The policemen got up from their chairs. The stocky one got out a card and handed it to the tall one, who then proffered it to Marianne. This is where you can get in touch with us if you remember anything or come across anything that could be relevant, he said. Marianne put the knife back on the table and took the card: Of course she replied and smiled. I accompanied them to the door, leaving Marianne at the kitchen table. Well thank you for your time, the smaller guy said. It was the first time he’d spoken and his squeaky voice surprised me. Not at all, I replied, and I continued: So who was this guy Richard Weldon anyway? Too late I realised that I’d used the past tense instead of the present. He’s a professor at an Oxford college, said the taller one, looking me directly in the eyes. Really, I replied. I’d maybe wanted to ask other questions but I shut up now after the past tense slip-up. Well good luck with your enquiries, was all I could think of saying.

  I shut the door and waited in the hall until I could hear their car starting up. I went into the kitchen but Marianne had already returned to the studio. I thought of following her out there but then immediately dismissed the idea. The whole thing was too confused and it was impossible to think straight about it. Marianne had been so cool and unruffled with the police, I wondered how she’d managed it. I wondered too why she hadn’t told them that Richard Weldon had been her lover, but in a way it didn’t seem to matter. Nonetheless, if she had done, I’d certainly have admitted everything as well, there and then, even in front of Marianne, and despite having to implicate Christian. I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself.

  I checked Jessica’s room but she wasn’t there, she must have gone over to the studio as well. I was alone in the house. I went into our bedroom then through to the bathroom. I took my clothes off and stood naked by the full-length mirror Marianne had put up – wherever she lives, she always has to have a full-length mirror. I examined myself from head to toe. I was aware that I’d always taken a little too much pride in my body – my pectorals, flat stomach and the symmetry of it, a sort of blank perfection like a youth in a fascist poster. Nothing had changed but I could see now what would happen twenty years down the line, if ever I lived that long – the roundness that would eventually turn into a paunch, the thin bony legs, the sagging chest. I remembered the old man that I’d seen at the swimming pool, on the day Susan Tedeschi died, and then once again, on the day I’d killed Marianne’s lover. I couldn’t help hoping that it was the last time I’d have to encounter him.

  XIII

  There was the usual pile of mail on my desk: I flicked through it, tossing the boring-looking letters aside for Jo to deal with. One envelope – slightly crumpled with a colourful stamp, a crossed-out address and a number of smudged postmarks – caught my attention. I ripped it open. In my hand was a sheaf of poor-quality writing paper, covered with a barely legible scrawl. My eye skipped along the lines, hardly making any of it out. Perhaps it was just another of those crazies who write in all the time but the lurching of my heart was telling me otherwise. Then eventually I went back to the beginning and tried to decipher it, word for word, rewriting it in my own clear hand on A4 paper.

  The letter was written in not particularly good English, full of grammatical errors and franglais. He’d heard me on the World Service and was writing to correct a few false impressions. First and foremost, he had never been tortured and he wanted me to publicly correct the statement I’d made about that. Conditions in the prison were not good, he wrote, but in his opinion they didn’t specifically contravene any UN conventions. In any case they were no worse for him than for any of the other prisoners there – and in some ways were a lot better.

  This was in the first section of the letter, and he repeated the denial of torture several times. The second section was in a different pen and was different in tone as well. It was long and rambling, disjointed and vague. It was all about how he’d appreciated everything we’d tried to do for him but he wanted us to stop now. He’d accepted his guilt and made his peace with God and was ready for justice. Let me die with dignity, there’s no dignity in fighting for what’s wrong instead of what’s right. Once sentenced he’d lived in a state of permanent fear for several weeks, and every time they’d come round to wake him or feed him or take him to the exercise yard, he’d terrified himself into thinking he was about to be executed. But you can’t live long with this kind of fear, he wrote. Either you go mad or you kill yourself or you lose the fear. He’d lost the fear and discovered the freedom of his tiny cell.

  I spent a long time copying it all out. It was wordy, occasionally narcissistic and self-pitying, but then at times the words hit me in the gut as if they were personal messages to me. After I’d finished writing, then reading and rereading what I’d written, I sat there for quite a while not doing anything, just thinking. It was this devastating immobility of thought that had crippled me ever since the bedsit. At times it felt like a torture I couldn’t escape. But there was this suspicion or fear that it might eventually lead me to a place of terrible clarity.

  Everything was confused emotion and contradiction. For example, after the shock of receiving the letter had abated a little, I was overwhelmed with an intense hatred for Jarawa – as if what he’d written was one enormous rebuff of everything I’d been trying to do for him. But then moments later a warm empathy washed through me. The letter had in fact released me from the grip of some strange jealousy, an envy of all the others who’d met and knew him. Now he’d ‘appeared’ to me as well. Unless, of course, the letter was a scam, a forgery, some sophisticated means of trying to get us to drop the campaign. But I didn’t want to believe that. I couldn’t believe that. Because the nearer it got to the date of his execution, the more alive he seemed to me. Perhaps he would only seem totally alive when he was dead. It was a weird thought and a disturbing one. I turned it round in my head but it didn’t seem to mean anything.

