Innocent Blood

  So he was wicked as well as ugly, and in some mysterious way the ugliness and the wickedness belonged together. When he thought about his boyhood he marvelled at the child’s stoical acceptance of this yoked burden of physical and moral repulsion, hardly made more bearable by the knowledge of its arbitrariness, or his powerlessness to shift the load from his shoulders.

  Two things saved him, delinquency and chess. The first had begun in a small way. He had wandered unobserved into the saloon bar early one Saturday morning before opening time. He liked the bar when it was silent and empty, the round tables with their ornate cast-iron legs and stained tops; the wall clock with its swinging pendulum and flower-painted face measuring the silence with ticks which were too soft to be heard except out of opening hours; the smeared plastic cloth covering the tray holding two of yesterday’s sausage rolls; even the smell of beer which permeated the whole house, but which in this smoky brown-clad cabin was strong and potent as a gas; the mysterious dimness behind the counter with its rows of darkly gleaming bottles awaiting the magic moment when the bar lights would be switched on and the liquids would take fire. Venturing behind the bar into this heartland of the forbidden territory, he saw that the till drawer was unlocked and slightly open. Gently he pulled it towards him. And there it was, money; not money in the possession of grown-ups, a symbol of adult power, not a few crumpled notes being stuffed, almost surreptitiously, into his mother’s purse in a supermarket, not coins carefully doled out weekly to him to pay for school dinners or his fares. Here was money under his hands, two bundles of notes held together in rubber bands, silver coins, unnaturally bright, looking as heavy as doubloons, coffee-coloured pennies. Afterwards he couldn’t recall taking the one-pound note. All he could remember was being back in his own room, terrified, his heart thudding, his back pressed against the door, turning the note over in his hands.

  It was never missed, or if it was, he was not suspected. He spent it that morning on a model of a Lotus racing car, and on Monday, brought it out ostentatiously between lessons, and ran it over his desktop. The boy in the next desk looked at it trying to conceal his envy.

  “That’s the new Lotus, isn’t it? Where d’you get it?”

  “Bought it.”

  “Let’s have a look.”

  He passed it across, feeling a momentary pang at the loss of its smooth brightness. He said: “You can keep it if you like.”

  “You mean you don’t want it?”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “I mean you can have it.”

  Thirty pairs of eyes slewed round to witness this marvel. The form bully said: “Got any more at home?”

  “I may have. Why, d’you want one?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  But he did mind. Looking into the face he feared, into the greedy little eyes, Norman rejoiced in the knowledge of just how much he minded.

  “I’ll bring you one next week. Monday maybe.”

  And that was the end of the persecution and the beginning of a year during which he lived at a pitch of inner excitement, of exhilaration and terror, which he had never experienced since. He didn’t again steal from the pub takings. Twice more he stole into the saloon bar in hope, but on neither occasion was the till drawer unlocked. Part of him was relieved to be spared the temptation. To risk a second theft would have been too dangerous. But with the beginning of summer and the influx of visitors came other and safer opportunities. In his solitary wanderings after school along the promenade or on the beach his restlessly blinking eyes, so deceptively mild behind steel-rimmed spectacles, grew adept at spotting his chances; a purse casually laid on top of a beach bag, a wallet stuck into a blazer pocket, loose change from paying the deck-chair attendant dropped into the pocket of a coat slung across the back of the canvas. He grew skilful at picking pockets, the tiny marsupial hands insinuating their way under the jacket, into the back trouser pocket. Afterwards, his tactic was always the same. He would wait to examine the spoils until he could be sure that he was unobserved. Usually he would seek the rank-smelling metallic saltiness of the gloom under the great iron girders of the pier, take out the money, then scuffle the purse or wallet under the sand. Apart from coins, he took away only pound notes. To proffer anything larger at a local shop would be to invite suspicion. But, perhaps because he worked alone, was so unremarkable, looked so neat and respectable, there never was suspicion. Only once, during the whole of the year, was he in danger of discovery. He had bought a model of a breakdown van and had been unable to resist playing with it in the hall before school. His mother’s eye had been caught by the unexpected brightness.

  “That’s new isn’t it? Where d’you get it?”

