Roger Curtis - Lights in a Western Sky

I turned away, not able to look at her, groping for something to say. ‘Did Grimston say why Harry had changed?’

‘Well, it seemed to him Harry’d had a new lease of life. Which makes the thing so difficult to understand.’ She paused to wipe away a tear. ‘You know he’d joined a fitness class? He’d even started running when they let them do it in the yard. Quite good at it, Grimston said, considering he was never the active one of you two. And he’d even started writing. Michael, why couldn’t they have left him alone, when he seemed to be doing so well? What had he done to deserve it?’

I couldn’t show her Harry’s notebook. Not yet understanding its contents I knew there was a risk if it ever got passed around. On the other hand I felt an obligation to seek an explanation for her. It was then that I went to the next room and telephoned the prison for an appointment with the governor.

Was it the forlorn hope of seduction or expiation of guilt that made me pass Fenner’s Café, the next day, on my way to the station? She looked up from wiping a table as I approached the window, then opened the door, with that little half-smile I’d carried in my head from the day before; and what – if I was honest – had drawn me back now. But I was taken aback by her first words.

‘You weren’t straight with me yesterday, were you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You said your brother had killed a man.’

‘I said…’

‘He came back, you see. That bloke you were talking to.’

‘Grimston?’

‘If that’s what you call him.’

My body chilled as she motioned me to a table in the darker depths of the café. ‘This Grimston said your brother was innocent. That’s not what you told me.’ Then she said, ‘I’ll bring you your coffee.’

My thoughts raced. By the time she’d returned I’d rehearsed what to say. ‘What I said was he’d been arrested for killing someone. It was never proved but his prints were on the knife. It was enough to convict.’

‘But did he do it?’

What had Grimston told her, or for that matter known? I tried to adopt an explanatory tone. ‘My brother told the police he had, under interrogation…’ I said, looking down at the table.

‘You believed that?’

‘The bar was packed. In the confusion it was impossible to see what happened. The witnesses – if there were any – didn’t hang around.’

‘Shouldn’t think they did, but that’s not what I asked.’ She lowered herself into the seat opposite me, elbows on the table, chin resting on her interlocked fingers, waiting.

Under normal circumstances I would have switched on the charm. But not now. ‘Why are you so concerned?’

‘I told you about my partner.’

‘You did.’

‘But not about my affairs, while he was banged up.’ There was a brief catching of breath. She lowered he voice. ‘So I know what makes people do such things… and the hell you go through after.’

I looked at my watch and jumped to my feet, suddenly relieved I could claim only just enough time to catch my train. ‘Shall I see you again?’ I said. ‘That depends on you,’ she replied. I looked back to see her still sitting there.

At two-thirty I rang that familiar and innocuous-looking bell at the prison gate. But instead of passing through the usual series of clanking doors I was shunted along a less forbiddingly grey corridor, into the beige neutrality of the governor’s office.

‘The thing that puzzles me about your brother,’ governor Robinson said, ‘is that he seemed to have no enemies. Bullied sometimes, maybe. Depended on what others were passing through. But certainly nothing recently. In fact about a month ago his demeanour seemed to change for the better. He got quite motivated when we introduced changes in the PE sessions and made a small running track around the yard. Brought out all their competitive instincts – and made them more subdued when they came back in. But Harry, he seemed obsessed by it. Not just in winning, but in bettering his own achievements.’

‘Grimston said he’d started writing in his cell.’

‘Ah, yes. Grimston, his cell-mate. Curious that. Considering the two were so pally it was odd that the change in your brother seemed to start when we announced Grimston’s release. Perhaps Harry did it to take his mind off the prospect of another cell-mate. It gets to some of them that way.’

I thought a new line of attack was needed. ‘Did my brother ever question the verdict that had sent him here?’

Robinson smiled sadly. ‘I once looked through the transcript of the trial. If he hadn’t pleaded guilty my guess is that the conviction would have been unsafe. In my opinion. But the matter was never raised.’

Into my head came an image of Harry pausing to look at me as he stepped from the dock: a little grimace – without malice – that said, don’t worry about it Michael, I’ll be okay. But in the end it wasn’t okay, after it must have seemed I’d abandoned him.

‘I suppose you would like to see where it happened?’

The building seemed deserted and you could tell why from the shrieks from the exercise yard outside. We climbed the three flights of metal stairs to the uppermost corridor.

‘The odd thing,’ Robinson said, ‘was why he was up here in the first place, seeing that his own cell was two floors below.’

I had visions of him being chased, terrified, up those bleak steps and along the corridor. Robinson saw my unease.

‘The puzzle is that there were no witnesses that we know of and as you can imagine no-one’s admitted to the attack.’

‘Is that surprising?’

‘No. But we have the rudiments of an intelligence system and so far that’s drawn a blank.’

He led me along the top corridor, which ended in a blank wall faced with those brown glazed bricks one associates with pre-war public lavatories. He pointed to a spot about four feet from the floor.

‘It must have been a powerful blow as the wall here – and the floor below – was splattered with blood. I can only think that someone felled him with a blow to the head while he was bending down. If you’re up to it I can show you photographs when we get back to the office. The other strange thing is that there’s been no trace of a weapon and I can’t believe a fist alone could have opened up his skull like that. We’ve searched high and low, but found nothing.’

‘Smuggled out?’ I asked.

He gave me a withering glance at having challenged the integrity of prison security. ‘I don’t think so.’ He looked at the ground. ‘Won’t please the prison visitor, though, when we can’t come up with an explanation. Anyway, we ought to get back, before the prisoners return from their exercise.’

Things were beginning to come together in my head.

‘Would you mind if I stayed just a moment,’ I said. ‘By myself, just to reflect. I did love my brother, you know.’ I was about to add, for all his faults, but in those last few minutes something fundamental to my relationship with Harry’s memory had changed. Whatever had been there before had become an amalgam of guilt and remorse.

‘Of course. A minute then? I’ll be waiting on the floor below.’

I watched him walk the length of the corridor, back to the stairs at the far end. I turned my attention to that shiny brown wall, imagining the red blood upon it, dripping to the floor, and poor Harry’s body writhing in its death throes, splattering his blood around. I followed in my mind the pages of the notebook Grimston had given me – the skull-shaped dome at the centre of the calculations and the estimations of speed – of that I was now sure – and the forces that needed to be applied to it through the resilience of the only structure unambiguously available in that hellish place.