Not Safe After Dark (10 page)

Reed could understand members of the victim’s community appearing against him, and he could even comprehend Maggie’s hurt pride. But why Hakim and Bill? What had he ever done to
them? Had they never really liked him? It went on and on, a nightmare of distorted truth. Reed felt as if he had been set up in front of a funfair mirror, and all the jurors could see was his
warped and twisted reflection. I’m innocent, he kept telling himself as he gripped the rail, but his knuckles turned whiter and whiter and his voice grew fainter and fainter.

Hadn’t Bill joined in the remarks about schoolgirls? Wasn’t it all in the spirit of fun? Yes, of course. But Bill wasn’t in the dock. It was Terence J. Reed who stood accused
of killing an innocent fifteen-year-old schoolgirl.
He
had been in the right place at the right time, and
he
had passed remarks on the budding breasts and milky thighs of the girls
who had crossed the road in front of their office every day.

Then, the morning before the defence case was about to open – Reed himself was set to go into the dock, and not at all sure by now what the truth was – a strange thing happened.

Bentley and Rodmoor came softly into the courtroom, tiptoed up to the judge and began to whisper. Then the judge appeared to ask them questions. They nodded. Rodmoor looked in Reed’s
direction. After a few minutes of this, the two men took seats and the judge made a motion for the dismissal of all charges against the accused. Pandemonium broke out in court: reporters dashed for
phones and the spectators’ gallery buzzed with speculation. Amidst it all, Terry Reed got to his feet, realized
what
had happened, if not
how
, and promptly collapsed.

•

Nervous exhaustion, the doctor said, and not surprising after the ordeal Reed had been through. Complete rest was the only cure.

When Reed felt well enough, a few days after the trial had ended in uproar, his solicitor dropped by to tell him what had happened. Apparently, another schoolgirl had been assaulted in the same
area, only this one had proved more than a match for her attacker. She had fought tooth and nail to hang onto her life, and in doing so had managed to pick up a half brick and crack the man’s
skull with it. He hadn’t been seriously injured, but he’d been unconscious long enough for the girl to get help. When he was arrested, the man had confessed to the murder of Debbie
Harrison. He had known details not revealed in the papers. After a night-long interrogation, police officers had no doubt whatsoever that he was telling the truth. Which meant Reed couldn’t
possibly be guilty. Hence motion for dismissal, end of trial. Reed was a free man again.

He stayed at home for three weeks, hardly venturing out of the house except for food, and even then he always went further afield for it than Hakim’s. His neighbours watched him walk by,
their faces pinched with disapproval, as if he were some kind of monster in their midst. He almost expected them to get up a petition to force him out of his home.

During that time he heard not one word of apology from the undertaker and the bible salesman; Francis still had ‘stuff to do . . . things to organize’; and Camille’s answering
machine seemed permanently switched on.

At night Reed suffered claustrophobic nightmares of prison. He couldn’t sleep well and even the mild sleeping pills the doctor gave him didn’t really help. The bags grew heavier and
darker under his eyes. Some days he wandered the city in a dream, not knowing where he was going, or, when he got there, how he had arrived.

The only thing that sustained him, the only pure, innocent, untarnished thing in his entire life, was when Debbie Harrison visited him in his dreams. She was alive then, just as she had been
when he saw her for the first and only time, and he felt no desire to rob her of her innocence, only to partake of it himself. She smelled of apples in autumn and everything they saw and did
together became a source of pure wonder. When she smiled, his heart almost broke with joy.

At the end of the third week, Reed trimmed his beard, got out his suit and went in to work. In the office he was met with an embarrassed silence from Bill and a redundancy cheque from Frank, who
thrust it at him without a word of explanation. Reed shrugged, pocketed the cheque and left.

Every time he went into town, strangers stared at him in the street and whispered about him in pubs. Mothers held more tightly onto their daughters’ hands when he passed them by in the
shopping centres. He seemed to have become quite a celebrity in his home town. At first, he couldn’t think why, then one day he plucked up the courage to visit the library and look up the
newspapers that had been published during his trial.

