Hidden Forever

by Martin Westlake

‘I think friendships are the result of certain needs that can be completely hidden from both people, sometimes hidden forever.’ — Patricia Highsmith

Little did I know, when I got out of Euston Station that blustery autumn afternoon, that I would soon be contemplating murder. I followed the zig-zag route I had thought through on the train: Malet Street, Charing Cross Road, High Holborn, the Strand, Trafalgar Square and, finally, John Adam Street and the Royal Society of Arts.

The route helped me meet my daily steps target but, more to the point, it helped me with sales. For at every major bookshop I visited, I made sure that my book, No Such Thing: The Inevitability of Moral Relativism, was at the front of the shelf and at eye level. It was mid-morning, and I’d calculated that there’d be nobody in the Philosophy departments in the book shops, and so it proved to be the case. Excellent.

I had come to London to meet a fellow philosopher and friend, John Evans, who was going to host a ‘lecture and in conversation’ book launch event with me about No Such Thing at the Royal Society. I walked down the steps to the Coffee House and found John apparently deep in conversation with a cheery, small-eyed man. John waved to me, and I walked across to his table and greeted him warmly.

And then the other man spoke: ‘Hello, Gareth, long time, no see.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But I don’t recognise you.’

The other man chortled and gave me a big wink. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Surely you haven’t forgotten your best friend at school.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I think you’re making a mistake.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said the man.

This was insufferable! I turned to John.

‘Shall we go to the meeting room?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ said John. ‘You don’t want a coffee or anything?’

‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fine.’

‘Who was that?’ I asked, as we walked back up the stairs.

‘I don’t know his name,’ said John. ‘but he’s been coming to my events here for quite a while. It seems philosophy — and particularly moral philosophy — interests him a great deal. Do you really not know him?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I really don’t. I’ve never set eye on him in my life. I suppose it is possible for people to be completely mistaken like that.’

‘He knew your name, though,’ said John.

‘But only because you shouted it out when I arrived,’ I reminded him.

‘Did I?’ said John.

I nodded.

‘I suppose I must have done,’ he said, with a small frown.

John led me up to his office and the preparatory meeting went very well. I wasn’t as used to this sort of thing as John evidently was, but he took me gently through the various stages of the event; his introduction, my introductory talk, his preliminary questions, questions from the audience, and then his wrapping-up. Afterwards, he showed me downstairs, we said our farewells, and John went back up to his office.

As I stepped out into John Adam Street, I found the cheery man waiting for me. God! This was so irritating.

‘It’s been a very long time, I grant you,’ he said. ‘but surely you haven’t completely forgotten me, have you?

‘I’m sorry,’ I said coldly. ‘I really haven’t the faintest clue who you are.’

I brushed past him and walked as fast as I could, but the cheery man waddled alongside me. ‘All right then,’ he said, ‘you went to Saint Anthony’s Roman Catholic Church, Ealing. We were in the same classes all the way through the school. Ms Hannover was our form mistress in our last year. Do you remember now?’

I stopped, and he stopped alongside me. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ve given many interviews over the years. I don’t check my online profiles all the time. The fact that you seem to have gathered a few facts about me does not mean that you know me.’

‘Come on,’ said the man. ‘It’s Tony. I went out with your sister, Rachel, remember?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But you are completely mistaken. I do not know you at all. And now, if you’ll forgive me...’ Fortunately, I had been able to hail an empty taxi. I climbed in and left the smiling man on the pavement.

The event was on the Thursday of the following week. The lecture room was satisfyingly full. Unfortunately, the cheery little man, Tony, was among the crowd, I noticed, but John had told me that he was interested in moral philosophy, so his presence of itself was not necessarily problematic. The talk went very well.

‘As some of you will no doubt have realised,’ I began, ‘my title, No Such Thing, is a reference to the first sentence of the late, great J. L. Mackie’s seminal 1977 work, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong: “There are no objective values,” Mackie begins. And to my mind nobody has ever, nor will ever, disprove that simple statement. There are no objective values, and therefore...’

It was a humdinger of a first line. How I wished I had written it!

In the Q & A session, John took a question from Tony. It was about the possible positive moral consequences of immoral acts. He babbled on a bit and John cut him off before turning to me.

‘So,’ he asked, ‘can good come of evil?’

‘Of course,’ I replied. ‘That’s the short answer. But if the questioner is asking whether we should commit immoral acts because we know they will have positive moral consequences, then everything becomes a bit more complicated. Causality is one thing; intention is another.’

I gave some examples from history and finished by tossing the question back to the audience.

Inevitably, at the drinks afterwards, the Tony fellow sidled up to me. ‘You know what I was getting at, don’t you, Gareth?’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me.’

He tapped the side of his nose with his finger and gave me another wink. Fortunately, John realised that I was being badgered and came to the rescue. It was at that moment I realised that, in one way or another, I was going to have to get rid of Tony.

