At school, Anselm had met a Jesuit teacher who considered familiarity with the life and work of John Bunyan to be a valuable adjunct to the onset of adolescence. First, that exemplar, in his youth, had been haunted by demonic dreams; second, he’d suffered a strange sickness that had made him blaspheme atrociously and want to renounce the benefits of redemption. To counter these inclinations, so often manifest in the young, the amused Jesuit would read choice excerpts from Pilgrim’s Progress, the allegory of a burdened man, fleeing a burning city.
This warm memory touched Anselm because he was sitting on a bench near the author’s tomb in Bunhill Fields. At his side sat Mrs Dixon in a long overcoat of russet tweed. She wore sturdy shoes and thick socks. A paisley scarf had been tied around her head with a knot under the chin. She’d brought Anselm to this garden of peace without a word. Thousands of tombs stood crowded among the planes, oaks and limes. The light came to them through the rafters of these winter trees.
‘I had already decided to speak to you about my son,’ said Mrs Dixon finally.
Anselm presumed he would now learn why she hadn’t mentioned George’s name at their first meeting. A jitter of excitement made him impatient. Leave it to Anselm.
‘I told someone recently that Elizabeth’s last words to me were that she wouldn’t be coming any more. That wasn’t true.’ Mrs Dixon examined the backs of her hands. ‘Elizabeth said a lot more: that she’d found Graham; that the time of the lie was over.
For a second or so, Anselm didn’t understand what had been said. His mind lay with George Bradshaw, not Graham Riley When he clicked, it was as though he’d stepped out of a musty matinee into the chilling daylight. ‘Your son?’ he asked foolishly.
Mrs Dixon nodded. Her face became blank, as if all her emotions had been drained into ajar for safe-keeping. Decisively she said, ‘But that was not the lie.’ Mrs Irene Dixon spoke softly and resolutely ‘I wish I’d stayed in Lancashire, but I went south, to start over. All that I knew had changed, because Graham’s father died in the pit, under thirty tons of coal and rock.’
Mother and child came to London, encouraged by an aunt -a seamstress – who had a house with rooms to spare, and a business with more work than she could handle. These were hard times because Mrs Dixon was a widow at barely twenty. But then she met Walter, a big, handsome man with responsibility and a house of his own in Dagenham. He was the manager of a warehouse in Bow; he hired and fired. He ruled the roost. After courting for a year, they were married, and by the end of the second year, there was a child on the way.
This is the beginning, thought Anselm. From this moment onwards, it is all an unfolding. He understood everything, but with such speed that his insight into what would happen became foreshortened, and he lost the detail. He was left with the first simple realisation that Walter Steadman was Elizabeth’s father; that Riley was her half-brother.
The two children grew up under the one roof, but did not enjoy equal favour. Walter didn’t mean it, said Mrs Dixon, but he was hard on Graham, who was not his own, and soft on Elizabeth, who was. The inequality of affection was ever present and Graham simply couldn’t understand why: they were, after all (he thought), the same flesh and blood. As Graham grew older, it became obvious: he was not a Steadman.
‘The boy became the shadow of his father, my first love,’ said Mrs Dixon. ‘And Walter was a jealous man, even of the dead. It was pitiful that a boy so small could pose a threat to a man so big.’ She hesitated, as if she’d come to a defining moment. ‘And then the warehouse closed and Walter lost his job.
‘It might not sound much,’ said Mrs Dixon, after another break, ‘but the big man who’d told everyone else what to do for ten years was unemployed. The only work he could find was selling pies from a barrow on the pavement. He lost his self-esteem. The men he’d sacked mocked him. He drank what he earned, and I had to work twice as much. And when he was in drink, he didn’t control himself any more. The small things loomed large in his head. You could say he was the same; you could say he’d changed.’
Walter hit Graham and Mrs Dixon. But he never touched Elizabeth. He wanted to be someone else with her – the person he could have been – and that longing survived even the sickness that came with beer. Graham, however, became Walter’s target.
‘When things go wrong in your life,’ intoned Mrs Dixon, ‘you look for someone to blame. And you always settle on someone who’s different. Graham was different, in every way and all of them small.’
According to his teacher, Graham was clever. He asked questions that didn’t have easy answers. He shrank from the rougher games, preferring to collect things – all manner of rubbish that he thought interesting, like pebbles and bottle tops. His arms and legs were thin. When he tried to help with the shopping, it was always too heavy. It showed up the sheer difference between him and Walter. And on one fateful, drunken day Walter mocked him, just as those sober men had mocked Walter.
‘No son of mine would collect bottle tops,’ said Walter, swaying.
‘But I am your son,’ snapped Graham defiantly.
‘No you’re not.’
‘What?’
‘You heard.’
‘That was how he found out,’ said Mrs Dixon. ‘He seized hold of me, wanting to know who his father was, his real name, what had happened, why he’d never been told… endless questions… It was as though Walter’s rage – all of it – had infected him. From that day Graham refused to call Walter his father. He dropped Steadman and became Riley. And the rage I’d seen… It simply vanished.’
While Mrs Dixon was speaking, Anselm began to recover a fraction of the insight that had struck him and gone. He remembered the conversation with Elizabeth about the death of his mother, knowing that she’d been harvesting his experience. He said to Mrs Dixon, ‘What happened to Walter?’
