With the late-evening’s hard miles behind him, Tyler lay on the single mattress, alone in the darkness, trying to beat away the returning ghosts that seemed intent on reminding him of how different existence had once been.
When Kim had come into his life.
He had been a bobby on the beat with visions of grandeur. An early marriage to the job, though it wasn’t long before he and Kim were living together. A three-way relationship, that’s what she had once called it, and perhaps more than once. And then one day she came home with news indeed: she was pregnant. Except that the great Jim Tyler, preparing to take his exams, wasn’t so sure how wonderful the news really was.
‘It isn’t a good time, that’s all.’
‘I thought you’d be happy, Jim. I thought it was what you wanted.’
‘What I wanted?’
‘We don’t have to stay living here; we can get a decent mortgage between us. Find somewhere—’
‘But not right now, that’s all I’m saying. The timing couldn’t be worse.’
‘I’m sorry to have inconvenienced you.’
‘We could have talked about it. We could have planned things properly.’
‘But life isn’t always like that, Jim. Sometimes life just happens.’
And on it went. How could she have done this? Everything had been going along fine, hadn’t it? There was time for all the family stuff later on, when his career was established, when both their careers were established. What was the hurry?
‘How could I do this? How could … I … do this? Can you hear yourself? There will never be the perfect time, Jim, don’t you see that? Is that what you’re waiting for? You wait forever for that and it doesn’t come. I didn’t plan this, but it still might be the best thing that’s ever happened to us.’
Was his look so accusing? So transparent?
He apologised. Blamed it on the stress he was under at work, and the exams coming up. Of course she was right.
He said the words but did she believe them? Did he even believe them? He made up for it a dozen times over, and when he passed his exams with flying colours, he took her to Spain, their first trip abroad together and, as it turned out, their last.
Kim miscarried in Spain and the awfulness of that time broke completely what hadn’t already been broken. She made a full recovery, physically, but whatever they still had together never made the journey home. With hindsight, he came to see that it had never made the journey out there in the first place.
They split up and didn’t keep in touch. For a time, he wondered what had been so urgent about passing exams and gaining promotions, but the doubts didn’t last. With Kim gone, his temporarily abandoned sense of ambition was refuelled and re-ignited, and he quickly developed the art of burying himself alive in work. And it was only on rare occasions that he wondered how far he would have to go to lose the feelings of inadequacy that seemed to wait for him in the quiet and in the dark.
He became relentless; obsessive. When he wasn’t working himself to the bone, or studying, he was visiting the corporate gymnasium. He found a chest hiding under the skin and bones, and in no time other muscles were popping up to see what was going on.
Kim would hardly recognise him. It was that thought, more than any other, that could make him want to cry.
But as DCI Jim Tyler lay on his bed in the darkness, on the outskirts of Hanley, he could no more cry now than he could back then.
Shortly before the incident at work that pre-empted this current exile, he had bumped into Kim on the street. He hadn’t seen her in years. And in all of those years he had never found another like her and he knew that he never would. In some dark chamber of the heart, all that time ago, he had arranged the ceremony and taken the oath, consigning himself to a single life.
And now the screw had been turned again. It had been his day off. He had turned a corner and suddenly she was there, in front of him. She was married and recently found herself to be pregnant again, her third child.
They were strangers now, on an old familiar street but living in different worlds; yet it seemed that she wanted to tell him her news, proclaiming it proudly. And tell him she did, adding that this time he might approve because she’d done things in the right order: marriage first, baby second, career a long way down the line. He had to respond with something. He said that yes, this time he did approve because this time it had nothing whatsoever to do with him.
And he had walked away with a momentary sense of victory; of restored pride.
And it lasted all of a minute.
That day he almost did cry.
Almost.
On the Sunday evening DCI Tyler went to bed late. It was a week since the discovery of the corpse of Alan Dale. He had been out pounding the streets again, running through the city, trying to gain some clarity on the case and at the same time trying to exhaust the demons inside him clamouring for retribution and the balm of alcohol. He had finally fallen asleep, exhausted, lying on top of the single bed with dark dreams for company.
The phone was ringing.
It was Chief Superintendent Berkins, no less. Suspected murder of a forty-five year-old male found dead in his flat.
The age registered in some remote region of Tyler’s mind, though not in the conscious part.
Steven Jenkins, his body discovered in the flat in which he was apparently living, surrounded by enough illegal substances to start a small empire. A neighbour had called the police after hearing a disturbance; the woman had gone around to check that everything was okay after hearing a car screeching up the road, in the aftermath.
But everything had not been okay.
Steven Jenkins.
Now the registration was a conscious one. ‘You may have to put the other case on a back-burner,’ said Berkins.
‘Actually, we might not have to,’ said Tyler.
‘What’s that?’
‘I’ll get over there straight away.’
‘That’s what I thought you said.’
When the call ended Tyler rang Danny Mills.
