Throw Me to the Wolves Read online

‘Banjos on the wall—’

  ‘Lutes …’

  ‘Old cinema posters, DVDs and videos, foreign films, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals … This is more your world than mine, I can tell you.’

  How right you are, Gary – how accidentally, unknowingly right you are.

  But you’ll know soon. Because I promise I’ll tell you first.

  I take 1983–7 and carry them to the desk. To get there I must step over piles of paper – corrected essays, poetry handouts, lesson plans and a file marked ‘Teaching Review’. There’s a stack of photocopied ‘Feedback Forms’ from pupils, and a letter from the headmaster about the school’s ‘Reviewed Mission Statement’. They’re at least a decade old, yellowing at the edges. I wonder how a man who can’t answer a question about his own childhood without wondering if he played with his toys or curated them copes in a world where ‘quality’ is used as an adjective, and where teachers are called ‘knowledge-brokers’.

  The flat is large and expensive and takes up the ground floor of a Georgian mansion on Parktown, the poshest crescent in the poshest part of the city. The whole street is listed. It’s the kind of street where they dial 999 if you use a non-heritage colour on your porch. Or, as Gary puts it, ‘The kind of neighbourhood where guys are called Cecil.’

  Why are we here, Gary and I, snouting through Wolphram’s flat while the neighbours peer out of their windows and take pictures of us?

  Wolphram is one of Zalie’s neighbours. We don’t know if they liked each other or even knew each other much beyond a good morning or a pleasantry called out over a fence, but we know he helped her bring her shopping in a few times, and we know he gave her a lift to the ferry terminal last summer: he was driving to France, she was meeting her boyfriend off the boat. Tim. He lives in Saint-Omer and came to see her two or three times a month, either by ferry or by Eurostar. He hasn’t left France for two weeks so we ruled him out immediately.

  We also know, from Zalie’s text messages, that she and Wolphram had last spoken the day before she disappeared. We know she thinks he’s a bit odd, that he doesn’t do chit-chat, because she messaged Tim about how awkward it was to talk to him, that she couldn’t decide whether he was shy or arrogant.

  We will find traces of Wolphram in her flat, and traces of her in his car. But that will mean nothing. Not unless it’s blood, some skin or a more than usual number of hairs. A tooth.

  We’re here because of the way he answered our questions, because of the way he spoke about her as if she might be dead before even we knew she was. The tenses threw him. For a man in control of words, it was odd that he couldn’t decide whether he knew her or knows her; whether she lives or lived down the road. If she had or has a boyfriend.

  Death’s tenses are important: it’s one of the ways the shrinks and forensic speech scientists catch the inconsistencies in the murderer’s stories – how they might accidentally use the past or overemphatically use the present; how they are relieved when the body is found because they don’t any longer need to watch their tenses, because they can finally talk about their victim in the past – which is where they put them.

  Mr Wolphram must have been clearing out his papers, because there’s a green recycling bag beside them, already half full. We’ll check that, too. Like hesitating between tenses and hovering on the line between was and is, the urge to clean, to clear out, to bag up and purge is also a guilt reflex.

  They’ve taken DNA from her place, now it’s his turn. With her it was hairbrushes, sheets and pillowcases, lipstick, a doormat, dirty washing-up and a laundry basket; even the foot scraper by the bath with its shavings of hard-skin parmesan. The nail clippings on the toilet cistern she never got around to flushing down. At some point, in some lab in Swindon, on an industrial estate patrolled by private security vans, they’ll sort it and repeople her last days with the DNA of others. Traces of who she saw and knew and maybe touched will come up on a computer screen in sequences of 0s and 1s, strands of colour-coded atoms twisting like bunting.

  Until then it’s just me and Gary and Small-Screen, poking around inside the shell of her life in white plastic onesies.

