Patchwork Man (29 page)

Sarah, though – she hadn’t seemed hard or hostile. Perhaps Pop’s bellicose nature had passed her by after all, or had been contained in her determination to live – or die – her way. The boys and Georgie, I couldn’t comment on. That only left me. That violent force must be within me too. I faced another part of the patchwork I’d steadfastly concealed in the box – the man who entered court, determined to win at all costs. The man who belittled his opponents, demolished his competitors and ground witnesses to dust in the pursuit of success. That was where my aggression went – and my bitterness – into the man who’d left his principles at the court door when prosecuting the Wilhelm Johns case. The one Atticus would have renounced long ago. I deliberately turned my back on him and watched instead the boy who could be me, wondering how different we actually were. Had his violence already found its mark in the old woman, or was it yet to emerge?

My reverie was cut short by the phone ringing in my study. Danny was still gob-full of sandwich so I left him in the kitchen, cheek distended with too much crust and trying to lick his fingers at the same time. I got the phone just before the caller rang off. It was Kat. I couldn’t keep the terseness from my voice even though it wasn’t intended for her. It was for everything but her at the moment.

‘Oh, have I called at a bad time?’

‘I’m not sure there’s a good one at the moment. No, it’s OK, but Danny is here. I was probably going to ring you in a while anyway.’

‘Danny’s there? But he should be in hospital. What’s going on?’

‘You tell me. My charming brother visited him after we went but I haven’t yet found out why – other than to set the cat amongst the pigeons even more.’

‘Do you want me to come over?’ Once upon a time it would have been the last thing on earth I would have wanted – more complication, but it was all my world seemed to be composed of now. Besides, the thought of having Kat there was inexplicably comforting as well as unbearably complicating.

‘If you can.’ I gave her the address.

‘I’ll be about five minutes.’ Five minutes from Morden to Chelsea – I doubted it, but then as with all things and all people now, I had no idea where Kat actually was, wherever it was she ought to be. I put the receiver down and turned to find Danny had padded in behind me. His cat-like entry reminded me of Win. He was all eyes.

‘You got an awful lot of books, Mister Big.’

‘Mainly law books Danny – for my profession.’ He moved toward one of the floor to ceiling bookcases and caressed the spines of the shelf nearest his eye level.

‘I like books, but we don’t get that many of them at home. Only crappy ones – love stories that Mum reads.’ Love stories was said with disgust. ‘You got real ones.’

‘All books are real, Danny – we just have different tastes. Maybe it’s escapism for your mum.’

‘’Scapism – what’s that?’

‘An imaginary world where things happen the way you want them to.’ It occurred to me with intense irony that I had been suffering from escapism for the last thirty five years or more. Hiding in plain sight? Who was I kidding? I’d been in the sights of either Win, Jaggers or Margaret for all of that time. I’d never been hidden at all. It had just suited them to leave me alone until the time was right.

‘D’you do that? ’Scapism?’ The boy must have a direct line to my brain.

‘We all do at times, Danny. It’s human nature to want what we haven’t got – or for life to be perfect. Unfortunately most of the time that’s not possible. We have to make the best of what we have. Cobble it together.’

‘This is a real book. I seen it in the library at school.’ Mocking Bird. The cover of my copy depicted Tom and Atticus. He was waving it at me. ‘Is there a good guy and a bad guy?’

‘Yes, more than one.’

‘Does the bad guy get his come-uppance in the end?’

‘In a way – although not everyone is completely good either.’

‘That ain’t having a good guy and a bad guy then, is it?’

‘Good and bad are sometimes relative, Danny.’ He looked bemused. ‘Sometimes something bad might have a good outcome and something good might cause harm. You have to look beyond the person or the action to see the outcome before you decide.’

‘But how can something that’s good be bad, or someone’s that’s nice be bad?’

‘Things aren’t always black and white. People aren’t always what they seem to be.’ And there I was in a nutshell.

‘Can I keep it?’ He was clutching the book to himself. ‘I ain’t got no proper books of me own.’ It was my childhood copy, dog-eared, thumbed and cracking along the spine; resident untouched in my bookcase for the last ten years or more. It no longer had seemed an appropriate read after the Johns case, yet it symbolised everything I’d fought to be – and failed. It was right he should have it – me before the fall, perhaps. And maybe a right amongst all the wrongs I’d committed so far.

