The Heights

by Louise Candlish

  Only two more birthdays had passed since then. Eighteen, nineteen. Nineteen years old and already gone. There’d been that song, hadn’t there, back in the day? N-n-n-n-nineteen. They used to sing along to it in the union bar at uni. More of an elegy, really, than a pop song.

  * * *

  The court proceedings provided a focus, albeit a grim one. Ellen was energized again by then, unwavering in her disbelief in Kieran’s claims of memory loss and relentless in her insistence that he must be concealing a truth even more terrible than the one pieced together by investigators. Vic despaired of so ardent a longing for an account that could neither improve on nor reverse the outcome, but what she was doing, he was told on good authority, was a common form of displacement. A kind of deferred pain.

  It was that same obsessive yearning that fuelled Lock Up Longer. To have refused to take part would have been to expose himself to the accusation that he cared less deeply for Lucas’s memory than she did and so he went along to as many of those talks and interviews and support groups as he could bear. And it grew to be quite the roadshow, with guest appearances by police officers and paramedics and driving instructors – Vic lost count.

  ‘All these people care about our boy,’ Ellen would exclaim, filling herself up on the collective energy. But Vic had learned to distinguish at a glance between those attendees who’d suffered comparably and those who were seduced by the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God frisson that came from having left one’s own children safely tucked up in bed.

  He was secretly pleased when the Mirror modified the campaign to include other types of driving offences, in effect retiring their grievance from view. He felt they’d made their point to hundreds of thousands more people than they’d had any right to expect to reach, even if the sentencing guidelines remained, for now, unchanged.

  And, if he was honest, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be associated with some of those thousands. String ’em up, they demanded. An eye for an eye. There were even slurs regarding Kieran’s hair colour. ‘No wonder sperm banks don’t accept donations from red-headed men,’ one woman posted. Women were more vicious than men, Vic noted, though he didn’t say that to Ellen.

  ‘It makes sense to quit while we’re ahead,’ he told her, when they drove back to South London after a talk in Tunbridge Wells, one of their last. ‘We’re lucky no one’s delved a bit deeper and challenged us.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Ellen said. In the gloom of the passenger seat, she was almost invisible in his peripheral vision, until oncoming headlights flooded the car and her fine, tragic profile would suddenly be aglow.

  ‘About Lucas, I mean. Say there’d been a full trial, with witnesses… they’d have testified to his habits and behaviour, not just Kieran’s. Put him on trial as well. We knew he was doing a lot of drugs, didn’t we?’

  ‘Thanks to that dealer, Kieran,’ Ellen said, and Vic glanced warily at her before returning his attention to the road.

  ‘It was never really established he was dealing, was it?’

  ‘I caught him in that car park on London Road!’ she snapped. ‘I told you.’

  ‘Did you actually witness a transaction, though?’

  ‘No, because we drove off after I confronted him. I should have hung around, got a photo of him doing the deal.’

  ‘Right,’ Vic said, as if agreeing. ‘But remember how the school singled out Lucas, not him. That photo they got from his phone, that’s the kind of thing I mean. We’re lucky no one’s published that or others like it. How many more might there be on all these sites and apps we’ve never heard of?’ He indicated right and sped past a van. ‘All I’m saying is it could all have looked very different.’

  ‘This is about careless driving,’ Ellen said, with cold fury. ‘We’re not fronting an anti-drugs campaign. Though we could.’

  He said nothing more. It was still too unkind – perhaps always would be – to ask her to question the account she’d not only publicly given but also wholeheartedly believed. That Lucas had been blameless, an innocent with no agency of his own possessed by a malign force.

  Often in media interviews, Ellen would invoke her memory of seeing Lucas handing out cash to the homeless living under a local bridge.

  ‘Which bridge?’ Danny had asked, when Vic had mentioned this practice at the time. It was early in Kierangate then. Good times (relatively).

  ‘The one under the railway on Queens Road.’

  Danny chuckled. ‘He’ll be getting something in return for his donations, know what I mean? It’s notorious down there – and not just weed, by the way.’ He grew serious, remembering Lucas’s youth, perhaps. ‘You need to tell him there’s dodgy stuff on sale there. He shouldn’t trust it.’

  Vic had told him. He’d laid down the law. ‘Wait for university for all this stuff,’ he advised, in a spirit of compromise, and had known, before being told, that Leeds would be his son’s first choice. It was the party uni of the day.

  * * *

  God, work was a shitshow by then. He was not so much phoning it in as communicating it telepathically. He was in his mid-forties and had given up on his craft brewery ambitions, not least because his three most recent applications to join someone else’s launch team had not even merited a reply.

  By then, he was drinking way too much of the type of product he’d once dreamed of making. Friends fell away – he could hardly blame them. Danny and Jo still came around, proposing all kinds of changes: that he move in with them, say, or that they help him make over the flat he’d rented for over fifteen years and not once asked the landlord to redecorate. That he cut down on the booze. When they visited, they no longer brought the bottle of wine or the six pack they used to, but a low-maintenance house plant or satsumas in a net sack. He’d tear the netting open with his teeth a week later and eat the dried-out fruit one after the other.

  Jade’s mother Sheridan was welcome, therefore, when she turned up one evening with not one but two bottles of cheap Tesco Bordeaux. She’d made a point of keeping in touch since Lucas’s death. (Okay, so she fell plum into the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God category, but, in her case, it was actually true.)

  ‘I’ve just discovered Jade’s been getting letters from Kieran,’ she said, drinking so urgently her glass chinked against her front teeth. Dressed in monochrome grey and not her usual gerbera shades, she seemed to be wallowing in a darker mood than usual.

  ‘From inside? Wow. Don’t tell Ellen that, will you?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not stupid.’

  Jade was at the end of her second year at university by then. Vic had seen her in the street in college holidays, looking morose, though it was hard to know if the melancholy was really hers or if he was projecting it on her. She’d gained a little weight and he found himself fantasizing about her being pregnant with Lucas’s child, even though the dates were wildly impossible. But in movies and novels, that was always what revived the hearts of the bereft, wasn’t it? New life equalled new hope.

  ‘So what’s he been saying to her in these letters?’

  Sheridan raised an eyebrow. ‘That, I don’t know. But when she was home last week, I noticed two envelopes on her desk with that prison service stamp on them. Like, who else writes actual letters?’

  It sounded to Vic as if Sheridan had been snooping. ‘I used to wonder if they had a thing going,’ he said, experimentally. ‘Kieran and her. Back when she was with Lucas.’

  The look Sheridan returned was considerably less surprised than it might have. ‘I think they didn’t know what they had going. They were kids, all three of them.’ She paused. ‘Not that we get any better at knowing, do we?’

  And, suddenly, her face was coming towards Vic’s and her mouth was on his, bloody with wine. He eased back, embarrassed. ‘I don’t think so, Sheridan.’

  She flushed and shrank away. ‘I’m so sorry, I thought…’

  He couldn’t bear to hear what she thought. ‘It’s fine. Forget it. You’ve had a tough time.’


  ‘No,’ she exclaimed, ‘you’ve had a tough time!’

  ‘The thing is, I have a girlfriend,’ he said, in belated – and bogus – explanation.

  ‘And I have a husband,’ Sheridan countered, and they mustered a laugh before she remembered she needed to get home to said spouse, and left.

  Vic finished the wine on his own and fretted that he could have handled the situation better. He felt sorry for her, he really did. Confused by her daughter’s choice of pen pal and so disconnected from her husband that she’d had to remind Vic she still had one, she had her share of stresses, no doubt about it. But sleeping with her daughter’s dead boyfriend’s alcoholic father was hardly likely to improve matters.

  What were they like, these older women? Even those who hadn’t been shipwrecked with grief were ill-equipped for the high seas they seemed so determined to sail into.

  Vic

  Then

  After Lock Up Longer wound down, he might have been entitled to think that the rest of Kieran’s time inside – there was about a year of it still to be served – would offer a period of welcome reprieve. That he and Ellen would return to their careers and set about the painful rebalancing of priorities that was required, eventually, of the bereaved.

  But Ellen was not yet ready to rebalance. She transferred her work ethic to a lower-profile endeavour: tracking the inmate’s progress. Vic began to dread her calls; even her voicemails agitated him. She’d discovered this and that from Kieran’s key worker or from digging online, infiltrating forums where the parents of young offenders exchanged tips about visits or sending parcels.

  Her greatest hope seemed to be that Kieran would take his own life, though, like a birthday wish, this was not explicitly declared. Instead, she talked about suicide more generally. ‘The rate is really high in these places,’ she reported to Vic.

  ‘That’s tragic. They throw themselves off those landings, I suppose?’ He guessed that she, of all people, must find it quite natural to picture Kieran meeting his end by plunging from a height. Exiting his cell and diving over the rail towards the central rec hall far below, other inmates watching in horror from the rungs of identical walkways.

  But evidently not. Those voids had safety nets these days, she said, and anyway, didn’t he remember her telling him YOI Danstone was a modern, low-rise building?

  Other, viler ideas were discussed on the Lock Up Longer forum, which remained open, if no longer formally monitored. The use of razor blades and showerheads was invoked, or shoelaces by which Kieran might hang himself from a light fitting or bunk. Vic made occasional efforts to delete these comments and block those posting, but the venom kept coming.

  This was their world now. It hardly mattered that they’d helped create it.

  * * *

  Whether by obligation or courtesy, the police surely ought to have alerted them to Kieran’s release date, but in the event Vic only knew the boy was out when he spotted him in Bromley Shopping Centre. It was April 2017, a Saturday afternoon.

  He wasn’t even supposed to be there himself. His new girlfriend Chloë had dragged him along at the last minute to help her choose a gift for someone or other. As she browsed a homewares sale, Vic idled on his phone in the entrance to the store, and that was when he saw him. He was directly across from Vic on the other side of the escalator void, apparently alone, his elbows propped on the top of the balustrade as he looked down at the teeming throngs on the concourse below. His expression was one of mild disdain. Boredom.

  After years of considering himself the moderate to Ellen’s zealot, Vic surprised himself by wanting to march over and kill the bastard. No prison landings needed, just a standard design shopping centre: one shove and the punishment would finally fit the crime. Kieran would be out of their hair for ever. But he found he couldn’t move. It was like when your muscles go into paralysis when you dream to stop you from hurting yourself. By the time he’d mobilized, Kieran had covered his head with a low hood and moved onto the escalator, gliding rapidly downwards.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Vic yelled over the barrier. ‘Hey, Kieran!’ But none of the faces that turned his way was the one he was after and by the time he’d made the descent himself he couldn’t place Kieran in the crowd in front of him. He drew to a halt, breathing heavily. The pounding of his heart was so agonizing he put a hand to his chest, causing a security guard to approach and check he wasn’t having a heart attack.

  He didn’t go back to find Chloë and when she tracked him down by phone later that day, he didn’t tell her about Kieran. She dumped him soon after. ‘It’s not like there’s anything really to finish,’ she told him, with exactly the sense of impotent sorrow the circumstances called for.

  * * *

  After that, every conversation he had with anyone either began with the words ‘Kieran’s back’ or else fizzed with the tension of the subject being self-consciously withheld.

  Ellen called to say she’d had a sighting too and already taken the opportunity to harangue Kieran’s probation officer. ‘The way they try to protect him, anyone would think he was the victim,’ she said, with bitterness.

  Not long after, Vic ran into Justin at the train station and they had a pint at the Farmers Arms. It was, remarkably, the first time they’d drunk alone together and both scanned the bar on entering with a wariness that would have been redundant a few months ago. It was a Monday, pretty quiet, no trouble to be found.

  ‘So he was living it up at the Crown, I hear,’ Vic said, after sharing news of his own near miss.

