Throw Me to the Wolves Read online

  ‘I’ve seen two murders,’ said Gary, ‘drugs and drink – bashed-in heads and blackouts. I’ve found dead people no one remembered, rotting on sofas or behind avalanches of junk mail, their fingers nibbled by their cats. Scummy stuff, sad stuff, bits of filler between the celeb deaths and the flashy TV car chases. Dead people no one loved or even knew, some of them. But the only thing that’s given me nightmares is a family man in his des res telling other people’s kids to kill themselves.’

  If anything is going to displace that in Gary’s prime-time nightmare-schedule, it’s the case we’re on now. Not because it’s gruesome – on the contrary, it’s so savagely clean – but because of the places in the mind we’ll have to go to before it’s all over.

  The Fatberg

  The media are out sniffing for Mr Wolphram’s ex-pupils and colleagues, for stories to make stories from. If he’s innocent they’ll just move on, jettison him by the information roadside to make his broken way back to whatever life they’ve left him. The Evening Post has something already, but we’ve managed to get them to hold off doing any more. At a cost. That cost is Lynne Forester. ‘Interesting fact about Mad Lynne Forester,’ Gary tells me, ‘she’s got a Twitter following of ninety thousand, that’s forty per cent bigger than her paper’s entire readership.’

  The nationals are circling; they smell it, too, the wafts of news-decay on the air. They scent it like crows scenting roadkill.

  Outside the station the rain is a light smirr that settles on your face in a saliva-thin layer, the air puffy with a gauze of fog that makes it look as if we’re seeing everything through a damp mosquito net. The bets on a white Christmas are optimistic in proportion to their unlikeliness. We’ve all put a fiver on white. You have to.

  There are vans and lights everywhere and for a moment I’m afraid the story is already out there. But the strobing lightbars are from council vehicles, their regulation caramel glow, not TV vans. They’re excavating.

  Out in front, between the main square and the police station, they’re digging up the road and cleaning out the tons of fat that have solidified in the sewers and drains. It’s the seepage of millions of fry-ups and Sunday roasts, all that pale carcass-slither oozing its way through the undercity. I watched it on the local news, where they’d mapped out the seweropolis, its avenues and streets. It was where all the waste we thought we were getting rid of was curdling and hardening up a few feet below. It’s like we’re looking at ourselves in a mirror of shit, says Gary, who gets it right without needing to refer to Freud or Jung or the Narcissus myth: ‘Instead of kitchens and toilets and bedrooms, it’s shit and fat, nappies, Durex and tampons. Everything we do up here finds a way to happen down there.’

  Now they’ve opened up the ground, and under the thin rain the tarmac they’ve sawn through glistens on either side of a swelling, half-solid, half-malleable ooze, a rippled yellow-beige cream marbled with brown, and stuck like a porcupine with bottles, foil, papers, bits of plastic.

  The fatberg, they call it, but, unlike icebergs, fatbergs don’t calve. They grow and inflate and ball up and expand and are indifferent to global warming and temperature changes; to whether it’s a white or a grey Christmas we’re going to have.

  Gary watched an interview with the chief engineer who told us that if we didn’t unclog it soon we’d have our own shit coming back up to meet us before we’d even flushed it. ‘Those weren’t his exact words,’ specifies Gary.

  The fire brigade is power-hosing the fatberg into slabs, which are then scooped by JCB into skip-lorries or spaded on by men in masks. The job will take nine days. The hoses are drilling it into moveable blocks and it hulks there, veiny and seamed, rifted like ore being mined. Occasional suitcase-sized pieces fragment on the pavements, where they slide and skitter on their own foam like hot lard in a pan. There is a smell, but it’s nothing like the stink of detritus and shat-out carrion you’d expect: it’s sweet and quite faint, discreet enough to tempt you into taking in another inquisitive noseful. It’s when the mind registers what it is, when the knowledge synchs with the sensation, that you want to retch and block every part of you that opens and lets the world in: eyes, nostrils, ears, mouth.

  Among the fronds of selfie sticks, a young mother is being sick as she watches, splashing the liquorice-coloured tyres of an expensive pram. There’s a Mexican wave of mobile phones flashing as people take photos. #Fatberg. #FatbergSelfie.

