He begins to remove his clothes and books from the canvas holdall. The clothes will go in the wardrobe. He tries the door to the built-in cupboard, but it appears to be locked. Croft wishes the woman, Sandra, had felt able to stay with him in the room for just a few minutes longer.
Why would she, though? What is he to her, other than the sixty pounds each week she will get from him in rent money?
Croft wonders what, if anything, she has heard or read or been told about his case.
The child, Rebecca Riding, lived less than two miles from the place where he is now standing. A decade has passed since she died. In an alternate world, she would now be a young woman. Instead, she went to pick flowers in Manor Park on a certain day, and that was that.
Abducted and raped, then murdered. Her name had joined the register of the lost.
Did Croft kill Rebecca Riding? The papers said he had, for a while they did anyway. He has served a ten-year prison sentence for her murder. Even now that the charges have been overturned, the time he has spent living as a guilty man is still a part of reality.
He is free, but is he truly innocent?
Croft cannot say yet. There are too many things about that day that he cannot remember.
His first meeting with Symes consists mainly of Symes cross-examining him on the subject of how things are going.
“Did you manage to sign on okay?” As if penetrating the offices of the Lewisham DSS was a significant accomplishment, like shooting Niagara Falls in a barrel, or scaling Everest.
Perhaps for some it is. Croft thinks of the faces, the closed and hostile faces of free people who through their freedom were unpredictable and therefore threatening. In prison, you became used to people doing the same thing, day after day. Even insane actions came to make sense within that context. In the offices of the Lewisham DSS, even getting up to fetch a cup of water from the cooler might turn out to be a prelude to insurrection.
All the people he encounters make him nervous. He tells Symes everything is fine.
“It was lucky about the room,” he adds, as a sweetener. “I’m grateful to you.”
The room at The Old Tiger’s Head was Symes’s idea. He knows Angus McNiece, apparently. Croft dislikes Symes intensely without knowing why. In prison, you come to know a man’s crime by the scent he gives off, and to Croft, Richard Symes has about him the same moist and fuggy aroma as the pathetically scheming lowlifes who always sat together in the prison canteen because no one else would sit near them, suffering badly from acne and talking with their mouths full.
Symes wears a lavender-coloured, crew-necked jersey and loose brown corduroys. He looks like an art teacher.
That Symes has been assigned to him by the probation service to help him “re-orientate” seems to Croft like a joke that isn’t funny.
Symes is telling Croft about a group he runs, once a week at his home, for newly released offenders.
“It’s very informal,” Symes says. “I think you’d enjoy it.”
Offenders, Croft thinks. That’s what we are to people. We offend. The idea of being in Symes’s house is distasteful to him, but he is afraid that if he refuses, Symes will see it as a sign of maladjustment and use it against him.
Croft says yes, he would like to attend, of course. It would be good to meet people.
“Here’s my address,” Symes says. He writes it down on one of the scraps of paper that litter his desk and hands it across. “It’s in Forest Hill. Can you manage the bus?”
“I think so,” Croft says. For a moment, he imagines how good it would feel to punch Symes in the face, even though Croft isn’t used to fighting. He hasn’t hit anyone since he was fifteen and had a dust-up in the schoolyard with Roger Burke by name, Burke by nature. Croft has forgotten what it was about now but everyone had cheered. He imagines the blood spurting from Symes’s nose the way it had from Roger Burke’s nose, the red coating the grooves of his knuckles, the outrage splayed across his face (how fucking dare you, you little turd), the pain and surprise.
Symes is finally getting ready to dismiss him.
“Tuesday at eight, then. Are you sure you don’t want me to email you directions?”
“There’s no need.” Croft isn’t online yet, anyway, but he doesn’t tell Symes that. “I’m sure I can find you.”
“I’m just popping to Sainsbury’s,” Sandra says. “Can I fetch you anything?”
The supermarket is only across the road. Croft can see the car park from his window. Sandra knows Croft could easily go himself, if he needed to, but she asks anyway because she’s like that, kind, so different from her husband, McNiece, who hasn’t addressed a single word to Croft since he moved in.
Sandra has her boy with her, Alexander. He gazes around Croft’s room with widening eyes.
“You’re painting,” the boy says.
White, Sandra bought. A five-litre can of matt emulsion and a can of hi-shine gloss for the woodwork.
The smell of it: bright, chemical, clean, the scent of new. It reminds Croft of the smell of the fixative in his old darkroom.
“That’s right,” Croft says. “Do you like it?”
The boy stares at him, open-mouthed.
“Don’t bother Mr. Croft, Alex,” Sandra says. “He’s busy.”
“It’s no bother,” Croft says. “And it’s Dennis.” The presence of the boy in his room makes him more than ever certain that Sandra McNiece does not know what Croft was in prison for. If she knew, she would not have brought her son up here. If she knew, she would not have allowed Croft within a mile of the building.
She will know soon though, because someone will tell her, someone is bound to. Croft is surprised this hasn’t happened already. Once she knows, she will want to throw him out, though Croft has a feeling Angus McNiece won’t let her, he won’t want to lose the extra income.
“I could do with some tea bags,” he says to Sandra. “If it’s really no trouble.”
“Were you really in prison?” the boy says. Alexander. He sits on the edge of Croft’s bed, swinging his legs back and forth as if he were sitting on a tree branch, somewhere high up, in Oxleas Woods perhaps (do kids still go there?) where it is said you can hear the ghosts of hanged highwaymen, galloping along the side of the Dover Road in the autumnal dusk.
“Yes,” Croft says. “I was. But I’m out now.”
“What were you in for?”
“Does your mother know you’re up here?” Croft replies. The idea that she might not know, that the boy is here in his room and that nobody has given their permission, makes Croft feel queasy. Or perhaps it is just the smell of the hardening gloss paint.
“Yes,” the boy says, though Croft can tell at once that he is lying, that the child has sneaked upstairs to see the prisoner, that in the boy’s mind this is the bravest and most daring feat he has ever performed. Croft wonders if Sandra realises she has given her son the same name as her own. Perhaps she does, perhaps the boy was named after her.
Alexander the Great.
Alexander Graham Bell.
Alexander Pushkin.
In Russian, the shortened form of Alexander (and Alexandra) is not Alex, but Sasha. Pushkin was shot in a duel. He died two days later in some agony from a ruptured spleen. He was thirty-eight years old.
“Shouldn’t you be in bed?” Croft says. The boy looks at him with scorn. How old is he, exactly? Six, seven, eight?