  “A man gave it to me.”

  “What man?” Her voice was sharp, worried.

  “Just a man coming out of the bar. A customer.”

  “What did you do for it?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t do anything.”

  “Well, what did he ask you to do?”

  “Nothing, Mum. He just gave it to me, honest. I didn’t do anything.”

  “Well don’t, that’s all! And don’t take toys from strangers.”

  But in the following autumn, the beginning of the second year at senior school, came Mr. Micklewright, a new and enthusiastic young member of staff, with his passion for chess. The school chess club was formed and Norman joined. The game fascinated him. He played every day, needing no opponent since there were published games to work out, strategies which could be developed in secret, books from the public and school library to teach him the subtleties of the various openings. Encouraged by Mr. Micklewright’s enthusiasm and praise he rapidly became the best player in the school. Then there were the local school competitions, the Southern Championships, and eventually even a photograph in the Brighton Evening Argus, a photograph cut out by his aunt and passed from hand to hand round the saloon bar. That established his fame. From then on he lived the rest of his school life without fear. He stopped stealing because it was no longer necessary for him to steal. Even the spitting monsters deserted the railway arches, leaving nothing but their debris of beer cans, screwed-up cigarette cartons and a brown, mildewed pillow leaking damp feathers against the furthest wall.

  On his walk back to the station and his homeward train, he wondered what would have happened to him if he had gone on with the stealing. He couldn’t have hoped to have evaded detection forever. And then what? He would have been officially labelled delinquent; processed through the juvenile justice system; become the unprepossessing object of the machinery of bureaucratic caring. There would have been no respectable career in local government, no meeting with Mavis, no Julie. So much in his life seemed to have depended on that moment when Mr. Micklewright set out before his fascinated gaze those mystical warriors whose lives, like his, were governed by such unalterable and arbitrary rules.

  When at last he reached home he went to his bedroom and tried on his equipment for murder. He looked at himself in the long wardrobe glass. With the unsheathed knife in his hand, the raincoat hanging in glistening folds from his thin shoulders, he looked like a surgeon gowned for some desperate operation or, perhaps, like the member of a more ancient and sinister priesthood garbed for a ritual slaughter. And yet the image was not wholly terrifying. There was something wrong about it, something almost pathetic. The clothes were right, the naked knife showed the keen edge of fear; but the eyes which met his with their look of mild, almost painful resolution, were the eyes, not of an executioner, but of the victim.

  16

  On 4th August a probation officer came by appointment to look at the flat. Philippa prepared for the visit with excessive care, cleaning and rearranging the sparse furniture and buying a geranium in a pot to sit on the kitchen window. There was still a lot to do to the flat before it was ready to receive her mother, and only another ten days in which to do it, but she was pleased with her efforts so far. She couldn’t remember when she had physically worked harder than during the las
t week, or with more satisfaction. She had concentrated on her mother’s room and it was now nearly ready. The worst job had been taking up the carpet and getting rid of it, but George, hearing her coughing with the dust and struggling on the stairs with the discarded roll, had helped her carry it down and had bribed or persuaded the dustmen to take it away. Then she had spent two days scrubbing and staining the floor. She had brought nothing with her from Caldecote Terrace except one suitcase of clothes and the Henry Walton oil. She had hung it above the fireplace in her mother’s room where, although it was not in period, she thought it looked particularly good above the newly gleaming fire hood and the plain but elegant overmantel.

  She was glad that she still had some money in reserve. She was surprised how expensive cleaning materials were; how many small items were essential to domestic comfort and how costly they were to buy. The previous owner had left in a box under the sink his set of tools, and after trial and error and much consulting of a book on elementary carpentry borrowed from the Marylebone Road branch of the Westminster library, she managed to make a reasonable job of putting up extra shelves in the kitchen and a coat rack in the hall. She found in the market a cheap batch of old Victorian tiles and fixed them behind the sink. Some of the jobs she particularly enjoyed; painting the woodwork white, with the sun from the open window warming her arms, searching in the local junk shops and in Church Street market for the extra pieces of furniture they needed. One particularly successful buy was two small cane chairs. They were in perfect condition but painted a particularly repulsive green. After a coat of paint and new patchwork cushions they added a touch of gaiety to the two rooms. George, if he saw her struggling with items of furniture, would temporarily leave his shop and give her a hand. She liked him. They seldom spoke, except when she bought from him the fruit which she ate each day for lunch, but she was aware that there flowed from him a general goodwill. Once he asked when Mrs. Palfrey was expected to arrive. She told him on August the fifteenth, but didn’t correct the name.

