Border Crossing

ONE

They were walking along the river path, away from the city, and as far as they knew they were alone.

They’d woken that morning to a curious stillness. Clouds sagged over the river, and there was mist like a sweat over the mud flats. The river had shrunk to its central channel, and seagulls skimmed low over the water. The colour was bleached out of houses and gardens and the clothes of the few passers-by.

They’d spent the morning indoors, picking away at their intractable problems, but then, just before lunch, Lauren had announced that she had to get out. They might have done better to drive to the coast, but instead they donned raincoats and boots and set off to walk along the river path.

They lived on the edge of what had once been a thriving area of docks, quays and warehouses, now derelict and awaiting demolition. Squatters had moved into some of the buildings. Others had suffered accidental or convenient fires, and were surrounded by barbed-wire fences, with pictures of Alsatians and notices saying DANGER, KEEP OUT.

Tom kept his eyes down, hearing Lauren’s voice go on and on, as soft and insistent as the tides that, slapping against crumbling stone and rotting wood, worked bits of Newcastle loose. Keep talking, he said to clients who came to him for help in saving their marriages, or – rather more often – for permission to give up on them altogether. Now, faced with the breakdown of his own, he thought, Shut up, Lauren. Please, please, please shut up.

Bits of blue plastic, half-bricks, a seagull’s torn-off wing. Tom’s gaze was restricted to a few feet of pocked and pitted ground into which his feet intruded rhythmically. All other boundaries were gone. Though he did not raise his head to search for them, he was aware of their absence: the bridge, the opposite bank, the warehouses with the peeled and blistered names of those who had once owned them. All gone.

A gull, bigger and darker than the rest, flew over, and he raised his eyes to follow it. Perhaps this focus on the bird’s flight explained why, in later years, when he looked back on that day, he remembered what he couldn’t possibly have seen: a gull’s eye view of the path. A man and a woman struggling along; the man striding ahead, eager to escape, hands thrust deep into the pockets of a black coat; the woman, fair-haired, wearing a beige coat that faded into the gravel, and talking, always talking. Though the red lips move, no sound comes out. He denies her his attention in memory, as he did in life. The perspective lengthens to include the whole scene, right up to the mist-shrouded warehouses that rise above them like cliffs, and now a third figure appears, coming out from between the derelict buildings.

He stops; looks towards the river, or rather at a small jetty that runs across the mud into the deep water, and starts to stride towards it. And at this moment, seeing in memory what in life he did not see, Tom freezes the frame.

In reality, it was Lauren who first noticed the young man. ‘Look,’ she said, touching Tom’s arm.

They stood and watched him, grateful to be distracted from their own problems, to be mildly interested, mildly puzzled by the behaviour of another human being, for there was an oddity about this boy that they both recognized seconds before he did anything odd. His trainers bit into the gravel – the only sound except for their own breathing – and then he was slipping and slithering over the rotted timbers of the jetty. He stood, poised, at the end, a black shape smudged with mist. They watched him drop his coat, scrape off his trainers, tug the sweatshirt over his head.

‘What’s he doing?’ Lauren said. ‘He can’t be going to swim.’

People did swim here: in summer you saw boys diving from the end of the jetty, but surely nobody would want to swim on a raw, murky day like this. He seemed to be shaking pills into the palm of his hand and cramming them into his mouth. He threw the bottle away, far out into the water, but his body got there first. A low, powerful dive that raised barely a splash. Almost immediately his head appeared, bobbing, as he was swept further from the bank.

Already Tom was running, crunching broken glass, dodging half-bricks, jumping piles of rubble. Once he lost his balance and almost fell, but immediately was up again and running, the slimy wood of the jetty treacherous beneath his feet.

At the end, fumbling with buttons, he looked down into the dead water, and thought, Shit. And realized this is what people do think who meet sudden, violent deaths. Shit. This is it. Oh bugger. Lauren came panting up and said nothing, not ‘Don’t’ or ‘Be careful’ or anything like that, and he was grateful. ‘It’s September,’ he said, answering one of the things she might have said, meaning the water wouldn’t be lethally cold.

