The Closed Circle (30 page)

So why did she suddenly feel sick to the stomach?

Perhaps that was precisely the problem. Five thousand would have been an unimaginable figure. It would have seemed meaningless. Whereas, there was something obscenely specific and graspable about the number one hundred and forty-six. As Claire dropped her towel on the scorching white sand at the water's edge, and waded out to the point where the waves would break against her, she thought about the one hundred and forty-six families who would be receiving that news shortly after Christmas. Doubtless Michael was right to have done what he did. And it was thoughtful of him, too, to wait until Christmas was over before telling them. He wasn't a bad man, she could see that: but she couldn't love him, either. She couldn't love the man who made those decisions and took satisfaction in them. Perhaps somebody else could. She hoped so.

The warm water foamed around her thighs, her waist. She took a breath and dived into a breaking wave. The shock of it stung her face, set her ears ringing, and when she surfaced a few seconds later the sunshine all around her was almost too much to bear. She shielded her eyes against the dazzle and glimmer, then dived again, repeatedly, hurling herself into each oncoming wave, and every time she dived, it was like a slap in the face, a wake-up call from an unforgiving but well-intentioned friend.

Soon afterwards, she walked back to the house. Thankfully, Michael was nowhere to be found. She packed her bag and left a simple note, saying “Thanks for all the good times, but better make that 147.” Then asked the ever-dependable George to drive her to the airport.

Claire finished her coffee, gave up on the hot chocolate, and ran back to the Modern Records Centre with her raincoat pulled up over her head. The rain was starting to ease off anyway.

The coffee had revived her. She knew that she was strong enough to look through the folders now, and was ready for anything that they might reveal. (The only thing that scared her, in fact, was the thought that they might reveal nothing.) Reflecting on the holiday had only made her understand, with more clarity than ever before, who she was and why she had come here. This rain, these grey English skies, this scurrying, preoccupied mass of dour and dampened humanity: these were the things that defined her. If her life for the last twenty-eight years had been leading anywhere meaningful at all, it was here: to this campus, and this library. Anything else, she knew now, was an irrelevance. She would never be able to move on, until she had confronted whatever it was that this place was now ready to disclose to her.

She began reading.

Whatever else she had been expecting from Bill Anderton's papers, she had never thought that they would be so involving. She had assumed they would be dry and guarded, written only so as to preserve the tersest and most official of records. Instead, she found a whole world, and a whole era, summoned up for her.

As Convenor of the Works Committee, it seemed that Bill had been something more than just the spokesman for his workforce. He had been agony aunt, political agitator, resolver of disputes and keeper of secrets. People had written to him on almost every conceivable subject: from a fellow shop steward in the forging factory, who had complained that his men's pay was being docked for time spent washing down in the showers after their shift (a complaint that had ended in a walk-out), to a distraught father who had penned a closely written, five-page letter claiming that his daughter was being tortured and held prisoner by nuns at a convent in Gloucestershire. It was not clear whether Bill had replied to all of these letters. Certainly he had replied to many of them, and the work must have kept him extremely busy. Claire had never thought of the 1970s as being a distant era, but she found that the tone and the discourse of the correspondence now seemed touchingly archaic. She was struck by Bill's unironic use of the word “Brother” when writing to the other union members, and by the way he signed off each letter with “Yours fraternally.” She was struck, too, by how much of his paperwork related to the National Front, and to the ways in which various elements from the far right had attempted to infiltrate the Longbridge factory in those days. There was a letter frostily refusing a member of the National Front permission to use union facilities for one of their meetings; a copy of an almost illiterate message inviting workers (incredibly, it seemed to Claire) to a party in Birmingham celebrating Hitler's birthday on April 20th, 1974; and a statement from the Works Committee which condemned

. . . the outrages that occurred in Birmingham on Thursday night the 21st November 1974. We urge our members to exercise restraint, and not to allow the instigators of these acts to create divisions among working people. The most positive manner to help and express our sympathies is to contribute to a massive collection in this factory, and not to participate in demonstrations called by outside organizations.

But where was Miriam in all of this?

