenely simple.

  “Come on, Colin. Why do you do it?”

  “I’ve already explained. I’m saving the taxpayer a fortune, and making people feel happier about themselves.”

  “And that makes you feel good, does it?”

  “Why wouldn’t it?”

  “Do you become sexually aroused when you’re dealing with these people, Colin?”

  I was too shocked to answer, just for a moment. I stared at him, my face hot with rage at his insolence. The change of topic had been sudden and, this time, unexpected.

  “How dare you?” I said, my voice low, calm. Disguising the fury as best I could.

  “You see—our search teams found this in your house, Colin.”

  From the cardboard box under the table Lewis brought forth a plastic bag, sealed at the top, covered with printed writing but transparent. Inside was an old copy of the Briarstone Chronicle, the center spread showing all the pictures of them. The happy smiling pictures.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  “It’s a copy of the newspaper,” I said, my tone even.

  “We retrieved it, as I said, from your house. Specifically, from your bedroom. More specifically, from underneath your bed.”
br />   “Quite.”

  “It’s covered in semen, Colin. Is it yours?”

  My face flushed again and I could not bring forth any words that would sufficiently express my indignation and discomfort. Damn the man!

  Eventually I hissed through gritted teeth, “No comment.”

  “Did you masturbate over the newspaper, Colin?”

  “No comment!”

  “Did it turn you on, knowing you’d caused these people to die?”

  “No comment!”

  They both sat staring at me for several seconds. I was breathing hard, my hands clenching and unclenching at the rudeness of it, the terrible intrusion into my private life. How dare they? I thought. Do they have no idea who I am, what I could do?

  “What?” I said. “Is it a bloody crime to masturbate, now? Are you going to charge me with desecrating a fucking newspaper?”

  “Please don’t swear, Colin.”

  “I’d prefer it if you called me Mr. Friedland, Detective Constable Lewis.”

  “Whatever,” Lewis said with a sigh. “We’ll stop there, for now. I’ll ask the custody sergeant to take you back to your cell.”

  Now that I have finally calmed down, lying on my narrow bunk back in my cell, I realize something that makes me smile. The newspaper is their best weapon. Which means they haven’t found my notebooks or the images. If they don’t find those, they have nothing at all.

  Maggie

  I wasn’t always like this. Alone, I mean. I had a husband and a family, two boys. When they grew up and left home it was just back to Leonard and me, and that was fine with me. I worked two days a week at a tea shop in the village, and that was only for fun really. Leonard was quite senior in his organization when he retired, and with the boys gone it left us with quite a bit of money. Stephen said we should sell the house, buy something smaller, but that would just give us more money sitting in the bank earning next to no interest, and what were we supposed to spend it on? We had vacations, of course, a cruise, usually, and a month or more in the sunshine during the cold, dark days of winter. But even when we were away I was always looking forward to coming home.

  Our house was large, on a quiet lane outside the village, with a yard extending right down to the river, trees hundreds of years old that groaned and sighed when the wind was strong. This house had nurtured us, looked after us, kept us safe, and grown my boys into tall, proud men. Why would I want to live anywhere else?

  Stephen got married to a Norwegian girl named Ina. They settled in North London and had two daughters. I saw them regularly, at least once a month. They would come for Sunday lunch. My younger son, Adrian, met a girl and went traveling with her. They ended up settling in Australia because she had family there, and a year after that they had a boy. They never got married. Of course I didn’t see them nearly as often as I saw Stephen and Ina. Adrian and Diane came home for Christmas, once. They came for my sixtieth birthday. And then they came back for the trial.

  They came for him early on a Tuesday morning. He was still in bed, fast asleep. I was up because in those days I had trouble sleeping past five. I’d made a cup of tea and I was sitting at the kitchen table reading yesterday’s newspaper, waiting for it to get properly light so I could go outside and do a bit more of the weeding that I’d abandoned when the daylight faded the evening before.

  There was a knock at the door. I thought, The postman’s early today. But of course it wasn’t the postman. It was two detectives, a man and a woman.

  “What is it? Is it the boys? What’s happened?” I demanded.

  “We need to speak to your husband, Mrs. Newman. Is he in?”

  I took the ID the man offered me, shut the door, and studied it in the hallway, and then I opened the door and let them in.

  “Where is your husband?” the woman asked, once they were in the hallway. “Where is Leonard?”

  “He’s in bed, of course. It’s half past six. What’s all this about?”

  The male detective went upstairs and I waited in the kitchen with the female. It was all very quiet, upstairs. There was no shouting, no crashing and thumping. A few minutes later Leonard came down the stairs with the police officer, dressed in the clothes he would wear to do the gardening: jeans, a sweater over an old shirt. His hair was standing up away from his head because he hadn’t brushed it. He was by the door with the man, putting his shoes on, and I thought for one dreadful moment he wasn’t going to acknowledge me at all, so I called out, “Leonard!”

