If I’m Honest

Martin Jameson

If I’m honest, it’s not something I spend a lot of time thinking about.

But what if I wasn’t honest – perhaps just marginally mendacious? Then I’d say it was something that did haunt me from time to time. If I were wholeheartedly dishonest, I would say I wake up during the night in a cold sweat, pursued by guilt-edged demons snorting warnings of the icy hell awaiting me.

But I don’t. Which ought to surprise me in the circumstances, but it doesn’t even do that.

Something they don’t tell you when you’re young, is how disassociated you can become from parts of your own life, a bit like one of those rockets blasting off into space, jettisoning huge boosters, once full of fire and flame, only to fall redundant to the bottom of the ocean.

I’m only thinking about it now because Zosia – we were at uni together – sent me an email telling me that Drew had died. He’s the first of the old gang to cop it. A few of us have had cancer, various bits falling off over the years, but now we’re tipping into our seventh decade, I guess the grim reaper has us in his sights for a bit of scythe practice.

Suicide, she said.

Drew never came to any of our reunions. People used to ask me what he was up to, because I’d shared a flat with him for a year, and I was always having to explain that he wasn’t someone I’d kept up with, and I had no idea. After he died, several people emailed me to say that they were sorry for my loss, as if Drew and I had somehow been welded together in their memory. I didn’t bother to disabuse them. Why make a thing of it?

So, yes, today, I have been thinking about what happened, although it might as well have been a story someone told me, or a chapter in a book I once read. It was forty years ago, and for all intents and purposes it happened to someone else. After all, the whole thing was his idea. Effectively, I was a bit player in someone else’s drama.

I was reading History; Drew English. I’d briefly fancied my chance as a student thespian (I’d heard they had the best parties) and had met him auditioning for a role in a Drama Soc production of Crime and Punishment. Neither of us got it, and while it didn’t bother me particularly – especially when the director announced we would be required to perform three of the scenes completely naked – Drew told me later in the student bar that he’d wanted to go to drama school, but his folks had insisted he get a ‘proper’ degree to fall back on before frittering his life away, failing to be an actor. I’d seen his audition and his parents had a point, but I didn’t say anything, and we resolved to give up on the stage and join the Film Soc instead.

This was a lot more fun. DVDs hadn’t been invented and videos were still fairly new, so the society ordered in celluloid prints of cinema classics which were screened in one of the lecture theatres. They only had one projector, so there was always a minute or two’s break between reels. The reason I remember this is that during a season of Alfred Hitchcock movies, they showed his 1948 film, Rope. The whole point was that Hitchcock wanted it to look as if it were one continuous take – technically impossible at the time – but we had to wait while the projectionist changed things over every twenty minutes or so, which kind of defeated the object. However, we were happy to slip out to the toilets and have a quick spliff, so by the end of the movie we were off our heads.

In Rope, Farley Granger and some other actor I’d never heard of try to commit the perfect murder, holding a dinner party with James Stewart as their alibi, while the corpse lies in a chest in the living room. They’re gay, I think, and it’s all a bit stereotyped, so Farley Granger is a neurotic mess who loses it completely and the other guy is arch and camp and arrogant, chancing his luck until Jimmy Stewart rumbles them and they get their comeuppance.

Drew and I were sharing a scuzzy student flat by then – slugs on the carpet, silverfish in the bath, that kind of thing – and we’d fallen into a bit of an insular lifestyle. Neither of us had much money for going out. I was on the basic student grant as dad had died and mum was always broke. Meanwhile, Drew refused to take cash from his parents, who were loaded by all accounts, so we mainly stayed in, missing lectures, watching dodgy videos and daytime TV and getting stoned until the small hours. Every now and again we’d get so out of it we’d have masturbatory sex, but, if I’m honest, I don’t think we were particularly gay, it was just a thing that would happen, now and again. We didn’t really talk about it.