Claire did not imagine that she would find any love letters. There would be nothing as obvious as that, surely: personal documents would have been sifted out by the archivist, she supposed, and discreetly returned to the Anderton family. If there was to be any direct reference to her sister, the likelihood was that it came in the folder marked “Charity Fund Committee.” Bill had been the Chairman of this committee, and Miriam had been its secretary. That was how they had met in the first place, she seemed to remember. But she had not opened this folder yet. She had placed it carefully to one side, intending to leave it to last. She had been determined to go through this material in sequence, patiently.

But that resolve did not last for very long. The Charity Committee folder was the second that she opened, after only twenty minutes.

The papers here were not arranged chronologically. At the top of the pile was a thick sheaf of legal documents relating to one Victor Gibbs, who appeared to have been the treasurer of the committee, and who had been caught out by Bill in the act of forging cheques and embezzling funds. He had been dismissed from the company, according to Bill's notes, in February 1975, although no criminal proceedings had been brought against him.

Claire recognized this name; or thought that she did. Hadn't Miriam once referred, in one of her diaries, to somebody called “Vile Victor?” It must be the same person. She tried to remember what she had written about him, but nothing surfaced. Why had she called him “Vile”? His forging and embezzling didn't imply an especially attractive personality, of course: but was it something more than that? Had he done something to Miriam— victimized her in some way—to make her write about him with such repugnance?

The minutes of the Committee followed next, at considerable length. The chief interest of these, for Claire, lay in the fact that her sister must have typed them. Otherwise, they were not especially revealing. None of the names of the other committee members was female, she noticed. Women were still barely getting a look-in, in those days. Claire tried to imagine what the atmosphere must have been like in the committee room, on those wintry weekday evenings. She pictured cigarette smoke, curling in the light of a naked sixty-watt bulb or fluorescent tube. A group of men sitting around the table, the sweat and grime of a nine-hour shift at the factory still thick upon their bodies. Miriam, sitting next to Bill, scribbling everything down in her haphazard Pitman shorthand. They would all have been looking at her. She had been beautiful. She had always found it easy to attract men, and had always enjoyed the power she exerted over them. What a focus of rapt, furtive attention she would have been! Had Victor Gibbs been one of that circle, resentfully captivated, unable to take his eyes off her, and had she made it clear that she wasn't interested? Was that the cause of the animosity between them?

The next document Claire found did not answer that question. But it gave her such a shock that, after her first glance at it, she pushed back her seat with a crash that shattered the silence of the library, and rushed outside to stand on the steps for a few minutes, gasping for breath, unmindful of the rain that drizzled thinly on to her hair and began to trickle down her neck in tiny streams.

It was a letter from Victor Gibbs to Bill Anderton. A letter about Miriam. But it wasn't the content of the letter that had shocked her. It wasn't what it said. It was the way it had been typed.

Claire thought about photocopying the letter; but she didn't want to have a photocopy. She wanted to have the letter itself. So she stole it. She had no scruple about this at all. If it righfully belonged to anyone, it belonged to her. She folded it and placed it in her handbag and carried it out of the library without anybody noticing. She knew that it was the right thing to do.

When she arrived home that afternoon, she laid the letter out on the kitchen table and read it again. These were the words that Victor Gibbs had typed to Bill Anderton nearly three decades ago:

Dear Brother Anderton,

I am writing to complain to you about the work of Miss Newman in her capacity as Charity Committee Secretary.

Miss Newman is not a good Secretary. She does not perform her duties well.

There is a lack of attention on the part of Miss Newman. At meetings of the Charity Committee, you can often see her attention wandering. I sometimes think she has other things on her mind than performing her duties as Secretary. I would prefer not to say what these other things might be.

I have made many important remarks, and addressed many observations, which have not been recorded in the minutes of the Charity Committee, due to Miss Newman. This is true of other Committee Members, but especially of me. I think she is discharging her duties with total inefficiency.

I draw this matter to your urgent attention, Brother Anderton, and personally suggest that Miss Newman be removed as Secretary of the Charity Committee forthwith. Whether or not she continues in the Design Typing Pool is of course at the firm's discretion. But I do not think she is a good typist either.

Yours fraternally,
Victor Gibbs.

