Cry Baby

by Mark Billingham

  So much easier to understand.

  ‘You know already there’s been an incident, this morning.’

  ‘Well, I know something happened between Josh and one of the children in his class.’ Maria’s hand tightened around the tissue that was ready and waiting, that she’d already made use of while she was summoning up the courage to get out of the car. ‘I don’t know the details.’

  The headmistress – a stick-thin woman in her fifties, with a greying perm and oversized glasses – pushed some papers aside, then proceeded, in painful detail, to tell Maria exactly what was what. The poor girl Josh had scratched and slapped, inconsolable in the nurse’s room, while Josh remained surly and uncommunicative. A teacher in tears after a barrage of foul language. The girl’s parents upset and understandably furious.

  ‘They’re demanding that something be done.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Maria said. ‘It’s his first day back.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that.’

  ‘He was so excited when I dropped him off this morning. He was desperate to come back to school.’

  ‘I’m sorry to say that this is extremely serious.’

  ‘Of course,’ Maria said. ‘I’m taking it every bit as seriously as you are.’

  The headmistress nudged her oversized glasses. ‘Because I have the other children to think of, as well as their parents, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to suspend Josh for a while.’

  ‘Come on, is that really necessary?’

  ‘I don’t think I have any other choice.’

  Maria leaned forward, lowered her voice a little. ‘You do know why Josh has been absent from school? What happened to his closest friend?’

  ‘Yes, of course I do. You told me yourself over the phone. I spoke to all the staff about it and I took care to welcome Josh back in front of all the other children at this morning’s assembly. To let them know he’d been through a difficult time.’

  ‘It’s been incredibly upsetting for him.’

  ‘Mrs Ashton . . . we both know that this kind of behaviour had begun before what happened to Josh’s friend. Perhaps nothing as bad as this, but the fact is, he’s been disruptive for a while.’

  Maria did not know what to say or how to feel. Her fist tightened further around the tissue and she dug her nails into the palm of her hand.

  ‘I was wondering . . . has Josh talked to anybody?’

  Maria looked at her.

  ‘Some kind of therapy, perhaps?’

  ‘I appreciate your concern,’ Maria said.

  ‘I’m sure the school could help you find someone—’

  ‘We’re dealing with it.’

  ‘Oh. Well, that’s good to hear.’

  The headmistress tried, unsuccessfully, to disguise the curiosity in her expression. She knew that Maria was divorced, that Josh’s father had been anything but hands-on when it came to matters such as this, so it was understandable that she might wonder what Maria had meant by we.

  Maria was asking herself the same thing.

  The headmistress stood up and escorted Maria out of the office. They walked in silence past a wall of multicoloured lockers, turned along a corridor decorated with paintings and collages made by children who presumably did not bite or slap or scratch or swear, and stopped outside a classroom door.

  The headmistress shook Maria’s hand and said, ‘I’ll put something in writing.’

  Inside, Josh sat alone at a desk towards the back. His head lay on his folded arms and he did not look up when Maria walked in. She didn’t know if the teacher who quickly stood and put away the magazine she’d been reading was the one Josh had reduced to tears, but Maria mumbled an apology, just in case.

  ‘Josh, your mum’s here . . .’

  All too aware of the teacher’s eyes on her, hating every ounce of pity and judgement in the polite smile, Maria walked across to where Josh was sitting. It wasn’t until she’d gently laid a hand on his arm that her son sat up, wide-eyed and shaking as if he’d been woken from a nightmare, and burst into tears.

  On the short drive home, Josh stared out of the car window while Maria kept her eyes fixed on the road and tried to cry as quietly as possible. He turned towards her only once, to put on the Babylon Zoo CD he liked, the one with ‘Spaceman’ on it, that Maria kept in the car for long journeys, that he always sang along to. Maria switched it off. When Josh immediately leaned across to turn it on again, Maria ejected the CD and tossed it into the footwell.

  She pulled on to the drive and turned the engine off.

  ‘What’s going on, Joshy?’ She waited, her hands remaining tight around the wheel. ‘Is it because you’re still upset about Kieron?’

