by Simon Lelic
Not that either option would have interested Fleet, even if there’d been enough daylight left by which to see. It had already begun to fade when he’d first come down here. To think, to walk. To make the most of the break in the weather when he’d finally left the station. Now, under cover of darkness, the rain had returned, and Fleet would long ago have gone back to his hotel if, in the dying of the light, his eyes hadn’t caught on the words that were etched on the bench.
In memory of Jeannette Fleet, loved and never forgotten.
The bench was the last on the harbor walkway, a final resting place for passing pedestrians before the river washed away into the sea. Fleet could see exactly why his mother would have chosen this particular location—and who else other than his mother could have been responsible? He imagined her sitting exactly where he was now, in the slight hollow he could feel beneath him in the seat. Early mornings, late evenings—it would be as private a spot as was possible to find in an area that was so exposed. The perfect place for Fleet’s mother to set aside her shame and, with her eyes on the point the heavens met the water, to quietly allow herself to grieve.
He’d misjudged her. For the best part of twenty years, he’d assumed she’d put religion over family, her god over her one and only daughter. He thought of the crucifix around his mother’s neck, as well as the mantelpiece devoid of Jeannie’s image—not to mention the accusations Fleet had hurled his mother’s way before, as a teenager, he’d stormed from his childhood home. Driven by guilt, undoubtedly, but anger, too. At the fact his mother, after Jeannie killed herself, had chosen to act as though she’d never been alive. If suicide was a sin, he’d challenged his mother, then what was that?
But it turned out things hadn’t been so simple. He thought of his mother now as being like the very river that had taken his sister’s life: cold, inscrutable, but with unseen currents swirling below the surface. Her faith—her anger—tugging her one way; her grief—her love—the other. And he felt ashamed that, after watching her suffer the loss of one child, he’d forced her to endure the same thing all over again.
You heavens above, rain down my righteousness.
Standing, Fleet wiped the rain from his face. He moved to the railing and looked down toward the churning water—at the spot, by the final kink of the river, where Jeannie’s body had caught amid the reeds. He heard his wife’s voice: It isn’t the same . . . And it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t.
But it scared him how close he’d come to believing it might be.
As Fleet turned to walk back toward the harbor, the wind kicked the rain into his eyes. Perhaps if it hadn’t, he might have seen them, though it was hard to imagine afterward how else things might have played out if he had.
“Evening, officer,” said one of the men. Tall, broad, gruff. Stepping from the darkness into the pall of a streetlight, like a performer laying claim to center stage. There were three other men around him, hanging back in the shadows like cowardly hyenas around a lion. Fleet didn’t need to glance around to know that the rest of the harbor was deserted. The nearest building was back beyond the boats, its curtained windows glowing dimly, like sightless eyes.
“Good evening,” said Fleet, and he made to keep walking. The lion—a match for Fleet’s height and build—stepped across his path.
Fleet raised his chin. “Can I help you with something?”
For some reason this was considered funny. The men’s laughter carried with it a stench of lager. From somewhere nearby Fleet heard a drunken babble of conversation, rising and fading, as though a door had been opened and then shut again. The Hare & Tortoise—the pub Anne had told him about when he’d checked in, and from which the men in front of him had no doubt recently spilled.
Fleet took a moment to survey their faces. Three of them he didn’t recognize. One, he did.
“Looking for someone, were you?” said Lion, who to match his status within the group had a mane of unkempt hair, long enough that he would probably have been able to tame it into a ponytail—though Fleet had to wonder what the bloke’s mates, who hardly seemed in touch with their feminine side, would have made of that.
Hyena One—spotty and shaven-headed—cackled again. Hyena Two, thickset and bald, belched. The fourth man stood twitching quietly in the background. The one Fleet recognized: Mason’s father, Stephen Payne.
Fleet, who’d dealt with plenty of drunks in his time, found Payne’s manner difficult to read. Was he nervous? Excited? Afraid, perhaps? And if so, of Fleet’s temper—or of whether he’d be able to control his own?
