No spoilers, you’ll need to buy the book – but here’s a tease:
You might think by the way that Helena Ryle spoke about me that I was a someone, except I wasn’t, not really. It was not fame I possessed but infamy, and even that, after two years, very much faded. People thought they knew me. I was one of those faces that stirred distant memories. Aren’t you that footballer, they might ask? Or was it you that…? And so on. Occasionally, they happened across the right story – oh yes, you’re the policeman, aren’t you, the brother? Even then, though they might look at me sideways, they made little of it – they expected to see something, some evil, horns or something, and instead, they found someone quite normal.
One man’s normal is another man’s weird, of course. It was different for me. I didn’t know what normal was anymore, and even if by now my story was one among millions, it was my story, and though I don’t like to admit to it, as fresh to me then as it was when it happened. It still burned in me, and because it did, it was not something I ever dwelt on. It was one reason why I didn’t stop to wonder why it was important to Helena Ryle, regardless of the clues that it offered to me.
My brother, Ray, was eight years older than me and shone so bright that I was lost in the shadows until everything changed. In his prime, Ray had been the pin-up boy of the force. When he turned it on, he was an oversized personality who was also – as the newspapers loved to proclaim – ‘police royalty’. Not just the son of the commish, Ray was also the decorated head of the drug squad and, to the tabloid audience, the cop they knew best. He was writ large, the police go-to man, the cop every punter related to and rooted for because they knew him and because he spoke their language. For a while, Ray was everywhere. He was a pugnacious, witty, almost comic-book version of what a 21st-century cop should be. None of it was false, but it was not altogether real either. Ray was more complex than that, and not just in the ways we soon learned. He was my brother, and I saw him as the public never did, felt the easy affection of an older brother for the younger, shared with him my exuberant hopes and witnessed the rare occasion when he was less certain or less boisterous.
To the broader world, to the media, to the public who wanted to know which nag ‘Razor’ had tipped for the Cup, and to the police PR department who egged him on, Ray was a commodity. He knew it and lapped it up. “Give ‘em a little of what they want,” he had once said to me with a smirk, “and there’s nothing they won’t give you back.”
Then it changed. There was a tip-off: Ray was dirty. From one day to the next, Ray went from folk hero to public enemy number one. It was a circus. The tabloids shrieked his name, and the talkback lines choked with outraged callers shocked that Ray had not lived up to the image they had thrust upon him. Ray was guilty of the one thing that could not be forgiven: he had betrayed the trust of the people – and the people’s proxy, the media.
Ray became Judas, and not even his death could appease the baying crowd. There was no satisfaction in that. Like a scorned lover, they were furious with their shame. They wanted answers. They wanted to hold him in the palm of their hand, and in their power, they wanted, should the law permit, to hang, draw and quarter the dastardly traitor. They got none of that. He’d played them for a mug and got away with it. Now, he was gone. But I remained.
None of you can understand what it was like. I wasn’t sure that I did. When the blood’s up, when tabloids scream headlines every day, and carnivorous reporters stake out home and work, the presumption of innocence is nothing more than a judicial precept. If I was not Judas, then at least I was Judas’ brother, was I not? I was guilty by association, if not in fact. At best, I confused people. I was the inconvenient reminder of their shame and cupidity. What I said or did or if I was guilty or innocent was beside the point. The point was they needed a living, breathing fall guy, and I was it.
There were TV cameras there the day I left. The sun blazed from a blue sky, and the cameras pointed at me. I stood where I was told, numbed by disbelief. There were speeches made and a presentation while I continued to play my compliant role. I was lauded for my service, praised for my accomplishments, commended for my sacrifice, and publicly consoled for the shame wrought upon the family name. You see, I was one of theirs, after all, officially, but the fine-sounding words did nothing to disguise their smug hypocrisy. As far as the world was concerned, I was innocent only because they couldn’t prove I was guilty, and that was that…