A second later, the water enclosed him in a coffin of ice. His mind contracted in fear, became a wordless pinprick of consciousness, as he fought the river that pushed him under, tossed him about, slapped him to and fro across the face, like an interrogator softening up his victim.

After the first few floundering strokes, he began to get used to the cold. At any rate he could get no colder. Looking around for the dark head, he realized he couldn’t see it, and thought, Good, because now he could get out, phone the police, let them dredge the river or wait for the body to float. But then he saw the boy, drifting slowly with the current, thirty or forty feet away.

Water slopped into his mouth, skinning his throat, and then the current pushed him under. Bubbles of released breath trickled past his eyes. He kicked his way to the surface and came up closer to the boy. Purple face hidden by a fall of black hair. The current threatened to sweep Tom past, and he panicked, scrabbling at the water like a drowning dog. Then he let himself sink, and dimly, through the thick brown light, he saw the boy, hanging suspended, a dribble of bubbles escaping from his gaping mouth.

Tom grasped him by the arms and propelled him to the surface, gasping for air as they broke through and floated, the sky rocking around their drifting heads. Deep breaths. The river seemed to squeeze his chest tight. He didn’t care, now, whether the boy was alive or dead. The determination to get him out had become as mindless as a dog’s retrieving of a stick. The current made the turn difficult, but then he saw Lauren running along the path, and, towing the boy along, his eyes full of sky and river water, he struck out towards the bank. He made slow progress at first, then, miraculously, felt the tug of another current pulling them in to land. They floated, at last, into a fetid backwater, amongst a scum of rubbish the tide had cast up. A shopping trolley, knotted condoms, tinfoil trays, plastic bottles.

Tom pushed his face through it, to reach the edge of the mud. Thick, black, oily, stinking mud, not the inert stuff you encounter in country lanes and scrape off your boots at the end of the day, but a sucking quagmire, God knows how many feet deep. Lauren reached out to him.

‘Don’t come in,’ he shouted.

A tree had been washed up on to the bank, and she clung to that, reaching out her hand. He began to inch his way towards her, keeping his weight evenly spread, dragging the boy behind him. The mud clutched at his elbows and knees. Lauren’s spread fingers seemed a mile away, and she wouldn’t have the strength to pull them out even if he managed to reach her. The stench and taste of the mud filled his nose and mouth. He was aware of not wanting to die and, quite specifically, of not wanting to die like this. Heart shaking his chest, he squirmed forward, and found the new ground firmer than he’d thought. Lauren, still clinging to the dead tree, had waded in to her knees. His outstretched fingers closed over hers, and slipped. ‘Get my sleeve,’ she said. He knew he should be keeping the boy’s mouth clear, but there was no way he could do that and drag him out at the same time. Another few inches and he was able to grab Lauren’s coat. The effort exhausted him and he lay still, panting for a while, then started to crawl across her until his hand closed round a branch of the tree. He tested it, found it locked fast in a groyne of the bank, and slowly stood up, hauling the boy behind him out of the mud, which surrendered him with a belch of protest. Tom lay gasping, head and shoulders on the grass, feet trailing in the slime. Then he told himself the job wasn’t done, and turned to look at the boy.

Black and glistening, he lay there, a creature formed, apparently, of mud. Lauren knelt beside him, supporting his head, while Tom raked an index finger round the inside of his mouth, checking that the airways were clear. Then he pressed two fingers against the slimy neck, but his hands were so numb with cold that he couldn’t feel anything. He shifted his hold, dug deeper.

‘Yes?’ Lauren said.

‘No.’

‘Shit.’

