An old Ford Fiesta had been found abandoned less than two miles from Jenkins’ flat. Fibres inside the flat matched those found in the abandoned vehicle. Tyler acknowledged the possibility of a professional job, a contract killing, perhaps; again he expressed caution in leaping to conclusions: it was also possible that somebody was choosing to give that impression.
Contrary to the belief that was fast developing at the station, Tyler hated stating the obvious. But this wasn’t television, and the road he travelled doing this job was paved with years of stating it. Let them talk; it came with the territory.
Mills was given the trip to Derby. ‘I think the ex-patriot has to be yours,’ said Tyler. ‘You can ask if he still finds the time to visit the Beloved City.’
When the briefing was over Tyler told Mills about the curious conversation with Dale after he’d returned to her house.
She had, naturally enough, appeared surprised to see him again only minutes after he had made his exit, but welcomed him back in nonetheless. He’d been thinking about the reference she had made to hooligans, and it had set something itching at the back of his mind.
Mindful of his sergeant’s remarks over the phone, about what Anthony Turnock had said regarding football allegiance intensifying Alan Dale’s problems, he had raised the subject of Alan’s final days again and watched Miss Dale’s reaction carefully. She’d hesitated, not for the first time, either, he’d noted. It seemed to him that she was trying to decide on the next course of action.
Then she had started crying. A deluge, like before. Tyler sat it out; waited for her to regain some composure. Without warning, she launched into her tale.
Close to the time that Alan went missing, two days before, in fact, Alan had returned home from school complaining of not feeling well. He was late returning home, and she remembered that vividly. ‘Alan always came home promptly. I was the same, though we never walked home together.’
Tyler asked why that was, and Dale explained that Alan had been picked on in the early days for walking home from school with his sister.
‘I had started my homework but I was aware that he was late. I was starting to get worried, and then he suddenly turned up. I remember feeling very relieved, like I’d sensed something was wrong but had been trying to keep my panic under control, and now I could let go.
‘But when he came in the house I could tell that something really was wrong. I asked if he was alright and he said that he wasn’t feeling very well and wanted to lie down. He went straight up to his room and I followed him upstairs. I was concerned about him.
‘When I got upstairs I could hear him sobbing. I stood outside his room. He was breaking his little heart, he was. I called his name, but either he didn’t hear me or else he was ignoring me.’
Dale had broken off from her tale, struggling to keep herself together.
‘I opened his bedroom door – to see if he was okay.’
‘And I saw him.’
‘Take your time,’ said Tyler.
‘It was horrible,’ she said, her eyes screwed tightly shut, reliving the scene. ‘He was getting undressed to get into bed. From his back down to his knees he was a mass of red marks– I’ve never seen anything like it. I must have gasped, because he turned around. I said, ‘What have they done to you?’
‘He was angry at me, going into his room like that, and he was shouting at me, telling me to get out, but then he stopped and he ran to me and he held on and I didn’t think he was ever going to stop crying. When he finally stopped, it all came pouring out of him.’
She paused again, opening her eyes and looking straight at Tyler.
‘The day before, they had been taunting him about being a traitor to his city for not supporting his local football team. And on the way from one classroom to the next they started calling him names, filth like you never heard in your life. They were doing that when they turned the corner and bumped right into Mr Wise. Two of them, the main culprits, were singled out. Wise ordered them both to his office.’
‘Was Steven Jenkins one of them?’ asked Tyler.
Dale nodded, blotting her eyes with a tissue.
Tyler ran through the other names. She thought it could be Hillman, the other boy, but couldn’t be certain.
‘Part way through the next class – Howard Wood’s class – the two boys returned, extremely subdued, explaining to Wood where they had been and why. Wood had, according to Alan, glared at him – glared at Alan, but nothing more was said. The boys gingerly returned to their desks and it was apparent to all that Wise had made a job of dealing with them. Some of the girls were giggling and making gestures about their ordeal.
‘The following morning, Wood was talking to the class about some match he had been to, and about the importance of having pride in your heritage. That the red and white stripes of Stoke City were something to carry with your head held high.
‘After school they rounded on Alan and said that it was time he was initiated into the colours of his real team. They wouldn’t let him go home. They walked him past his house and down the hill to The Stumps.
‘There were a few people playing in the park and one or two working in the allotments, but those animals who took him down The Stumps told Alan that if he shouted for help it would be the worse for him.
‘There was demolition work going on. They were knocking down one eyesore in preparation for another.’
The great symbol of the rebirth of the city was how Sheila Dale had put it, with a sneer as she said it, bitterness and anger bleeding out of her.
‘And now they’re doing it again. Nothing changes.’
‘What happened next?’ Tyler had asked her.
‘They told him that they were going to make a Stoke City fan out of him if it killed him. They reminded him that Mr Wood had said that you had to wear the stripes of your city proudly. Then one of the boys – one of them who Wise had punished – exposed himself, revealing the marks left by the headmaster. They said that it was his turn now.’
