by Simon Mason
‘Listen to me,’ he said.
They gathered around – Shan and his men, Bob Dowell and the back-up team, the men and women of the Dog Support Unit and the patrolmen who had found the bike – and when he finished speaking they fetched their lights and their animals and walked into the woods together. No one said anything. They went with slow, awkward steps, peering about them, crouching and bending through the tangled darkness made more confusing by the swooping beams of their lights. They went behind their straining dogs along the path, and spread out between briars and bushes in a rough line, stumbling in and out of hollows and splashing through streams, their breath fogging the night air around them. Long ago the wood had been allotments, and from time to time they found themselves clambering over tumbledown brick walls, and stepping on the jagged remains of greenhouse panes glinting underfoot, and stooping under archways of gigantically overgrown privet. No one knew the place and their progress was slow and uncertain.
Singh had told them that Naylor was dangerous, probably still under the influence of drugs. He’d also told them that he might have lured a boy into the woods.
For half an hour they forced their way, grim-faced and uncomfortable, through trees and undergrowth, doing their best to stay together, finding nothing except refuse, the charred remains of old campfires and rusty junk, but going on with the same unspeaking, crunching determination. Singh walked in the middle of them with Shan and a woman from the Dog Support Unit, saying nothing to either, though twice he took out his phone and called the same number as before, listening helpless and whitefaced to its voicemail message.
‘Really can’t be bothered ...’
It was now a quarter past eleven. A cold rain set in.
Suddenly there was a shout.
‘Sir!’
Lights swept wildly in all directions.
‘There, sir!’
Momentarily the outline of a figure stood out in the darkness of a slope ahead, and at once disappeared.
Cries went up from several policemen. One ran forward and fell heavily, and Singh’s voice could be heard shouting for calm over the uproar, during which they all caught another brief glimpse of the figure ahead dodging silently between trees.
At last Singh found his whistle. ‘Quiet! Stay where you are! Get your lights on him!’
The slope in front of them lit up in the beams of two dozen high-power flash-lamps: a deserted patch of dense holly and young beech trees, their slender trunks pale against the darkness of the thicket behind. The rain was coming down harder now, crackling in the leaves and flickering like pinpricks of metal in the artificial light, and everything was dripping wet.
Singh called out, ‘Naylor?’
For a long moment there was nothing in front of them but black holly and pale beech trunks darkening with rain; then the figure appeared again, the police lights following him as he dodged from shadow to shadow, a figure in a red and yellow varsity jacket with a hood pulled low over his face.
‘Stay where you are, Naylor!’ Singh called. ‘This is an armed unit!’ There was the chinking noise around him of weapons being brought to bear.
Still the figure took no notice, and they saw now that he was coming closer. As they hesitated he floated through the last of the trees and out into full view, slowing down as he approached them, walking – to their astonishment – almost lazily down the rough slope towards Singh until he stood right in front of him and threw his hood back from his face and said, ‘Dude, do you want to keep the noise down a bit?’
Singh’s eyes bulged. ‘Smith!’ he said at last.
‘Good to see you too, man. But you’re way too noisy. Naylor’ll hear you.’
‘Naylor? Where is Naylor? And why are you wearing his jacket? And what the hell are you doing here?’
‘Calm down, man, you sound like my mother. I’m here ’cause this is where Naylor stashes his stuff. And this isn’t Naylor’s jacket. I thought you would’ve known that. The button’s missing off the wrong sleeve, see? It’s Alex’s. You just missed him, by the way. He sends his apologies. I hate to say this, but he just didn’t want to see you again.’
Singh couldn’t control himself any more: he caught hold of Garvie by the arm and dragged him to one side. ‘What are you playing at?’ he hissed.
Garvie regarded him coldly. ‘Listen, if you don’t want my help you only have to say so. You don’t need to start pulling me around by my friend’s jacket sleeve. You could have had the other button off.’
‘Your help! You promised not to help.’ Singh looked around. ‘I’ll get a man to take you back to the cars.’
Garvie finished straightening his jacket and looked up. ‘You really want to blunder around in the woods all night? Or do you want me to take you to Naylor?’