Immediately she placed her hands one on top of the other on the boy’s breastbone, and pressed down. Tom tilted the head back and – aware of a momentary frisson of distaste that surprised him – pinched the nose, fastened his mouth over the flaccid lips and blew. Through the spread fingers of his left hand he felt the ribcage rise, then he came up for breath, counted, went down again. The boy’s mouth jerked under his, as Lauren pressed again. He heard her grunt with effort. This time when he came up he looked at her. Her eyes were glazed, inward-looking. Like labour, Tom thought, the irony as sour as the mud on his tongue. The boy looked like a baby: purple face, wet hair, that drowned look of the newborn, cast up on to its mother’s suddenly creased and spongy belly. Distracted by thoughts and memories, Tom breathed too hard, detected from a struggle in the boy’s chest that the rhythm had been lost, checked himself, counted, went down again. His breath snagged in the boy’s throat. He pressed his fingers to the carotid again and thought he detected a flutter. ‘Got him.’

They waited, Lauren’s hands still clasped one on top of the other, ready to start again. One breath, then another. And another. No way of telling whether the colour was coming back. His face was masked by mud.

‘All right,’ Lauren said. ‘Let’s get him over.’

Together they heaved him into the recovery position. She stood up, brushing pebbles from her knees, and looked up and down the path, but the damp fog was enough to keep people indoors and there was nobody to send for help.

‘It’s probably quicker for me to run back to the house,’ she said.

‘No, I’ll go.’

‘I think you’d better stay where you are.’

Something in her voice startled him. He looked down and realized he was wearing a red glove. The blood had dried on his fingers, which felt tight and sticky. He had no memory of injuring himself, and felt no pain, but he must have seemed shaky, because Lauren said, ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’

‘Yes, go on.’

He watched her set off down the road, a tall, pale, blonde figure fading rapidly into the mist, which had thickened and lay over everything, smelling metallic, iron perhaps, unless that was the blood on his hand. The boy’s eyes were closed. Tom took his pulse, and then, hobbling over the sharp gravel, retraced his steps to the end of the jetty, and picked up his coat and the little heap of the boy’s clothes. Then he stood still for a moment, looking out over the water. The mud smelt sharp and strong. He was conscious of his skin chafing against his wet clothes, and he was filled with joy.

The elation drained away as he walked back, tripping over dangling sleeves like a honeymooner in an old-fashioned farce. The cut on his arm had begun to ache. He knelt down beside the boy, wrapped the heavier of the coats round him, then huddled inside the other, muttering under his breath as he rocked to and fro: C’mon, Lauren. C’mon. He was too cold to think or feel anything.

After a few minutes he heard an engine, then voices. He looked up to see two black-clad paramedics negotiating a stretcher down the crumbling steps. They worked their way along the bank, elbowing branches of willow aside. Thank God, he could sign off now, have a hot bath, a whisky, two whiskies, climb back inside his own life.

A stocky woman with strongly marked eyebrows reached him first, followed by a bull-necked man with a ginger moustache, still breathless from the struggle to get the stretcher down the steps.

‘My God,’ the woman said, kneeling down. ‘Wasn’t your Saturday morning, was it, son?’

They worked quickly. Within minutes they’d removed the coat, checked his pulse and breathing, wrapped blankets round him, established that neither Tom nor Lauren knew who he was.

‘We were just going for a walk,’ Lauren said.

‘Lucky for him you were.’

Gently, they transferred him to the stretcher. The small procession filed along the bank. The boy’s head was hidden now, wrapped in the folds of a red blanket: a solitary splash of colour against the waste of black mud. When they reached the steps, Tom pushed his way forward and helped discreetly with the lifting. The mud on the boy’s face had begun to dry and crack, like a ritual mask or the worst case of psoriasis you could imagine.

The ambulance was parked a short way from the steps. They trudged over the gravel and set him down briefly on the ground while they opened the doors. At the last moment, just as they were preparing to slot the stretcher in, the boy stirred and groaned.

‘You’ll be all right,’ Tom said, touching his shoulder, but there was no sign that he’d heard.

