The Closed Circle (35 page)

“There's nothing to bloody talk about!” he said, raising his voice. “I've never met you or your bloody sister and I reckon you must be mental or something. I reckon you belong in a mental home.”

“I've got another letter,” Claire told him. “A letter you wrote to Bill Anderton.”

For a moment that wrongfooted him, and he sat down again, just long enough for her to say: “You remember
that
name, don't you? And I can prove they're from the same person. They were written on the same typewriter.”

Gibbs tried to get up one more time, pressing with more force than ever against the table's edge. “I've never heard of him,” he hissed. “You've got the wrong bloke.”

“Sit down, you lying bastard,” Claire heard herself saying. And all at once, she was the one whose whole body was shaking, whose voice was out of control, who felt her grip on the situation beginning to slip away. She was terrified, now, by the look of levelled hatred on his face. “Please sit down.
Please.
I'm not going to go to the police or anything like that. I haven't come here to hunt you down.”

“Then what the fucking hell have you come here for?”

He was pushing the table up against her until it hurt. She could feel the sharp edge of it digging into her belly.

“Stop that!” she shouted. “Stop!” Furious with herself, she realized that tears were welling up in her eyes. “I just want to
know,
Victor. I just want to know what happened to my sister. I was just a girl. She was twenty-one. I just want to
know.
”

He glared at her for the last time, the malevolence concentrated, unbending.

“Well you won't get it from
me,
” he said, and on the last word he gave the table such a powerful shove that Claire was thrown backwards, spinning off her seat, colliding at first with the woman sitting behind her and then ending up sprawled on the floor. Gibbs pushed his way out from the corner and stepped over her. As he did so a mug flew off the table and lukewarm coffee was thrown into Claire's face, down the front of her raincoat, on to her hands. Gibbs rushed onwards and was out of the café in an instant. The other customers looked on. Someone came over and pulled Claire to her feet. She was sobbing.

“Did he hurt you, the rotten bastard?” a man was saying.

The girl from behind the counter sat Claire down in a chair and began cleaning up her coat with kitchen towel.

“Don't cry,” she repeated, over and over. “Don't cry. A little sod like that isn't worth it.”

The town was cloaked in darkness. Claire sat hunched on the seafront, her limbs aching with the cold, her body numbed from sitting on the same concrete bench for more than an hour. Behind her, on the main road, occasional cars swished past wetly. Ahead of her, a few yards away across the beach, the ocean rolled in as it always would, a regular, monotonous whisper of waves against shingle. There was a bruise on Claire's cheek, just beneath her left eye, where she had caught it against a chair as she fell to the ground. She touched it now, exploring it with her fingers, and winced at the raw tenderness. A wilder than usual gust of wind blew in from the sea and set her shivering again: she would need to drink something hot before she went back to the car. Another five-hour drive lay ahead of her, in the darkness this time. And she was so tired. Maybe she should find a hotel to check into: but the prospect was too depressing. She knew what it would be like: tea bags and sachets of instant coffee on a bedside tray, a battered old portable TV, the ghosts of a thousand previous guests. She should drive home. The long journey would do her good, take her mind off things.

But she didn't move. Something held her to this bench, in spite of the cold, in spite of the loathing for this town that had been building up inside her. She continued to sit there, no longer crying, no longer thinking, no longer even hearing the changeless background noise of the waves and the cars. Far out to sea, deep in the cloudy blackness, mysterious lights were winking. And meanwhile, Claire was paralysed. Freezing cold and soaked to the skin, she couldn't imagine what it would take to make her leave this spot.

Some minutes later—she couldn't have said when, the passing of time had become unmeasurable, meaningless—she heard footsteps approaching, and then the voice of a man addressing her. He said: “You'll catch your death, sitting there.”

Claire glanced up. It was Victor Gibbs. The mist and the rain made him look scrawny and bedraggled. She turned away again.

Uninvited, he sat down beside her. He leaned forward and was silent at first.

“You've got some of the look of her,” Gibbs said, finally. “I should have noticed that, the first time I saw you.”

Without moving, her voice almost toneless, Claire said: “You remember what my sister looked like?”

“Oh, yes. I remember her, well enough.”

Claire shifted on the bench, moving an inch or two further away from him. She pulled her raincoat up around her throat.