That night however, we had terrible munchies, and back at the flat over a Kentucky Fried Chicken Bargain Bucket, we were in dribbling hysterics about how useless Farley and his mate were at committing any kind of murder, let alone the perfect one. Drew had it all worked out how we could do it so much better.

First up, we wouldn’t kill anyone we knew. If we did it for money, passion or revenge we were bound to get caught. Luckily, we were used to not having cash and it didn’t bother us; neither of us were particularly passionate about anything or anyone, so that was covered; and no one had ever done anything to us worthy of revenge, apart, perhaps, from the Drama Soc guy who didn’t give us a part in his play.

‘And of course,’ Drew was wolfing down his fourth chicken drumstick, ‘we definitely won’t piss on our own front doorstep!’ The perfect location for the murder couldn’t be local, but somewhere urban where there was already a certain amount of violent crime, where our presence wouldn’t be in any way unusual. London seemed like the ideal candidate. Obviously, most serial killers get caught because they keep going back for more and develop a predictable M.O. in terms of geography and methodology. We would do it once and once only – and never break the law again.

‘But,’ Drew was dipping his finger in the BBQ sauce and sucking it, ‘the key to the perfect murder is offender profiling.’ I started losing track at this point. Surely that was what you did to catch a murderer, not to commit the crime.

‘That’s the point!’ Drew explained that the best profile for us would be no profile at all. This was long before the internet or social media, so he wanted to know if I’d ever kept a crazy psycho diary, because those things could end up in court. I had kept a diary once, when I was eleven, but it was mainly full of stuff about what I’d had for lunch, and a girl called Debbie I’d had a crush on in junior school.

Drew could definitely go OTT when he was on one, and I started to feel like I was being interrogated. He wanted to know if I’d ever been in trouble for being weird – but most important of all, had I ever mistreated any animals. Apparently serial killers often had pre-existing patterns of cruelty towards their pets. I had a clean sheet as far as that was concerned, but I did start to wonder where Drew got all this from. It sounded a bit hokey to me, but he said he’d read some books on criminal psychology, and it was kosher. Drew seemed to have given it a lot of thought.

‘Are you in?’ He called after me as I staggered off to bed.

‘Definitely,’ I slurred, making a gun with my fingers, and miming the recoil from shooting him.

It was just another stoned conversation like our plan to assassinate Margaret Thatcher; or freaking ourselves out over the unfathomable nature of the cosmos, and whether life itself was a computer-generated illusion; or discussing whether the government was injecting KFC with mind altering drugs as a way of suppressing a revolution – which would explain why the coal miners (who were in the middle of a year-long, and extremely acrimonious industrial dispute) were kicking up so much, because they couldn’t afford takeaways any more. Obvious when you thought about it! I would have forgotten about this entirely if it hadn’t been for that sunny afternoon four months later.

It was the summer vacation and I’d been doing shifts in the bottle factory near my mum’s, going quietly out of my mind. My end of year exams had been a disaster and I was thinking about chucking in uni altogether. When I got home that night, mum told me Drew had rung, asking if I’d meet him at Rough Trade Records on Portobello Road the next day. This was before mobile phones and he hadn’t left a number. I realised I didn’t even know where he lived. Somewhere in Hampshire, I think. Anyway, as mum had told him, I’d be working, so it would have to be another time.

I’m not quite sure why, but I got the train into London anyway. I didn’t tell her though, ringing in sick from a phone box.

He was loitering outside the shop as I arrived from Westbourne Park tube. He said he knew I’d come even though mum had given him the brush-off. I assumed we were going inside, but he nodded for me to follow him, and we started off down a circuitous series of side streets. There weren’t anything like the number of CCTV cameras we have now, and no door-cams of course, but he said we needed to be to be off-grid for at least half an hour and preferably a good mile away the next time one picked us up. I kept asking him what this was about, and all he’d say was: ‘You’ll see’.