  Reporters are ready for the local segment of the six o’clock news, when the voice from the centre of the country announces: ‘It’s time for The News Where You Are.’ They’re leading on the fatberg. Or, as they call it on social media, ‘The ’berg’.

  ‘Him in there,’ says Gary not using his name – he doesn’t like to, because naming someone is a way of making them happen as people, and Gary is afraid of that. If Mr Wolphram happens as a person Gary won’t be able to do and say the things he wants to do and say to him – ‘he’s got at most twenty-four hours before the press get hold of it, before they skin him and yank out his bones, mince up his crappy little life and shame him for all those books and operas in that big shiny head.’

  With all that’s coming to him, it’s almost for his sake that I hope he’s guilty. Does that make sense? I think. I only think I think it, because I realise I’ve said it aloud.

  Gary says it quietly: ‘Yes. Yes it does.’

  He moves to the window, scratching his neck with a biro. ‘It’s a funny old world when the only thing standing between you and a lynching is a supermarket-sized ball of shit and fat.’

  *

  Michael Wolphram is sixty-eight, and took early retirement ten years ago, when the school went mixed. Correlation is not causation, the law says, but that won’t matter to the press. Or to us, if it comes to it.

  To me he’s the same, though I notice – I quickly calculate – that I must have known him when he was in his thirties. Younger than I am now. Doesn’t this always happen with teachers? They seemed so old back then, so far ahead. Years later we feel we’ve passed them the way ocean liners pass each other as we watch from the shore: they come side by side, one disappears behind the other, is gone, then noses up ahead and breaks free.

  Perhaps I’ve aged and he has not; perhaps I’ve passed him now; perhaps Time chooses who it’s going happen to and how.

  He has put on no weight, accrued no wrinkles, lost no hair. He dresses as snappily retired as he did when he worked. In the weirdoed-up pictures they’ve emphasised the almost unnatural youthfulness of his face. In most of them, he wears a hat – one of his trademark trilbies or fedoras – so it is easy to conjure up the image of a shifty spy, or a half-shaded, lamppost-leaning villain from an old B-movie, the face uplit by a struck match.

  He’s perfect freak material. And he reads books.

  When we brought him in through the back of the station, the photographers were ready. Above all their shouting there was one, a voice in the scrum, clean and loud as a firecracker: ‘Get a shot of that book bag!’ I looked – yes – he had one of those free hessian book bags. ‘I love books!’ it declared, the love done as a big Valentine heart and the shop’s name and address – an arcade in the old town – happily blazoned across it. The bookshop had to close. They got bricks through their windows, shit through their letterbox. I ♥ Books, AKA ‘Monster’s secret book obsession’, as Lynne Forester had it.

  In other words: the man loved reading.

  In Mr Wolphram’s flat the next morning, we have at best six hours before he hits the news. Before the news hits him. Let the fatberg slide down page: make way for the Monster.

  Forensics have been and gone, and though they haven’t confirmed it, I can tell they’ve found nothing. But it’s not the right kind of nothing: it’s neither an exonerating nothing nor an evidential one. It won’t help us charge him and it won’t help him get off. The white plastic suits have been in and out of the place all afternoon while neighbours take pictures on their phones. There are no journalists yet, but a few pe
ople must have sold their smartphone snaps to the Evening Post because they’re already on the website.

  Small-Screen Dave is going through the opera box sets, whistling if there’s something there he recognises.

  Gary is looking through boxes of photographs. We were pleased to find them; they looked promising: children, schoolboys in uniform and out, sports days, school plays and swimming pools. Gary relaxed; tucked in. He thought he’d found it. ‘Found what?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know,’ said Gary, ‘just it.’

  But so far, no it. The photos are legitimate: one shoebox for his own childhood, eight photographs marinating in stale air. We’ll get to those. First, the three other boxes: those long, scrolled school photos with their panorama of faces barely detailed enough to recognise, class photos, newspaper clippings, concert programmes. We’ve checked Mr Wolphram’s computer, and it’s clean, almost empty – suspicious, says Gary – but they’ve tested it. Nothing deleted and nothing downloaded other than concert and cinema information, holiday brochures, sheet music, school circulars. In other words, not suspicious at all. But Gary would be the first to tell you that not being suspicious is the new suspicious. There’s no history of deleted histories either. His searches are specific – information about books and editions, classical music, writers … – and his search terms are laboriously worded. It’s as if he’s writing longhand to a person rather than typing keywords into a machine. ‘Where can I buy piano hammer felt in the South East area?’