  I’ve asked Small-Screen to find out where Wolphram’s money comes from, because by any standards the man is rich. His salary is good but nowhere near this good. Even if he got in early with property, which he did, the flat would be expensive to keep up on: high ceilings, complicated coving, dado rails. It’s carpeted neutrally wall to wall with an oatmeal-coloured pile, the same in every room. His bedroom contains a double bed with one bedside table, and a wardrobe with four suits, three pairs of drainpipe trousers, three jackets and four identical red ties. A red silk scarf hangs off a peg inside the wardrobe. A trilby and three fedoras stand in a row, each on its own stand. The ‘stands’ in Wolphram’s case being vintage wooden milliner’s heads, just detailed enough – eyes in bas-relief, the crest of a nose, the tapering of a chin – to scare Gary with their almost-faces as he draws the curtains and reveals them lined up along the dressing table. There’s a dress suit, a dress shirt and a bow tie, still in its dry-cleaner’s polythene shroud. I check the receipt to see when it was last cleaned, and it was two days ago. Three days after Zalie went missing, one day before we found her. Do people commit murder in black tie? Only in Dorothy L. Sayers novels. But, still, I make a note to check what was on that night in any of the theatres and concert halls between here and Brighton.

  There’s one room with nothing in it; not empty so much as never filled: nothing on the walls, no dents in the carpet weave where chairs or tables or lamps have printed themselves in. Not even the ghost of furniture, not even a picture hook or the dust marking the frame of a frame. He has been trying out paints on a small patch of wall, just under the windowsill, and the tester pots are lined up neatly on the floor, separated from the carpet by an old copy of the Times Literary Supplement. There’s a kitchen with one of everything out on the drying rack, and second of everything in a drawer. No one to get back to.

  The kitchen has a bookshelf with cookbooks ordered according to country rather than title or author. I take one out, and it’s Moroccan cooking. It has a few spatters on the pages, some recipes bookmarked and cramped handwriting that isn’t his. Maybe there was someone to get back to once? Maybe there is someone to get back to occasionally?

  Later I will realise how it bothered me that he had only one bedside table, on the right, and how it jarred. Most people have two, even if they’re single. Don’t they? Is it for symmetry? It must be, though solitude is asymmetrical. Because solitude is asymmetrical.

  His life happens in a study-living-room where he keeps his books, his records, his three guitars – two acoustic, one electric – a lute, his television and his VHS video machine. There are several eclectic shelves of sheet music: The David Bowie Songbook, The Kinks for Guitar, Salvation Army band music, English madrigals and Welsh harp music, Thomas Tallis. Wagner spine by spine with The Who. The music collection takes up a whole wall, the books the remaining three. There are even bookshelves over the door and around the doorframe, and a stepladder so he can reach the books that touch the ceiling. There is an antique chaise longue beside which, as in a film or a painting, a book has been languidly dropped, and a large metal-framed armchair, its black leather worn smooth and shaped to the body of a man who reads a lot and who lives alone and more than alone. It’s overhung by an arching floor lamp with a chrome shade that gives a perfectly angled, cleanly bordered cone of white light. A three-piece hi-fi – turntable, double cassette deck, amplifier – at least twenty years old, is connected to waist-high speakers aimed at the chair like cannon. The last record listened to, still on the turntable and with the sleeve leaning against the armchair, is The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society. I notice a shallow, barely perceptible furrow in the carpet where the DVD player and television stand is regularly pulled on its coasters to face the armchair.

  There isn’t much in this flat, but what’s there is the best of what there is:
bought once and bought for a lifetime. But unlike the rich he lives among, there is little decoration, and the luxuries are for the ear, the eye and the mind, not for the body.

  The bathroom is spotlessly clean and has the perfect whiteness of an igloo in a children’s book. Forensics have removed the toilet and the bath, and have taken the base off the shower cubicle. They have bagged up a clotted dredging of hairs, and some sludgy coagulates of soap and grit and everyday life-sheddings. As Gary and I look in on it all, I expect him to come up with some fatberg-related wisdom about the clean surfaces of our bathrooms and the dirt in the grouting of our tiles, but instead he surveys it, nods and heads back to the hunt.