  At night she lay on the narrow bed in the back room in an almost sensuous languor of exhaustion, with the window wide open, listening to the rumble and murmur of London, watching the stain of its nightlife on the scudding clouds, letting herself be gently shaken into sleep by the shudder of the Underground trains running between Marylebone and Edgware Road.

  The probation officer was ten minutes late. When the downstairs bell at last rang Philippa opened the door to a tall, dark-haired woman who looked little older than herself. She was lugging a bulging plastic bag from the Edgware Road supermarket and seemed harassed. She said: “Philippa Palfrey? I’m Joyce Bungeld. Sorry I’m late. The gasket went. I only got back from holiday this morning and it’s been one hell of a day. All the eight O’Briens in court together. They’re apparently terrified that I may be made redundant so they go out on a family shoplifting bash every time I’m away just to prove to the authorities that I’m indispensable. Very pleased with themselves they were, grinning in the box like a row of monkeys, but I could have done without it. You weren’t thinking of making tea, were you? I’ve got a throat like a gravel pit.”

  Philippa made the tea, taking down her two new pottery mugs. Her first visitor. She told herself that she mustn’t let resentment at the inspection prejudice her enterprise, and was resolved to counter officialdom with at least a show of docility. The probation officer rummaged in her bag and produced a packet of chocolate wholemeal biscuits. She tore open the package and offered it to Philippa. They munched companionably, sipping hot tea, both perched on the kitchen table.

  “Your mother has her own room, has she? I see, in here. I like your picture.”

  What was she afraid of, thought Philippa, that she and her mother were about to embark on a sophisticated variety of incest? And how could having separate rooms prevent this? She said: “Don’t you want to look at the bathroom? It’s on the half landing.”

  “No thanks. I’m not a sanitary inspector, thank God. You’re here; the flat’s here; your mother has someone and some place to come to. That’s all I’m interested in. I’ll write to the prison CWO tomorrow. You should hear in a day or two. I think they’re trying to keep to the original release date, the fifteenth of August.”

  “Will it be all right?” Philippa tried to keep the note of anxiety out of her voice.

  “I should think so; why not? But it’s finally up to the Home Office. Will you be here much? I mean, I suppose you’ve got a job?”

  “Not yet. I thought we’d get one together; hotel work, waitressing, something like that.” She added, with an echo that was only half ironic: “We’re not afraid of hard work.”

  “Then you’re the only two people in London who aren’t. Sorry. I’m feeling a little sour this afternoon. This would be a lovely job if it weren’t for the clients. You go up to Cambridge in October, don’t you? What had you in mind then?”

  “For my mother? Nothing. I imagine she’ll look for a cheaper flat if she can’t afford to stay on here, or she could take a living-in job, if she can find one. And there’s always one of your post-release hostels.”

  She thought that the probation officer looked at her a little strangely. Then she said: “Then she’s probably only postponing most of her problems. Still, the first two months are the most difficult for a lifer. That’s when they need support. And she did ask to come here. Thanks for the tea.”

  The visit had lasted for less than twenty minutes, but Philippa thought that Miss Bungeld had seen all she wanted to see, had asked all the questions which it was necessary to ask. Shutting the street door after her and climbing the stairs she could imagine her report.

  “The prisoner’s daughter is of full age. She is an intelligent and sensible girl and the accommodation for which three months’ rent has been paid in advance appears adequate. The licensee will have her own room and the flat, although small and unpretentious, was clean and tidy when I called. Miss Palfrey intends to find a job working with her mother. I recommend that the arrangements be approved.”