  Jamie came into my office. I hadn’t spoken to him for a week or so. He didn’t knock or anything, he just barged straight in as he always does. Once, a month or two back, Charlotte Fisher had come round to my office to pick me up for lunch and we’d started kissing and embracing and she’d even started unbuttoning her shirt and Jamie had barged in just like that, without noticing anything.

  This time he was looking gleeful, smiling radiantly and rubbing his hands: ‘Fantastic news! Listen to this!’

  He paused for effect. Had they released Jarawa perhaps? With Jarawa free, would there be anything left for me to do? I knew that it would mean the end for me but what kind of end I couldn’t yet tell. In fact it almost didn’t interest me.

  ‘Remember I told you about my niece? How I was going to send her over to do volunteer work for Freedom Africa? Remember? Hello … are you with me?’

  ‘Yeah. Yes I remember.’

  It was something that was happening more and more frequently: someone would be talking to me but I’d just switch off and start nodding. I’d be somewhere else. I forced my mind back to what Jamie was talking about. I remembered the conversation I’d had with him a while back, about how he was going to send his niece to Freedom Africa to ‘spy’ on them for us. It seemed so long ago. It was before the bedsit. Everything before the bedsit seemed such a long time ago.

  ‘Well they fucked up,’ Jamie gloated. ‘They fucked up big time and now they’ve passed on the Jarawa case. That means the field’s clear for us again.’

  He started explaining how Freedom Africa had paid for Jarawa’s wife to come to the UK, how they’d set up this unit of specialists and Oxford academics to negotiate Jarawa’s release, how they’d been hoping for a big publicity coup but the whole thing had fallen through when one of the academics involved had mysteriously disappeared. I was trying to listen but once again my attention was sliding. I just couldn’t stop it. This time it was Marianne’s shaved head. I wondered why she’d done that. I wondered whether it was to make herself less sexually attractive to me, to try and repulse me. Then again, maybe it was nothing to do with me. Perhaps it was more like an act of self-mutilation. It was always in the back of my mind, it never left me. Her and the pills she took.

  ‘Anyway the upshot is they’ve closed their Jarawa unit,’ Jamie was crowing. ‘The whole thing must have cost them a fortune! Now we’ve got to take up the slack. We’ve got to get in touch with Jarawa’s wife and get her on board. For Christ’s sake, why didn’t you tell me she was in the UK? Have you seen her? Have you spoken to her?’

  I stared down at Jamie’s shoes. They were exactly the same tan colour as the shoes Marianne’s lover had been wearing, the ones he’d put on just before I’d killed him. It was one of those inconsequential details you remember for some reason.

  ‘No. No, I haven’t spoken to her.’

  ‘Well see if you can get a contact number. Better still, I’ll get my niece to get the number from Freedom Africa.’

  ‘No Jamie. I don’t know if that’s the right approach.’

  Jamie was scowling at me. He started giving me the old spiel about how there wasn’t enough money around for both us and Freedom Africa, how now was the moment to deal them the death blow. Then I explained to him about the clipping I’d received from South Africa, the article about Jarawa’s wife. I said I didn’t think it would be helpful to give her any public role since it was likely to blow up in our faces. I said the last thing we needed now was for anything else unsavoury to emerge about Jarawa.

  He started stroking his double chin: ‘Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re right. Well of course you must act as you see fit.’

  Then he hunched his shoulders and leaned closer to me: ‘Listen, I’ll let you into a little secret. Thing is, I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around here.’

  He was in negotiations with some American software billionaire who wanted to set up an African development agency: ‘It’s the new philanthropy – before it was art galleries, now it’s human rights. They want us to think they’re the good guys.’

  Jamie was lobbying for the position of director of this new agency. If he could swing it, he said, it could work out very well for both of us. Of course I could end up with his present job but what he really meant was that he’d be looking out for people for his own team: ‘It’s worth thinking about. It’d be based in New York and there’d be serious money on the table.’

  I said I’d keep it in mind. For a moment the idea of going to work in New York with a big salary ignited me but then the feeling dropped away and I was left empty again. It was as though a door had opened briefly before me then slammed shut in my face. I could see Jamie glancing in the direction of my desk, with Jarawa’s letter and my transcription scattered all over it. Instinctively I put my hands over the pages – I knew immediately that I was never going to show what Jarawa had written to anyone or ever tell anyone about it.

  Eventually Jamie looked away then got up: ‘Well anyway. Keep me informed. But you can see now how important this campaign could be for us. It could be our calling card.’

  He was at the door then turned back to me: ‘Oh by the way – I heard you on the radio last week. Very good. I don’t know why you don’t do more of this stuff. Jo always comes across as too touchy. I liked the torture angle. It was strong stuff.’

