Antman (2 page)

'It's rubbish to assert the past is a foreign country. It's always with us.'

'Of course it is. The sound of voices is the echo left by our ancestors. They leaned over us when we were children, fixing themselves in our memory before their frail bodies crumbled into coffin shapes.'

* * *

As if he could forget those rows, the beatings, his cries of terror as his father's hand raised the strap once, twice, again and again. As if he could forget the defiling of his body, the violation of his privacy under the sheets. Or the loneliness, the intense self-loathing, the guilt, the anger.

* * *

Here was a memory with a tolerable lead-in. He remembered Mother Bernadette. She attended to the children. Oh she attended all right. She had the power. She ruled the Home with the awesome power of the dictator, backed by her punishing God.

* * *

Graver, down in the park, staring at the ducks, walking along by the waterside, appealing to the spirit of Mother Bernadette.

'I never meant to trip you. I was sad to see you bleeding when you fell. I heard you call out as you lay there, blood hissing from your ear and nose, reaching towards me: "Bring me a glass of somet'ing, little one, a little glass of somet'ing. Oh, my poor head. Fetch a doctor for my poor head.”

‘
I nodded and nearly let you reach me with your hand which still held the cane. It was a lifetime before you stopped calling out. I felt easier when you called me Thomas because then I knew you couldn't see me, or if you could, you couldn't recognise me and take my name with you to that place beyond death, from which to return and haunt me. When you died I watched your body for ages, hypnotised by the sounds still coming from it as the organs within it slowly came to rest. No one had ever told me how noisy a newly dead person's body is. It's like a steam engine when the heat's removed from the firebox. But even then, no earthly power would move my feet or let me lean towards you. I got up, walked towards the door, closed it and ran away. If I had known a single line of a hymn you hadn't corrupted, I'd have sung it for joy.

‘
I would have got away with it because no one in that place would have suspected a small boy of doing in Reverend Mother. Any more than outsiders would have believed the injuries she inflicted on the children in her care. The sisters knew of course, and the other children. Which was why nobody breathed a word till about thirty years later, when it became quite all right to sprag on staff who on the whole were too old and decrepit to beat you. Three of the girls grassed Mother Bernadette then, but it was too late because she had been under the sod for almost a quarter of a century.'

*  *  *

Years later, the turning point, the first time he became aware of the possibility of evening up the score. Remember, he kept saying to himself: in order to be a successful experimenter you have to be very, very clever.

*  *  *

The experiment. He would remember this first experiment.

People stared curiously, walking away, or if it was too late, trying to avoid his glance. Graver wandered through the park, debating endlessly with the voices, the crowd multiplying in his head, jostling for space to express themselves.

'What does she want?'

'She wants to come out, sir.'

'Out of what?'

'She wants to come out of the killing machine, sir.'

Graver shook his head.

'No, can't do that.'

He turned, faced his invisible audience, challenging them to debate the matter.

'What? No reason to do it.'

'What did you say your name was?'

'Shbiggesdrywauk, sir.'

'Whassat? Never heard of it.'

'Remember what I said: in order to succeed you have to be very, very clever.'

Chapter 2

Less than twenty-five miles from Coldharbour as the crow flies, Laura Fortius shepherded her two children, Matthew aged nine and Sarah aged eight, through the early spring crowds of Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, England, down King Edward Street, past the Town Docks Museum and the Ferens Art Gallery, and into the Old Town at Whitefriargate. She turned to the shop window and caught sight of her reflection – tall, slender to the point of thinness, her aquiline nose accentuated by her short hair. Auburn was an exaggeration, she thought. Mousey, more like. The overall effect was of neatness rather than beauty. Her irritation at the hairdresser boiled up again. The problem with some hairdressers was their pre-formed view of what she needed. It didn't matter what she said, they followed their own plan regardless. Fancy styling it to make me look so pinched and mean, she said to herself as she led the children through the Victorian arcade, crossed the road and walked the short distance to the car park.

Laura let out a long, involuntary sigh as she unlocked the battered old Volvo estate. The car had seen them through more than a decade since before her husband Tom obtained his tenured post at the University. The reliability of the car annoyed her. Its appearance reminded her of stuffy, intellectual husbands, sinking into safe middle age. Bloody reliable Volvos. She had a premonition that at this rate the car would outlast their marriage. This was slightly contradictory. Why shouldn't I be contradictory, she thought. All these intellectual men, so damned logical all the time. She installed the two children in their seat belts in the back. She went round to the driver's side and inserted the ignition key. As she turned it slightly, the radio was in mid-flow: “…  absconded forty-eight hours ago from Cortham Hall secure mental health unit near Goole. Police are warning members of the public not to approach him. He could be dangerous.” She turned the key back and the radio clicked into silence.

'I'm thirsty,' said Sarah.

'I want an ice cream,' said Matthew.

'When we've dropped the shopping off at the car, we're going to meet Helen at the coffee shop,' said Laura. 'Stay here, cherubs, while Mummy pops back to the corner of the road. Don't worry, you'll be able to see me waving. I only want to look up and down the road for one sec. Keep your hands on the boot of the car, like this. Look Matthew, copy Sarah.'

