Authors: JOHN YORVIK
I was outside a house near Hackney Central. Dani was upstairs talking to her shaven-headed friends. I was skulking in the garden below. Occasionally, I saw bald-headed faces peering down through the window with the same eyes that had scrutinised me outside the Free Press office two years ago.
After half an hour, Dani came out and walked down the fire escape to the garden. She held up a set of keys and said I could have the basement flat. She’d told me in the park that no-one would think of looking for a male murder suspect in a women’s refuge and I had seen the wisdom in her words, but now I was beginning to doubt it. Didn’t some of these people hate men? And if they saw that photofit, why wouldn’t they turn me in to the police? I contained my urge to run away, and greeted Dani with a smile.
“Just what did you tell them, Dani?”
“That you’re gay and your partner beat you up.”
“And they bought that?”
“Pretty much straight off,” said Dani, her eyes full of mischief.
“I’m glad you can see the funny side of all this.”
“I’m sorry. Just trying to keep your spirits up. C’mon. Let’s get moved in.”
I popped two more painkillers from the packet and swigged them back with a can of beer I’d bought from a corner shop. Dani shoved the key in the door and struggled to turn the lock. Finally, it opened with a click and we went in. There were signs of damp rot, and mouse droppings near the fridge, but it would do. It was secluded and there was a double bed, heavy curtains and clean blankets in the cupboard. Dani volunteered to go to the shops and get in some supplies. Taking out my roll, I gave her a fifty-pound note and requested Spanish wine, brandy and cigarettes.
“Jeez,” she said. “One day, we’ll have to do something about your drinking.”
I wanted to tell her that there is no ‘we’, but I felt my hard-wired independent streak had suddenly reached an impasse. Dani was risking a lot for someone she’d known little more than two years. I didn’t want to offend her or the society of women.
“Let’s face it, Dani,” I joked, “I’m just a mass of urges and impulses, kept in check by nicotine, alcohol and guilt. Take that away and there’d be this huge outpouring of sex and violence.”
Dani looked bemused. She put on her coat and left without saying anything. She came back half an hour later with food, alcohol, cigarettes and candles.
* * *
When we’d finished eating, my plate still half full, Dani asked me to tell her the story from the very beginning and not to leave anything out. I started with Thursday night when I met Marty and told her every detail I could remember. When I got to Saturday night, she interrupted me:
“Hang on. You don’t remember getting home Saturday night?”
“All I know is I woke up in my own bed on Sunday afternoon.”
“How often do you have these blackouts?”
“Not exactly blackouts. I don’t remember getting home on Friday night either, but that’s because nothing spectacular happened. It was routine,” I said unconvincingly, filling my glass again.
Dani suddenly looked concerned. I continued with the story until I got to Hampstead Underground and being chased down the stairs.
“You don’t know for sure that anybody recognised you. You were chased because you jumped the barrier.”
“They thought I was the murderer. I began to believe it myself. I saw blood on my hands.”
“That can happen. You can become convinced you’re guilty of something terrible you didn’t do. It’s called false memory syndrome.”
“Even if I imagined it. There’s no surer sign of guilt in the eyes of the law. They will ask: but why did you run if you’ve got nothing to hide? It’s suspect behaviour like not having a mobile phone or complaining about increased airport security.”
“Do you think I’m capable of it?” I added after a pause.
“Everyone’s capable.”
“Should I go to the police?”
“No,” she said. Her face taking on a solemn expression.
“I’m surprised you think that,” I said, slanting my head and lighting another cigarette. The blue-grey fog filled up the space between us. Dani wafted the tobacco cloud away with her hand.
“Lishman, there’s something I have to tell you. Something I had to tell Brent when I started at Free Press.”
I filled up my glass again and leaned back against the sofa to listen as Dani told me her story. At the age of eighteen she’d abandoned her A levels to attend art and photography classes at the local college, waiting tables at night to pay her mother some rent. Her photography impressed her tutor so much he decided she would be better off attending the art school in the city and he arranged for a friend to act as her mentor while she worked on her portfolio. Dani met her mentor once a week at his studio. His name was Michael and he was in his early forties, married with two kids. After a few weeks, it became obvious that Michael, as well as being very impressed with Dani’s photographic eye, was interested in Dani herself. However, Dani, a sensitive and shy teenager, didn’t want to know and blocked out his flirtation. She didn’t want to admit to herself that Michael’s interest was anything other than avuncular or professional.
Michael began to invite Dani out on Sundays to take landscape shots. He would pick her up in his car and drive them to local beauty spots. Dani used their meetings to get as much photographic experience and advice as she could. What she didn’t know was that Michael had started to tell his friends that they were having an affair. He’d even confessed it to his therapist. Of course, an affair with Michael was the furthest thing from Dani’s thoughts.
One day, Michael told Dani that he’d organised a photography field trip to a remote part of the southern Welsh peninsula. They would be joining a group of students with the aim of workshopping darkroom development techniques. They would stay overnight in a farmhouse. Of course, when Dani and Michael got to the farmhouse there was no-one else there. Michael placated Dani with the possibility that the others had had car trouble, but Dani was already beginning to suspect the worst. After dinner as they sat by candlelight in the cottage, miles away from the nearest village, Michael made his play. Grabbing Dani’s hand he asked her what they were going to do about ‘us’ and that he knew he should tell his wife but that it was hard what with the kids. Dani pushed his hand away and told him he was crazy: there was no ‘us’. She told him that he’d had too much to drink and that they’d talk about it in the morning. With that she went to bed, only to be woken by Michael, drunk out of his mind, accusing her of being a tease and violently ripping the bed clothes off the bed. In her fear Dani grabbed the bedside lamp, which had a ceramic base, and smashed it into Michael’s head. Swaying but apparently not badly hurt, Michael steadied himself and without uttering another word left the room.