“Shame what happened to your sister,” said Lion, prodding his chin toward the river. “It was before my time, of course. Must only have been ten when it happened. When she topped herself, I mean. But Stephen here remembers it. Don’t you, Steve?”
Excited. Stephen Payne was definitely excited. He’d started nodding and seemed to be finding it difficult to stop. His pupils were dilated, too, meaning it perhaps wasn’t only lager he’d been indulging in this evening.
“Still, some people round here say it was justice,” said Lion. “Say that’s what happens when you go around telling lies.”
“Is that right?” said Fleet, focusing on Payne. “So how come you’re still knocking around, Steve?”
Which was stupid. But stopped Payne nodding, at least. A memory came back to Fleet, of a situation similar to this one. Fleet had been outnumbered on that occasion, as well, though back then he’d known exactly who he’d been dealing with. Stephen Payne, obviously, a year younger than him, though at the time half a head taller. Nigel Sullivan, built like a postbox, with an intellect to match. Matthew Morgan. Morgue, to his friends—as in, shit with him and he’ll happily put you in one. And James Cooper. Little Jimmy Cooper. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. Unless that fly happened to be a fourteen-year-old girl he’d taken a fancy to, but who’d made the dubious decision not to fancy him back.
When Fleet had confronted them—thirteen days too late for it to have made any difference; hell, a year too late, it had turned out—they’d kicked the living shit out of him. And Fleet had welcomed it. Self-flagellation: when Holly had used the word, she’d known as well as Fleet did that he knew exactly what it meant.
Looking at Payne now, Fleet saw nothing about the man that came as a surprise. He was tall, and carried weight, but nevertheless managed to look malnourished. There was a hollowness to his cheeks and a pallor to his skin that suggested it had been years since he’d last sat in sunlight, and longer since he’d come within a fork’s distance of a vegetable. But none of that made him look weak, exactly. Maybe he would have struggled to lift a barbell at the gym, but in a pub brawl his fists would no doubt land quick and heavy. Or even in his son’s bedroom at home.
What surprised Fleet more than Payne’s appearance was his own reaction to being in his presence. It was the first time since Fleet’s arrival back in town that he had been. Predictably enough, Payne hadn’t come to the police station with his son—probably because he’d been worried that if he set foot in there, they wouldn’t let him back out. But he’d been on Fleet’s mind. Of course he had. And seeing Payne now, Fleet felt an old familiar rage—a readiness to risk his reputation, his career, his freedom, for the chance to rip the man’s throat out.
“Different faces, same old story. Eh, Steve?” said Fleet, gesturing loosely around the group. “The only difference now is that people in this town seem to have cottoned on to what a lowlife you are. Is that why the buddies you had back in the day decided to ditch you? Just like your old lady, from what I heard.”
“No one ditched me,” said Payne. “I ditched them. Waste of oxygen, the lot of them. Decided it was time to get me a new life.”
“A neat trick, that,” said Fleet. “Moving on without moving anywhere.”
Out of his old gang of four, it was only Stephen Payne who hadn’t left town. Fleet knew because one of them had written to him. The p
ostbox, fittingly: Nigel Sullivan. Five, six years ago now, this had been. In shockingly bad handwriting and with spelling that would have foxed the Forensics lads, Sullivan had not only revealed what his former friends had amounted to (Jimmy Cooper, the ringleader, was an accomplished housebreaker—or not so accomplished, arguably, given the amount of time he’d evidently spent in prison; Matthew “Morgue” Morgan was dead), he’d also apologized for everything he’d been a part of. He’d listed things Fleet hadn’t even been aware had happened, though they didn’t fundamentally alter the overall picture. Below the radar—below Fleet’s radar, anyway—his little sister had suffered over a year of relentless bullying and abuse. She’d been made into a pariah at school, something else Fleet, in his dumb, dipshit existence, had failed to notice. To notice, or to take note of? Either way, he hadn’t lifted so much as a fingernail to try to stop it, nor to attempt to understand the anguish his sister was going through. And he hadn’t been there for her, either, when Stephen Payne and his cronies had followed Jeannie into the woods one day and subjected her to an assault that had only stopped short of rape by virtue of the fact she’d been having her period.