At that point Sheila Dale had dissolved again into tears, her body heaving in grief and disgust.
Tyler gave her time to regain her composure, and finally she told him that it was the only time Alan let any of it out, and that he begged her not to say anything to anybody.
‘‘Please don’t tell Mum and Dad,’ that’s what he said.’
‘Why do you think he said that?’
‘He was terrified. My brother was as traumatised as a soldier on a battlefield. Have you any idea..?’
Tyler looked at her, his own memories mixing with the obscenity that she had described, and then he lowered his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I have no idea.’
‘They beat him, those boys took it in turns to beat him. They acted like savages. There were five of them, and I don’t know the names of any of them except for Steven Jenkins and maybe that other one that you suggested, but I don’t know. Alan wouldn’t tell me, but I knew the name Jenkins and later I heard that other one, I think.’
‘Heard from whom, Miss Dale?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, I can’t remember. But they were all to blame, every one of them.’
‘Alan told you there were five of them?’
‘And those who weren’t hitting him, they watched and not one of them showed an ounce of pity. They chanted while they were doing it: ‘What is the colour? Red is the colour.’ Over and over, they did. And Alan held me that day in his bedroom as he sobbed his heart out. Can you imagine, for one moment, the hell that he must have been living through?’
Tyler had to look away from the fury and pain, impotently shaking his head, and lowering it again respectfully.
When she had stopped crying, in the quietness of the room, the stillness, Tyler looked up. Sheila Dale was looking at him, breathing deeply, as though gathering her forces a final time. Tyler had felt every muscle tense in preparation for what she was about to impart.
‘And then my poor little brother said something that will haunt me to the end o
f my days.
‘Alan said, ‘Don’t cry, it’s over now. It’s done with.’’
Afterwards, Tyler had sat in his car and mulled it all over. He thought of the neighbourhood bullies and the string of sadists parading as teachers, who had tormented him for close on five years, a chunk of his childhood forever tainted and troubled and in so many ways unredeemable. How he had vowed to leave that estate forever, to climb out of it, and rise above it. In his final years at school he’d buckled down and at college he worked himself into university. And the zeal didn’t wane; it was like an engine, over-revving for fear that it might stall, become immobilised; in fear that in failure he would be dragged back into the nightmare from which he had escaped.
And then he met Kim.
And his sin had been not to tell her of his ghosts and his nightmares.
His ambition had split them apart, because she never really understood where he had been coming from. If he had found the courage to tell her that; to let her know what was driving him, instead of hiding it away like a dirty secret and denying it even to himself …
Tyler had pushed the thought away, steering his mind back to the words of Sheila Dale. And as he sat in his unmarked car outside her house in that narrow street in Leek, he had dwelled on the greater sins that had been inflicted upon an innocent young boy, until he found himself crying for the first time in a long time.
When Tyler had finished telling Mills about his visit to Leek, minus the part about the tears, he said, ‘So you see, half this city has blood on its hands. What they did, what they didn’t do. Like any other city. The world we live in.’
‘Do you think,’ said Mills, ‘that they took Alan Dale back to that place two days later to finish the job?’
‘I think it’s one of a number of possibilities. But I don’t want to confront anybody with that scenario just yet. I’m interested to see what accounts of those evil days are given voluntarily.’
‘She didn’t recall any of the other names?’
‘Hillman was a possibility.’
‘Hillman? I doubt he’ll admit to being there,’ said Mills. ‘Councillors, aspiring MPs don’t generally own up to having skeletons in the closet.’
‘I think you’re probably right about that,’ said Tyler. ‘But it’ll be interesting to see how high this man’s defences are built. Could be that he drove the demons from his system that day, in the summer of ’72. Turned his life around, saw the light, you know the story. Maybe others thought it would be fun to take their turns having sport with a terrified, traumatised boy. We might even find out.’
In the late afternoon sunshine, Mills headed east, passing the Britannia Stadium, home of Stoke City FC. He had a thought to fly in the face of his circumstances and buy himself a season ticket. Buy the whole family a ticket and be damned. So what if they didn’t end up going half the time? What was money when you didn’t have any? What was money against such a life-affirming act of defiance?
Tyler, meanwhile, drove west out of the city, bypassing the town of Newcastle, and on towards the village of Audley. He was due to interview a social worker, a protector of children who, thirty years earlier, had possibly witnessed the death of one.
19
Mills found Councillor Martin Hillman every bit as keen to help in person as he had been on the phone.
Hillman had heard about the unearthing of his ‘old classmate – the Dale boy’ – and of the ‘terrible tragedy of Steven Jenkins’ who he seemed to recall as being ‘a somewhat troubled young fellow.’ These things came to try us, the politician and businessman told Mills. It could be a harsh world, but one did what one could, and tried not to dwell on such dark realities. ‘You’d go mad if you dwelled on all the tragedy that surrounds us.’