After reading it one more time, Claire ran upstairs, and unlocked the desk in the spare bedroom where she kept all her most precious souvenirs of Miriam. She took out the most precious of all—the letter her parents had received early in December, 1974, two weeks after her sister had disappeared—the last news they had ever heard of her—and ran back downstairs with it. She placed it on the kitchen table, next to the letter from Victor Gibbs. It said:

Dear Mum and Dad,

This letter is to tell you that I have left home and will not be coming back. I have found a man and I have gone to live with him and I am very happy. I am expecting his baby and will probably have it.

Please do not try to look for me.

Your loving daughter.

It was signed by Miriam herself—or so, until today, Claire had always believed. But hadn't Victor Gibbs proved himself to be an expert forger of signatures? She could only speculate about that, for now; and in the meantime, there was no need to speculate about the letters themselves. They both had the same typographical oddity—a defective letter “k” that fell slightly above the line. They must have been typed on the same typewriter.

What did this mean? That Miriam's final letter was a forgery? Or that she had still been alive, two weeks after she vanished, and had been with Victor Gibbs when she wrote it?

Either way, Claire was going to have to find him.

1

Benjamin's neighbour, Munir, was a vocal opponent of the war. The war hadn't started yet, but everybody talked as though it was inevitable, and you were either for it or against it. Actually, almost everybody seemed to be against it, except for the Americans, Tony Blair, most of his cabinet, most of his MPs, and the Conservatives. Everybody else thought that it was a disastrous idea, and could not understand why it was suddenly being talked about as if it was inevitable.

The only person who didn't seem to have a definite opinion about the war, either for or against, was Paul Trotter. This was ironic, because he was regularly being paid large sums of money, by several of the national newspapers, to express his opinion about it. The first of these pieces, headed “My Grave Doubts over War with Iraq,” had appeared in the
Guardian
in November. It was followed by similar pieces for the
Times,
the
Telegraph
and the
Independent,
all expressing further doubts, of equal gravity, over the moral justification for the war, its legality, and its political wisdom. These articles would find Paul wrestling with his conscience in language of the most anguished sort, while somehow managing to stop short of actually telling his readers the very thing that they wanted to know, viz., whether he thought that the war was a good idea or not. He was careful not to include any attacks on Tony Blair himself, or to portray him as anything other than a man of principle and a potentially fine war leader. It had also not gone unnoticed, by most commentators (including Doug Anderton) that on the two occasions so far when there had been a vote on this subject in the House of Commons, Paul had done the bidding of the party whips and voted with the government. And yet his doubts, it would seem, remained grave. The reading public was never allowed to forget this fact.

“Have you seen this?” said Munir, walking through the open doorway into Benjamin's flat one evening early in December. He waved a copy of that day's
Telegraph,
which had called Paul back for a repeat performance. “Your brother is sitting on the fence again. I don't know how he gets away with it. It's a joke.”

“I'm on the phone, Munir,” Benjamin said, covering the mouthpiece. “It's not a good time.”

“That's all right,” said Munir, sitting himself down on the sofa, the cheapest and most uncomfortable in the Ikea range. “I can wait.”

Benjamin sighed and walked through into his bedroom. He liked his neighbour and didn't want to antagonize him. A middle-aged Pakistani who worked as an informations officer for the City Council, Munir—like Benjamin—was single, and had got into the habit of coming upstairs from the ground floor flat most evenings to drink tea and to discuss politics, of which he was an avid follower. Sometimes the two of them would also sit and watch television together: Munir didn't own a set—claiming that British television was corrupting and decadent—which meant that he frequently had to come and watch Benjamin's for hours at a time. Theirs were the only flats in this small terraced house (where Benjamin had been living now for eight months) and the two men had come to value each other's company.

“Sorry about that, Susan,” Benjamin now murmured into the telephone, closing the bedroom door behind him.

“That's all right—I'd better go now anyway,” Susan said. “I haven't given the girls their bath yet and it's nearly eight. Thanks for listening, anyway, Ben. You must get sick of this sad old cow calling you every night.”

“You're not sad, you're not a cow, and
no way
are you old,” Benjamin insisted.

Susan laughed at the other end of the line. “Yeah, I know—it's just how your brother makes me feel, sometimes.”

“He's just busy, Susan. I know you've heard that before—from me and everybody else, probably—but I'm sure that's what it is.”

He hung up and went back into the living room.

“Hi, Munir. I was just going out, actually.”

