“My eyesight-”
“Take off your bloody glasses!”
He did so.
“Now look at me.” Barbara waited till she could see his eyes, grey to the point of altogether colourless. She wanted to read the truth in them, but even more than that she wanted just to see them and to have him know that she was seeing them. “At this precise moment, no one’s saying you handed over any boys in order to get them killed.” She felt her throat trying to close on the words, but she forced herself to say them anyway because if the only way to get him to move in her direction was to lie, cheat, and flatter, she would lie and cheat and flatter with the best of them. “You didn’t do that to Davey Benton and you didn’t do that to anyone else. When you left Davey with this…this bloke, you expected the game to be played the way it had always been played. Seduction, sodomy, I don’t know what-”
“They didn’t tell me what-”
“But,” she broke in because the last thing she could bear was to hear him justify, protest, deny, or excuse. She just wanted the truth and she was determined to have it from him before she left the room. “You didn’t mean him to die. To be used, yes. To have some bloke touch him up, rape him even-”
“No! They were never-”
“Barry,” his solicitor said. “You needn’t-”
“Shut up. Barry, you offered those boys for cash to your slimeball mates at MABIL, but the deal was always sex, not murder. Maybe you had the boys yourself first or maybe you just popped your cork by having all those other blokes depending on you to supply them with new flesh. The point is, you didn’t mean anyone to die. But that’s what happened and you’re either going to tell me that the bloke in this picture is the one who called himself two-one-six-oh or I’m going to walk out of this room and let you go down for everything from paedophilia to pandering to murder. That’s it. You’re going down, Barry, and you can’t escape it. It’s up to you how far you want to sink.”
She had her eyes locked on his and his skittered wildly in their sockets. She wanted to ask him how he’d come to be the man he was-what forces in his own past had brought him to this-but it didn’t matter. Abused in childhood. Molested. Raped and sodomised. Whatever had turned him into the malevolent procurer he was, all that was water under the bridge. Boys were dead and a reckoning was called for.
“Look at the picture, Barry,” she said.
He moved his gaze to it another time and he looked at it long and hard. He finally said, “I can’t be sure. This is old, isn’t it? There’s no goatee. Not even a moustache. He’s got…his hair is different.”
“There’s more of it, yes. But look at the rest of him. Look at his eyes.”
He put his glasses back on. He picked up the picture. “Who’s he with?” he asked.
“His mum,” Barbara said.
“Where’d you get the picture?”
“From her flat. Inside Walden Lodge. Just up the hill from where Davey Benton’s body was found. Is this the man, Barry? Is this two-one-six-oh? Is this the bloke you gave Davey to at the Canterbury Hotel?”
Minshall set the photograph down. “I don’t…”
“Barry,” she said, “take a nice, long look.”
He did so. Again. And Barbara switched from Come on to prayer.
He finally spoke. “I think it is,” he said.
She let out her breath. I think it is wouldn’t cut the mustard. I think it is wouldn’t get a conviction. But it was enough to spawn an identity parade, and that was good enough for her.
HIS MOTHER had finally arrived at midnight. She’d taken one look at him and opened her arms. She didn’t ask how Helen was because someone had managed to catch her en route from Cornwall and tell her. He could see that from her face and from the way his brother hung back from greeting him, gnawing on his thumbnail instead. All Peter managed to say was, “We rang Judith straightaway. She’ll be here by noon, Tommy.”
There should have been comfort in this-his family and Helen’s family gathering at the hospital so that he did not have to face this alone-but comfort was inconceivable. As was seeing to any simple biological need, from sleeping to eating. It all seemed unnecessary when his being was focussed on a single pinpoint of light in the midnight of his mind.
In the hospital bed, Helen was insignificant in comparison to the machinery round her. They had told him the names, but he recalled only their individual functions: for breathing, to monitor the heart, for hydration, to measure oxygen in the blood, to maintain watch over the foetus. Aside from the whir of these instruments, there was no other sound in the room. And outside the room, the corridor was hushed, as if the hospital itself and every person within it already knew.
He didn’t weep. He didn’t pace. He made no attempt to drive his fist through the wall. So perhaps that was why his mother ultimately insisted he had to go home for a while when the next day dawned and found them all still milling round the hospital corridors. A bath, a shower, a meal, anything, she told him. We’ll stay right here, Tommy. Peter and I and everyone else. You must make an attempt to take care of yourself. Please go home. Someone can go with you if you like.
There were volunteers to do that: Helen’s sister Pen, his brother, St. James. Even Helen’s father although it was easy to see that the poor man’s heart was in shreds and he’d be no help to anyone while his youngest daughter was where she was…as she was. So at first he’d said no, he would stay at the hospital. He couldn’t leave her, they must see that.
But finally, sometime in the morning, he consented. Home for a shower and a change of clothes. How long could that take? Two constables ushered him through a small gathering of reporters whose questions he neither understood nor even heard very well. A panda car drove him to Belgravia. He dully watched the streets roll by.
At the house they asked did he want them to stay? He shook his head. He could cope, he told them. He had a live-in man in the house. Denton would see that he had a meal.
He didn’t tell them that Denton was off on a long-awaited holiday: bright lights and big city, Broadway, skyscrapers, theatre every night. Instead, he thanked them for their trouble and took out his keys as they drove off.
The police had been. He saw signs of them in the scrap of crime-scene tape that still clung to the narrow porch’s railing, in the fingerprint dust that still powdered the door. There was no blood, Deborah had said, but he found a spot of it on one of the draughts-board marble tiles that comprised the top step just before the door. She’d been so close to getting inside.
It took him three tries to get his key properly in the lock, and when he’d managed the whole operation, he felt light-headed. He expected the house to be different somehow, but nothing had changed. The last bouquet of flowers she’d arranged had lost a few petals to the marquetry top of the table in the entry, but that was it. The rest was as he’d last seen it: one of her winter scarves hanging over the railing of the stairs, a magazine left open on one of the sofas in the drawing room, her dining-room chair sitting at an angle and not replaced the last time she’d sat upon it, a teacup in the kitchen sink, a spoon on the work top, a binder of fabric samples for the baby’s room on the table. Somewhere in the house, the bags of christening clothes were probably stowed. Mercifully, he did not know where.
Upstairs, he stood beneath the shower and let the water beat upon him endlessly. He found he couldn’t exactly feel it, and even when it struck his eyeballs, he didn’t blink nor did he feel pain. Instead, he relived individual moments, silently imploring a God he could not say he believed in to give him a chance to turn back time.
To what day? he asked himself. To what moment? To what decision that had led them all to where they now were?
He stood in the shower until there was no hot water left in the boiler. He had no idea how long he’d been there when he finally emerged. Dripping and shivering, he remained undried and unclothed till his teeth were castanets in his skull. He couldn’t face walking back into their bedroom and opening the wardrobe and the drawers to search out clean clothes. He was nearly air-dried before he summoned the will to pick up a towel.