What he found was total character annihilation, nothing less. When the headline about the capture of the real killer came out, it could have made no difference at all; the damage had already
been done to Reed’s reputation, and it was permanent. He might have been found innocent of the girl’s murder, but he had been found guilty too, guilty of being a sick consumer of
pornography, of being obsessed with young girls, unable to get it up without the aid of a struggle on the part of the female. None of it was true, of course, but somehow that didn’t matter.
It had been made so. As it is written, so let it be. And to cap it all, his photograph had appeared almost every day, both with and without the beard. There could be very few people in England who
would fail to recognize him in the street.

Reed stumbled outside into the hazy afternoon. It was warming up towards spring, but the air was moist and grey with rain so fine it was closer to mist. The pubs were still open, so he dropped
by the nearest one and ordered a double Scotch. The other customers looked at him suspiciously as he sat hunched in his corner, eyes bloodshot and puffy from lack of sleep, gaze directed sharply
inwards.

Standing on the bridge in the misty rain an hour later, Reed couldn’t remember making the actual decision to throw himself over the side, but he knew that was what he had to do. He
couldn’t even remember how he had ended up on this particular bridge, or the route he’d taken from the pub. He had thought, drinking his third double Scotch, that maybe he should go
away and rebuild his life, perhaps abroad. But that didn’t ring true as a solution. Life is what you have to live with, what you are, and now his life was what it had become, or what it had
been turned into. It was what being in the wrong place at the wrong time had made it, and
that
was what he had to live with. The problem was he couldn’t live with it; therefore, he had
to die.

He couldn’t actually see the river below – everything was grey – but he knew it was there. The River Eden, it was called. Reed laughed harshly to himself. It wasn’t his
fault that the river that runs through Carlisle is called the Eden, he thought; it was just one of life’s little ironies.

Twenty-five to four on a wet Wednesday afternoon. Nobody about. Now was as good a time as any.

Just as he was about to climb onto the parapet, a figure emerged from the mist. It was the first girl on her way home from school. Her grey pleated skirt swished around her long, slim legs, and
her socks hung over her ankles. Under her green blazer, the misty rain had wet the top of her white blouse so much that it stuck to her chest. Reed gazed at her in awe. Her long blonde hair had
darkened and curled in the rain, sticking in strands over her cheek. There were tears in his eyes. He moved away from the parapet.

As she neared him, she smiled shyly.

Innocence.

Reed stood before her in the mist and held his hands out, crying like a baby.

‘Hello,’ he said.

I had just
finished cauterizing the stump of Ezekiel Metcalfe’s left arm, which I had had to amputate after it was shredded in one of the combing machines, when
young Billy Ratcliffe came running in to tell me that a man had fallen over the weir.

Believing my medical skills might be required, I left my assistant Benjamin to take care of Ezekiel and tried to keep up with young Billy as he led me down Victoria Road at a breakneck pace. I
was not an old man at that time, but I fear I had led a rather sedentary life, and I was panting by the time we passed the allotment gardens in front of the mill. A little more slowly now, we
crossed the railway lines and the canal before arriving at the cast-iron bridge that spanned the River Aire.

Several men had gathered on the bridge, and they were looking down into the water, some of them pointing at a dark shape that seemed to bob and twist in the current. As soon as I got my first
look at the scene, I knew that none of my skills would be of any use to the poor soul, whose coat had snagged on a tree root poking out from the river bank.

‘Did anyone see him fall?’ I asked.

They all shook their heads. I picked a couple of stout lads and led them down through the bushes to the river bank. With a little manoeuvring, they were able to lie on their bellies and reach
over the shallow edge to grab hold of an arm each. Slowly they raised the dripping body from the water.

When they had completed their task, a gasp arose from the crowd on the bridge. Though his white face was badly marked with cuts and bruises, there could be hardly a person present who
didn’t recognize Richard Ellerby, one of Sir Titus Salt’s chief wool buyers.