14
The scene of flashing lights was a mile or so out of Hanley town centre. Steven Jenkins, it turned out, had been DCI Tyler’s near neighbour.
According to the woman who had made the discovery, Jenkins had been a frequenter of the town centre most weekends. She seemed to know his routine remarkably well for somebody who ‘only lives next door. Not close, nothing like that. ‘It was even more remarkable considering Jenkins had only been living there for a few weeks.
The neighbour was telling Tyler that she had occupied the flat for more years than he’d seen, before embarking on a potted history of every tenant who had lived next door.
At the risk of appearing rude, Tyler tried to restore some focus to the woman’s boundless erudition on the subject, and she responded with a promise to be as helpful as was humanly possible on this, clearly, the night of her life.
Steven Jenkins had been a presentable young man who favoured denim in the day as much as in the evening. Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Tuesday were his usual nights out, leaving the flat usually around eight and returning in the early hours, and usually alone.
Though preferring to keep herself to herself, the neighbour had spoken with Jenkins on a few occasions, and found him to be ‘more sociable than the average man of his age. Having said that, I saw him only yesterday and it was like getting blood from a stone getting a simple “hello”. Sharp, he was, too – when he did speak.’
‘Sharp?’
‘Like he had things on his mind. Big things, I would say. Nervous, he was. Living on his nerves and his cigarettes. I know what it’s like.’
No, she wasn’t sure what exactly Steven Jenkins did for a living, but he always went out early in the morning, same time every day, Monday to Friday, back late afternoon and casually dressed; jeans for all weathers. Didn’t drive – didn’t own a car, at any rate. Never noticed him using the bus stop down the road, and so as likely as not he worked locally, thou
gh she had never come across him in the town during the day.
Tyler gently nudged her observations on the life of the late Steven Jenkins back towards the previous evening, and she apologised for running off at the mouth. It was the shock and all that, she explained. ‘He usually returned to his flat to have something to eat before going out for the evening. Except last night he didn’t. It was very late when he did come back.’
‘Did he return to his flat alone?’
‘As far as I could tell – not that I go about minding other folks’ business, you understand.’
‘Of course not.’
‘But I didn’t hear voices. I’m a light sleeper. It doesn’t take much to wake me. I suppose, living on my own like I do, and not having much company, I tend to listen out. Bit like having a son, you might say. In a way, I mean.’
She looked awkward, as though she had let out some treacherous secret, exposing the terrible truth about herself.
Tyler waved a hand, as though to dismiss the need for further explanation. It wasn’t easy to admit to loneliness, he knew that. Not a socially acceptable condition. If this neighbour felt assured to hear the safe return of the man next door, treating him in her fantasy world as some quasi-adopted son, then where was the sin in that? The world was short of good neighbours, in every sense of the word.
‘So, when Mr Jenkins did eventually return, as far as you know he was alone?’
‘I would say so. But then I must have dozed off.’
Again, the woman appeared guilty, as though admitting that she had been negligent. As though her lack of vigilance had made her somehow responsible.
The next thing she heard, she told Tyler, was a ‘commotion going on. I must have been in a deep sleep. It’s these tablets the doctor’s been giving me.’ Again the caution, as though she was giving too much of herself away; the need in her to qualify insatiable. ‘On prescription, naturally,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t take any of these things like they do today.’
‘Naturally,’ agreed Tyler.
‘And neither did that young man.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Take things like they do today. Mind you, you can’t tell these days. Some of them look so respectable. It’s drugs all the time, what you hear in the papers and see on the telly.’
As though a reality that the woman had been fighting against was finally seeping through, she said, ‘Do you think this might have been about drugs? I hope not.’
Tyler looked into the woman’s filling eyes. Steven Jenkins was dead; murdered in cold blood. What difference did it matter to his neighbour whether drugs formed part of the equation or not?
Was it fear of the unknown? Did people feel safer, believing that some kind of order remained active in the world, if murder could be explained in old fashioned terms, whatever they might be? That the man next door is killed for love, money, some pub argument about football, maybe, then the world can keep turning. But drugs … and the universe is set to explode.
‘So, you awoke hearing sounds from next door?’
‘Like I say, Inspector – you did say ‘Inspector’, didn’t you? Like I say, those tablets—’
‘You were telling me about what awoke you.’
‘That’s right, but I was in such a deep sleep that I couldn’t get my bearings at first. I thought I’d left the telly switched on or something, but then I remembered that I hadn’t been watching it that evening hardly at all. Thought it might have been Mr Jenkins – Steven – next door – his telly, I mean.’
‘What exactly did you hear?’
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t really know. It was over before I was properly awake. Then I heard a car start up outside and I got out of my bed. The car made such a noise as you never heard in your life.’
‘You saw the car?’
‘Not really. It was up the road and gone and I’m not very good with cars, to tell you the truth.’
Tyler heard a cough behind him and he turned around to find Danny Mills.