Dani lay awake most of the night frightened that Michael would return, but as daylight flooded the nearby moor, she drifted off to sleep. When she awoke, she got dressed, packed her bag and went downstairs where she discovered Michael sitting on an old wooden chair, his upper body sprawled across the kitchen table. She walked around the table to make sure he was asleep and noticed his eyes were open. He was dead.
Dani found herself accused of Michael’s murder and was given a life sentence. She won an appeal two years into her sentence. The fact she was still a virgin at the time of her arrest had destroyed the prosecution’s scenario that she’d been having an affair with Michael and had killed him because he refused to leave his wife. As so often happens, this evidence was buried during the original trial. Due to her nervous disposition, Dani was put on tranquillisers from the time of her arrest until years after her release.
She’d met Erika and Pippa, the two shaven-headed women upstairs, when she was in prison. They’d also killed men in self-defence. Seeing a vulnerable person in Dani, they took her under their wing. And when they were freed and had established a refuge, they’d encouraged Dani to come to London and get back into photography. Dani’s mother had died soon after her release, so she’d jumped at the chance of starting her life again, albeit with a new-model family in Hackney.
With the support of her two ‘guardians’, she’d finally been able to tear up her prescription and go cold turkey. She regressed slowly into the hypersensitive teen obsessed with photography that had existed before Michael. The one that had somehow survived underneath the layers of drugs and institutionalising.
“But why the shaven heads and big clothes?” I asked, after a long period of silence following the end of her story.
“Why did you turn up to the park today in sunglasses, a baseball cap and a hoodie?” she replied with a smile on her lips and tears in her eyes. She poured herself a glass of wine and downed it in one. Then poured herself another. This one she sipped slowly.
“So you believe I didn’t do it?” I asked.
“I believe you. And you can trust me. We’ll lie low together until it all blows over,” she said as if cheered by the prospect of spending weeks together in this gloomy, mildewed flat.
We sat on the sofa side by side drinking, smoking and talking, each with an earphone in one ear and the Walkman between us. My mind slushing around in a pool of barbiturates.
Dani was soon asleep leaning against my ribs. I was uncomfortable, so I got up and lay her down on the sofa. I fetched a blanket and threw it over her. Then I got undressed and got into bed between two blankets. At first, despite the painkillers and wine, I couldn’t sleep. My mind was racing. I thought about the horror of false memory syndrome. Surely false memories would never seem as real as actual memories. They could be identified by their factual inconsistencies, their lack of detail, their inauthentic taste and smell. There was always a way out of the labyrinth if you could take control of your mind and distinguish truth from fiction.
* * *
“Brent thinks your illness is delayed grief,” said Dani, no doubt reacting to my worried expression. “He said you could take as long as you needed.”
“Delayed grief?” I muttered, as I pulled out a cigarette and lit up. But before Dani could respond, I got up, walked into the kitchen and filled up the kettle.
After a ten-minute chat over a cup of tea, Dani headed back to work. The rest of the afternoon I sat and jotted down everything I remembered about the previous four days. Getting to Natasha’s building, the raptors hanging around outside must have clocked me well enough to give the police a description. The numbers dialled on Natasha’s phone would have put them in touch with the friends she’d gone for a drink with. They would have verified the description. From the friends, the police could piece together our night out. In the second pub we went to, people would have remembered how drunk we’d been. In particular, the men laughing at us as we left the bar. Short of another lead, I would fit the bill as far as the police were concerned: I was a single man, I drank a lot, I had scratches on my face and a bruised hand, I had no alibi and my DNA was all over her flat.
While making notes I was interrupted by a knock on the door. I looked through the front window and saw someone walking away. I opened the door. On the ground was a tray bearing a pot covered with a plate. Beside it was a bread roll. I went out and picked up the tray. Before going back in the flat, I looked up to the window above and saw a face quickly disappear behind a curtain.
After eating, I decided to get on with some work for Brent. I unzipped the holdall Dani had brought from my flat and found some post at the very top. I picked up a large brown envelope. It looked like the one that had been pushed under the door on Sunday morning. I tore it open and pulled out 25 or so photos. Looking at the top of the pile there was a photo of the front door of a flat in a council block. I thought it must be yet another urban-degradation-as-beauty photo exhibition and searched for the accompanying press release highlighting how the artist is able to bring out the inner radiance of social deprivation. Expecting the following photos to be of fat, badly dressed people eating eggs and beans in a small kitchen, I turned over the next one to see the door open and the hallway. The next was further into the flat. The place was in disarray, smashed glass, papers everywhere. The next was in a dark corridor, a hand print clearly marked on the wall. The next was the bathroom door, broken in two, hanging off its hinges. The next were in the bathroom, swastikas were painted on the mirror in lipstick and nail varnish, and scratched into the glass, and the enamel of the bath. The shower curtain was on the floor. The next was Natasha lying in bed, her dead-doll eyes staring eerily into the camera lens and back at me.