“I don't know much,” Gibbs said hoarsely, after a long pause. “What I know, I'll tell you.”

To all outward appearances, Claire made no response. But she had stiffened. Her whole body was rigid with expectation.

“There was a guy in the factory,” Gibbs began. “A kind of a friend of mine. Name of Roy Slater. We didn't work together or anything. I was in the accounts department, he was on the shop floor. But we got to know each other, I forget how. I think it may have been at some kind of political meeting. We had a few things in common like that. We saw eye-to-eye, politically.”

“I read about him in Bill Anderton's files,” said Claire, flatly, distantly. “He was a fascist, wasn't he?”

“Times were different then,” said Gibbs. “You had more freedom to say what you thought. Anyway. I won't deny that Slater was a villain. So was I, in those days. I stole some money out of a charity committee account—forged some signatures, I was pretty good at it, still am as a matter of fact—and ended up getting the push. Got caught doing the same thing with another firm a few years later and did some time for it, then. That pulled me up sharp. I was pretty straight after that.”

He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and offered Claire one. She shook her head.

“I don't think Slater had anything against your sister. I don't know if he even knew who she was. She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She got caught up in events.

“This was how it went. You remember the Birmingham pub bombings? When the IRA blew up those two pubs in the middle of town and there were loads of people killed? Well, there was a bad atmosphere after that. All over the city, but in the factory as well. A lot of anti-Irish feeling. A hell of a lot. Not just things being said, but . . . things being done. There were Micks being beaten up all over the place. There'd been anti-Irish stuff going on in the factory before, but this was in a different league. And Slater was always prepared to go one better than anyone else. He hated the Micks. Fucking hated them. I suppose it was only a matter of time before he did something about it.

“Well, it could only have been a week or so after the bombings, when they picked on someone. There was this block where the blokes used to shower off after the shift, and they took this lad there—he was only a young lad, mid-twenties maybe—and three or four of them dragged him off to this block, with Slater in tow, and they gave him a hell of a going-over. They never meant just to rough him up, those guys, that was never the plan. They meant to kill him. And that's what they did. Cracked him over the head with a hammer or something and finished the poor fucker off. It was a professional piece of work. They did a good job of making it look like an accident. That was how it was reported in the papers a few days later.”

“Jim Corrigan,” said Claire suddenly—as a name slipped back into her consciousness after an absence of more than twenty-five years.

“What?”

“I read about it. That was his name. It was in our school magazine.” She remembered the day clearly now. She had been in the old Ikon Gallery in John Bright Street, looking through back issues of
The Bill Board,
when she had come across this story. While she was reading it, she had spied on Phil's mother as she enjoyed a surreptitious date with Miles Plumb the art teacher. “I remember thinking at the time what a terrible story it was. He had a wife and a kid. They said that a big piece of machinery had fallen on him.”

“Most probably, yeah. That was the one.”

Gibbs fell silent. In the distance came the sudden boom of a ship's foghorn.

“I don't get it,” Claire said at last. “Where does Miriam fit into this story?”

“Like I said,” Gibbs continued, “she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was
there,
when they did it, you see. She was there in the shower block. She saw the whole bloody thing.” He drew on his cigarette, and tapped ash on to the pavement. “God knows what she was doing there. That I never
did
understand.”

Claire knew. “She would have gone there to meet Bill,” she said. “It was one of the places they used to meet.” She sat back and closed her eyes, trying to remember every detail, everything that might turn out to be a clue. Had her sister's relationship with Bill reached a crisis by then? She thought it probably had. “So what happened next?”

“That,” said Gibbs, “I don't know. I think Slater must have had a word with her and told her to keep her mouth shut. But that wasn't good enough for him. She was a witness to what they'd done, so somebody had to get rid of her. Slater told me afterwards that he'd done it himself. He was always a boastful little swine, but I think he was telling the truth. I believe she tried to go straight home and he followed her but . . . well, I don't know where he did it, exactly. He told me he'd left her by a reservoir. Then later that night he came back and tied weights to the body and chucked her in.”

“And then,” said Claire, her voice shaking, “then he asked you to write that letter? And you
did it
?”