It freaked them out, apparently. Sent them running.
In his letter, Sullivan admitted to it all, and apologized for having denied it at the time. Which they all had, obviously, after Jeannie had admitted to her mother what had happened, and she in turn had insisted on taking the matter to the police. The problem, of course, was that it had come down to one person’s word against four, and the boys’ parents somehow managed to get the community on their sons’ sides. They called into question Jeannie’s character—did everything but put up posters declaring outright that she was a lying slut. They made out Jeannie had been obsessed with their boys, with Jimmy Cooper in particular, and that when he had rejected her advances, she’d concocted the entire story as a form of retribution. And so it had been Jeannie herself who’d paid the price for what had happened, while Payne and his buddies walked away scot-free.
Sullivan, when he’d contacted Fleet over a decade later, had offered to testify, but ten years into his career as a copper by then, Fleet had known precisely how much good that would have done. How insultingly slim the chances would have been of a conviction. Besides which, any charges that could have been brought against the three men who’d still been breathing would have fallen well short of the crime they deserved to answer for. Because in Fleet’s mind, suicide wasn’t the cause of Jeannie’s death. The way he saw it, his sister had been murdered.
“Wasn’t there something you wanted to say to the nice policeman, Steve?” said Lion, with an expression somewhere between a smile and a snarl.
Payne sniffed and wiped his nostrils with the side of his hand. Fleet could practically taste the cocaine dribble at the back of the man’s throat.
“Yeah,” Payne said, stepping forward—level with Lion but no farther, Fleet noted. Perhaps another pint of Foster’s, another line of coke, would have carried him the extra few inches. “Leave my kid alone,” Payne told him, pointing a finger. “He ain’t done nothing and you know it. Not his fault some stuck-up bitch decided to take a swim and forgot to bring her armbands.”
Fleet edged forward himself, far enough that Payne felt the need to withdraw a fraction.
“Are you offering to provide information that might be pertinent to an ongoing investigation, Mr. Payne?”
It was evidently too many syllables in quick succession for Payne to handle. “Huh?” he grunted.
“What I’m asking you,” you dumb, child-beating piece of shit, “is whether there’s something you’d like to tell me. Because it sounded just then like it might be worth my time hauling you down to the station. Asking what you know about Sadie Saunders’s disappearance.”
How dearly Fleet would have loved to do exactly that. To rattle Payne into believing he was a suspect. But Fleet already knew the man had an airtight alibi. The night of Sadie’s disappearance, and following a brawl outside the boozer, Stephen Payne had been shut in a police cell. That was part of the reason Mason’s alibi was so weak. He’d claimed he’d been asleep in his bedroom, but his old man being locked up meant there hadn’t been anyone else in the house.
Still, it was worth putting the wind up Payne, just to see him rattled.
“Nuh-uh. Fuck you. You can’t do that. You ain’t pinning Sadie on me.”
“Maybe I should just insist that you turn out your pockets,” Fleet pressed. “You’re looking a bit twitchy there, Steve. I wonder whether it’s just cash you’ve got tucked away in your wallet. Or, if I searched you, whether I might find something a bit more . . . illegal.”
Payne melted away, his skittering eyes landing on Lion in a plea for help.
Dismissing the men with a headshake, Fleet made to walk on, but once again Lion stepped across his path. Through it all, he’d been the only one of the foursome to hold his ground.
“All our mutual friend is trying to say,” he said, his tone dangerously reasonable, “is that he thinks it would be a good idea for you to face the facts. You’ve been running around town shouting murder, accusing people left, right and center, when it seems blindingly obvious to anyone with half a brain that Sadie took a nosedive in the river. Just like your poor little sister.”
Fleet’s teeth clamped tight. Furiously, he held the man’s eyes.