  The boy said nothing. His eyes were squeezed shut.

  ‘You said you wanted to go back to school, so . . .’ Maria shook her head and stared across the perfectly manicured front garden at her perfectly shiny front door, the carefully shaped box trees in aluminium planters and the lush arrangements in pots on either side. The engine ticked slowly for a minute or more and then stopped.

  She felt ashamed, helpless and heartbroken.

  ‘I get angry,’ Josh said.

  Maria looked at her son. He shifted in his seat but would not make eye contact with her. ‘Well, we all get angry sometimes,’ she said. ‘But you have to learn to . . . control it. Talking is always the best thing.’

  Josh hugged his school bag tight against his chest.

  ‘What makes you angry?’

  Half a minute later, Maria was reaching to open the car door when the boy said, ‘Everything.’

  FORTY-NINE

  From the front door, Cat walked back across to the small dining table in her living room, sat down and moved a few of the cards around. ‘My nan taught me this when I was little,’ she said. ‘Good for taking your mind off stuff.’

  ‘I don’t even know how you play it,’ Thorne said, joining her.

  ‘It’s easy.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m cut out to play any game called “patience”.’ Thorne pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘I haven’t got a lot of it.’ He watched her turning up the cards then laying them down without a clue what was happening. ‘I played a bit of three-card brag at school,’ he said. ‘For fags at lunchtime. I wasn’t any good at it, even then. I haven’t really got what you call a poker face.’

  ‘Billy used to play a lot of poker,’ Cat said, without looking up. ‘He was pretty decent, I think.’ She placed the jack of clubs below a queen and grunted in satisfaction. ‘Or maybe he just never told me when he lost.’

  Thorne watched for half a minute longer. ‘I saw Billy this morning.’

  Cat glanced up, laid down the deck and nodded. ‘About Dean, I suppose?’ She sat back and shook her head. ‘Bloody horrible. I mean, he wasn’t exactly my favourite person in the world, but why would anybody do that to him?’

  Thorne had called her the night before, keen to let her know exactly what had happened to Dean Meade before she read about it in the papers.

  ‘Billy certainly had a good reason,’ he said.

  Cat stood up, waving away the suggestion as though it was not worth thinking about. She walked over to the sofa, picked up cigarettes from the low table and lit one. ‘So, what did he say?’

  ‘Nothing I wasn’t expecting,’ Thorne said. ‘He was over the moon that Dean was dead, obviously, but he had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Of course he didn’t.’

  ‘We don’t know that,’ Thorne said.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You think you do.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ She flicked the worm of ash from her cigarette. ‘Did you just come round here to wind me up?’

  Thorne knew when he was flogging a dead horse, so he turned away to stare down at the playing cards on the table. If he did have any patience, it was starting to wear thin. He was becoming more than a little irritated by this young woman’s apparent ignorance, blissful or otherwise, of her partner’s . . . capabilities. Her r
efusal to so much as entertain the possibility of his involvement in an act of violence for which he most certainly had a decent motive. Denial or delusion, kidding herself at best; standing up for her man like some cut-price north London Tammy Wynette.

  For a moment he wanted to stand up and shout. He wanted to shake her.

  Then he looked across at her again, watched her drawing smoke into her lungs as though the possibility of cancer was a comfort, and remembered exactly who she was. What she’d lost.

  The child he had been unable to find and return to her.

  And suddenly he no more cared about what had happened to Dean Meade than Billy Coyne had professed to a few hours before. He was being selfish and stupid. Useless . . .

  He looked at Cat and, more than anything, he wanted to offer her something.

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ he said, ‘things might not be as bad as you thought they’d be. With Billy, I mean. The business about who Kieron’s dad is.’

  She turned to look at him.

  ‘He seems to think Dean was just shouting his mouth off and that you were a bit confused or something. It’s like he doesn’t really believe it. So, you know . . . the whole thing might not be such a problem after all.’

  Cat blew out a thin stream of smoke and smiled. ‘Oh, don’t worry, he believes it.’