‘You want to get that cut looked at,’ the woman said, gesturing at Tom’s arm. ‘We could take you in now, you know, if you liked.’

‘No, it’s all right, thanks. I’ll see my own doctor.’

‘Where are you taking him?’ Lauren asked.

‘The General.’

The engine was running. Tom bundled the boy’s clothes together and handed them up to the woman. The doors slammed shut. Tom and Lauren stood and watched as the ambulance jolted along the path, weaving from side to side to avoid the worst of the potholes, and then, reaching smooth tarmac, accelerated, and disappeared round a bend in the road.

TWO

After the ambulance had gone, Tom went back to the jetty and, kneeling at the far end, managed to scoop up enough water to wash off the worst of the mud. A smell came off the river: something cold, fishy and rotten – and then he realized it was coming, not only from the water, but from his clothes, his skin, his hair.

They didn’t speak at all on the way back. He hadn’t bothered to put his trainers on and the pebbles hurt his feet. As soon as they were in the house, Lauren took him upstairs to have a look at the cut. ‘It’s not too bad,’ she said, peering down at it.

‘They always look worse than they are,’ he said, impatient to have it over.

She washed his arm with a sterile solution, till the sides of the small wound gaped white, then pressed the edges together and applied a clear, waterproof dressing. She didn’t speak as she worked and was breathing audibly, as children do when they concentrate. A dim memory of playing doctors and nurses with his slightly older girl cousins came back to him. He’d always been the patient, he remembered, though in those far-off games it had never been his arm that required attention. There was something erotic in Lauren’s intent, impersonal gaze, and he put his free hand on her hip.

‘Hot bath,’ Lauren said, closing the lid of the first-aid box. ‘Do you a lot more good than whisky.’

Resigned, he stripped off his wet clothes. She was bending over the bath, stirring the water, her face slick with steam. ‘Do you think he’ll be all right?’

‘Depends what he took. Prozac, yes. Paracetamol, no.’

‘Do you think we should ring?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘We did what we could. It’s somebody else’s problem now.’

‘I’ll put these into wash,’ she said, picking up his clothes.

He could see she was disappointed. She’d wanted to talk, to polish the shared-but-different experience until it acquired an even patina, became theirs, rather than his and hers. But he was used to switching off, to living his life in separate compartments. He’d learnt early, in his first few months of practice, that those who take the misery home with them burn out and end up no use to anybody. He’d learnt to value detachment: the clinician’s splinter of ice in the heart. Only much later had he learnt to distrust it too – its capacity to grow and take over the personality. Splinter of ice? He’d had colleagues who could have sunk the Titanic.

Gingerly, he lowered his aching shoulders into the water. Looking along the length of his body, he saw his cock, slightly engorged from the heat, gleaming and bobbing in the foam like a cylindrical fish. Well, hello, there, he thought, slipping into the mid-Atlantic drawl he used to distance pain.

‘Are you any warmer?’ Lauren asked, coming back with an armful of towels.

‘Bit. Why don’t you get in? You must be frozen.’

Dropping her clothes in a heap near the door, she climbed into the bath behind him, and lowered herself cautiously into the water. ‘Ouch.’

‘Sorry.’ He kept forgetting his ‘hot bath’ was Lauren’s idea of being boiled alive. ‘Would you like more cold?’

‘No, it’s all right. I’m in now.’

Her breath came in little explosive bursts against his back. He could feel her breasts pressing against his shoulder blades, and then her hand crept round, burrowing between his legs until she found, and cradled, his balls.

‘Not fair,’ he said. ‘I can’t reach anything.’

Groping under his arm, he found a nipple, and felt her laughter vibrate in his chest. A flash memory of cold mud sucking him in. ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

They dried each other, then he chased her upstairs, and they fell on to the bed, where they lay, gasping for breath. Her eye, an inch away from his, was a grey fish caught in a mesh of lines. For the first time in months he didn’t know or care where she was in her cycle. This had nothing to do with ovulation or getting her pregnant, and not much to do, if he were honest, with loving her. Everything to do with the moment when he’d seen the boy’s body hang suspended, like a specimen in a jar of formaldehyde, an umbilical cord of silver bubbles linking his slack mouth to the air. He saw him now. The boundaries of flesh and bone seemed to vanish. He was staring at his own death.