Mills hadn’t been asleep when Tyler rang. He’d been lying in bed, next to his wife, listening to the calm sounds of her breathing. Thinking about the case; his imagination bringing Alan Dale back to life; trying to see the boy and understand some of the torment that he might have been subjected to.
He’d thought of his own son, Harry, and his daughter, Jessica. About the bullying that he and his wife had found out about and tried to nip in the bud, talking to the headteacher and respective form teachers.
He knew from his own memories of school days, that it wasn’t always evident what was going on in a child’s mind. Neither he nor his wife had noticed any worrying signs for more than a week now, but might they be missing something? Were their children going through some dreadful daily ordeals that they were too frightened or ashamed to talk about?
Short of hiding in the playground bushes and bugging the classrooms, how was it possible to be sure? And was that kind of paranoiac feeling a normal part of being a parent, or a symptom of encroaching mental illness brought on by the stresses of work and life in general?
His mind had drifted back to Alan Dale. If the boy had died directly – or indirectly, for that matter – as a result of bullying, was he tragically unlucky or had his idiosyncratic nature marked him out?
Not fitting in had never been a recipe for an easy life. If you stood out from the crowd because you were fat, thin, tall, short, spotty, the wrong kind of clever or stupid: whatever the differences, it could be the call to arms for the bully, and a guarantee of years – a lifetime, even – of misery for the victim.
He could see the dead boy, but as a living, frightened soul begging for someone to save him, to intervene on his behalf.
When the call came, Danny Mills might as well have been asleep, so deeply was he involved in the nightmare, conjuring up the dead boy.
Mills was taken to one side and quickly briefed. Steven Jenkins had been found naked, clutching a large bag of cocaine, his throat cut so deeply it had almost taken his head off. There were other substances found in his flat.
‘Any questions, Sergeant?’
‘Dozens.’
‘Any that can’t wait half an hour?’
‘Just the one.’
‘Fire away.’
‘Do you believe in coincidence?’
‘About as much as you do.’
Tyler asked Mills to take over with the neighbour while he went to make calls. When he returned he saw Mills still engaged with the woman, her mouth firing on all cylinders. He set about relieving the ear-bent sergeant, calling for reinforcements in the form of an available constable.
They watched as the neighbour was assisted back to her flat. ‘Let the SOCOs do their dealing and count your lucky stars. That kettle will be in for a hell of a night. So, what do you know?’
Mills repeated the neighbour’s account, Tyler hearing nothing that he hadn’t already.
‘I think we can probably rule her out,’ he said with a weary tone. ‘Of course, you know what happens next. The press will have a field day juxtaposing the two events: the thirty-year-old mystery of a dead schoolboy and the brutal killing of his classmate. Then and Now: A Bloody History of the City of Stoke-on-Trent. The irony is that they won’t see the possibility of a genuine connection. Not yet.
‘When we resume the trail that leads from River Trent High, we must be cautious and discreet, and not a little open-minded.’
‘I don’t follow?’
‘We must be wary of assuming that there has to be a connection. We might be seduced into missing something even more obvious.’
Mills frowned.
Tyler closed his eyes, and for a few moments seemed to become lost in whatever tangle was absorbing him. ‘Guilt can do strange things to a person. The corpse of a missing schoolboy comes up out of the ground and with it likely a multitude of dirty secrets, of one kind or another.
‘And so, when somebody is murdered, a short time after the discovery of the dead boy, or what’s left of
him, the curious mind starts to consider possibilities. When the police are digging around already, does someone have a vested interest in keeping somebody else quiet?’
Mills looked about to say something when Tyler cut in.
‘We let scene of crime do their work with the late Steven Jenkins and we put out an appeal for witnesses who saw anyone coming to his flat or leaving in a hurry and we go door-to-door. And we pray that something comes in on the getaway car, if that’s what it was. So, what’s the order of the day? The teacher of the dead pupils, or the classmates? Or should I say surviving classmates?’
‘I had Howard Wood down as next on the list, sir.’
‘And I see no reason to change that. I’ll visit Wood later while you follow up this end.’
Tyler was getting into his car when Mills said, ‘Looks like Jack the Ripper turned up after all.’
15
Howard Wood was still off sick and not feeling receptive to visitors when Tyler rang him to make arrangements.
Wood maintained that as he was off work, any visit would have to wait. Tyler made it clear that while he had no wish to compound the effects of the migraine, or to become infected with the alleged stomach virus now afflicting the teacher, he was prepared to risk it. The visit could not wait.
Tyler had little trouble finding Wood’s flat. He was becoming familiar with parts of the city, even if the ramshackle lack of design was still baffling. Oh well, he thought, with any luck, I won’t be around long enough to grasp it.
Wood’s home was in Hartshill, bordering the west side of Penkhull village. Following the main road that curved up out of Stoke, passing the site where Alan Dale had been found thirty years too late, the turn off was on the right, just beyond the Jolly Potters public house.
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