After ten minutes he paused by a low garden wall at the front of a vacant property with a big For Sale sign nailed to the front gate. He reached into a bush and pulled out a small canvas shoulder bag.

‘Drew? What’s going on?’

His eyes were shining. ‘If the cameras caught us on the main road, we’re not holding anything. If we dump this before anyone sees us again, the evidence won’t make sense.’ I had no idea what he was talking about.

He opened the flap for me to see. It looked like something out of an old cowboy movie.

‘It’s a Webley.’

‘What?’

‘My uncle’s service revolver. He died a few weeks ago. We went to clear out his stuff. It was in his desk. I took it before my dad even saw.’ Drew was walking again.

I was starting to get annoyed. ‘Is this why you’ve dragged me up to London, to show me your new toy?’

He stopped. ‘Pick a number from one to forty.’

‘Why?’

‘Pick a number!’

‘Thirty-six?’

‘Thirty-six it is. Come on.’

He started marching toward one of the houses, about twenty yards down the street. This part of Notting Hill was still in the process of gentrification, so quite a few of the properties were having work done. There was a lot of scaffolding around, obscuring the view. The garden path for number thirty-six was only a few short paces. He pressed the ancient doorbell.

‘Drew?’ I still hadn’t twigged, but then again, why would I?

He opened the flap of the army bag and put his hand on the revolver.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ That’s when the realisation finally dawned. I was horrified – no, if I’m one hundred per cent honest, I felt a rush of excitement. The blood was pumping in my temples. It hurt. I do remember that, yes. That definitely happened to me.

‘You said you were in.’

‘In? In what?’ My voice was unnaturally shrill as I feigned innocence.

‘This!’

‘What? Now?’

Drew shrugged as if it should have been obvious.

‘Fuck’s sake!’ I hissed. ‘You could’ve warned me!’

‘And there’d’ve been a trail. We discussed this.’

I wasn’t sure we had, but before I could argue, the door started to open. The man’s hair was wet and he was in a bathrobe.

Drew pulled out the gun.

‘Jesus Christ.’ The man – only a couple of years older than me – stared in disbelief.

If Drew was going to pull the trigger, he had to do it straight away, but he’d frozen. It wasn’t out of fear – at least I don’t think so – he was as astonished as I was. We knew the guy. Well, not personally, but he was on the telly. We used to watch him in the afternoons presenting kids’ shows on the BBC with a talking skunk. In fact, he was so popular, he’d been on the front cover of the Radio Times only that week – ‘Britain’s Favourite Boy Next Door’. He was about to launch a new Saturday morning show, although he was ditching the skunk apparently.

The rational thing would have been to run for it, there and then, dump the gun, split up and never mention it again. The chances of getting caught were next to zero. Drew would have proved his point – ‘proof of concept’ I think they call it these days – with no harm done. These things are always easy with hindsight.

What can I say? I’d only turned twenty a few months before. I was basically still a teenager. Who, in all honesty, hasn’t got some stupid – maybe even appalling – thing they did when they were a kid that makes them wince at unexpected moments, decades later when they’re least expecting it? That’s what growing up is all about, isn’t it? Making mistakes and learning from them. You can’t do the latter without the former. I think that’s why I’ve always been popular as a teacher. The kids like me, even if they say I try too hard, and I’m a bit ‘cringe’ sometimes.

I’d go as far as to say that what I did was just as rational as the alternative. Perhaps more so. He’d seen Drew with the gun, pointing it straight at him. Given his profile, the police were sure to throw everything at it. He could identify us from any CCTV they had. It’d be all over the papers. The pictures might be grainy but they’d find us sooner or later. We were both in deep shit, either way.

He was about to slam the door, so I grabbed the gun off Drew, screwed my eyes shut and fired.

It occurred to me, as I was pulling the trigger that I had no idea whether the thing was even loaded, but in that millisecond, I prayed that it was. I’d never fired a gun before (nor since). It wasn’t just the noise; the recoil took me completely by surprise. The thing nearly jumped out of my hand.