  ‘Yes. Ellen was pretty upset.’ Typical Justin understatement.

  Vic no longer thought of Lucas’s stepfather as the poor bastard who hadn’t signed up for this drama, this tragedy, but had come to appreciate that he was one of life’s natural carers and caring for Ellen was his calling. What troubled Vic was the suspicion that, in tending to her pain, Justin had subjugated his own. He had no doubt that Justin had felt the loss of Lucas just as they had. They’d been three equal parents.

  Three of them and still not enough to protect the boy!

  ‘She says she saw him outside the house yesterday morning, as well,’ Justin added. The clue was in the ‘says’. She probably did see him, but there was just the smallest chance that she hadn’t.

  ‘What was he doing?’ Vic said, curious.

  ‘Nothing, apparently. Just standing there watching.’

  Vic glanced down at his pint. God, he drank so quickly these days. He had become one of those middle-aged men he’d secretly admired as a fifteen-year-old, when Danny had taken him to his local boozer. Men who had drunk with a no-nonsense suction Vic aspired to emulate one day. Well, here he was, emulating. ‘That’s a thing, isn’t it? Revisiting the scene of the crime – or in this case the locations linked to the victim. I can imagine getting something out of that psychologically.’

  ‘Has he turned up at yours?’ Justin asked.

  ‘Not that I’m aware of, but he certainly knows where to find me if he has the urge. He was over often enough back in the day.’ Vic gave a bleak chuckle. ‘Talking like Ice Cube, telling the others about the strap he was going to get.’

  ‘Strap?’

  ‘Gun. Wonder if he met any real gangsters inside, eh.’

  Justin’s guilty smirk made Vic see how unused he was to joking in this way. Not about Kieran. ‘The thing is, should we be worried he might be planning some sort of revenge?’

  The thought had crossed Vic’s mind, of course. He’d known from Ellen that a limited selection of newspapers was available to the Danstone residents, but had assumed any reference to a current inmate’s crime would be redacted. Besides, the worst of it had been online and free access to the internet was definitely not part of Her Majesty’s offering. He’d also assumed that the first thing ex-cons did when freed was to google themselves. Pump themselves full of the accumulated hatred of those they’d strewn in their wake – and those who’d just piled on for the hell of it. Well, Kieran must have had more reading material
than most.

  ‘I don’t think he’d risk getting into any trouble, at least not during his supervision,’ he told Justin.

  ‘Ellen’s talking about wanting to move, but I think, why the hell should we? We lived here long before he came along.’ Justin took a swallow of lager. ‘I’m not sure what the alternative is, though. I get the feeling she wants me to go round there and threaten him.’ He gave Vic a wry half-smile. ‘Maybe I should take Freya’s old rounders bat with me?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go anywhere near him,’ Vic advised. ‘He’ll have all kinds of social worker types looking out for him right now and they’d be sure to escalate it.’

  ‘I wasn’t serious.’ Justin sighed deeply. ‘To be honest, I’m hoping he’ll slink back into his video game hole and Ellen will forget he’s even back.’

  ‘That’s pretty much my best hope, as well,’ Vic said.

  ‘It doesn’t help that he seems to be hanging out with Jade, does it? Did Ellen tell you that?’

  ‘No, but if he is then it’s definitely not going to help his cause.’ Deciding not to mention the love letters sent to Jade from the clink, Vic eyed his companion’s empty glass. ‘Fancy another?’

  ‘No, I’d better get back,’ Justin said.

  See if Ellen might be in the mood to forgive, Vic thought. Maybe they could watch the pigs fly past the window together.

  He had two more pints on his own and then walked home. Having begun the evening in a comfortably neutral mood, he now felt his spirits decline with every step. Perhaps Ellen was right and removing themselves from the area was the only solution here. Because the idea that that feckless wastrel was free to enjoy all of the places – and people – Lucas once had, but never would again, was diabolical. And what if this connection with Jade continued? Deepened into something serious, with ghastly mini Kierans tearing around the neighbourhood?