  Gary taps the computer screen: ‘Does he reckon there’s a little man in there typing the answers if you ask nicely?’

  These searches of his, almost every one of them, correspond to items he used to buy in real shops until the shops closed down. Mr Wolphram’s taste is for things that have taken sanctuary on the internet, endangered species whose high-street habitats have been destroyed: second-hand books, LPs and LP racks, styluses, tape-head-cleaning fluid, electric shaver leads, shaving bowls. Some of these have been given a new life by hipsters in retro shops, but he probably doesn’t know they exist.

  ‘A bit of an internet surfer, are we?’ asked Gary.

  Mr Wolphram doesn’t hear the taunt, only the question it comes wrapped in. He thinks about it as if it were a genuine question, genuinely asked. Is he nonplussed by the surfing metaphor? Because he seems to consider it. Is this the first time he’s heard it? Maybe. He seems less certain of himself today, frayed and uneasy.

  ‘I wouldn’t describe myself in that way, no. More of a deep-sea diver.’ He says this a little proudly, glad to bat back the metaphor, to be back on the right side of words: on top of them, where he’s used to being.

  He blinks and tries to smile and for a moment even Gary sees he’s trying to be helpful, that he’s a naïve, unworldly pensioner who finally – after the archness and sarcasm of the first interview – starts to understand this isn’t a game. It’s his second day at the station. We haven’t told him we’re going to apply for more time to question him, but he knows. He keeps checking his watch. With all the crime shows on TV you’d expect him to have a better sense of the situation he’s in.

  ‘Someone to get back to?’ asks Gary. There’s no misunderstanding the tone now. It flexes menace and contempt.

  Mr Wolphram looks down at the desk. Thinks about it. ‘No, there’s nobody.’ He says it with surprise, as if he’d only just realised that he lived in a world where people have people to get back to. He checks his watch again, then pulls his cuff back over it like a schoolboy caught out willing the lesson to end. ‘Nobody.’

  That’s why Gary is pleased to find the photographs, and why he calls them a ‘stash’. If something is a stash, or in a stash, or stashed, it’s bound to be wrong, contraband. It sounds bad. Gary tries not to show it, but he is intelligent. He thinks being clever is effete and maybe ‘a bit gay’. At the very least metrosexual. He doesn’t want to be mistaken for the kind of person who orders olives or wasabi peas in bars. He is also kind. But because kindness is not part of his self-image as a coarsened, cynical cop with no life beyond the job and a tabloid-swagger turn of phrase, we have an unspoken agreement to pretend he isn’t. It isn’t hard today, because he’s especially ugly and insensitive. He’s wearing yesterday’s clothes and he smells angry. He’s going for Mr Wolphram, sweating him, brutalising him – first with words and then with no words, with nothing but stares and silence. Gary has a way of doing this – I’ve seen it – and people start to wish he’d hit them just to break the ice: to break the ice with their face if necessary.

  Now Gary’s there in his house, happy and cross-legged, sifting the photos, holding them up, putting them back down. ‘Deep-sea diver …’ he sneers, ‘okay Jacques Cousteau, let’s see what you’ve got below deck …’

  Gary is onto something. He thinks he’s onto something. Child + bare flesh + photograph = something. He clenches his jaw and sucks in the air; it sounds like a radiator being bled. The gaps between his front teeth are overgrown with tartar the colour of kettle-bottom limescale. Occasionally he dislodges a piece with his pen top, crumbles it on the desk, then flicks it off into that office void where hairs and skin flakes and bogies finish up and begin their journey into dust.

  ‘Ever wonder where it all goes, Prof?’ he asks me, and it’s not a big metaphysical question, it’s a very precise one: ‘All the skin and hair and nail parings, cuticle-skin, nose-food? All the offcuts, all that sediment?’