  I worked all morning but I couldn’t get Jarawa’s letter out of my mind. I read it through several times. Certain strange phrases had already lodged in my mind, despite their clumsiness, despite the fact that I didn’t even understand them. I remembered something Marianne had said to me once. When she was a child she’d been sent to Bible class. But she’d never really understood why Jesus had to die. Or why he’d been resurrected. In fact, she still didn’t understand it. The odd thing was that it didn’t interfere with her faith at all.

  Around three I decided I had to get out. For an hour or so I just walked around the streets. It was hot and sticky and I could feel my buttocks slipping against each other. I hated this heat that I could take no pleasure from and longed for colder weather. I remembered how when I was a child my bedroom window would cloud up with condensation in winter and I’d draw pictures on the pane. These childhood memories which had continued to assault me since the bedsit brought on a feeling of aching sadness but I couldn’t think why. My shirt was soaked from perspiration. I had a T-shirt on underneath and at one point I unbuttoned my shirt and took it off. For a while I had it tied to my waist but in the end I dumped it in a rubbish bin. It was an expensive shirt I’d bought in St-Germain last time Marianne and I had been over to Paris. After dumping the shirt in the bin I could feel a wave of liberation washing through me. It was similar to what I’d felt after giving that beggar sixty pounds. But the feeling didn’t last long. It was a delusion.

  I’d been walking aimlessly around Bloomsbury for some time but then I passed by an art bookshop. There was a print in the window, a medieval painting of a crucified Christ with a luminous golden background. I recognised the picture. The original was in the National Gallery, hanging right next to another painting of the same period, of a massacre scene, with bits of bodies strewn all over the canvas. I knew these paintings because sometimes we used to go to the National Gallery on school excursions. More often than not we’d bunk off to smoke dope down by the river but I’d obviously been often enough to recognise the print in the bookshop window.

  All of a sudden I was really anxious to get to the National Gallery and see those paintings again. It was odd because at school they hadn’t interested me at all – except maybe that one of the massacre. What I’d liked was that it was a scene of action and yet it never changed. It was always exactly the same whenever you went to see it. The guy with the helmet was always just about to lop off the head of the guy in stockings. But he never did. The victim’s face was forever frozen in terror, always a split-second away from being killed and yet never killed. It was strange. Because in the end what changed was not the picture but the person looking at it. Each time you saw it you’d be older. Each time you’d be a little happier or sadder. In some way you’d be different and that was what had interested me.

  I started walking fast, back in the direction of the Gallery. I wanted to see all those crucified Christs again. I was thinking about them and visualising them and their vacant, mysterious faces but then I started thinking about the bedsit. It came back to me at odd moments, like flashbacks … the glass fragments turning slowly in the air and glinting in the sun and the man beckoning me, whispering to me, smiling at me … the beautiful pink tulips scattered over the tiles, petals that bulged out from the base, curved like a woman’s hips. I seemed to be hovering over the scene looking at it from the height of the ceiling or perhaps beyond. But there was something disturbingly thought-out and aesthetic about it all, as if it too were a painting.

  I was seeing all that in my mind and then I found myself in Trafalgar Square, drenched in sweat and breathing heavily. I stood outside the gallery for a moment to get my breath back. They’d built that new wing to the National, I’d completely forgotten about that. How could I have forgotten when I drove past it every day? Perhaps they’d changed the inside of the gallery as well. Perhaps the crucified Christ I’d seen in the bookshop window was no longer hung next to the massacre scene. It would spoil everything for some reason. I started to go up the stairs but then stopped and turned around again. I’d changed my mind. I’d got myself all excited and worked up about going to the gallery but then as soon I was outside it, the desire dropped away.

  I was in my car again, driving. I drove past a police station. Almost out of boredom, I thought of stopping and giving myself up. But it didn’t feel right, not yet. I had this idea that I would know when the moment would be right but perhaps that was totally spurious. Perhaps that moment would never come. As if I were waiting desperately for something to happen but I didn’t even know what – some kind of release that would allow me to move up and out of the abyss or perhaps deeper into it. Maybe instead I would be stuck forever in this intolerable moment, like the terrified man in the massacre painting.

  It was the Jarawa case. I couldn’t give myself up until that had been resolved. Because that had to be resolved, one way or the other. I mean, he’d either be executed or he wouldn’t be. There was nothing indefinite about that, no halfway possibilities. In some bizarre way I even envied Jarawa for that certainty. I had the impression that if by magic I could change places with him, I would gladly do so.

  Jarawa himself seemed to have given up the will to live. Even his own wife talked of him in the past tense. Perhaps there was only the slimmest chance of his survival but for him to try and sabotage even that seemed a miserable thing. If I couldn’t save Jarawa from death then I might as well be dead myself. It would be easy. I could just accelerate into that wall over there. The problem was that it would be too easy. Nor would it end anything. Everything that had been set in train would continue, would culminate in other events which would culminate in other events. In other words, life would go on. The only difference would be that I wouldn’t be there. If I died now, I would be dying in utter ignorance. It was that ignorance that was impossible.