  BOOK TWO

  AN ORDER OF RELEASE

  1

  On Tuesday 15th August, Scase was at York Station beginning his watch by half past eight in the morning. He had travelled to York the previous evening and had taken a room in a dull commercial hotel close to the station. He could have been lodged in any provincial city. It never occurred to him to visit the Minster or to stroll through the cobbled streets within the city walls. Nothing the city promised could seduce his mind for an instant from the task in hand. He travelled light, carrying only his rucksack, adding nothing but his pyjamas and toilet bag to the sheathed knife, the rolled plastic mackintosh, the binoculars and the thin gloves. He was never now parted from the knife and the other impedimenta of murder. It was not that he expected to be able to kill her during the journey to London, a crowded train was hardly likely to afford opportunity, but it had become necessary to him to carry the knife. It was no longer an object of fascination or horror, but a familiar and potent extension of himself, the part which, when he closed his hand round it, completed him and made him whole. Now, even at night, he felt bereft without the drag of the rucksack on his shoulder, without being able to slip his hand under the flap and run his fingers along the cardboard sheath.

  It was a convenient station in which to keep watch. From the outside hall an arched passage led through to the small concourse. To the right was the women’s waiting room. He could glimpse through the door a heavy mahogany table with carved legs, a lumpy couch and a row of carved chairs against the wall. Above the unlit gas fire was a nondescript modern print; it looked like a row of fishing nets strung out to dry. The waiting room was empty except for one very old woman huddled in sleep among an assortment of bulging packages. There was only one entrance to the station concourse and the indicator showed him that the London trains went from platform 8. Beyond it the cavernous arched roof rose from the pale grey pillars with their ornate capitals. There lay over the station the freshness o
f the early morning overlaid with the smell of coffee. It waited in what seemed an eerie and portentous calm for the flood of commuter traffic and the chattering throng of the day’s first tourists. Scase knew that, waiting alone so early, he would be conspicuous, but he told himself that it didn’t matter. No place was more impersonal and anonymous than a railway station, no one would challenge him, and if they did he would say that he was waiting for a friend from London.

  The bookstall was open and he bought a Daily Telegraph. A paper would be a quick way of hiding his face when she arrived. Then he settled himself on a bench to wait. He never doubted that Eli Watkin had kept faith with him, that this morning was the day of release. But he began to agitate himself with fears that he might not recognize her, that nearly ten years in prison might have changed her fundamentally or so subtly that she would slip past unnoticed. He took from his wallet the one picture that he had of her, cut from the local paper at the time of the trial. She and her husband had been snapped by a commercial photographer on what looked like a promenade at Southend. It was a photograph of two young people laughing, holding hands in the sun. He wondered how the reporter had managed to get hold of it. It told him nothing, and when he held it close to his eyes the image disintegrated into an anonymous pattern of microdots. It was impossible to connect this face with the woman whom he had last seen in the dock at the Old Bailey.

  He had sat alone through every day of the three-week trial of his child’s murderess, and by the last day nothing had any longer seemed real to him. It was like living in a dream world confined within the clean claustrophobic courtroom in which the ordinary conventions of life had been replaced by a different logic, an alien set of values. In that surrealist limbo no one except the professionals had any reality. All present were actors, but only those gowned or bewigged moved and spoke with assurance or knew their parts. The two accused sat side by side in the dock, yet distanced, not looking at each other, hardly moving their eyes. Perhaps if each had stretched out an arm their fingers might have touched, but their arms did not move. Touching was not in the script. The searing hatred which had infected him like a fever during the first days after Julie’s death, which had driven him out into the suburban streets, walking endlessly, pointlessly, unseeing, desperately striding on to prevent himself from beating his head against those neat suburban walls and howling for vengeance like a dog; all that passed when he looked at their dead faces, since how could you hate someone who wasn’t there, who was merely a bitplayer, selected to sit in the dock so that the play could go on? They were the most important characters, yet they had the least to do, were the least regarded. They had a look of ordinariness which, in some dreadful way, wasn’t ordinary at all; they were shells of flesh from which not only the spirit was missing. If they were pricked, they wouldn’t bleed. The members of the jury seemed afraid to meet their eyes. The judge ignored them. He felt that the drama, so muted, so desultory, could have gone on even without their presence.