‘You can keep it Danny. When you’re a little older and you’ve read it we’ll talk about it again.’

He beamed and sauntered around the room examining the rest of its contents. I watched from my transfixed position by the phone. He reached the desk, and the photograph of Margaret, still floored and facing heaven-wards.

‘That’s your missus, ain’t it?’ Of course, he’d met her.

‘Yes.’

‘Are you meant to put photos of dead people flat then?’

‘No, it just got knocked over and I haven’t righted it yet.’ He put Atticus carefully on the edge of the desk and stood the photo back up, facing me.

‘Oh.’

I asked carefully, ‘How often did you meet her, Danny?’

‘Only once before the mugging. She came to see mum with Uncle Win.’

‘When was that?’

‘Last year, round about now. She brought me sweets and a comic and took me outside with the other kids when Uncle Win and mum were having a spat. We talked about drawing.’

‘Do you know what they were arguing about?’

‘Me.’

‘You? What about you?’

‘Uncle Win wanted mum to say something she said were lying. I heard her say it were all right to lie to the other bloke, but she’d done it for cash then and it hadn’t done any harm but she weren’t going to get anyone into trouble.’

‘Do you know what kind of trouble – or what he wanted her to lie about?’

‘Nah, but then when mum had no money for the tallyman, Uncle Win came round and they had the same barney all over again, and it ended up with her agreeing for me to help him out instead.’

‘Help out – how?’

‘I could run fast, see. I had to pinch the old girl’s bags and run like fuck.’ He looked sheepish. ‘I’m sorry, Mister Big. I didn’t want to pinch off them old ladies but mum said they only picked the rich old ones who could afford it ... But I didn’t do it.’ It was the refrain from the interview room. The doorbell rang and I motioned for him to stay where he was and wait. It was Kat, breathless and bright-faced. She burst on me like a flower and irrelevantly I remembered one of Margaret’s foibles as I described her so in my head:
Queen of the night
–
Peniocereus greggi
. It was a bloom Margaret had told me about once – not because she was a keen gardener, but because she was a harvester of unusual information; a warehouse of minutiae and trivia she could turn on me whenever she had an argument to win.
All information is useful, Lawrence – you just have to know when to use it.

The queen of the night epitomised Margaret to perfection for me now – if not Kat – a dramatic, white, waxy flower composed of elegant petals and dainty stamens. Virtually invisible most of the year, making its inconspicuous home amongst other desert cacti or shrubbery whilst growing its extensive tuberous root storing food and water to out-survive less hardy desert plants; just as Margaret had stealthily gathered her resources secretly beneath her charitable facade. Although each bloom will last only one night, a queen cactus can grow more than one bloom, appearing on a different night over a period of several nights during a week's period – each as dramatic and overawing as the next. Margaret had no doubt been planning her night to bloom thus soon. I hoped to God there was only one flower she’d been nurturing.

‘What’s going on Lawrence?’ Kat’s bloom was far more earthy and in my face. I sucked in a deep breath of her fragrance and took courage. I shrugged my shoulders.

‘Come and find out – I’m as much in the dark as you, even though I have all the facts so far.’ She followed me impatiently back to the study, eyes swivelling en route taking in the minimalistic chic and then widening at the contrast to it in my study.

‘Danny, you know you shouldn’t have run away!’

‘Like a mother hen, ain’t she?’ The comical appeal to me had me smiling. We were comrades: pragmatic men battling the fuss and over-reaction of women. We both laughed and Kat glared at us.

‘It’s not funny. There’ll be all sorts of trouble over this. We have to take you back right now.’

‘Hold on, hold on!’ Danny’s face had taken on the hardened criminal look again where it had been becoming relaxed and childlike. ‘Danny was telling me why he ran away and I think we ought to listen to his side first, don’t you?’

Kat frowned. ‘It’s not just the case that matters, Lawrence. It’s Danny’s health too. You should have more concern over that, considering.’

‘I am considering,’ I told her sarcastically. ‘I’m considering what all this means as well as how it affects Danny’s health. Win has a rather devastating effect on people’s health at times, you know – physical and otherwise.’ I didn’t add what I feared more about Jaggers. That was definitely something to keep to myself for the moment, his letter lying uneasily alongside the crested one in my pocket. I turned back to Danny who’d been watching us carefully. ‘Carry on, Danny. Miss Roumelia needs to hear this too.’ He wrinkled his nose at me in disbelief.