Matthew, like his father in appearance as well as personality would always be less reliable than his sister, she thought. Sarah was the image of her mother, tall for her age and built like a coat hanger. “For Heaven's sake, feed the child,” Laura's mother had said when they visited her recently. It was her self-appointed mission to stuff both the children with sweets and cakes at all opportunities, which was why Laura's visits had tailed off since her father's death. Sarah already looks as though she'll be running an office, Laura thought. She desperately wanted not to pass her mistake on to her daughter. If we split up, I'll keep Sarah, he can have Matthew. Only this morning she'd let the thought fall like a stone into the puddle of her over-busy brain. The ripples spread, merging into all the other thoughts, losing definition, flattening out till they almost disappeared.

A noise near at hand brought her back to reality with a jolt. She couldn't place it, then she saw Matthew had a handful of small pebbles and was tossing them into the air, one at a time, trying to catch them. She immediately was able to place the metallic sound she now realised she had heard. One of the stones must have hit the bodywork of a car. Laura hoped fervently that it was her car.

'For goodness sake, Matthew, put those stones down. What do you think you're doing?'

Matthew did not reply, pulled a face and slowly opened his hand, letting the stones drop to the ground, one by one.

*  *  *

Laura wondered how different life would be if she acted on her intuitions immediately. Was it only minutes earlier – it might as well have been a lifetime – when she was listening to Matthew and Sarah giggling about the funny man as she walked with them back to the car park? It had dawned on her it would be ironic, if in the middle of an unseasonably warm and sunny morning in Hull, it took a couple of kids only two minutes to spot a seriously disturbed man the police hadn't found in as many days. These were stray thoughts. Like the wisps of cloud in the blue sky above, they came and blew away in moments in the strong, warm breeze.

She was back at the car in two minutes.

'Is that what Helen can't face,' she exclaimed to herself out loud, 'the chance that Detlev didn't commit suicide but was killed by such a man?'

'What did you say, Mummy?'

'Nothing darling. Mummy thought she'd lost her purse.'

'It's in your hand already, Mummy.'

'Yes, it is.'

'Silly Mummy.'

'That's right. Too silly for words.'

Laura's mind had jumped wildly from the strange man to the inquest.

She was still puzzled at how Detlev's death had occurred. She had her own reasons for wondering what the verdict of the inquest might be.

*  *  *

One minute to ten o'clock. Professor Tom Fortius from the Centre for Entomological Research at Hull Wilberforce University, shuffled uncomfortably on the tiny island of his chair. Big framed and, apart from his spreading waistline, muscular rather than fat, he often had difficulty accommodating his six foot six body in spaces built for more average people. His pet aversion was being given lifts in tiny cars designed for under-size people to drive about town.

Tom looked round the courtroom, his brilliant blue eyes almost hidden under a mass of near jet-black wavy hair, which as he leaned forward threatened to cascade down his forehead and prevent him seeing anything. He had too much on his mind to focus properly on the proceedings. It reminded him of a crematorium – not the kind of place you'd ever anticipate attending unless you had to. The usher had disappeared a few minutes ago through the door behind the coroner's bench. Those left in that sombre courtroom in Beverley, ten miles from Hull, sat in a silence strongly reminiscent of a religious ceremony.

Tom had worries over and above his questions about Detlev's untimely death, about ten months ago. The funeral, a few days later, had taken place too close to the shock of his death and the immediate grieving, for considered reflection. It was different now. This occasion created that uniquely dramatic atmosphere, through the deliberate concentration of many hearts and minds on the circumstances surrounding the death.

The courtroom was modestly small, with a raised desk and seats at the front facing a line of tables and chairs in the centre, and along each side two rows of chairs facing inwards. It was barely formal enough to serve its sombre purpose. The square seats in the courtroom, like the decor, were comfortable at a minimal level.

When the usher returned, he didn't have to raise his voice to be heard clearly by the fifteen people present: witnesses, relatives, two police officers and two press reporters.

The uniforms of the two police officers contrasted with the everyday clothes of most of the relatives and other witnesses. Constable Tebbutt displayed his nervousness at his first time giving evidence to a coroner's court by standing at the front table in the courtroom from soon after half past nine, whilst sorting and re-sorting his papers. Constable Birch, Scenes of Crime Officer, and very experienced at appearing in coroners' courts, was there as well, sitting down, more relaxed and conversational than her colleague.

The rear table was occupied by the two press reporters, who came in at the last minute and kept themselves to themselves. Witnesses, including Detlev's friends and family who had flown over from Wolfach, their home village in the Schwarz Wald of Germany, were sitting to the left of the coroner, next to the usher.

The usher, Frederick Blunt, his face as grey and his suit as plain and off-the-peg as his name, came in and stood, grey and bald like the butler in an old-style drama. He intoned in his sepulchral voice: 'The Court will stand.'

James Wilkes, coroner, followed and then Faith Wistow, the clerk who for the past six years had taken a shorthand record of these proceedings. Wilkes appeared embarrassed at even this minimal ritual and spoke almost to one side as though he couldn't abide that people still stood there while he sat down first: