The Report (3 page)

Before the boy arrived on his doorstep, Laurence Dunne had spent the morning at the club. Rushing home for a Wimbledon match on television, he’d swerved and hit a fox in the road, killing it instantly. Laurie was a good driver, possessing excellent hand-eye coordination and the reflexes of a sportsman. His height as a younger man had served him well, and—although he was beginning to bend toward the earth—he still stood six feet and could see well above the dashboard. That was not the problem. When he hit the fox, Laurie was craning his neck out the side window, gauging the weather for angling—the preoccupation of his retirement—the next day. So far this June of 1972 the weather had been less than satisfactory. The car rushed on, and the small reddish body spun under the hedgerow and lay still, as if sleeping.

If Laurie had known, he would have felt remorse, but he didn’t much believe in apologizing.

He was mistaken about the time of the match, and so, though he parked carelessly in the gravel drive and rushed into his house on Nelson Close, he missed the first set. He sighed and eased himself into his favorite chair. The afternoon was warm and sunny, a day to be outside, but he was content at the moment to watch Ilie Nastase’s unconventional tactics. Among the prospective quarterfinalists, there were no Englishmen and no Australians (for Hewitt now played as a South African). There was the wild Romanian, Nastase; Hewitt, the new South African; two Spaniards, one Czech, one Frenchman, one American, and one Russian. Many thought it was the strangest list Wimbledon had ever produced, and Laurie agreed.

But his fabled concentration was waning, something few people realized, and this, combined with the champagne his old friend the mighty William had ordered at lunch to celebrate the arrival of yet another grandchild, had Laurie asleep within minutes. His head weaved, settling finally against the glossy patch on the right wing of the chair. He saw a number of children running about; then he was angling on the Tay, his favorite of the Scottish rivers.

After a while the fish, hundreds of them, began knocking about on the rocks, and he opened his eyes to see Nastase toweling his face. When he heard the knocking again, he began to move, but with little expectation of actually making it to the door in time. They’d had servants when Armorel was alive, but she had always dealt with them. He called out that he was coming, but that, too, was futile. Gravity seemed to be working on his voice as well as his body; it had dropped into a register that was difficult to project.

His legs carried him to the front door more swiftly than he’d anticipated, but a stranger on the doorstep eroded his pleasure at arriving in time. He’d hoped for a visit from Mrs. Beckford. Bettina. She checked in on him now and then, always with a little package of something as an excuse—half a dozen fresh scones, some hyacinth from the garden.

The boy on the doorstep was flustered. “Sir Laurence,” he said. “I’m Paul Barber. I wrote to you about the thirtieth anniversary of the Bethnal Green report?”

Another fabled component of Laurie’s reputation: putting people at ease. He’d given it up.

The boy looked intelligent and sincere, qualities Laurie required. However, points against him included ridiculous sideburns and wide lapels. Barber must have noticed him staring, because he raised a hand and smoothed one cheek. Laurie had read his letter and had simply not yet worked out how he wanted to participate in this retrospective the boy had in mind. Laurie was surprised, and not a little piqued, to be contacted by such an amateur filmmaker. Still, the boy’s surname interested him, and when Laurie ran through the remainder of his day and saw that it contained nothing more exciting than an omelet for supper, he gave in.

“Where are you from?”

“Bethnal Green.”

That had not been in the letter. Laurie squinted.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-nine.”

Laurie’s mind did the familiar calculation: born during the war. He was taking a risk, he knew. Tragedies, when they became documentaries, usually changed. They turned fuzzy, he thought. Laurie hesitated but then opened the door wide and turned down the hall. At least the boy could make tea.

Barber stepped in quickly and asked a question Laurie ignored. Absurd to talk in this configuration. He would wait until they were seated. Laurie moved slowly, partly because he had to, and partly to give the boy behind him a chance to calm down and notice all the awards and other decorations on the wall.

The woman in front of Ada lost her balance and stepped back, bringing the point of her heel down on the top of Ada’s foot. Ada’s eyes turned hot with tears, and she limped a few steps. Suddenly Emma flinched and leaned into her. “Watch out!” Ada yelled. Their part of the crowd flowed into the entrance, and just before the darkness of the stairs, she saw that Mrs. W. was in front of them. Ada couldn’t believe it. How had she managed to get all the way up front? What if there wasn’t room in the shelter for everyone tonight? Why was the crowd moving so slowly? She looked for a warden or a constable. She tried to lift Emma onto her hip, but the crowd was too tight. She took her hand and squeezed it, pulled Tilly to her other side, and started down the steps.

The clerk heard an explosion to the north. The ducks took flight, and the certainty of their decision made Bertram leave the park and head back along Cambridge Heath, toward the shelter. The road teemed with people, many of them running. This was unusual. Had the explosion unnerved them? He looked around for someone he knew. He thought he spotted Constable Henderson, but when Bertram called out, the man didn’t turn. When Bertram was still quite far from the entrance to the shelter, the crowd began to slow. He was only as far as the chip shop, yet people around him were beginning to jockey for space. Yelling and shouting came from up ahead, but Bertram couldn’t make out the words. He thought of the shelter, its smells and mosquitoes, and suddenly wanted to go home. Clare would find him. They’d planned to meet at their regular place—he had their blankets and the new notebook—but she would figure out what had happened. If the raid was bad, or if it went on all night, they could go to the building’s cellar.

The shouting from up ahead grew louder for a moment, and then someone near Bertram said, “It’s gone off.” The suggestion coursed through the crowd, its power and path nearly visible. In the next instant, the mass quieted but turned more fierce, a single image now assembled in its mind. Bombs, a fire raid, the retaliation for what they’d done to Berlin. Bertram tried to turn, but there were so many people, he couldn’t. Fear filled his chest then, like a sudden infection, a fever, turning his head hot and his bowels cold all at once. He wanted Clare. He wanted to be with her in their bunk along the curve of the tunnel. At the start of the war, he’d wondered how anyone could sleep where trains ran and people spat. Then, the hard, gritty surfaces and the nearness of strangers’ bodies had revolted him. Now all that mattered was quiet. Sleep. The peace and rest of almost safety. He closed his eyes and imagined it, his body stretching along the wall, taking the cold and the damp, Clare’s along his. She didn’t need a lot of protecting, but this he could do.

Constable Henderson heard someone call his name, but he didn’t respond. Best now to blend in, he thought. He told himself there was still time to get to his post. He’d work his way to the front and, once there, calm everyone down. But as the crowd grew closer, worry flooded in. “Wait!” he called. “Let me through!” No one paid any attention. “Let me through!”

At the bottom of the first flight of steps, Ada let go of Tilly. Just for an instant. Then she and the girls stumbled onto the landing, where they were steadied by a strong man reaching toward them in the crowd. With her right hand, Ada started Tilly down the second flight of seven steps, safely into the booking hall. Ada’s left hand, arm outstretched, still held Emma. But something was happening: people were falling onto the last step above the landing, and she felt Emma’s small hand slip. Ada heard her cry, “Mama!”—then she was gone. The stairwell seemed to swallow her; the weight of the falling crowd sucked her in. “My daughter’s in there!” Ada screamed, and she clawed at the people in her way. A few seconds later, she turned to one person for help, a warden in a white tin hat. But when she saw the terror and confusion on this man’s face, she became silent, full of purpose. She would have to get Emma out by herself. The people were jumbled together, like fingers clasped in wretched, twisting prayer. Ada ran at the mass of fallen, interlocked bodies again and again, her daughter still calling.

Bertram stretched up as tall as he could, trying to see what was keeping the crowd back. All he could see was a jostling black mass darker than the night. He smelled sweat on his shirt, and the breath and sweat of the people all around. His stomach heaved, his mouth convulsed as if it were not his own. He knew this street; it had always seemed spacious. He remembered a bus accident that had once blocked the intersection for hours, but that was a crowd paralyzed by tragedy. This was a crowd in motion, a crowd with a destination, unprepared to change its course. Bertram felt elbows and shoulders; tears and sweat covered his cheeks, but he couldn’t raise his hands to wipe them—his arms were pinned. Nothing looked or felt right: even the tree branches above seemed reaching and wrong. He thought of the plans he’d had, Clare at the shelter, her slow smile when she saw the notebook. The crowd compressed even more—he couldn’t draw a deep breath—and then Bertram, temperate and kind, who would have said compassion would last longer, struggled to get his arms up, his hands on the back of the man in front of him. The crowd pressed tighter, friend against neighbor, teacher against student, mother against child, shouting, screaming, crying.

Inside the station, Warden Low couldn’t see the chaos unfolding outside, but when he looked up from his desk and saw empty space where there should have been a queue at the escalators, he was among the first to understand. If the booking hall was empty, there was an obstruction at the entrance. He immediately called the police station to report an accident, then sprinted across the booking hall. “For God’s sake, keep back!” he cried. People were falling from the upper steps, one after another, already several layers deep. The pensioner Bill Steadman was there, reaching and pulling, but within seconds there was a solid wall of people filling the space between the bottom step and the ceiling. The edge of the mass looked as if it should tip down onto the landing, but it did not.