‘We were at the top of the stairs,’ she replied, as if she were dictating a statement to the police. Her eyes were to the front, her back straight. ‘There’d been a lot of shouting. He swung out but keeled over on the step and went down, like a tree. I fell back, trying to keep my balance, so I didn’t see; I just heard him tumbling down, and then, after a second or so, a bang. When I looked, there was a large heap on the floor. I called the ambulance and they took him away but he was dead.’
‘I’m sorry,’ muttered Anselm.
‘Don’t be,’ she replied. ‘I was relieved… glad that he was gone.
Staring ahead once more, Mrs Dixon resumed what she’d planned to say: the opening up of a lie. Again, she seemed to be recording a deposition.
A week or two later a policeman knocked on the door. He knew Walter. He knew about his temper and the violence. He told me the doctor had found a long wound on the head. He examined the stairs. He took measurements of a tread, and its edge. I said nothing about the bang that I’d heard after the fall, that Graham had been downstairs, that the poker was missing. In due course, the police concluded it had been an accident. My son, however, had stopped eating. He was sick. One night, I held his hands in mine and asked if he’d seen the poker. He pulled himself free, hid behind a pillow, and said, “I’ve thrown it in the Four Lodges.” The next day he was gone. He was seventeen. I haven’t seen him since. Everyone said it was because he’d lost his dad.’
Bunhill Fields is a wonderful place, thought Anselm, wanting to flee those stairs, that hallway The Pieman must have taken shape among its shadows and blood: a name coined from other people’s contempt, an engrossment of rage and abuse, tame to Riley but towering over those whom he would terrorise. Elizabeth had walked along the same corridors, among the same shadows. Anselm felt her presence. She’d worn a delicate perfume that didn’t seem to fade. She was always very clean, in strictly tailored clothes, with sharply cut hair.
Elizabeth blamed herself for Graham’s running away for Walter’s treatment of him. And Mrs Dixon, against herself, blamed Elizabeth: not with a single word, but with a host of manners. On a cold night Elizabeth made a fire. Looking for the poker, she asked her mother where it might be.
‘Graham threw it away.’
‘Why?’
Mrs Dixon didn’t answer the question directly She let the silence do it for her. A month later Elizabeth disappeared. Everyone said it was because she’d lost her dad and her brother.
Anselm knew what had happened next. Sister Dorothy had come to the house of Mrs Steadman. Her decision to do what Elizabeth wanted had been instantaneous and heartbreaking. Mother and daughter, without saying so, had agreed to hush up a murder. You can’t do that sort of thing under the same roof.
‘I next saw my daughter a year ago,’ said Mrs Dixon, without emotion, enunciating her words. ‘She traced me through my national insurance number, because I had remarried… to a wonderful man, who would have been a wonderful father to anyone’s children.’ Mrs Dixon swallowed hard and carried on with the job in hand.
Elizabeth had learned of her heart condition, and that it was hereditary. Mrs Dixon underwent the tests with a Doctor Okoye, who pronounced her clear. Big, strapping Walter, it seemed, had been a fundamentally weak man. But that was not why Elizabeth had come.
‘She told me that Graham had built a new life,’ said Mrs Dixon, ‘but not a nice one.’
Not for the first time in his life, Anselm marvelled at the word ‘nice’, and the wonderful uses to which it was frequently put.
‘She told me that the only way to save him was to bring him to court to answer for the murder of her father. It wasn’t revenge she wanted, I knew that. She was talking about… what was right. But I refused.’
‘Why?’
‘Because if it was anyone’s fault, it wasn’t Graham’s, or Elizabeth’s, it was mine. I failed to protect him. I thought that if I stick by Walter, then maybe he’ll change back to who he’d been who he was with Elizabeth – that his anger might boil dry; that he might wake up and see Graham as… different, yes, but not a threat. I’m the one who put that poker in Graham’s hand. All I ever said to him was that Walter has tempers.’
The quietness of Bunhill Fields filled the pause. Nothing moved, not even the trees, which were so full of life. For once, it seemed strange.
‘Elizabeth came each week, trying to persuade me. I refused. Then, on the day she died, I received her last call and her last words.’
‘The time of the lie is over,’ Anselm said to himself. To this he added the final message for Inspector Cartwright, uttered seconds before: Leave it to Anselm.
‘Mrs Dixon,’ said Anselm, ‘as I’m sure you know’ – he watched her nodding, because Elizabeth had already told her -’I will have to inform the police. They will interview you. Graham will be tried for murder. You, too, may well be charged, because of your silence. Do you realise this?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, as if she were already in court.
Anselm regarded her with compassion and said, ‘Why did you change your mind?’
‘Because,’ said Mrs Dixon defiantly proudly ‘I have met my grandson, Nicholas. And I do not want his life to rest on a lie -on a false understanding of who he is and where he comes from – as Graham’s did. One day he might learn the truth about his family I do not think he would thank his mother for the story she dreamed up in its place. It is, of course, what she wanted, what she’d asked of me. I didn’t appreciate why until I saw Nicholas… He looks just like Walter.’
Anselm took Mrs Dixon’s arm, and they walked slowly like mother and son, along the lanes of Bunhill Fields. In their shared quiet, he thought of Riley’s early life, and of murder, undetected and forgotten, and what it might do to a man. And he thought of Bunyan, whose youth had been marred by four chief sins: dancing, ringing the bells of the parish church, playing tipcat and reading the history of Sir Bevis of Southampton.