‘So, what changed? Did Alan say something to your parents?’
The sadness in her eyes was almost too much to look on. ‘Alan never said anything. But I knew that something was wrong and I told them.’
‘What did you tell them?’ asked Tyler.
‘I said that Alan was having a hard time at school. They’d noticed that he was more quiet than usual, and had been for a few days. When they asked him what the matter was he said that it was nothing. So eventually I couldn’t stand it and I said that Alan was getting picked on.’
‘Did you witness Alan being picked on, directly?’
‘I never saw anyone actually hitting him, or anything like that. They were craftier than that. They weren’t quite stupid enough to do anything when anyone might be watching. They knew that they might get into trouble, I suppose. So, they were always sneaky about it.’
‘And you’re certain that Alan never mentioned any names?’
Again, she seemed to hesitate. ‘Never,’ she said. ‘Apart from his friend, Anthony.’
‘When your parents visited the school, do you know what followed from that? Was any action taken?’
‘I shouldn’t have thought so. At least, not at first. Wise didn’t want anything damaging the good name of the school and his own reputation. Because we didn’t have any names or any proof of anything, he assured my parents that he would be speaking to Alan’s form teacher. And that if anything surfaced then the guilty party would be punished. That’s what he said, apparently.’
‘And was this assurance enough for your parents?’
‘They were very old fashioned. They would have seen an authority figure like Wise as being a man of his word. A man of integrity. That’s a laugh.
‘I think they would have expected that justice would be done, if the culprits could be identified. But the trouble was that Alan wouldn’t come forward with anything and Wise said that without that his hands were tied.’
‘Do you know if justice was done?’
‘My parents kept asking Alan, and I did, too. It was like getting blood out of a stone most of the time with my brother. He was scared, though. I think he was afraid that if he gave them any names, if he told them about what was going on at that place, that it would have made things a lot worse for him.’
‘It must have been very difficult for you, knowing that Alan was being bullied but nobody doing anything about it.’
‘It was horrible. I felt so helpless. I asked them – my parents, I mean – about going back up to the school because things were getting worse. And that’s when Alan said that two boys in his class had been summoned to Mr Wise’s office and had come back looking very sorry for themselves.’
‘When was this, Miss Dale?’
‘It was close to when my brother went missing.’
‘He didn’t give the names of the two boys?’
‘Like I said, he never mentioned anybody except his friend, Anthony.’
‘Do you think Alan was telling the truth? Might he have been saying what your parents wanted to hear?’
Dale smiled. ‘You are a very perceptive man. I don’t know, not for sure. But I was there when those conversations were taking place, and at the time I believed Alan.’
‘You believed him?’
‘I did, yes.’
‘How could you be certain, Miss Dale?’
‘I couldn’t, of course. But I believed him because of the way he said it. And I remember thinking that there might be reprisals.’
‘Reprisals from the two boys?’
‘Wise had quite a reputation, and the boys genuinely feared him. I think he would have dealt severely with somebody, anybody, if he believed that his position was being compromised. Just so that justice could be seen to be done. He wouldn’t want anything coming back on him or his precious school. I’m sure it would have been properly documented in case our parents or anybody else had taken the matter further. That’s what I imagine, anyway, for what it’s worth.’
‘Thank you,’ said Tyler. ‘That’s interesting.’
Tyler thought over what Dale had said, pausing to finish his drink and to frame the question: ‘Does the name Steven Jenkins mean anything to you?’
Mills arrived a few minutes early, and sat outside the terraced property. Fenton was something of an enigma, he had often thought. Regarded as one of the towns making up the city, yet it seemed curiously devoid of any tangible centre. He thought of the area around the magistrate’s court as the heart of the town, but wondered if that wasn’t down to the job he was doing.
He recognised the figure walking briskly along the road towards him, even though he had never seen Turnock before. The grown-up version of the boy who had once been Alan Dale’s best, and possibly only, friend might not be exactly a contender for the fattest man in Britain, but the bouncy gait and jowly features betrayed a man with no history of being thin. He looked nervous and was keen to disappear inside the property with his visitor, and Mills obliged.
The inside of the property suggested a confirmed and lifelong bachelor. It didn’t look as though the man had accumulated much in his life, and for a moment Mills felt an empathetic sadness, and a sense of being blessed in this life after all.
‘I’ve got about forty minutes,’ said Turnock, breathlessly. ‘Is that enough?’
Mills nodded. ‘If we get straight to business.’
Mills let the man begin with his own memories of Alan Dale, painting a familiar picture of a classmate subjected to the worst horrors of the so-called education system back in the day. It seemed to Mills that the grown up ‘fat boy’ might be describing scenes from a war story, in which fear and danger marked out every day. A game of survival, relentless and without mercy. Yet in their clandestine friendship, some secret respite had been born in the knowledge that at least they were not suffering entirely alone.
The man had a kindly, affable face, with a smile that seemed warm and genuine. But the way it remained glued to his face, regardless of the context, regardless of the twists and turns in the conversation, quickly became unnerving. It suggested an almost pathological eagerness to please, and a desperate need for urgent approval.
So far there had been no mention of any names, and already Turnock was starting to glance at his watch. It was time to end the preliminary sketching and come up with a few faces.
‘Do you remember the name of your class teacher, Mr Turnock?’
‘Which one?’ he answered, and rather lamely, thought Mills.
‘The year that Alan went missing. 1972. Your penultimate – your next to last – year.’
‘I know what penultimate means, sir.’
Mills blanched at the mild rebuke, and at the use of the word ‘sir’. Turnock looked about to apologise.
‘You don’t have to call me “sir”, by the way. Actually, that’s what I’m supposed to call you.’
‘Mr Turnock’s fine. Tony, if you prefer. I really don’t mind.’
It wasn’t quite the discussion of names that Mills had been hoping for, and again the man was eyeing his watch.
‘So, do you recall your class teacher that year, Mr Turnock?’
The name came out like a reluctant blasphemy. ‘Mr Wood, you mean?’
Mr Wood, it seemed, had given Alan Dale a hard time indeed. Given both of them a hard time. Mills was intrigued to hear why that might be.
‘He said that he didn’t like boys who wouldn’t stand up for themselves. I once told him that some of the others were picking on Alan, and he gave me a right good hiding in front of the class. Said he didn’t like tell-tales, either. I didn’t tell him again.’
‘Can you remember the names of any of the others in your class?’
‘I can remember all of them.’
It didn’t surprise Mills to hear that. The man had an anorak quality about him, a trainspotter’s eye for every kind of detail that the average person easily missed or else discarded. Fear and humiliation, too, tended to leave their marks in the memory, making
names from a difficult time impossible to forget.
Turnock was looking at his watch again, and Mills assured him that they had another ten minutes and that he was quite prepared to give Anthony a lift back to work and be discreet on all counts.
Mills could almost feel the tremors emanating from inside the grown-up fat boy, the dark fear hidden behind the thin mask of that perma-smile. Thirty years on, a grown man, and still afraid of being found out telling tales. It took all the remaining time to extricate the names, one by one, beginning with Steven Jenkins.
Sheila Dale thought that she remembered the name but couldn’t be certain. ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘It does ring a bell. Alan never mentioned any of them by name, like I said.’
‘But, Miss Dale..?’
‘One day after school I waited around near to the school gates. Out of sight, you understand. I had a bad feeling that something was going to happen. There were two boys who always seemed to be picking on somebody or other when they came out of school, and I wondered if they were the two that had been in trouble with Wise.
‘I saw those two get Alan’s friend, Anthony, down on the ground and start hitting him and taunting him. I asked another kid who those boys were, but the child was too frightened to say anything. But I heard the name Jenkins, I’m sure that was the name, and I even went into the school to report what I had seen.
‘I saw Mr Wise himself. He didn’t recognise me.’
It was a big school, thought Tyler. He wondered whether Miss Hayburn could remember the names and the faces of all the kids under her command. Maybe she could at that.
Dale stopped talking, carefully placing her teacup and saucer on the little stand next to the chair. Tearfully she said, ‘I let them down that day, Alan and Anthony.’
‘In what way did you do that?’ asked Tyler.
‘Wise could be very intimidating. The girls rarely had anything to do with him, directly, but he had a manner about him. I remembered him from assembly, and I lost my bottle that day. He asked me if I made a habit of policing his school at home time, and he made me feel stupid and I didn’t pursue it.’
‘Do you think it would have made any difference if you had?’
‘Who knows? But I should have tried to do more.’
‘Miss Dale, are you aware of what happened to Steven Jenkins?’
‘Happened? What do you mean?’
If she knows, then her acting is right up there, thought Tyler. And anyway, the idea of this quiet-spoken spinster cutting the throat of a naked man clutching a bag of cocaine, and zooming away at high speed, was too ludicrous for words.
Anthony Turnock said that he mentioned Steven Jenkins first because he was always the one who seemed to do most of the hitting. He wasn’t the biggest or the brightest, but he was always trying to make a name for himself.
‘A big Stoke City fan, he was. He asked us one day who we supported. I could tell he was spoiling for trouble, so I said that I supported Stoke even though I couldn’t care less about football. He punched me in the stomach and told me I was just being a creep. Alan didn’t say anything and so Jenkins kept on saying that he had to name a team or else he would get a right good kicking.’
Turnock paused. ‘I don’t know why he didn’t just say Stoke, and be done with it. But that was Alan. He could never make life easy for himself. So, he said Chelsea.’
‘Chelsea?’ said Mills. ‘Why them?’
‘I asked him that myself, later, and he said he’d heard of them and that he liked the colour.’
‘He knew that they played in blue?’
‘It was because of that song the fans sing. Blue is the Colour. They’d played Stoke in a cup final a few weeks earlier and everyone had been on about it. It was a massive thing, all over the school and the city too. You couldn’t get away from it. That’s the only reason Alan knew anything about them, I imagine.’
‘So, when Alan said Chelsea..?’
‘Jenkins eyeballed him and told him that in this city, if you didn’t support Stoke, then you didn’t deserve to live. That people who support other teams are traitors and should all be tortured and killed and their corpses dumped in the sea.’