When I opened my eyes again, the man’s face was a bloody mess as he crumpled to the floor. What I remember more than that, though, was his bathrobe falling open and wondering whether I should cover him up, but I knew better than to hang around, or leave any incriminating evidence, even though DNA wasn’t a thing back then.

‘Run.’ I breathed, handing the gun back to Drew. He was staring at the spreading pool of blood dripping down the steps.

‘Run, you fucking idiot.’ I hissed, racing off, disappearing down a side street just as doors started to open.

As soon as I turned the corner, I slowed to a leisurely stroll, hands in my pockets.

I had no idea where I was, but when I heard the sirens, I headed in their direction as it had to be a main road of some sort. An ambulance and two squad cars whizzed past. I carried on walking for the best part of an hour, strolling through Hyde Park, smiling at toddlers feeding the ducks on the Serpentine. I carried on through Green Park, pausing to watch the sightseers outside Buckingham Palace. I even took a picture for a happy Japanese family.

I suppose I must have been panicking, and worrying about Drew, and whether he’d ditched the gun, or a million other things… but perhaps I wasn’t.

I honestly can’t remember.

When I try to picture it in my mind, all I can see is a gaggle of kids making rabbit ears on each other’s heads for a group photo, and two men walking hand in hand along the Embankment which I think was the first time I’d ever seen that in a public place. Someone with a Coal Not Dole bucket was collecting for the miners. I didn’t give them anything but they slapped a sticker on me anyway,

When I got home that night, it was all over the news. It stayed in the news for a week. The nation’s children were traumatised, flocking to Notting Hill to leave flowers and toy skunks. There was a Crimewatch special about it. The only eyewitness reports said that a lone male had been spotted running from the scene, but the description was vague, ageing him anywhere between eighteen and thirty. It must have been Drew, who presumably bolted a few seconds after I did. They hadn’t found a murder weapon, nor established any motive for the crime, although the tabloids were having a good dig and had discovered that the presenter was two-timing his girlfriend with a make-up assistant and had been spotted snorting cocaine in The Wag Club which was apparently a hangout for all the young celebs, although I’d never heard of it. The traumatised girlfriend had been shooting a pop video in the Aegean at the time so she was never a suspect.

Even if I’d been tempted to contact Drew, I didn’t have a number or a home address. If I tried to track him down that might look suspicious, so I got on with a life that had no connection to the killing whatsoever, just as Drew had suggested on that stoned night stuffed full of Colonel Sanders’s finest.

I was amazed how easy it was. I’d watch the news every night, with mum shaking her head that surely the BBC had more important things to worry about, especially with the coal strike and everything. The idea that I’d even been there, started to feel unreal. I had shut my eyes after all. Technically, I was wasn’t even a witness.

For the first few days I was nervous of going to sleep, in case I had nightmares and woke up screaming a confession, but I never did. To my genuine surprise I realised it wasn’t even a subconscious urge. In books and films and dramas on the telly, murderers always spew their guts to someone in the end, but why on earth would they? Writers don’t know anything. I just went to the pub with my mates.

The week before I went back to uni, a man from Shepherd’s Bush – a loner with a collection of antique army pistols – was charged with the murder. The news filled me with a warm glow, not unlike how you feel after a long overdue visit to the toilet.

It did cross my mind that I ought to feel guilty: family and friends were grieving, a man was wrongly accused. It wasn’t that I couldn’t imagine their pain, but what use would it serve, if I did? My empathy wouldn’t mean anything to them. I couldn’t help them. I couldn’t change what had happened. Me going to prison wasn’t going to bring the guy back to life. When it came down to it, I had to face the fact that I didn’t really care. I didn’t know these people. The idea of worrying about the unhappiness of strangers wasn’t a skill I developed until my late forties. I didn’t start giving to charity until I was married and had kids of my own.