  All Wolphram’s photographs are in boxes and files; there are none on his shelves or walls, except for one on the dining table. It stands there, solitary as the last grave in a razed churchyard. Two young women in wide-brimmed straw hats, taken in what must be the forties, are posing beside some topiary in front of an Elizabethan tower. I know it’s Sissinghurst, because all of us – even Gary – have been to Sissinghurst, that staple of school day trips and drives with elderly relatives. In the photograph it’s sunny, and the women are happy. It’s an uncomplicated, bright little image and for that reason alone I don’t expect to find it here. It’s full of warmth, too. I lift it, bag it, and give to Small-Screen – ‘Find out who they are, can you?’

  ‘We know who they are, sir, it’s in his profile,’ protests Small-Screen, who wants a more telegenic task, a whole more telegenic life. ‘It’s his aunts, and the one who’s still alive is in Hastings, and we already know that, too.’

  ‘Find out again, Dave. Then come and tell me again.’

  Unlike Gary, I know what I’m looking for. Now, with him on the other side of the room and Small-Screen resentfully doing proper, and thus properly pointless, police work, I am as close to alone as I can be at a possible crime scene. I unsnap the elastic and spread the pictures out. There must be about two dozen of them. There are still a few black and whites, trespassers from a different era, but it’s the colour photographs that look unnatural. Nineteen-seventies colours are washed out and bloodless. There are Polaroids, too, with their fat white frames, taken at parties or on sports days, fading as they emerged, as if they’d undergone a preliminary dose of Time even as they slid out wet and sleek in their skins of ink. You’d hold them by the edge and wave them so they dried faster, and sometimes they’d take the print of your thumb. By the early 1980s the colours are different; they’re too primary and brash. They shout.

  Everyone looks lost and otherworldly, even without that patina of extra-terrestrialism all adolescents have.

  What am I looking for? Who?

  There they are: Ander and Danny, together as they always were, at the start anyway. I see the others, too, whose names I remember but who are, one or two excepted, as irrelevant as extras in a battle scene from a costume drama.

  I lay them aside while I riffle through the other photographs.

  There was something of that pain and thwartedness in the teachers, too. I see it now, in the pictures, but, back then, like all adolescents, I was trapped in myself, the centre of my burning world. I saw nothing else, felt nothing else. I couldn’t see it but it was everywhere in the angrysad eyes. There were so many things we couldn’t see then, which we now see so clearly that we forget that not seeing it was part of it; that there was no way you could see it because, if you did see it, it meant you were on the outside of it, on the outside of yourself.

  I will have to tell them soon. Time is running out. I can feel its vacuum-pack effect as it tightens around me.

  Danny and Ander

  They arrive on the same day: 1 October 1983. Everyone else arrives that day, too, but Danny and Ander somehow arrive together. Did they know each other before? That’s how they feel and that’s how the others see it. The teachers, too, who seem not to notice these things but do – who notice them all the more because they know what they mean, what they will come to mean, in time, as the bodies warp into adolescence and the minds push out and overrun. From the start, Ander and Danny are placed together in class and put side by side in the dormitory. Danny is Newcastle-Irish and has the name to prove it: Daniel Patrick McAlinden. But Daniel Patrick McAlinden says he isn’t Irish, and he should know.

  Ander is … well, he’ll explain later. He needs to line up the words in advance, find the right ones, then put them in order.

  Danny is the son of an Irish dad and an English mother. That’s what he calls them: mother and dad. Dad works in what’s left of the shipyards, in the dry docks of Wallsend where his own father settled when he moved from Belfast for the jobs. Mother works in Fenwick’s, in the café where she used to serve food but now sits at the cash register, or does when she’s well enough, because she’s ill or she’s ailing, and it’s not quite clear what she has. That, or no one has told Danny in so many words. But Danny may not know exactly and Danny certainly won’t say, because saying it makes it into a thing. The reason everyone knows everything about Danny immediately is that he tells them all of it in one go. He sounds different, yes, so there’s more to explain. He has a scholarship, so falls exactly into that zone – intellectually superior, socially inferior – that makes the English upper-middle class uneasy.