  He spoke to the man for a moment and then came through to the kitchen. The look on his face was terrible, as though he’d just received the most appalling news.

  “What is it, Leonard? What on earth’s happened?”

  He didn’t move toward me, or try to touch me. He just said three words: “I’m so sorry.”

  He didn’t even use my name.

  When they’d taken him away I called his solicitor, who promised to get to the police station as soon as he could. My house was full of people; in the end I had no idea who they all were. I made them cups of tea and some of them looked at me with pity. Some of them with other expressions that I couldn’t interpret.

  They practically dismantled Leonard’s office. They took his computer away in plastic bags, and the laptop, all the cell phones, including mine.

  I used the landline to call Stephen. I couldn’t seem to get through to him how serious this was. He was about to leave for work, and until I started to cry and get hysterical he was fully intending to go to work and call me in the evening. But when I broke down he said he would come right away. Then I tried to call Adrian in Australia, but there was no answer.

  I thought he’d been caught cheating on his taxes. That was my first thought and for a long time after that I didn’t consider any possible alternative. It seemed the most likely problem, and explained why they were concentrating on his office rather than anything else in the house.

  Stephen went to the police station in the afternoon, while I stayed at home to tidy up and clean the house, but he was back soon afterward. They wouldn’t tell him anything. His father was still being interviewed. He was unlikely to be released before tomorrow morning. I sent Stephen back with a bag containing pajamas, a bathrobe, his dopp kit. A clean shirt.

  “He’s not staying in a fucking hotel, Mother,” Stephen said.

  “I don’t care,” I replied. “And don’t swear at me.”

  He did as he was told, but when he came back he wanted something else. He hadn’t been allowed to see his father but a request had come through. He needed a suit.

  “What for?” I asked.

  “He’s going to court in the morning,” Stephen said. “He wants to wear a suit. Like it will help.”

  “Of course it will help,” I said. I went upstairs and found his best suit, the tailored one he wore at the board meetings. A new shirt, a silk tie in a deep blue to bring out the color of his eyes.

  He was charged the next morning with possession of child abuse images. The shock was immense. I think they thought I was in denial—in fact Stephen said as much—but I wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t possible; there was no way such a thing was true. There were very few people I could confide in, but one of them was my sister Janet, who lived about twenty miles away. I went to stay at her house for a few days at Stephen’s insistence. I think he thought the press might get wind of it and he didn’t want them taking pictures of me in the yard, or standing at the window like a lost soul.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said to Janet. I must have said this to her five times already. “I just can’t believe any of it’s true. I mean we still have a good sex life! Surely he wouldn’t . . .”

  She looked at me over her mug of coffee and let me get it all off my chest. Trouble was it didn’t help. It made things worse, talking about it, because the disbelief didn’t go away. It was as though somebody had made all this up, just to spite us. I tried to think who could hate us enough to do this, to tear us all apart.

  He was granted b
ail in the end and he came home, but by that time the press had worked out who he was and what he was charged with, and there were TV camera vans parked at the bottom of the driveway.

  We moved out. Leonard wasn’t allowed out of the country so we had to cancel our vacation that had been booked and paid for. Our insurance didn’t cover the loss; apparently being arrested, even for something you haven’t done, doesn’t qualify as enough of a disaster to warrant a settlement. He tried to insist I should go without him, but I could not. What if they came again, and took him away without me knowing? And besides, if the worst should happen—I wanted to spend every moment I could with him.

  He tried so hard to act as though nothing were wrong. We tried to live a normal life, in the little house owned by friends of ours who were living overseas. Only close family knew where we were, and of course the police. Leonard only left the house once a week to sign his bail document at the police station. When he came out again we drove for miles and miles to make sure we weren’t followed back to the house.

  Eventually the press moved on to other matters, but I was still too afraid to go home.

  My sister Janet asked me what he’d had to say about it all, what his excuse was. In truth I never talked to him about it. I never even asked him if he was guilty of the crimes he had been accused of, such was my faith in him. He was my husband and I’d vowed to stand by him no matter what, for better, for worse, and this was about as “worse” as it was possible to get. So I made the decision that he was innocent, that it was a mistake, or someone else’s malicious accusation that had caused all this.

  But, as hard as he tried to act normally, things were not really the same. Leonard hid himself away for hours at a time, working on possible lines of defense. Late in the evening I would hear him weeping after I’d gone to bed. Despite his efforts, reading over legal documents the solicitor brought, to give him something to do, his demeanor faltered and it felt as though he’d given up already.

  I hadn’t given up, not by a long shot.

  The trial changed everything. It was not quite a year since that Tuesday morning that they’d come and arrested him. We were all prepared for it, briefed by the solicitor as to what to expect, but even so the boys suffered terribly. Seeing Adrian and Diane and my grandson Joshy who was five by then and quite a handful—it was so good in many ways but so bad in others. Diane stayed for a week with us and then when the trial started she took Joshy to stay with her parents in Scotland. Adrian stayed with Stephen and me.