  ‘That’s not what he told me,’ Thorne said.

  ‘His sister knows the truth.’

  ‘So . . . ?’

  ‘Trust me, he’ll have believed it coming from her. Billy knows damn well I’m not confused about anything. Unfaithful, maybe, but not confused.’ She took another drag. ‘He’d never have said as much to you, because he wouldn’t have wanted to seem . . . weak. Because you’re a copper and as far as he’s concerned it’s none of your business. And because you’re a bloke.’

  Instinctively, Thorne knew that she was right, and that he should have clocked it at the time. Billy Coyne was as likely to have confessed to Dean Meade’s murder, or to nicking Shergar, as he was to have shown his real feelings about not being Kieron’s natural father. Far easier to bluff it out than let on to Thorne that he might be upset or, heaven forbid, that he felt . . . unmanned.

  ‘Thanks for trying to make me feel better, though.’ Cat leaned forward to stub out her cigarette. ‘I’ll sort that mess out when the time comes. Other things to worry about now, you know?’

  ‘Yeah, course.’ Thorne stood and moved to the window. He stared down for a few moments at the necklace of red lights moving slowly south, then up at the aircraft beacon on top of Canary Wharf, blinking in the far distance. He turned and noticed a large greetings card on the sideboard.

  Thinking Of You.

  ‘From everyone at Kieron’s school.’ Cat had seen him looking. ‘His form teacher brought it over.’

  ‘Simon Jenner?’ Thorne picked the card up, looked at the scrawled signatures inside.

  ‘Nice of him, I thought. Actually . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m meeting him for lunch in a few days.’ She shook her head. ‘Don’t know why, really. I barely know the bloke. He just said it would help to get out and do something and I thought he might be right.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Thorne said. ‘Something normal.’

  ‘Not like I’ve got a lot on, is it? Nothing that’s doing me any good, anyway.’

  Thorne put the card back and stepped across to perch, a little awkwardly, on the arm of the sofa. He said, ‘We’d like to do a reconstruction.’

  Cat looked at him.

  ‘For the TV. What happened in the wood.’

  ‘You don’t know what happened.’

  ‘Well, mostly it’ll just be you and Maria and the two boys in the playground. Actors wearing exactly what you were wearing. It’s about trying to jog people’s memories, getting new witnesses to come forward.’

  ‘What about after that? After the playground?’

  ‘Then it’ll be what we think happened. What our witness reckons he saw.’

  ‘The man with the red car.’

  Thorne nodded. ‘There’s always a lot of calls after one of these things goes out, so I think it’s worth doing. You sometimes get a few nutters, maybe one or two idiots just trying to piss us about, but if even one person comes forward with new information . . .’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So, you OK with it?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ She reached for the cigarettes again. ‘Anything, you know?’

  ‘Great. Thank you.’

  ‘When?

  ‘If we film it tomorrow, we can get it shown on Wednesday night.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘It would really help us if you could be there.’ Thorne waited. He saw the tremor in her hand as she struggled to pull a cigarette from the pack. ‘Make sure we get everything right—’

  ‘No.’ Cat shook her head, stared at the cigarette between her fingers. ‘No way am I going back to those woods.’ She looked at him. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘It’s fine, don’t worry.’ Thorne leaned down, took the lighter from her and lit her cigarette. ‘We’ll work around it.’

  ‘Ask Maria . . . ask her.’ She took a long drag, closed her eyes as she slowly exhaled. ‘She’ll do it. She knows what happened.’

  ‘OK, that’s a good idea,’ Thorne said. ‘I’ll call her.’

  They said nothing for a minute or so, the silence only broken by a shout from a nearby flat and the roar of a plane passing low overhead. A sob, muffled by a hand.

  ‘Make sure you get his anorak right, yeah?’

  ‘We will.’

  ‘Tartan with a hood. A furry hood.’

  ‘I know,’ Thorne said. ‘It’s all being taken care of. We’ve got pictures.’

  Cat nodded, relieved.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Well, obviously make sure the actress playing me is properly gorgeous.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘I don’t know how big your budget is, but Cindy Crawford would be good.’