Afterwards they lay side by side, a medieval knight and lady on a tomb.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He knew she hadn’t come.

‘It’s all right.’

He felt the bed shaking and knew she’d started to cry. ‘Lauren

She sat up. ‘Do you realize you risked your life back there for a complete fucking stranger?’

If this had been said with a scintilla of admiration, he’d have felt obliged to pooh-pooh the idea, to point out that he swam further than that every other day of his life, but her tone was aggressive, and he matched it. ‘There was no choice.’

A stubborn silence.

‘If I wasn’t a strong swimmer, I wouldn’t have gone in. But I am. And, anyway, I’m all right.’

She wasn’t angry with him for diving into the river. She was angry about the botched sex, and about his failure to get her pregnant. ‘Let’s have a drink, shall we?’

He didn’t expect her to follow him downstairs, and she didn’t. If only getting pregnant hadn’t become such an obsession. She reminded him of one of those female fish that, in times of environmental hardship, dispense with the male sex altogether, and carry his gonads in a purse on their sides. Well, sod that, he thought, glugging whisky. He was fed up to the back teeth with being a walking, talking sperm bank.

His mother (not that she knew the details, thank God!) blamed their difficulties on the new pattern of their lives. For the past year Lauren had been working in London, teaching at St Margaret’s School of Art, coming home only at weekends. ‘Husband and wife should stick together,’ his mother had said, sniffing over the tea towel she was using to polish a glass. ‘You and Dad were apart when he was in the army.’ ‘And a fat lot of good it did us,’ she flashed back at him.

But marriage was different now, he told her. Women didn’t expect to sacrifice their careers to their husbands.

‘Marriage doesn’t change as much as you think,’ she said, with another sniff. ‘You’d be better off sticking together.’

At the time he’d dismissed her as old-fashioned. Now it didn’t seem as simple as that. In his bleaker moments, he wondered whether he and Lauren hadn’t separated already, without even letting themselves know they were doing it. He could have gone to London with her. He was on sabbatical at the moment, writing up a three-year research project, and books can be written anywhere. There would have been nothing to stop him e-mailing chapters to his colleagues for comment, and if he had needed a face-to-face meeting he could have come back for a few days, or overnight. He hadn’t gone because he wanted to stay here. And since then, month by month, the sex had deteriorated. He blamed thermometers, calendars and pots of urine, and okay, he did find them a total turn-off, but there was something else he wasn’t admitting. Perhaps he’d just voted with … Well. Not with his feet.

‘Why?’ Lauren asked, after one of his not infrequent failures.

‘I don’t know.’

But she was having no truck with that. He was a psychologist, for Christ’s sake. It was his job to know.

He’d downed one tumbler of whisky, and was starting on the next, when Lauren came into the kitchen, and wrapped her arms around him. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘What you did was very brave and I’m sorry.’

‘What for?’

‘For hating you for doing it.’

Suddenly they were both laughing, and, for a few moments, it was all right.

It was late evening before he remembered the post. He’d left the house yesterday in a tremendous hurry because he’d thought he was going to be late for Lauren’s train, and didn’t want to leave her stranded at the station. The postman had met him a few yards from the front door and handed him the mail. Without bothering to glance at it, he’d shoved it into his coat pocket, and then, absorbed in discussing the difficulties of the marriage, he’d forgotten all about it.

Lauren was loading the dishwasher. ‘Where did you put my coat, darling?’ he called downstairs.

‘Utility room.’