Gibbs stubbed out his cigarette and sat for what seemed like an age, staring impassively out to sea. At last he said, very slowly, slurring the words: “I wished your sister ill. Don't ask me why. But I did.”

He had no more to say. And Claire had nothing more to ask him. After a few more minutes he rose to his feet stiffly.

“There. Now I've told you. Go to the police if you want, I don't care any more.”

He turned and walked away. Claire heard his footsteps receding. She did not watch him go.

Twenty minutes later, when she had slowly absorbed everything that Victor Gibbs had told her, Claire realized that there was another question she wanted to ask: what had happened to Roy Slater? Was he still alive? She hurried round to Gibbs's flat, half-running, with a premonition, already, that she was going to be too late. When she arrived, she found the front door open and his neighbour from the ground-floor flat standing in the hallway.

“I don't know what you said to him,” the woman said. “But he's gone. Drove off a few minutes ago, with two suitcases. He's taken everything he owns.” She started sorting through a pile of free newspapers on the hall table, throwing most of them into a black bin liner. “No great loss,” she added, sourly. “He hadn't paid his rent for months anyway.”

5

One evening, many years later, when Philip was paying a visit to Claire and Stefano in Lucca, she told him about the events of that day, and said: “And then, when I was driving home, I started to think about the pub bombings and how they'd messed up Lois's life, of course, because of what happened to her when she was in The Tavern in the Town with Malcolm that night, but not just hers, how they'd messed up Miriam's, as well, indirectly, because of what she saw happening at Longbridge and what that made them do to her, and how that means that they also messed up my life, because for years I couldn't really think straight or get on with anything because of wondering what had happened to Miriam, and in a way how they'd also messed up Patrick's, because he ended up obsessing over Miriam too, to compensate for something, to compensate for the pain we'd put him through by splitting up when he was little. And I started thinking of all the other families, all the other people, whose lives must have been touched by that event, and how you could go mad trying to trace the thing back to its source, trying to point the finger of blame at someone, you know, going right back to the beginnings of the Irish problem until you end up saying something like, Is Oliver Cromwell to blame for the fact that Lois had to spend so many years in hospital? Or is he to blame for the fact that Miriam was killed? And in a way, you know, although it's a terrible thing to say, the Birmingham bombing was a small atrocity if you look at it statistically, compared to Lockerbie, or compared to the Bali bombings, or compared to September the eleventh, or compared to the number of civilians who died in the 2003 Iraq war. So what would happen if you tried to explain all those deaths, all those messed-up lives, tried to trace those events back to the source? Would you go mad? I mean, is it a mad thing to try and do, or is it really the only sane thing to try and do, to face up to the fact that in big ways and small ways perfectly ordinary, perfectly innocent people continually have their lives fucked up by forces outside their control, whether they're historical events or just the shitty luck of stepping outside your house on the day a drunk driver goes past at seventy miles an hour, but even then you can start blaming the culture, the culture that's told him it's cool to drive at seventy miles an hour or the culture that's turned him into an alcoholic, and like I said maybe that's the
sane
thing to try and do, to stop shrugging our shoulders and just saying ‘Life is random' or ‘These things happen,' because when you get right down to it
everything
has a cause. Everything that one human being does to another is the result of a human decision that's been taken some time in the past, either by that person or by somebody else, twenty or thirty or two hundred or two thousand years ago or maybe just last Wednesday.”

And Philip said: “Are you pissed, or something, Claire? Because I've never heard you talk so much rubbish.”

To which Claire said: “I have drunk about two-thirds of this very excellent bottle of Bardolino in the last half hour, that's true.”

Philip said: “At the end of the day, if someone you love has been a victim of terrorism—has been killed in a terrorist attack, let's say—it makes no difference to them whether the terrorist has done it because he's psychotic or because he feels his country or his religion or something has been hard done by. The fact is that the person you love is dead and the person who did it is the person who planted the bomb or flew the aeroplane or whatever. You don't care about their motives.
They shouldn't have done it.
Roy Slater killed your sister because he was an evil man. Sorry to be so blunt about it, but that's that.”

Claire said: “Yes, but it
wouldn't have happened
if it wasn't for the pub bombings.”

Philip said: “Maybe not to that person, at that time. But he would have found other reasons for doing it to somebody else. And whatever became of him, by the way?”