The BBC’s Newsnight programme interviewed a child psychologist who waxed lyrically about how trauma lodges in a child’s consciousness, and that this event would be a milestone in the development of a whole generation. The next day I passed a bouncy castle full of giggling children. They seemed to have got over it pretty quickly. He’d been on the telly and now he wasn’t.

We’d had to give up the flat at the end of the summer term, and I’d decided to go back into halls for my final year, in the vague hope that, if I was sticking it out, I might just about scrape my degree. I was nervous of seeing Drew again, but resolved not to say anything unless he did.

Except there was no sign of him.

I was relieved at first, but after about ten days it occurred to me it would look odd if I didn’t make any enquiries at all. I went to Student Services and all they could tell me was that he’d dropped out. I asked if they had an address I could contact, but they weren’t permitted to release any confidential information. They could forward a letter on my behalf if I wanted to leave something with them, but on reflection that didn’t seem like a good idea.

The following week, the IRA tried to assassinate Margaret Thatcher at the Tory conference in Brighton and the dead TV presenter receded from the public consciousness.

To be honest, Drew leaving uni was the best thing that could have happened to me. I stopped smoking draw and discovered that history was pretty interesting after all. I got a high 2:1 in the end – a borderline first apparently, according to my rather astonished tutor. After the graduation ceremony she told me that she’d written me off as a dud the year before, and asked me what it was that had sparked my Damascene conversion. I shrugged vaguely. She pooh-pooed my modesty, inviting me to talk to some of her second years, about what had prompted me to get my act together – but that didn’t seem like a good idea either.

I stayed on to do a PGCE, at the end of which I got my first job teaching history. I was head of department within eight years, getting my promotion the same day that the weirdo from Shepherd’s Bush with the antique gun collection was acquitted on a technicality. The Metropolitan Police made a point of saying they were not pursuing any further enquiries. I got married the following year and in a concession to the sisterhood I took my wife’s name.

I never got past Deputy, but it suits me. Who wants that kind of responsibility anyway? I stepped up for a year when the Head had breast cancer, and managed to come through an Ofsted inspection in one piece. We got a ‘Good’ but that was more than enough stress for one lifetime, although it might be why she nominated me for an MBE for my work tackling knife crime in the county’s schools.

I’ve got three wonderful kids – I’m on my second grandchild with a third on the way – even if Jake, my youngest, struggles with his mental health and still lives at home. Karen and I have started to make plans for him for when we’re not around anymore.

I made the mistake of letting him watch The Matrix when he was only nine, and in his worst moments he becomes obsessed with the idea that everything about his life is fake.

I go to the gym three times a week and I haven’t eaten KFC in over thirty years. I’ve never felt inclined to start a revolution since I gave up fast food, so I suspect Drew and I definitely got that one wrong.

When the internet came along, people from uni started hunting me down. I was wary of joining Friends Reunited, and kept well away from Facebook when it emerged. Teachers tend to keep a low profile on social media, so I had a good excuse. Zosia had my email, and she kept me in the loop. It didn’t sound as if there was any sign on Drew online.

So, no, if I’m honest I barely think about it at all these days. Every now and again there’s a documentary on Channel 5 or some True Crime Netflix thing, but I don’t watch them. Karen berates me for my hard-hearted disdain for Romcoms ever since I refused, point blank, to sit through Notting Hill. But aside from that…

It was about six months ago. An ex-student had asked for a reference for a TEFL job they were going for in a school in South Korea – teaching English as a Foreign Language. I was happy to oblige. I must have I missed one of the boxes I was supposed to tick, and I got an email from the supervisor in Seoul asking me to correct the mistake. I recognised the name immediately. It’s not particularly unusual, but not many people would sign themselves as Drew on a formal letter. There was a picture on the website. I had every reason to check it out, so I didn’t worry about it being in my browsing history. He’d lost most of his hair, put on a lot of weight, and looked a good bit older than me, with the rheumy eyes of a drinker, but it was him all right.