As soon as he lifted it off the peg, he knew. River mud and, mixed in with that, a whiff of stale tobacco. He thrust his hand into the right pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. It was immediately obvious what had happened. He’d wrapped his own coat round the boy, because it was heavier, and that was the one he’d handed into the ambulance. He couldn’t put off trying to get it back, because there were spare keys in the pocket, and oh God, yes, his address on the envelopes. Admittedly, the boy wasn’t in much of a state to contemplate burglary, but you didn’t know. You didn’t know who or what he was. He could be a drug addict desperate for cash.

‘I seem to’ve got the wrong coat, darling. I’ll have to go to the hospital.’

‘Can’t it wait?’

‘Well, no, not really. There were letters in it.’ He didn’t want to alarm her by mentioning the keys.

It was only a short drive to the General, but then he had to spend fifteen minutes trying to find somewhere to park. Visiting hour. Cars crammed bumper to bumper in every legitimate, and illegitimate, space.

The casualty department was packed. On a bench near the door a boy with a torn ear and blood trickling down his neck stared around with a kind of blank belligerence. A short distance away a young boy, his voice shooting up into registers he never intended, was trying to calm down a middle-aged woman. ‘Howay, Mam. Don’t let him see you upset.’ ‘Upset? I’ll give him bloody upset …’ On a trolley near by, an old man, with a miner’s blue scars on the backs of his hands, gasped his life away.

‘Ward Eighteen,’ a nurse said, raising her head, briefly, between disasters.

He walked the length of the corridor to Ward Eighteen and stopped by the nurses’ station. An old man in a wheelchair, at the entrance to one of the wards, grabbed a nurse’s behind as she walked past. ‘Now then, Jimmy,’ she said. ‘You be a good lad now.’ The old man cackled in demented glee, and pawed another nurse. They’ll trank the life out of you, old son, Tom thought, if you don’t behave.

A tall, rangy woman with strands of ultra-fine hair escaping from a knot on the top of her head, glasses dangling from a gold chain, and a general air of equine goodwill squeaked up to him on rubber-soled shoes. ‘Tom. Hello!’

Mary Peters. He couldn’t have wished for anyone better. ‘Hello, Mary. I’m looking for an attempted suicide you had brought in this morning. Quite a young lad.’

She twinkled at him. ‘Oh yes, I know. One of yours?’

‘No, this isn’t a professional visit, actually.’ He felt embarrassed. ‘I’m the one who fished him out. Only in the process he ended up with my coat. And I got his.’

‘Yes, we found your coat. And the letters. You’re lucky,’ she said, leading the way down the corridor. ‘The nurse read the name and address on the envelopes and assumed it was his name. You were very nearly admitted.’ She stopped in front of a door. ‘Fortunately he came round in time. His name’s Ian Wilkinson.’ She tapped her throat. ‘And he won’t feel like talking.’

‘What did he take?’

‘Temazepam. About ten, he thinks.’

The young man lying in the bed stared at Tom, the colour draining from his face. Tom was puzzled by the reaction, and by his own sense that he knew this boy. Of course he dealt with hundreds of disturbed young people in the course of a year … Still, he generally remembered them. He wasn’t good with faces, but he remembered names. Ian Wilkinson. It meant nothing.

‘This is Dr Seymour,’ Mary said. ‘Who rescued you. I don’t suppose you …’ Her voice died away, as she registered the atmosphere in the room. ‘Well,’ she said, after a slight pause. ‘I’ll leave you to it, then.’ At the door she turned. ‘Coat in the locker, Tom, when you’re ready.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, shifting his gaze in time to see the door close.

The boy was hauling himself up the bed as if his first impulse were to escape. His colour hadn’t returned. ‘You don’t recognize me, do you?’ he said. ‘I suppose I ought to find that reassuring.’

‘You were covered in mud.’

‘No, I mean before.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘When I was ten. Do you remember, you –’

Oh my God, Tom thought. He sat down heavily on the chair beside the bed. ‘Danny Miller.’

‘That’s right.’