“Oh. Oh well, never mind. I was just hoping for a little chat. Perhaps you wouldn't mind if I stayed and watched the news for half an hour?”

“No problem,” said Benjamin, scooping up his keys and wriggling into his winter coat. “Just don't go flicking channels. I know how easily shocked you are.”

This advice failed to elicit a smile. Munir didn't like being teased. Looking around for the remote control, he asked:

“Was that Susan on the telephone again?”

“Yes,” said Benjamin, buttoning his coat.

“That's a bad situation,” said Munir. “Your brother is neglecting her. She's going to have an affair if he's not careful.”

“I don't think she's got the time or the inclination, to be honest,” Benjamin answered. “Not with two little kids running around. All she wants is a bit of grown-up conversation every now and again.”

Munir shook his head disapprovingly and turned on the television. Within a few seconds he was absorbed in the recital of closing headlines on
Channel 4 News,
and might almost have forgotten that Benjamin was there. Benjamin smiled and made his way downstairs, out into the freezing streets of Moseley to wait for a 50A bus into town.

Philip was late, but Steve Richards was already waiting for Benjamin at The Glass and Bottle, a pint of lager on the table before him. It was the third time they had all met up since Steve and his family had moved back to Birmingham. The arrangement had quickly become formalized, and they now met on the second Thursday of every month. It was something they all looked forward to.

“I did something really stupid a couple of weeks ago,” Steve said, returning from the bar with a Guinness for Benjamin. “I saw Valerie again.”

“Valerie?” said Benjamin. “Wow. That's going back a bit, isn't it? How did you find her?”

“FriendsReunited, of course.”

They touched glasses, and Benjamin drank deeply of the black, creamy liquid.

“I don't know . . .” Steve began. “It was one of those things where you know you shouldn't be doing it, but you can't stop yourself. Each step seems innocent enough at the time, but it takes you further down the path. The worst thing, when I look back at it, is how many times I lied to Kate. Lied to her for no reason at all, really. Just think about it: I was upstairs on the computer one evening, looking at FriendsReunited, when I'd told her that I'd got lots of work to do—that was lie number one. Then I got an email from Val a couple of days later, and I was reading it when Kate came into the room, so I deleted it straight away and told her it was spam—lie number two. Then I told Kate I was going out for a meal with some of the new guys from work— lie number three. Then, when I got home, she was asking me questions about them, and I had to make everything up: their names, their life histories, all the things we were supposed to have talked about—lies number four to twenty-seven. And what was the point? Me and Valerie just sat in a pub for an hour and a half and told each other how happily married we were and how much we loved our partners. And for
that,
I had to deceive my wife? Crazy. Crazy. A complete waste of time.”

“You're not going to see her again?”

“I shouldn't think so.”

Benjamin sipped his Guinness, and thought about those secret meetings with Malvina which had started three years ago, and which had spelled the beginning of the end of his marriage. But he knew that Steve's situation was different.

“Look,” he said, “I wouldn't beat yourself up about this. I know what Valerie meant to you. She was the first one, wasn't she? Stuff like that never goes away, it never leaves you. So if you get the chance—or you can
give
yourself the chance—to revisit that place, and take a look at it, and realize that you don't belong there any more, no one's going to blame you for doing that. You need closure. Everybody needs closure. That's what it's all about, I reckon.”

“What about you and Cicely? Have you got closure on that one?”

Benjamin thought long and hard before answering. “Put it this way,” he said at last. “I don't think about it any more.”

“That's not quite the same thing.”

But Benjamin wasn't to be drawn any further on that subject. Instead, he started asking Steve about his move to Birmingham: how the family were settling into their new home, whether Kate was starting to feel comfortable yet in this unfamiliar city, whether the girls liked their new school. He asked how it felt to return to the city of his birth, and Steve said: “You know what, Ben? It feels so good to be back in Birmingham. That's all I can say. Don't ask me why, but it feels
so . . . damn . . . good.
” They touched glasses again, and Steve started telling him how sad it had been to leave behind that little outfit in Telford, whose bosses had given him so much leeway to pursue his research. But he didn't regret the decision. You had to move onwards and upwards. The firm he had now joined, Meniscus Plastics, had a large and thriving R&D department, with excellent lab facilities, housed in premises just outside Solihull. And it also had a new, dynamic CEO, appointed only last year, who promised to take the company on to even bigger and better things. All in all, the future had never looked brighter.