I replied of course – anything else would have drawn attention – but I knew he would Google me. I look after myself so I’m even more recognisable than him even if I have changed my name.

The email arrived the following day, asking if I was related to an old friend of his as I was the dead spit. I checked whether any of my professional profiles listed my undergraduate degree, and thankfully they didn’t, so I laughed it off politely, wishing him well in tracking down his acquaintance, trusting that Drew wouldn’t be so stupid as to go anywhere near the Facebook group, who were bound to ask questions about why he’d dropped out of uni all those years ago. To my relief, that seemed to be it, until a few days later, when he emailed again saying it was a shame I wasn’t the man he thought I was, as he was coming back to the U.K. in a few months for a conference of TEFL providers just outside Shrewsbury, and had been hoping to track down his old friend as they’d got some important things to catch up on. I’m not prone to paranoia, so I had no doubt that the words had been carefully chosen. I moved the email into my spam folder, as deleting it might look suspicious. I didn’t reply.

I did wake up that night. I wasn’t in a cold sweat or having a nightmare. If I’m honest, I very rarely dream at all. It was indigestion, which I usually sort with a cup of peppermint tea. Karen barely stirred as I crept out of bed. The kitchen smelt of low-calorie air-fried spicy chicken. As I waited for the kettle to boil, I had a craving for a KFC Bargain Bucket, and for a second, I could hear Drew’s voice, drawling through a blue fug of dope smoke.

I closed my eyes. He was sitting cross-legged, rolling a spliff on his bright red Talking Heads:77 album cover.

‘Seriously mate,’ he took a long draw on the greasy joint, holding it in his lungs for the best part of ten seconds, finally squeaking, ‘it’s not like we’re the only stoned fuckers who’ve ever had this conversation. Let’s say just one in a hundred do something about it…’

He passed me the spliff. ‘There’d be bloody great piles of bodies!’ I coughed painfully.

He was on a roll. ‘Ten – maybe fifteen – unsolved murders every year. It was in the paper. Bits of bodies are turning up all the time. Most of them aren’t even classified as crimes. Dozens of people go missing every day. Never seen again. Killers only get caught if there’s a story. Take that away and there’s no route back to the perpetrator.’

I remembered this conversation ten years later when Fred and Rosemary West’s gruesome cellar floor was uncovered, and then a few years after that when the doctor, Harold Shipman was exposed as having murdered hundreds of his patients, his crimes going unnoticed for decades.

Fred, Rosemary and Harold only got caught because they didn’t follow Drew’s advice and quit while they were ahead. The story we tell ourselves is that killers are driven by a demonic compulsion to repeat the act, which is always their downfall. But surely that only applies to the ones who get caught. What if they’d only done it once… or, at the most… twice?

What if Fred, Rosemary and Harold were the exceptions, rather than the rule?

Although, even with just a single victim, there’s always the possibility that the killer will turn into some kind of emotional wreck, overcome by decades of guilt, contemplating making their peace with God and man by confessing all, while there’s still time.

Suicide, Zosia said. Drew had been teaching English all over the world, and hadn’t been back for about fifteen years. I might have read about the body they’d pulled out of the River Severn in Shropshire a few weeks ago, she suggested. That was Drew. Apparently, he’d had a long history of depression and substance abuse. Well, that was the story Zosia told me.

It made sense to me. If I’m honest.

~0~

After thirty years writing TV and stage, plus over a hundred credits for BBC Radio Drama, Martin Jameson has recently turned to prose fiction completing his first novel, Phyllis, currently out to publishers. After finishing this 500 page epic, developing a skill for short fiction seemed like a good idea. Judge Brett Alan Sanders agrees, as he found the story to be “a chilling and curiously affectless first-person account of a senseless decades-old murder, with some startling twists in the plot that brilliantly complicate the two participants’ relative culpability.”