•

Saltaire, where the events of which I am about to speak occurred in the spring of 1873, was then a ‘model’ village, a mill workers’ Utopia of some four or five
thousand souls, built by Sir Titus Salt in the valley of the River Aire between Leeds and Bradford. The village, laid out in a simple grid system, still stands, looking much the same as it did
then, across the railway lines a little to the southwest of the colossal, six-storey woollen mill to which it owes its existence.

As there was no crime in Utopia, no police force was required, and we relied on constables from nearby townships in the unlikely event that any real unpleasantness or unrest should arise. There
was certainly no reason to suspect foul play in Richard Ellerby’s death, but legal procedures must be followed in all cases where the circumstances of death are not immediately apparent.

My name is Dr William Oulton, and I was then employed by the Saltaire hospital both as a physician and as a scientist, conducting research into the link between raw wool and anthrax. I also
acted as coroner; therefore, I took it as my responsibility to enquire into the facts of Richard Ellerby’s death.

In this case, I also had a personal interest, as the deceased was a close acquaintance of mine, and I had dined with him and his charming wife Caroline on a number of occasions. Richard and I
both belonged to the Saltaire Institute – Sir Titus’s enlightened alternative to the evils of public houses – and we often attended chamber-music concerts there together, played a
game of billiards or relaxed in the smoking room, where we had on occasion discussed the possible health problems associated with importing wool. I wouldn’t say I knew Richard
well
–
he was, in many ways, reserved and private in my company – but I knew him to be an honest and industrious man who believed wholeheartedly in Sir Titus’s vision.

My post-mortem examination the following day indicated only that Richard Ellerby had enough water in his lungs to support a verdict of death by drowning. Let me repeat:
there was no reason
whatsoever to suspect foul play
. People had fallen over the weir and died in this way before. Assault and murder were crimes that rarely crossed the minds of the denizens of Utopia. That the
back of Richard’s skull was fractured, and that his face and body were covered with scratches and bruises, could easily be explained by the tumble he took over the weir. It was May and the
thaw had created a spate of melt-water, which thundered down from its sources high in the Pennines with such force as easily to cause those injuries I witnessed on the body.

Of course, there
could
be another explanation, and that, perhaps, was why I was loath to let matters stand.

If you have imagined from my tone that I was less fully convinced of Saltaire’s standing as a latterday Utopia than some of my contemporaries, then you may compliment yourself on your
sensitivity to the nuances of the English language. As I look back on those days, though, I wonder if I am not allowing my present opinions to cloud the glass through which I peer at the past.
Perhaps a little. I do know that I certainly believed in Sir Titus’s absolute commitment to the idea, but I also think that even back then, after only thirty years on this earth, I had seen
far too much of human nature to believe in Utopias like Saltaire.

Besides, I had another quality that would not permit me to let things rest: if I were a cat, believe me, I would be dead by now, nine lives notwithstanding.

•

It was another fine morning when I left Benjamin in charge of the ward rounds and stepped out of the hospital on a matter that had been occupying my mind for the past two days.
The almshouses over the road made a pretty sight, set back behind their broad swathe of grass. A few pensioners sat on the benches smoking their pipes under trees bearing pink and white blossoms.
Men of ‘good moral character’, they benefited from Sir Titus’s largesse to the extent of free accommodation and a pension of seven shillings and six pence per week, but only as
long as they continued to show their ‘good moral character’. Charity, after all, is not for everyone, but only for those who merit it.

Lest you think I was a complete cynic at such an early age, I must admit that I found much to admire about Saltaire. Unlike the cramped, airless and filthy back-to-back slums of Bradford, where
I myself had seen ten or more people sharing a dark, dank cellar that flooded every time it rained, Saltaire was designed as an open and airy environment. The streets were all paved and well
drained, avoiding the filthy conditions that breed disease. Each house had its own outdoor lavatory, which was cleared regularly, again averting the possibility of sickness caused by the sharing of
such facilities. Sir Titus also insisted on special measures to reduce the output of smoke from the mill, so that we didn’t live under a pall of suffocating fumes, and our pretty sandstone
houses were not crusted over with a layer of grime. Still, there is a price to pay for everything, and in Saltaire it was the sense of constantly living out another man’s moral vision.