  Thorne reached down for the box of tissues on the table and passed it across. ‘I’ll make a call,’ he said. ‘See if she’s available.’

  FIFTY

  The day was forecast to be warm, but it certainly hadn’t kicked in at a little after six-thirty in the morning as Cat helped unload the van. Wearing a Puffa jacket, fingerless gloves and Billy’s woolly West Ham hat, her breath was visible as she and Angie carried the heavy plastic boxes across the road and dumped them behind the stall.

  ‘You know I’m always grateful when you do this,’ Angie said, when they’d finished. She was climbing back into the van, ready to move it to the market car park. ‘But you really don’t have to, babe. Not at the moment.’

  ‘It’s good to get out of the flat,’ Cat said. ‘Feel like I’m turning into a zombie.’

  ‘OK, if you’re sure.’ Angie started the engine.

  Cat nodded, rubbing at the marks that the edges of the plastic containers had scored into her fingers. ‘Plus I get a free breakfast, so what’s not to like?’

  Half an hour later, after tea and sausage sandwiches bought by Angie, the women began unpacking and setting out the stall.

  ‘Where do you get all this stuff?’ Cat asked. She’d already laid out displays of captioned mugs, hairspray, suntan lotion and a range of household cleaning products. She’d arranged the multipacks of light bulbs, cigarette lighters and felt-tip pens.

  She’d lined up the VHS films and was now arranging the CDs into alphabetical order while Angie stuck souvenir London fridge magnets on to a large metal board hung beneath the striped awning.

  ‘I’ve got loads of different suppliers,’ Angie said, moving a few of the magnets around. ‘I pick up stuff all over the place.’

  It wasn’t the first time Cat had found herself wondering how Angie acquired her bewildering variety of stock and how – considering the low prices she was knocking some of it out for – the people who sold it to her were making anything at all. If it was a st
ep up from Only Fools And Horses, she thought, it wasn’t a very big one. Cat wasn’t going to ask too many questions, though, because Angie was family, more or less, and Cat wasn’t an idiot, and if Angie seemed to be making a decent enough living it was probably down to the fact that she had no kids to support and because she worked her arse off.

  She worked harder than Cat had ever done, no question about it.

  She was popular with the other stallholders, most of whom were blokes on the lairy side; flirting just a little bit when she had to and more than holding her own when it came to the kind of chat that would have made a docker blush.

  She had the patter, too.

  ‘Forget the Duracell bunny, love.’ She leaned towards a customer who was eyeing up a pack of batteries made by some company Cat had never heard of. ‘These’ll still be going when that furry little sod’s got myxomatosis.’ She paused and rolled her eyes, a comic’s timing. ‘That’s a disease rabbits get.’ She watched the man pick a pack up. ‘Go on, I bet your missus could put a few of those to good use.’ Angie carried on grinning until the money had been handed over and safely stashed away, the coins dropped into a metal box beneath the counter and the notes folded into a zippered pouch on her belt.

  ‘You’re so good at this,’ Cat said.

  ‘Been doing it a while, that’s all.’ Angie put her arm around Cat’s shoulder. ‘Go on, you have a crack at the next one. It’s just a bit of banter, nothing serious.’

  ‘Not really sure I’m up to that,’ Cat said.

  ‘OK, so smile at them.’ Angie saw the look on Cat’s face and pulled her close. ‘Sorry, babe . . . wasn’t thinking.’

  ‘I’ll just keep everything looking tidy.’

  As it turned out, there wasn’t another customer for the next twenty minutes. Shepherd’s Bush Market was never going to be as busy on a Tuesday morning as it was at the weekend, Angie had told Cat the night before when Cat had called and volunteered to help out, but they’d do decent enough business, she said, come lunchtime.

  ‘What did Billy say?’ Cat asked. She’d fetched two more teas and they were sitting together on stools behind the stall, commenting on passers-by as they drifted through the market. Which blokes were fanciable and which women dressed like they didn’t have mirrors in their houses. ‘When you talked to him?’