I was absently picking at the gunk under my fingernails when I heard a grunt of anger from Adam’s room. I went to investigate. I found him grabbing at his hair and giving his laptop evil looks. “You right, mate?” “It’s this fucking murder down in Camberwell. It’s such a pain in the arse, although I suppose I should be grateful for the chance of another front page.” “Forget about it for a bit, mate. Let’s go to the pub.” That seemed to be my answer to everything. We trooped round the corner to our local and went to the bar. It was quiet, as ever, and a few of the regulars were playing cards at a corner table. A big black dog ambled around, snuffling around under tables and flicking people with its tail. We talked about some trivial crap for a while, but Adam couldn’t keep away from talking about work. That’s one of the few good things about temping – you never want to talk shop. “There’s something that doesn’t quite fit.” “Oh, yeah?” I tried not to show undue interest, but I was desperate to know the details. “Thing is, I’ve done the usual background stuff, and I can’t find any skeletons in his closet. I don’t know what makes me say it, but he just doesn’t seem like a killer. I just don’t think he’s got it in him. He’s no more of a killer than you or me. I think he’s innocent.” What could I say? He started up again. “Still, they say it’s never who you expect. It’s always the quiet ones you have to watch, eh? What a load of bollocks.” Again his pause was only long enough for me to wonder what to say. “I dunno, actually, there might be something in it. Think about when you were a kid, and all the lads started boasting about shagging birds. You probably believed it at the time, but deep down you knew all along that they weren’t really getting any. It’s like they have to cover up for something by going on about it all the time. The ones who were getting theirs didn’t need to boast, because they knew the score.” “Yeah, maybe. Empty vessels make the most noise, or whatever the fuck it is.” After a brief pause for a gulp of his pint, he was off again, his mouth racing away with his mind, gathering half-baked ideas and unfeasible theories along the way. As he paused for breath, he must have caught sight of the expression on my face. “Listen, mate, I’m sorry to bore you with all this shit, it’s just that this fucking case is doing my head in, and I just need to let off a bit of steam about it.” I smiled weakly to assure him that I didn’t mind, and he picked up speed again, complaining about policemen, about taxi drivers, about South London, about other journalists, about his editor. I’m good at listening to other people complain, knowing when to shut up and when to murmur some non-committal guff. I’ve always found something reassuring in it. It’s as if they’re suggesting I’ve got the answer to their questions, which makes me think that I might have the answer to mine. “I got into journalism because I wanted to do something, you know. Yeah, I know it’s bullshit, but I wanted to make a difference to the world. I wanted to be like Woodward and Bernstein, doing some solid investigative stuff, you know? I wanted to be out there getting stuck in, righting wrongs and fighting injustice.” He laughed. He was just sober enough to realise how drunk he was, and he tried to bring himself back down to earth, but he was going off on one. “At least I’m on a halfway decent paper now. You wouldn’t believe how many fucking dog shows and school prize days I used to have to go to when I was on the locals. Local news is such utter wank, mate, it really is. You know, I’ve got this theory, right? All local news is trivial crap. Every local paper, even in the big cities, is so desperate for news that the local WI meetings are on page four, yeah? So where does the real news happen? If you put all the local papers together, they cover the whole country, so if the biggest news in any area is some children’s painting competition, then what you see in the nationals can’t be real.” He thumped his fist on the table for emphasis, almost knocking the ashtray off. He was laughing at himself, reining in his own high horse, but he was fairly worked up. “Anyway, this fucking murder, right, the guy’s so insistent about there being another man there that I’m starting to think that maybe it isn’t just a story. Maybe he went round there, and found her with some other bloke, and it was the other guy that killed her.” I stopped listening as he trailed off into spirals of doubt and disbelief, throwing theories back and forth, rejecting them before they’d even got past his lips. Suddenly his mobile chimed in, tootling forth its jaunty melody to cut him off in mid-flow. The old blokes in the corner gave us an even dirtier look than usual. “Hello mate, what’s new?” “Yeah.” “Yeah.” His expression was changing. The beer was draining itself from his face, and he was getting his work head on. “Yeah?” “Fuck me! I’ll be down there as soon as I can, mate. Cheers.” He scrabbled around for his fags and keys, slurped the last of his pint, and began to stand up and put his coat on. “Listen mate, I’ve got to shoot. They’ve been doing tests. DNA matching, all the rest of it. Turns out Carlton had somebody else’s blood on his shirt as well. There was another bloke there. They’re probably going to release Carlton.” “Oh yeah?” I had to say something. I couldn’t hold it down any longer. The whiskies had convinced me that everything would be all right. I could feel the words rising in my throat like vomit. I closed my eyes and let them out. “I was there.” It was barely a whisper, but it stopped him in his tracks. I had heard the expression ‘dropping a bombshell’ thousands of times before, but I’d never seen it illustrated so vividly. “What?” I couldn’t believe how calm I was. I felt like I should be panicking, should be going mental, but I just felt entirely level. It was as if the act of saying those three words had eradicated all my worries. I’d got all my uncertainty out of the way, and now I could move on. “I think I was there that night.” “What do you mean, you were there? Where?” I looked at him for a moment with a blank tranquillity, as if the question had been in another language. I felt like some Zen master who has uttered the ultimate truth, whose disciples are asking him if that’s all there is. Then he asked again, and everything came crashing down on my head. I could feel the tears threatening to come, entrenched in the corner of my eyes, waiting for the signal to charge. I had to hold them back. If I started to cry, I might never stop. All the saved-up tears from twenty years’ worth of brave faces would come flooding out at once. I could see him trying to hide his excitement, trying to stop the jackpot of scoop signs from ringing in his eyes. He lowered his voice to a hiss. “You’re telling me that you were there, in her flat, on the night she died? But how? Did you know her? What were you doing there?” I began to tell him what I could remember. He obviously couldn’t quite believe that this was happening, staring at me open-mouthed. “You’ve got to go to the police.” “But what if they think I did it? What if they arrest me?” “Then you tell them you didn’t do it.” He gives me the phone number of the detective leading the investigation, and tells me that if I don’t call him, he will. For a journalist, he seems to have a surprising trust in the police.
This is the beauty of cycling - the rhythm puts serious activity in the brain to sleep: it creates a void. Random thoughts enter that void - the chorus from a song, a verse of poetry, a detail in the countryside, a joke, the answer to something that vexed me long ago.
It's All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness On Two Wheels