It was true we’d been the closest of friends all through our final years at school. And it was true that he’d gone out with Rachel, though the relationship didn’t last very long. But even when they had broken up, Tony and I had remained the best of friends.

We’d both done well in our final exams. Our school was so deferential that they’d never encourage their bright students to apply for Oxbridge before the final results were known. But once they were known, both Tony and I believed we deserved to be considered, and so we applied. It meant taking a year off and taking Oxbridge entrance exams in December. But we both had chips on our shoulders and were determined to thwart the system and its inbuilt prejudices against people like us, by hook or by crook.

There were just the two of us that year. The ‘know thy place’ school establishment felt awkward about our ambitions, but they couldn’t stop us. So, we sat the exams in a small attic room above the school building. When we learned that ‘Dozy’ Mr Mullins was going to be our invigilator, we both had the same thought; he would be asleep within minutes and then we could confer between ourselves about the questions and answers.

And that’s exactly what happened. Of course, we’d revised, and all the basic knowledge was there, but it did help to be able to confer about the odd date or fact. To put it another way, we cheated. I never felt guilty about it. We had just done what we had to.

When we got our results, I learned that I had passed. Soon, I had been invited for interview by several colleges. I didn’t really have to choose because one trumped the others by granting me a ‘prize’ and, since my parents were not well off, the money was welcome. But, somehow, Tony had failed. I suppose I had just managed to cheat better.

And, if I’m honest, the fact that one of us had succeeded while the other didn’t even though we’d conspired, made me feel even more justified in my thinking that the cheating was immaterial. In any case, our paths, for so long so close together in terms of shared hopes and ambitions, suddenly divided. He went off to Bristol. It wasn’t the end of the world but, well, it wasn’t Oxbridge. We stayed in touch intermittently, but this was long before computers and the Internet and emails and mobile telephony came along. Inevitably, inexorably, our friendship dwindled and died out. And then I lost track of Tony altogether.

Until now. To tell the truth, meeting him again even just that first time before the launch had made me feel rather sick, even though I knew it was absurd to worry. The cheating, if that’s what you want to call it, was long in the past. But we live in such a volatile time, when the slightest misstep can ruin a career, a reputation, that I began overthinking.

At one low point over the last few days, laughably I know, I had even contemplated murder. But how on earth would I do that? I surfed on the Internet. When I put in ‘how to get rid of someone’ or ‘how to murder somebody,’ I found myself directed to scores of literary websites and blogs discussing how to kill off a character in a story. A quick look at the lists of possible deaths — poison, hit-and-run, a judicious shove in the back on the underground, and so on — convinced me that this wasn’t the way to go.

So, then I started to think about beating Tony at his own game. I wondered what he had got up to in life and went back on the Internet to have a look. I discovered that he had made a successful career for himself as a crime writer. He used a pen name and had several series on the go.

I never read formulaic fiction and pay little attention to the mainstream marketplace. Of course I had no idea that he’d managed to become a one-man writing factory ever-present in the bestseller lists. His niche, it seemed, was stories about crimes that resulted in interesting trials and judgements. He had built up a roster of characters and wove them into and out of his stories.

The little I could find on the Internet about his personal life suggested that he had become a lawyer after his law studies at Bristol and then started his crime series as a pastime. And then, as he’d become successful and wealthy, he had abandoned his law practice. All so very commendable. There was nothing there for me. If my ‘beating him at his own game’ strategy was to work, I needed to dig up some embarrassing dirt.

So, I went back on the Internet and looked up private investigators. The industry, I discovered, was well-established, very accessible, and very professional, not at all as murky as the common portrayal. I found one who did ‘background checks’ and asked for an estimate. I was surprised. The price seemed perfectly reasonable. I asked the company to dig into Tony’s background and see what they could come up with. Bingo.

Tony, they had discovered, had been convicted and served a prison sentence for... something. He had been struck off the list and could no longer practise as a lawyer. But since his prison sentence had been for less than four years, his criminal record had been expunged after eleven years.

Somehow, the private investigator had found a trace all the same, though he couldn’t find out exactly what the crime had been. I was full of admiration for Tony. Somehow, he had managed to turn his life around and make a success of it. I also felt a certain sadness for him and his conviction, although I noted that the moral relativism we had shared at school had continued in his life thereafter. More importantly, though, now I was in business!

As chance would have it, Tony had just published a new novel under his alter ego’s name. There was a big launch party in the bookstore in Trafalgar Square, so I went along. There were drinks and a signing session afterwards. I bought a copy and queued up with everybody else for my copy to be signed. Tony saw me when I was still some way out and waved cheerfully. When I got up to the desk, I asked him to sign it and dedicate it to ‘my old friend.’

Copyright © 2025 by Martin Westlake