  He has a Newcastle accent, but everyone mistakes it for Irish because of his name. He isn’t Irish himself, he says, because he was born in Newcastle and his mother is English. Plus, he tells them, plus … he’s never been to Ireland. And, anyway, if he did it would be to Northern Ireland, because that’s where his people are from. But people hear what they want to hear – if your name is Irish, as Irish as Danny McAlinden, then you’ll speak like an Irishman because that’s how you’re heard. Stands to reason, says Mr McCloud, who should know better but doesn’t: McCloud has a Scottish name but the voice of an English aristocrat from a radio drama. It is a confected accent, but he never drops it because he’s had it so long that there’s nothing left underneath it. Behind that expressive mask … all he has left is an expressionless mask. Danny puts his biography out there so everyone knows. He tells Ander that he hopes that if he says it once, and all in one go, he won’t have to repeat it over and over for the rest of his time at school. Plus, he says, a biography is just facts. It’s not an actual life.

  Ander is Dutch but with an English surname he has inherited but never properly inhabited: Alexander Widdowson – ‘a great sixteenth-century name, proper English, that is,’ says Mr McCloud. He seems to be proud on Ander’s behalf. Ander’s mother is from Holland, his father English. Up until now he has lived in Ghent, but with his father’s new job halfway across the world he has arrived here. Ander’s English is rusty without ever having shone, piecemeal without having been whole.

  McCloud jokes that the boys who come from overseas – McCloud always points towards the Channel when he wants to suggest something far away – are flotsam and jetsam. Ander doesn’t know the phrase, but he only ever hears the two words together, so he assumes they mean more or less the same thing. He looks it up in the dictionary: flotsam – debris from a ship that has been wrecked or had an accident; jetsam – debris that has been deliberately thrown overboard by the crew to lighten the ship’s load. They might look the same but they’re so different, thinks Ander, that they shouldn’t be soldered together into an idiom like this. Does McCloud know the difference? McCloud seems so funny, so natural, so kind. He sounds so affectionate when he says it. He sometimes puts his arm around you, too, to make you feel better about it, about having been washed ashore to where he combs the beaches. Ander doesn’t know if he’s flotsam or if he’s jetsam. He’ll have to ask his parents, since they are the crew. Or are they the ship?

  ‘Why Ander?’ asks Danny, ‘why not Alex? or Sandy? Like all the other Alexanders in history …’

  ‘Because Ander in Dutch means other, the other one … when my baby sister started to speak, that’s what she called me: Ander. People said it was funny and it got stuck.’


  ‘Stuck’ says Danny, ‘it stuck is fine – you don’t need to say got stuck …’ He looks Ander over, trying to discern the source of his clumsiness with words. Is he foreign or is he just slow? Either is fine, thinks Danny, but we all like to know where we stand with new people.

  ‘So that’s how you started out?’ asks Danny. ‘As someone else?’

  ‘Why not? It’s a bit how I feel,’ replies Ander. He’s joking – well, not joking exactly, because he doesn’t mind feeling that way, and, besides, he assumes everyone feels like that at that age – but the look Danny gives him gives no hint of a binding experience suddenly shared. At least Danny is reassured: he’s not slow, just foreign, he’s thinking.

  Ander knows that look – he gets it every time he speaks English, though usually he doesn’t know which they’d prefer: the foreigner or the dimwit. It’s difficult to tell with the English. But in general, he thinks, they prefer you stupid. Especially if you really are foreign.

  He’s had many chances to choose between foreign and stupid and each time he’s chosen foreign. Sometimes, that’s exactly what makes him stupid. The stupid person is dealing in the same currency at least, they just have less of it than everyone else; the foreigner … well, the foreigner is always at the bureau de change, always getting skimmed at both ends of the transaction: he means more than he can say, and by the time it’s all been converted he’s said less than he meant.

  There’s a silence where Danny says nothing and Ander fills the gap by repeating himself: ‘It’s a bit how I feel most of the time.’ This time he tries to sound offhand and jokey.

  ‘Not me,’ says Danny, with certainty. Then, just after he says it, he frowns and rolls his tongue behind his lower lip. Thinkily, as Ander describes it to himself in that strange intermediate language he has developed inside his own head as a transition between his mother tongue and the public English he needs to learn. Ander feels like he’s being dubbed, badly, as he speaks.