“And what you don’t seem to appreciate,” Lion went on, “is that when outsiders come along and start casting aspersions against the residents of this town, it affects the people who live here. Stand-up, honest people like our good selves.” The irony was written in his smile. “Maybe it doesn’t bother you now that you’ve set up home somewhere else, but for a town that relies so much on tourists, reputation is important. We want decent folks coming to visit. People with money to spend. Not fetishists and freaks, who only stay long enough to snap a picture for their scrapbooks before heading on to the next brains-spattered crime scene on their lists.”
One of the hyenas tittered, as though his friend had described exactly the sort of pastime he might enjoy pursuing himself.
“Now, I’m not an educated sort,” said Lion. “But from what I’ve heard, all sorts of nasty things start happening when there’s a downturn, particularly in a community that’s already on the edge. Crime goes up, apparently. Nasty crimes, like break-ins and burglaries, and assaults on little old ladies when they’re walking home from church at night.” He shook his head sadly. “It would be a shame indeed if that sort of thing started happening here. In the very place your mother lives. She’s a churchgoer, I believe?”
Fleet moved so they were toe to toe, and allowed himself to flinch at the stench. The man reeked like a beer mat.
“Murdoch,” he said. “That’s your name, isn’t it? Nathan Murdoch. Three counts of public disorder, four for the possession of class A drugs, and one for . . . what was the other thing?”
He watched Lion’s smirk slip into his jowls. Almost the first thing Fleet and his colleagues had done when the Sadie Saunders investigation began was run checks on the local scumbags. It had taken him a while to place Nathan Murdoch, but now that he had, he found himself recalling the details in the man’s file that had first caught his attention. Again, there was no suggestion of his involvement with Sadie’s disappearance, but for a while Fleet and his colleagues had considered Murdoch closely—just as they had everyone within a fifty-mile radius who was on the sex offenders register. In Murdoch’s case, the count Fleet had failed to mention was an indictment for distributing pornographic images involving minors. It was hard to say whether Murdoch had dabbled to satisfy his own proclivities or purely for profit, but Fleet doubted very much that Murdoch’s associates, were they to find out, would draw a distinction either way.
From the expression on Fleet’s face, it was obvious Murdoch was thinking the same thing.
Fleet shook his head. “It’s slipped my mind,” he sai
d. “For the time being. But I could always give the local desk sergeant a call and ask him to refresh my memory? Seeing as we’re standing around chatting and all, I’m sure it would make an interesting topic of conversation.”
Now Murdoch was the one to bite down. His jaw bulged, as though he were attempting to swallow a shit sandwich sideways.
“No,” said Fleet. “I thought not. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my way. Have a pleasant evening, gentlemen. Remember there’s always a bed for you at the local nick if you find yourselves tempted to start any more trouble.”
Fleet stood waiting, until finally Murdoch moved to one side. The other men parted, too. Grudgingly, as though they were being forced to watch a stranger queue-jump his way toward the bar.
Fleet kept his eyes on Stephen Payne’s until he was through. And then he was walking alone through the rain, barely conscious of his strides, aware only of the torrents of adrenaline flowing within him. It was taking every ounce of his self-possession, every facet of his training, to stop himself from turning around and hurling Payne, Murdoch—the lot of them—headfirst over the railings and into the river.
His mistake was to assume it was over.
Such was the pounding in his ears, he didn’t hear the sound of anyone behind him. He was focused only on the pavement at his feet, and he looked up in surprise when he realized he’d reached the hotel. The windows were dark, even in the guests’ lounge, but the thought of inflicting his mood on Anne if she were still awake was enough to stop Fleet heading immediately inside.
And that was another mistake.
For it was as Fleet loitered in the darkened street that the hood came down over his eyes. From the stink of it, the dust that immediately clogged his throat, it was an old rubbish sack, something from a building site or a skip. It was the last thought Fleet had before the first blow impacted against his kidneys. It snapped his body one way, before a punch on the opposite side hinged it back again. Fleet managed to swing out an elbow, striking teeth, but he was outnumbered, overpowered, and suddenly his feet went from under him.