Wardens Clarke and Bryant abandoned the escalators and came to help. Hastings and Edwards were already there. So was Steadman, holding a baby, tears streaming down his face. Low cried out instructions, but everyone flailed and pulled helplessly at the trapped people. A woman next to him was flying at the wall of arms and legs and shoes and heads. Low reached down and took hold of a fallen woman’s arm, sure that if he could just clear her, the nearest on the landing, then the people behind would follow. There would be injuries, of course, but not a disaster. He pulled and pulled; reached up farther so that one of his hands was around her shoulder, the other on her wrist; tried to leverage her out that way. He pushed at the man on top of her, trying to make room, then gave up and grabbed the arm again. Abandoning all caution, he pulled as hard as he could. Nothing! He fell back, the arm slipping from his grasp, and he saw that it was lifeless.

Dunne sat at the table and talked about tennis while Paul fumbled with the pot and water. Now and then Dunne offered a direction or a location, and Paul slowly assembled the tray: cups, saucers, sugar, cream. He’d read up on angling, had even brought a fly in his bag should the conversation go that way, but today fish seemed to be the furthest thing from Dunne’s mind. On and on he went, about the new rackets, the new training, the new physique. Nastase’s cunning; Stan Smith’s decorum. In the quarterfinals the American had impressed Dunne, it was clear, but Paul had to work hard to stay focused on what Dunne was saying about it. When they moved to the living room, Paul noticed the house was grand but overstuffed, decorated not quite as the country retreat he’d expected. Instead it felt like a room holding the furniture and memorabilia of a life lived a long time ago somewhere else. Paul glanced out the windows and hoped for rain; then the television might be turned off and Dunne would talk about something other than tennis.

When he looked back, Dunne was staring at him and Paul suspected he’d missed something.

“It’s an excellent tournament,” Dunne said. “But maybe you don’t like sport.”

Remembering what he’d read, Paul made a quick calculation. In his prime, the man before him had been known for his intelligence, his wit, his empathy across classes. As a magistrate before the war, he’d presided with a total disregard for public opinion, which, in Dunne’s view, was usually wrong. He was a man people trusted—lawyers, police officers, officials of his court. Even, it was said, the criminals who appeared before him.

“I’m sorry, sir. My concern today is so far from that world that I’m a bit distracted.”

“Yes, the report. Well, I could remind you that wars are won and lost on the playing fields of Eton. Perhaps I won’t.”

Paul tried to be jovial. “But you just did.”

Dunne laughed. “Indeed!”

Paul thought they were making progress, but then Dunne drained his tea, made a face, and looked at him. “What is it you think you want to know?”

Paul braced himself around his teacup. He could be straightforward and say that at the moment he simply wanted to know if Dunne would agree to an on-camera interview for the documentary. Or he could begin a conversation about the significance of the Bethnal Green report in 1943. Undecided, he nearly revealed too much too soon.

“I was … a child in Bethnal Green.”

Dunne frowned. “You’ve told me.”

“And so I’ve wondered how you managed such a thorough investigation in such a short time.”

Dunne was still frowning when Paul said, “How did you write the report?”

Dunne released the frown, and slumped in his chair. “It was very difficult. How do you think I did it?”

Paul looked down, and when he looked up, his expression had changed. This was one of his better tactics. “You remind me of my father, Sir Laurence,” he said. “I don’t think he ever answered a question without asking one. ‘How do you catch a trout, Dad?’ ‘What do you suggest, Paul?’ It pushed me, of course.”

What he was saying was a lie. Growing up, he hardly ever saw his father, but the story was a way to introduce angling, which Paul hoped would help him succeed with Dunne. To keep his bearings, he pressed his right heel hard into the floor while he spoke, a habit that had replaced the nervous bounce that plagued him when he was younger.

Dunne squinted at him.

Paul changed course. “You were a relatively unknown magistrate—”

“Not true.”

“You were the youngest Bow Street magistrate, but you were popular.”

Dunne nodded.

“And because of that, a defensive government obsessed with morale asked you to go into a close-knit community grieving over a terrible accident. Somehow in three weeks’ time, you produced a report that became a model of style and substance.”

Dunne held up a hand to stop him. “Your father was an angler?”

The muscles of Paul’s right leg began to burn.

“Yes. In fact, I’d hoped to show you something.” He reached into the bag by his feet and pulled out a fly wrapped in a piece of tissue paper. “He tried to teach me, but, well, I wish I’d paid more attention.” He held out the small trout fly, a pale evening dun. He fancied the name.

“What do you think?”

Copying from a book, Paul had tied it himself with some wool and a feather. The result was mediocre at best, and he knew it was a risk. Dunne, the master angler, would either see through the lie or be intrigued by the effort.

Paul held his breath when Dunne hesitated. Then the magistrate squinted and took it.