Saying the name changed his perception of the face. Now, second by second, under the sharp bones and planes of the adult face, a child’s rounded, pre-pubescent features rose to the surface, and broke through, like a long-submerged body. ‘I’m sorry,’ Tom said. ‘I didn’t even know you were out.’

‘It was kept pretty quiet, as you can imagine. And …’ He nodded towards the door.

‘Yes, of course. New name.’

‘Ian was the governor’s second name. Wilkinson was the chaplain’s mother’s maiden name.’ His voice was expressionless.

‘How long have you been out?’

‘Ten months.’

‘I won’t ask how it’s going.’

Danny – he couldn’t think of him as Ian – looked startled for a moment, then burst out laughing. A second later he was pressing his throat. ‘Tube.’

‘It’ll be sore for a few days.’

When Danny could speak again, he said, ‘What do you reckon the chances are of this happening?’

‘Of our meeting like this? A million to one.’

‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?’

It certainly did. Tom was already wondering whether this was genuine coincidence, or a dramatic gesture gone badly, almost fatally, wrong. Dramatic gestures of that kind are not uncommon, and they very frequently do go wrong, because the people making them usually have spectacularly flawed judgement. But to believe the meeting had been intended, he’d have to believe that Danny, for some undisclosed reason, had located him, and then, instead of ringing the doorbell, had decided to introduce himself by jumping into the river. It made no sense.

‘You know, when something like this happens,’ Danny said, ‘it makes you realize things aren’t just random. There is a purpose.’

Yes, possibly, Tom thought. But whose? ‘It doesn’t make me think that.’

‘You know the chaplain I just mentioned? He used to say coincidence is the crack in human affairs that lets God or the Devil in.’

had

Walking across the car park, he felt dazed, and stopped for a moment under the tarnished trees. He was remembering another car park, in June, in a heat wave. Arriving at the remand centre, where Danny was being held, twenty minutes before the time of his appointment, he’d chosen to wait outside, rather than in some dreary room inside the prison. The sun beat down and the car quickly became an oven. He left the doors open, and walked up and down the perimeter fence, listening to a Test Match on the radio. He had no need to familiarize himself with the notes spilling out of the files on the back seat. He knew them almost off by heart, and, in a sense, his task now was to forget them. The main pitfall in assessing the mental state of an offender is to produce a report that fits the crime, rather than the symptoms of the particular individual who is alleged to have committed it.

Sweat from the long journey evaporated from his armpits and groin. He was surrounded by beds of red-hot pokers, hundreds of them, coral-pink and gold spires proudly erect or drooping, at detumescent angles, over the path. A ripple of decorous applause came from the car radio. His mind filled with images from the path-lab photographs – Lizzie Parks’s body laid out on the slab. It seemed incredible that a child should have done that. He went on pacing, up and down, up and down, and the red-hot pokers seemed to breathe in his horror and incredulity, and exhale them as heat and dust.

And here Danny was, thirteen years later, grown up, out of prison, living under a false identity supplied by the Home Office and the police. He couldn’t tell Lauren. Any more than Martha Pitt had been able to tell him, though they were colleagues on the Youth Violence Project and saw each other at least once a week. She’d been supervising Danny for months. She knew Tom had been involved in his trial, but she hadn’t once mentioned him. Well, good for Martha. That was the degree of secrecy required.

He walked across to his car, deactivated the alarm and opened the door. ‘Coincidence is the crack in human affairs that lets God or the Devil in.’ Typical God-bothering rubbish, he thought, though his own paranoid suspicion that Danny had plotted the meeting was no more rational. The fact is, that when confronted by a number of disturbing events, the human mind insists on finding a pattern. We can’t wait to thread the black beads on to a single string. But some events are, simply, random.

Perhaps. Adjusting the mirror, he caught his own eye in the glass, and stared back at himself, alert, sceptical, unconsoled.

Contents

Pat Barker

BORDER CROSSING

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THE BEGINNING

PENGUIN BOOKS

BORDER CROSSING

ONE

TWO