  Gary is obsessed with, as he puts it, where it all goes. But with him it’s not a question about the soul or the spirit or mortality. It’s very specifically about waste, litter, the outgrown and the cast-off and the used-up. ‘We drink last week’s piss and drain water after it’s made its way through the system, and we’ll drink it thousands of times over before we’re forty. We go on eating dead stuff, shitting it out for machines to clean, until all of a sudden everything’s clogged up and we’ve got a bloody great fatberg under our feet.’ He pauses. ‘So the answer to where it all goes is: it doesn’t – it all stays.’

  The fatberg has become Gary’s way of seeing the world. He spends his time when not working looking it up on the internet, looking for other fatbergs: he has found them in Mexico, in Texas, in Slovenia, in China and India. Cousins of our own fatberg, they squat on the news-sites of their nations and provoke the same mesmerised disgust. The one in Texas is oddly lozenge-shaped, like a U-boat made of dirty lard. The one in Mexico has crept up and lifted manholes like a dandy tipping his hat to a lady. But they’re family and there’s a fatberg family resemblance. The contents are probably a little different, depending on diet, infrastructure or climate, but it’s the same principle: the infinite story of our waste.

  There’s even a portrait of the fatberg pinned to the cork board by Gary’s desk, in the place where you stick photos of your husband or wife, or the pictures your kids did in school.

  For Gary it’s a memento mori, like the skull on the desk in the corner of some Renaissance painting: Eram quod es; eris quod sum – As you are, so once was I; as I am now, so you shall be. Fatberg-slime, flushed meat, cemetery-landfill.

  Then, typically, comes Gary’s theory of civilisation: ‘Since the first man took his first shit, we’ve been running from it. We were all nomads ’til we invented sewers; for thousands of years we kept moving just to get away from our own excrement, and then Bingo! someone invents a sewage system and we stay put, build houses, art galleries … universities for people like you. Toy shops and police stations. Waitrose. Bloomingdale’s. We’re still shitting in the river, mind, just not actually squatting over the edge. That’s not me telling you that, Prof, that’s the Discovery Channel.’

  Right now Gary is quiet and completely absorbed in the photos. He’s sorting them into two groups: children and adults. Clothes, fewer clothes, but no no-clothes.

  I pick up a batch of pictures – a stash. They’re neatly stacked, a rubber band holding them together like playing cards, with Post-it notes marking each year. Gary has got through 1979–84 and found
nothing. Nonetheless, he’s taken a few out and put them aside. I can see what he’s after: it’s the pictures of boys in sports kit, or in muddy shorts; one where two of them are taking off their football shirts; another of the swimming team. The swimming team photo looks, from a distance, like a line of cuts in a butcher’s window: five chops for a tenner. Their goosebumpy chicken-drumstick skin shows how cold it is back there, back then: back in the days when they made us swim in open-air pools in January.

  I know what Gary wants, and it’s what we all want: a chance to make the Knight’s Move from kiddie-pic-hoarder to woman-killer. It’s two steps forward, then one to the side. That’s the way we solve crimes – or at least the ones that aren’t basic, off-the-peg crimes. Anything more complicated than what Gary calls the fixed price menu – husband kills wife, accountant defrauds own company, teacher sleeps with schoolgirl – and it’s the Knight’s Move.

  These pictures are innocent enough in their context, they’re only a fraction of a whole meticulous photographic record of his time at Chapelton College. Wolphram edited the school magazine, so his box files are full of photos and brochures, cuttings and page proofs from pre-digital days when pages had to be set by hand. There’s a manual on desktop publishing on his bookshelf, a run of twenty years of The Chapeltonian, and various newsletters for Old Chapeltonians across the world.

  Gary knows that the pictures need to be abstracted from their context. That way they can shine with the darkness of their innuendo.

  ‘You okay there, Gary? You’re going to get cramps squatting like that. Want me to take some off you?’

  ‘Knock yourself out, Prof,’ he says. ‘I can’t put my finger on it, but I know there’s something not right here, all these files and boxes and index cards and all these fucking Mozart papers with their squiggles …’

  ‘Musical scores, Gary, sheet music—’