‘You wouldn’t want to do that, sir,’ Mills had advised, though secretly he doubted Hillman was the type to lose much sleep over the misfortune of others. He appeared every inch the regulation business type, and a politician of high ambition. But Mills resolved to keep his prejudices at bay, and to obey DCI Tyler’s confusing maxim, his parting comment as the DS had left the station for Derby, about only partially judging a book by its cover.
The house was a small mansion by Mills’ standards, and set in a beautifully landscaped garden. Martin Hillman had not married, though the gleaming Aston Martin out in the drive suggested, at least to Danny Mills, that female companionship might not be lacking should its owner feel so inclined.
Again, Mills tried not to allow his feelings to intrude on his professionalism, tough as that could be sometimes. It was an ongoing battle. The bitterness rose up from time to time, but at least these days he was beginning to recognise it for what it was. And a part of him that he was slowly growing accustomed to, was proud to be making progress.
Still, for the present enquiry, the subject was irrelevant, and Mills resolved to put it out of his mind. One final time for luck, he reminded himself about prejudices and the covers of books.
Hillman had done well in his end of school exams, and following a two-year A level stint at a local college, had been the first member of his old class to reach university. Three years at Nottingham doing business studies … ‘and I never looked back. Not bad for the product of a single parent family, wouldn’t you say?’
His father had disappeared into obscurity when Martin had been too young to remember him. His mother had always ‘valued the merits of a solid education. She was a solicitor, so I suppose that was to be expected.’
‘Where did you live?’ asked Mills.
‘Hartshill, actually. Nice little cul de sac near to where they built the trauma unit.’
‘You still go back to visit your mother?’
‘Sadly, she died. I was at university at the time. I don’t have any relatives in the area, or anywhere else, for that matter. I have no ties. I’m what you might call a free agent,’ he said, with a wide smile. ‘I decided to make Nottingham my home, and more recently I moved across to Derbyshire. Business commitments and political ones too, these days. I love this area and, frankly, I have nothing to go back to Stoke for.’
‘You don’t keep in touch with friends?’ asked Mills.
‘I’m probably beginning to sound like a rather sad case,’ said Hillman, ‘but I didn’t make any friends back in the Potteries, to be honest. My life is here, and I’m happy with that state of affairs.’
‘So, you don’t have any contact with your old classmates, then?’
‘God, no!’ said Hillman, looking somewhere between amused and appalled at the very idea.
‘You didn’t get on with your classmates, I take it?’
‘They were alright, I suppose. But we were just kids. You don’t choose the people that you share a class with. You’re forced into a rather unnatural situation, in my opinion, and you simply try to make the best of it.’
‘Not the happiest time of your life – school?’
‘Like I say, it was a part of life that one has to cope with the best one can.’
‘And you don’t go back to watch Stoke City play?’
Hillman laughed, long and loud. ‘You are kidding?’
Mills didn’t say anything.
‘You a City fan yourself?’
‘I have my moments,’ said Mills. ‘I understood that, as a child at least, you were quite devoted.’
‘Me? Are you kidding? One or two of them in my class were regulars because their parents were regulars, their fathers, at least. Steven Jenkins used to go with his old man, and he was always going on about Stoke City, as I recall. It was a long time ago.’
‘So, you were never really a fan?’
Hillman frowned. ‘Are you sure that you’re talking to the right person? My mum hated football. She used to say that grown men with nothing better to do than kick a ball around ought to be drafted into the forces. And she thought that people who paid good money to go and watch were even more reprehensible. I happen to think that she was probably about right. Anyway, what are you, the football polic
e?’
Hillman laughed again, and Mills let it go.
‘When was the last time that you visited the city, sir?’
‘Oh, you lose track.’
‘But not recently?’
‘You know, it’s so long ago now that I would have to get an old diary out to check.’
‘But you haven’t been back to the city in the last few days?’
Intelligence shone out of those dark grey eyes, thought Mills, as he waited for Martin Hillman’s response. And when it came, it surprised him. At least, one aspect of it did.
‘Oh, I’ve been far too busy for nostalgia. Meetings like you would not believe. Business meetings, council meetings, none of them exactly five-minute affairs either. I had a right humdinger last night. I mean – Sunday evening! Is there no rest for the wicked?’
‘I wouldn’t know about that, sir.’
‘Well, let me tell you – it went on until well past midnight.’
‘Really,’ said Mills, noting the remark, but unable in the heat of the moment to grasp why it rang such an odd note.
Mills asked for details of the meetings, names of others present, the usual. Hillman didn’t bat an eye, assuring the officer that he would have all the information faxed over first thing in the morning.
Then Mills asked if Hillman had any memories of Alan Dale.
‘Not really. I mean to say, it’s tragic, obviously, whatever happened to the poor little sod, but–’
Hillman broke off. ‘Do you really think that he was murdered?’
Mills didn’t answer. Hillman was evidently the type used to running things. If you weren’t careful, you ended up telling the Martin Hillmans of this world more than they told you. ‘So, you have no particular memories relating to Alan Dale?’
Hillman appeared to make an effort of remembrance, but when he came back with nothing at all, Mills asked him if he remembered any bullying at the school?
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