‘You two not got it together yet? Blimey, you’re making a meal out of it, ain’t you?’ He picked up the book as if in self-defence – or in case I took it back off him, perhaps.

‘You have to look beyond the person or the action to see the outcome, remember?’ I reminded him. He studied us.

‘Oh, I see – she’s black and you’re white – like in the book?’

‘No, that wasn’t what I meant – but there are disparities between us, and like in the book, there are also ethics to consider. We’re both working for you at the moment, Danny. That makes things complicated.’

‘He’s me uncle,’ he added, but which of us – Win, or me – he was referring to didn’t seem to register with Kat. ‘That’d be one of them rellyvent things like you said once, wouldn’t it?’

‘Well, possibly that too. Shall we tell Miss Roumelia – Kat,’ I looked at her and she nodded in the affirmative, ‘what you were telling me just before she arrived?’ His head bobbed up and down enthusiastically and I summarised quickly for her, leaving out the more complex elements, before cueing him to continue.

‘That was it, really. Apart from the last time of course. Then that other bloke came along and all hell broke loose. ‘He pushed me over and I hurt me leg.’ He rolled up his track suit bottoms and displayed the bruising proudly. ‘That were it – still ain’t gone and it were ages ago. It’s me himmaphelia, ain’t it? I got left there with the bag and the old dear and she died. The old bill got there like a shot – quicker’n they’d ever turned up before, and I was nicked. But I didn’t do it.’ I looked at the small bony fingers clutching Atticus and was struck by how unscathed they were despite his problem. A switch clicked into place.

‘Danny, will you show us your bruises again?’ He obliged happily. ‘They’re now nearly six weeks old,’ I reminded the Kat. ‘That was when the mugging occurred. Danny’s bruising continued for some while after the event because of the haemophilia, but look at his hands.’ She went over to Danny and tried to take the book from his hands. He resisted. ‘It’s all right, Danny,’ I reassured him. ‘It’s yours for keeps. I’ve finally learned my lesson from it, I think.’ He allowed her to put it on the desk and examine his hands.

‘A few very old scars but they’re fine, otherwise.’ She looked at me. ‘What’s your point?’

‘My point is we’ve just proven Danny’s innocence – not from bag-snatching. By his own admission, he’ll have to take the rap for that, but I’m sure the jury will be sympathetic when we explain how it came about. But there’s the evidence he couldn’t have carried out the mugging right in front of you. The haemophiliac boy, with extensive bruising from the same day still apparent on the rest of his body, but not a mark on his hands; the hands he would have had to use to beat her up since there was no weapon used.’

‘Oh my God, Lawrence, you really are the best! Of course!’ I laughed deprecatingly, but preened nevertheless. ‘His hands would be in a terrible state wouldn’t they?’ She beamed at Danny. ‘Mr Juste has just proven your innocence of the mugging, Danny. Isn’t that wonderful?’

‘What does that mean now then?’ he asked cautiously.

‘Well, the police will want to see the evidence so the forensics people will have to come into hospital and take some photos of your injuries and your hands, and then interview the doctor as an expert witness, but after that it’ll be cut and dried.’ I thought about disputing that. There would still be the little matter of pleading and the trial. If we were pleading not guilty we’d still have to appear in court, but perhaps that was a minor point to talk about later when I understood more about the more worrying elements swilling around in the background.

‘So do I still have to go back?’ Danny sounded miserable. Kat put her arm round him.

‘Oh Danny, just for a little while – but then you’ll be able to go home. That’s wonderful, isn’t it?

‘I don’t want to go back there or home. Can’t I stay here – with Mister Big?’ Kat looked flustered and started to apologise to me. I found I was unconcerned and marvelled at myself. When did Lawrence Juste become so unafraid of commitment – and to a kid? I’d anticipated revulsion, distaste, even horror when faced with the fruit of my sin. Instead I couldn’t help admire the child’s resilience, and a small, locked away part of me revelled in the replication of me, even though I knew it shouldn’t. I didn’t trust myself to say anything whilst the strange melee of emotions spiralled the central question – why couldn’t he? He was, after all, family of one sort or another. Luckily Kat applied officiousness and answered for me before that now disconcertingly frequent inclination to stamp about where angels feared to tread invaded me again.