struck me at the time as a curious thing for her to have said. When you’d have expected her to say, “He liked playing footy”, or “He liked sweets.” But perhaps I am remembering wrong, maybe it was the teacher, Di Abbott, who said it, not the mother at all. When Mrs Abbott went to fetch Huey at the aunty’s, after he’d run away from school that time, I remember her telling me she knocked at the door of the aunt’s, and the aunty came to the door and said, “Yes, he’s here. I’ll get him.” Then the aunt said to Mrs Abbott, “Come in, he’s in the bathroom. He’s probably doing his teeth.” The aunty added, “He’s funny like that.”
I suppose it doesn’t matter much who said it, mother or teacher. The question is, did I notice? I’m talking about a fetish about cleanliness, a giveaway. Did it register with me at the time? Probably not. Then again, it must have done. How else could I have been so confident that my hunch was right?
NINE
THE MATTER REMAINED dark as ever. Again and again I tried to imagine Huey’s actual presence, what he had looked like as a boy in the snapshots his mother had brought out for me, as if by summoning up his physical shape from the outside I might see into the quality of his mind and find an answer to the riddle that plagued me. And now? What did he look like as an adult? As a twenty-two-year-old? Was he disfigured? Did he bear scars from the scalding still? Huey had expressed remorse again and again (“I will take him with me to the grave”…“I would give my life to have the old geezer alive and kicking again”). But did the remorse show ? Was it genuine? Huey had a light speaking voice. The register went up at the end of each sentence. (Not that he said very much.) I don’t know why butI pictured someone with a slightly crooked foot, and a limp.
He was powerfully built, Lawrence said.
Were I a novelist sitting down to invent a tale of intrigue and mystery, I can’t imagine picking a character like Huey Dunstan or devising a plot that relied so much on intuition, not to say guesswork, where logic and a priori reasoning were submerged in so much cottonwool and where the process of deduction from empirical facts led, precisely, nowhere.
One day Lisbeth said to me, “I’ve got a feeling the father is heading for a breakdown.”
“Eh?”
“Either a breakdown or a stroke.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Guilt. He’s trying to assuage the guilt.” Now what, I thought.
“There’s no other explanation, Charlie. You say the father is beggaring himself for the sake of the son. Making sacrifices. You keep talking about a person Glen and nasty noises in a caravan. What if nothing happened in the caravan?”
“Just a minute.”
“What if there was no caravan? Seems to me you’ve been taking a lot for granted.”
“Now just a minute!”
“Has anyone ever checked—checked, verified, corroborated—that there was an actual caravan? What if it didn’texist? What if everything took place not in a caravan but in the home? You say the father disciplined the boy for stealing. ‘Disciplined’? He picked up the kid and threw him against the wall. He did. It’s in the transcripts. How do you know that that wasn’t just the beginning? You said yourself the punishment was recurring .”
“Good lord. You’re not suggesting—?”
Lisbeth was silent. I felt a constriction in the throat and had difficulty breathing. I had to sit down.
She said, “I have to go out in a minute. By the way, I forgot to tell you. Lawrence rang yesterday. He said he wanted your opinion on something but it wasn’t urgent. I think he just wanted to chat.”
“It wasn’t to do with the case?”
“Don’t think so. We talked for about ten minutes. He said he’s been asked to run for mayor in Cornford. Did you know about that? I laughed, told him it was a mug’s game. We had quite a chat. I told him my theory about the father being the one.”
“You
I suppose it doesn’t matter much who said it, mother or teacher. The question is, did I notice? I’m talking about a fetish about cleanliness, a giveaway. Did it register with me at the time? Probably not. Then again, it must have done. How else could I have been so confident that my hunch was right?
NINE
THE MATTER REMAINED dark as ever. Again and again I tried to imagine Huey’s actual presence, what he had looked like as a boy in the snapshots his mother had brought out for me, as if by summoning up his physical shape from the outside I might see into the quality of his mind and find an answer to the riddle that plagued me. And now? What did he look like as an adult? As a twenty-two-year-old? Was he disfigured? Did he bear scars from the scalding still? Huey had expressed remorse again and again (“I will take him with me to the grave”…“I would give my life to have the old geezer alive and kicking again”). But did the remorse show ? Was it genuine? Huey had a light speaking voice. The register went up at the end of each sentence. (Not that he said very much.) I don’t know why butI pictured someone with a slightly crooked foot, and a limp.
He was powerfully built, Lawrence said.
Were I a novelist sitting down to invent a tale of intrigue and mystery, I can’t imagine picking a character like Huey Dunstan or devising a plot that relied so much on intuition, not to say guesswork, where logic and a priori reasoning were submerged in so much cottonwool and where the process of deduction from empirical facts led, precisely, nowhere.
One day Lisbeth said to me, “I’ve got a feeling the father is heading for a breakdown.”
“Eh?”
“Either a breakdown or a stroke.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Guilt. He’s trying to assuage the guilt.” Now what, I thought.
“There’s no other explanation, Charlie. You say the father is beggaring himself for the sake of the son. Making sacrifices. You keep talking about a person Glen and nasty noises in a caravan. What if nothing happened in the caravan?”
“Just a minute.”
“What if there was no caravan? Seems to me you’ve been taking a lot for granted.”
“Now just a minute!”
“Has anyone ever checked—checked, verified, corroborated—that there was an actual caravan? What if it didn’texist? What if everything took place not in a caravan but in the home? You say the father disciplined the boy for stealing. ‘Disciplined’? He picked up the kid and threw him against the wall. He did. It’s in the transcripts. How do you know that that wasn’t just the beginning? You said yourself the punishment was recurring .”
“Good lord. You’re not suggesting—?”
Lisbeth was silent. I felt a constriction in the throat and had difficulty breathing. I had to sit down.
She said, “I have to go out in a minute. By the way, I forgot to tell you. Lawrence rang yesterday. He said he wanted your opinion on something but it wasn’t urgent. I think he just wanted to chat.”
“It wasn’t to do with the case?”
“Don’t think so. We talked for about ten minutes. He said he’s been asked to run for mayor in Cornford. Did you know about that? I laughed, told him it was a mug’s game. We had quite a chat. I told him my theory about the father being the one.”
“You
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