Claire said: “It was weird, I had no curiosity about Slater, after that. It was as if I'd been bled dry of all those feelings. Patrick made some inquiries, a couple of years later. Found out that he'd died a while ago. Died in prison. Emphysema.”

Philip said: “That's funny. Patrick never mentioned doing that.”

Claire said: “What that day in Norfolk made me realize—this is all I'm saying—is that there are patterns. You have to look hard for them but when you see them you can cut your way through all the chaos and randomness and coincidence and follow the path back to its source and say, ‘Ah,
that's
where it started.' ”

Philip said: “You'd be crazy to do that. There are individuals. There are
bad individuals
—it's as simple as that—and they're the people you have to watch out for, and even if there are reasons for the way they behave, nine times out of ten they're not to do with history, and not to do with culture. It's to do with psychology and human relationships.
Other people
have made them the way they are. Parents, most of the time.”

Claire said: “So then you have to ask what made the
parents
the way they were.”

Philip said: “But that's impossible! Then you'll just keep going further and further back and there'll be no end to it.”

Claire said: “No, not impossible. Difficult, yes. Very difficult. But that's what we have to do.”

Stefano came out on to the balcony. He was carrying a bottle of red wine from which he refilled both of their glasses.

Claire said: “Smells fantastic in there. How long's it going to be?”

Stefano said: “Another half an hour or so. You can't rush risotto.”

He went back inside. Claire and Philip sipped their wine, and the mournful late sunlight of a September evening threw long shadows and burnished the ancient stones of the piazza beneath them.

Philip said: “People have to accept responsibility for themselves, that's all. Look at Harding. Maybe he was damaged by his parents, I don't know. But lots of people are damaged by their parents and end up living more or less harmless lives. He
chose
to become the person he became.”

Claire said: “You never really told me what happened when you went to meet him.”

Philip said: “I'll tell you now.”

“Harding was in Norfolk, too. Nowhere near where you went, though. Right at the other end of the county—the western end. The address I'd been given was some farm in the middle of nowhere, a few miles south of King's Lynn. The beginnings of the fen country.

“I don't remember the date exactly but it must have been some time late in March because I was listening to the radio on the way up and the Americans had been bombing Iraq for a couple of days by then. ‘Shock and awe,' that was the expression. You couldn't listen to the radio for five bloody minutes without some military strategist banging on about ‘shock and awe.' It felt strange after I'd left the main roads and I was driving through this empty landscape—things get very quiet in Norfolk very quickly, you can leave civilization behind in no time—and all I was hearing on the radio was descriptions of carnage and destruction, and all these American guys talking proudly about how much bloody
awe
the rest of us must be feeling. I suppose it's not hard to inspire awe in someone if you're the richest country in the world and you spend half of it on machines designed to bomb the living shit out of people. Anyway, there are different kinds of awe, aren't there? Sometimes it can be a landscape that gives you that feeling. It's so beautiful around there, so still. Miles and miles of watery flatness. Just you and the birds. And those Norfolk skies! In the summer they can be amazing. That afternoon it was just grey, silvery grey. But . . . the
silence
of it. That's what was so awesome, I suppose, coming from the city. I turned the radio off and before going to find the farmhouse I pulled the car over and turned the engine off and for a while I just got out and listened to the silence.

“I could see why he'd chosen to come and live here.

“You could see the house from miles away. There was no woodland round there, and the land was completely flat. Just reed beds for as far as you could see, and those strange-looking waterways which were made hundreds of years ago but still run absolutely straight, and feel very man-made. An odd kind of landscape. Not like anywhere else I know. Very exposed, in a way, but at the same time, so remote, you couldn't imagine anyone coming to find him there. I wondered if that was the idea. I wondered if he was hiding from something, or someone. I think the police had been after him more than once in the last few years, because of things he'd said and things he'd posted on the internet and of course the CDs, as well. I thought perhaps he was just lying low for a while, to give whatever trouble he was in the chance to blow over.

“I could see smoke coming from the direction of the house but when I got there I realized it wasn't coming from the main building. It was coming from the chimney of this old caravan he'd parked in the yard. There were a couple of women living there—or girls, actually—I don't know what you'd call them, they looked like they were in their early twenties. He called them Scylla and Charybdis and I never found out what they were doing there apart from helping him out with some of the farm-work. They were very good looking. I don't know where he'd found them or how he'd persuaded them to come there.