‘And what happened?’
‘I remember Jenkins saying: ‘Red is the colour, you better remember that.’ Then he called over one of the others. We were in the playground. I think it was Douglas Marley. He was another big Stoke City fan. Him and Jenkins made Alan repeat what he had said: Red is the colour. And then they started kicking Alan until the whistle blew, and I think a couple of them got sent to the headmaster.’
Turnock hesitated. ‘No, I don’t think it was Douglas Marley.’ He thought for a minute. ‘It could have been Robert Wild or Phillip Swanson, they were both Stoke fans too.’ But Turnock didn’t seem convinced. ‘It’s bugging me now,’ he said. ‘I think I’m getting things mixed up.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Mills. ‘If it comes back to you, get in touch.’
‘I think that was one of the reasons that Mr Wood had it in for us.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Because we weren’t interested in football.’
‘Mr Wood was a football fan?’
‘Never missed a match. He was always going on about Stoke City. When they beat Chelsea in that cup final he brought a programme in to school and passed it around the class. That’s likely how Alan knew Chelsea played in blue, that and the song.’
‘And Alan liked the colour and he told them he supported Chelsea,’ said Mills, almost to himself.
‘They never stopped after that.’
As good as his word, Mills drove Alan Dale’s old friend up the road, dropping him off discreetly around the corner from the small pot-bank where he had worked since leaving school.
Sheila Dale, hearing the news about Steven Jenkins, didn’t respond at first. Then the words tumbled out, gathering momentum. ‘The good Christian thing to do, I believe, is to forgive and forget. But how can you? How can anybody witness what happened to a timid, harmless, inoffensive little boy like Alan and not feel a sense of justice?
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t talk like that. I can’t help it.’
Tyler asked if she would like another drink. She declined, and he licked at his own dry lips.
‘If there’s anything else I can tell you …’
Tyler said that they would perhaps be best leaving it there for now, but that he might need to come and see her again.
‘Do you think you will find them?’ she asked.
‘Find who, Miss Dale?’
‘Whoever did that to Alan? Whoever took him down The Stumps and did that to him. Not every fifteen-year-old boy has to be a hooligan to get through the day.’
She looked close to breaking down. ‘Do you think that Steven Jenkins was involved? Do you think that he killed Alan?’
‘What do you think, Miss Dale?’
‘It’s the wrong kind of solution,’ she said. ‘It answers one question and asks a much bigger one.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘If this Jenkins killed my brother, then, yes, it is so tempting to imagine that justice has been done. But the truth is, you see, I don’t think that there’s a single person in this world who would have cared enough to have done that for Alan.’
Tyler wanted to say, Not even you, Miss Dale? In the end he held onto the thought, draped as it was in conflicting connotations of love and vengeance.
From his car Tyler rang Mills, and listened intently to the sergeant’s report of his interview with Turnock.
‘So, you don’t put him down as the noble destroyer avenging his friend?’
‘I think it’s highly unlikely,’ said Mills. ‘But it’s a funny old world.’
‘It’s certainly that,’ said Tyler. ‘I once read a story about someone turning up half a lifetime later and murdering an old enemy who lived hundreds of miles away. No apparent motive, the perfect crime – at least in the pages of fiction. And between you and me, I once thought long
and hard about putting that principle into practice myself.’
‘I take it that you put the idea on a back burner, sir?’
‘A back burner, yes.’
The silence down the line became loud and ominous, and Mills broke it. ‘Turnock said something very interesting about our old friend Howard Wood, though.’
‘Did he?’ said Tyler, his mind still running an ancient spool from the archives of his own past. ‘Then you’d better tell me about it.’
Mills related the anecdote about football allegiance, and how this had intensified the problems Alan Dale was having at school.
Tyler stopped him. He recalled the conversation a few minutes earlier. Something Dale had been saying – a reference to football? Hooligans. He hadn’t attached any significance; thought it merely an expression, a reference to the thuggery that existed everywhere in the world, throughout history.
Tyler ended the call quickly. He got out of the car and knocked lightly on Sheila Dale’s front door.
18
At the briefing Tyler gave what some regarded as a master class in the ‘stating of the bleeding obvious’.
He wanted the interviewing officers doing the rounds of the class of ’72 … ‘to raise the name Howard Wood, along with pupils on Maggie Calleer’s list, and to note all observations made by the interviewed persons. Naturally, all officers will focus on anything pertaining to Alan Dale on the day, or the preceding days, of his disappearance.’
He wanted an open style of interviewing, to allow possibilities to emerge, though using prompts where necessary regarding highlighted individuals.
‘With regard to Steven Jenkins, again let them do their own remembering first. Let’s see what comes out, what conclusions are leapt to, if any. I do not want any leading towards an investment in scenarios that happen to be resident in your heads. Open minds, okay? That’s the key thing. Then by all means resort to direct questioning.’
Somebody asked about media coverage.
‘Jenkins’ name is out there now. Most people will, I imagine, be putting two and two together when they hear the background on the Alan Dale case. The media haven’t made the connection explicit, but they will and soon. It will be interesting to see what two and two equals in the minds of the class of ’72.’
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