Philip arrived just after half past nine, straight off the London train, his face flushed with excitement. He had his briefcase with him, and insisted on sitting with it perched on his lap, as if the contents were unusually precious and he was afraid that somebody would steal it if he laid it on the floor.

“There was something I wanted to ask you, Steve,” he said, having downed most of his first pint of lager in one thirsty draught. “Do you still have that St. Christopher's medal? The one that Valerie gave you.”

Benjamin and Steve exchanged surprised, rather conspiratorial glances.

“We were talking about her before you arrived,” Benjamin explained. “We've been going back in time a bit this evening.”

“Sure, I've still got it,” said Steve. “Stashed away in a drawer somewhere. It's not the kind of thing you parade in front of your wife and kids. Why do you ask?”

“Because I've been thinking about what happened at school. When we all thought Culpepper must have pinched it, to put you off your stroke on sports day.”

“Well, he probably did. He was a nasty piece of work, wasn't he?”

The three of them drank in silence for a moment. Both Steve and Benjamin were waiting to see where this was leading. Eventually, Philip said:

“Do you remember what happened the year after that?”

“When do you mean?”

“When we were doing our A-levels.”

“Of course I do. The bastard drugged me. Made me drink something just before my physics exam.”

“That's right. We were all locked in a room together. Me, you . . . Doug . . . Anyone else that you can remember?”

Steve shook his head. “It was years ago, wasn't it? I can't even remember the names of half of those kids.” He made for his glass, but then paused in mid-sip. “Oh yeah—Sean was there, I remember that. Sean Harding.”

“Exactly.” Philip leaned forward. “Now think about this, Steve. Remember what happened. Culpepper found your medal in the lost property box, and we all crowded round to have a look at it. And we always assumed he'd done that on purpose, to create a diversion, so he could spike your drink. Right? But think about what happened
after
that.”

Steve's expression was blank. “No. It's gone.”

“Sean played one of his jokes. Remember? He got one of the little kids to throw a piece of paper through the window. You and Culpepper both thought it was the exam paper for that afternoon, and you had a fight over it. A real scuffle on the floor. And of course it wasn't. Sean had set up the whole thing, and while you were scrapping about it he just sat there, with this big grin on his face. Tapping away on the side of his tea cup, with—”

“With that
ring
of his! The signet ring. Yeah, I remember now.” But he didn't smile at the recollection of it. He had fallen out of love with Harding's mischief-making long before most of the other pupils at King William's. He had never really forgiven him for playing the part of a National Front spokesman, even as a joke. “What about it, anyway?”

“Well,” said Philip, “supposing
that
was the real diversion? Supposing Culpepper had nothing to do with it?”

“What—and Sean was the one who doped me up? Why would he want to do that?”

“OK.” Philip clicked open his briefcase, and took out a manila envelope, A4 size. He put it on the table between them. “I'm going to show you something now. It's to do with the CD you gave me.”

He took two black and white photographs out of the envelope, and pushed the first one forward for Steve's inspection—without revealing the second, which lay hidden beneath it.

“There's a magazine down in London that keeps tabs on the activities of the far right. When I was thinking of doing that book, they gave me a lot of help. Offered to let me have copies of all these pictures. I never took them up on it, but then Benjamin found this thing down in Dorset—did he tell you about that?”

Steve shook his head.

“Well, he can explain later . . . Anyway, it set me thinking. I thought I'd go down and have another look. That's where I've been today. Now: what do you make of this?”

The picture showed four skinheads, standing around a desk in some anonymous, sparsely furnished office, staring at the camera with dead eyes, as if they were challenging it to a fight. At the desk sat an overweight man in T-shirt and bomber jacket, leering cheesily and brandishing a pen.

“Who are these guys?” Steve asked.

“These are the four talented musicians in question. Unrepentant—the original line-up, now sadly defunct. And this is Andy Watson, one-time owner of the fine independent record label,
Albion Resurgens
—currently putting himself up for election as a BNP councillor, somewhere in the East End, I believe. The question is: who's the
sixth
man?”