“Anyway, I parked the car next to this caravan and sat there for a while trying to get my thoughts straight. I had no idea what I was going to say to him, or even what I was there for, really. I suppose it was curiosity, mostly. I wanted to know how the person we'd known at school—or thought we knew, at any rate—could possibly have turned out like this. I suppose that learning what Harding had become had knocked my whole past—our shared past—out of shape, and I was hoping to put that right, somehow, to make it seem that there was some logic behind it all. Keeping that chaos at bay, again. But there was another reason, too. I wanted to ask him about Steve. What he'd done to Steve at school. I wanted to know how he could ever justify that, even to himself.

“I sat there for about five minutes and then I went to the front door and I knocked as loudly as I could.

“There was no way I would ever have recognized him. In fact for a second or two I was sure that I must have got the wrong house. He was wearing a flat cap—I found out later this was because he'd gone almost completely bald—and had little round steel-rimmed glasses and an incredible bushy beard that came down practically to his chest. He was dressed in tweeds, a mustard-yellow waistcoat, neckerchief, the lot—he'd reinvented himself as an English gentleman farmer, although judging from the state of the fields I'd just driven through, he hadn't quite got the hang of the farming part of it yet. I can't say that he looked very strong, physically—he'd begun to walk with quite a stoop, and there wasn't much flesh on him—but the thing that really struck me about him was his eyes. There was real aggression there. Was he always like that, at school, can you remember? I mean, he knew who I was, he remembered me, and he was expecting to see me, but there was terrific hostility, terrific
suspicion
in those eyes. As if he was just waiting for me to say a word out of place and then he'd explode. And it was like that from the minute I appeared. No trust. You could tell he didn't trust me, didn't trust anything for that matter. He didn't trust the world.

“Of course, the first problem was, I didn't know what to call him. I'd already found out that he didn't like to be called Sean any more. He'd anglicized it to John. John Harding. I suppose it had a good, solid, English sound to it. I remembered that his dad was Irish, but later on, whenever I mentioned that, he'd ignore it. At one point he said that his father was only Irish going back a generation. Made quite an issue out of that. But on the whole he hardly talked about his father anyway. He said his mother was far more important to him, and there were pictures of her everywhere—on the shelves, on the mantelpiece, on the piano. She was a scary-looking woman, I must say. Looked like someone from the 1930s, not the 1970s. Like the kind of headmistress who'd give you nightmares. In a couple of the pictures she was wearing a monocle.

“I have to say the place was fairly tidy, and clean. I've got a feeling that Scylla and Charybdis had something to do with that. Not that there was much to clean, or tidy, when it came down to it. I don't think he had many possessions. There was hardly any furniture, just a table to eat off and a table to work at—one of the rooms was set up as his study, and he had a computer in there. But there were books everywhere: not just in the study, but all over the place, in the kitchen, the hallway, the bathroom. Great piles of them. Books on every subject. A lot of stuff on local history and topography, but also weird things like occultism, witchcraft, paganism. A lot of classical texts. Novels, hundreds of novels—not modern stuff, but lots of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers. Some politics, history.
Mein Kampf,
inevitably. A lot of books on the eastern religions. A lot about Islam. Very eclectic, I had to admit. Quite impressive. I don't remember him being that much of a reader at school.

“The silly thing was, we had nothing to say to each other. At least, he clearly had no desire to make conversation, and nothing that I said seemed to interest him very much. You know, the routine questions like ‘How are you?' and ‘What have you been up to?' didn't seem to get us anywhere. I tried telling him what the people from school had been doing, but he didn't want to know. Didn't even try to be polite about it. ‘I don't remember any of those people,' he would say. Didn't remember Doug—didn't remember you, either. He just said, ‘You were all earthbound. You were all of the earth.' I'm not sure what that was supposed to mean. The only exception, seemingly, was Benjamin. Something lit up for a minute in his eyes when I mentioned Benjamin. He asked whether Benjamin had ever got his book published and I said no, he never managed to finish it. He seemed to think that was a pity. He said Benjamin had potential, or something.