There was a path nearby, and they followed the boy along it, keeping their lights to a minimum and their animals quiet.
‘It leads all the way back to Naylor’s house,’ Garvie said to Singh. ‘There’s an opening in the fence he’s hidden with brush.’
‘And where does it go to?’
‘You’ll see. But you have to be quiet.’
For a quarter of a mile or more they went slowly in single file between trees, past an old quarry strewn with moss-covered boulders, a fallen cavern in a steep slope of alders, and weed-choked ponds, black and gleaming, deeper into Marsh Woods.
‘If this is a wild-goose chase ...’ Singh said at last.
‘Shh.’
Garvie pointed, and Singh saw among the trees ahead a denser shape among the bushes.
Garvie whispered, ‘Naylor’s hut. Alex found it yesterday and gave me a bell this morning. It sounded odd to me, and Alex was ... Well, Alex was odd too. I won’t tell you what he was planning to do but it was scary stuff. Look!’
Now Singh saw the weak and narrow gleam of a light through a window. ‘He’s in there?’
‘Last time I looked.’
Singh nodded and put his hand on Garvie’s shoulder. ‘Now it’s time for you to leave.’
‘What, and miss Singh of the Yard getting his man?’
Ignoring him, Singh moved away to talk to Shan and Dowell, and when he returned after a few minutes he brought a man with him who took hold of Garvie’s arm.
‘Hey!’
Singh put his finger to his lips. ‘You have to go back,’ he said quietly. ‘You know why as well as I do.’ To the policeman he said, ‘Take him.’ And without another look at Garvie, he turned to Shan and Dowell and began to talk.
A few minutes later the policemen moved forward, one by one, quietly creeping off the path round the side of the hut until they were all in position.
The rain had stopped, but the moon was obscured by cloud and everything was dark except for the one crack of light in the window of the hut. There was no sound from inside. Nothing. From his position near the door Singh looked around carefully one last time to check everyone was in place – and flinched to find Garvie standing next to him. When he opened his mouth, Garvie just put his finger to his lips, and grinned. It was too late for him to do anything about the boy now, and with a face of fury he turned again to the hut and called out with sudden loudness:
‘Naylor! Police! Come out!’
His voice echoed briefly and fell away into the quietness of the dark wood. There was still no sound from inside the hut.
‘Police!’ he called out again, even louder, with the same result.
Everything was peaceful and still, far too still, and out of nowhere a thought struck him so hard it made him wince.
‘Naylor?’ he cried questioningly, and this time his voice was anxious. But before he could act Garvie had stepped forward alone to the hut door and pulled it open, and it was too late to do anything but run after him, with Shan, Dowell and the others close behind, crowding into the hut, all shouting, weapons raised as per training, only to come to a sudden stop in the small room, let their arms fall to their sides and stand in silent shock around the body of Naylor, aka Paul John
son, hanging from the roof.
41
IT WAS LONG past midnight. Garvie sat silently in the police car as Singh drove slowly down the potholed Badger Lane away from Marsh Woods, and the rain came down again in steady gusts out of the low cloudy sky.
‘I called your mother,’ Singh said, ‘to let her know you’re on your way home.’
Garvie said nothing. He hadn’t said anything since the discovery of Naylor’s body in the hut. He slouched against the car door, gazing vacantly out of the window, his black hair wet against his forehead.
They bumped down Badger Lane. Singh was beyond tired, empty but alert, as if he would never need sleep again – just as well, since he knew he wouldn’t get to bed that night. Later he would return to Marsh Woods to meet the chief pathologist and the forensics team. One reason for taking Garvie home immediately was to prevent his uncle meeting the boy at the crime scene. But at least, he thought to himself, in a few days it would be over. All that remained now was the summing up – the filling in of the last few gaps in the reconstruction, the media liaison, the ordering of the files – then the legal processes would take over and he could leave the Dow case behind and give in to his exhaustion.
He glanced over at the boy sitting silently next to him gazing out of the window at the wet grey sky as if there were nothing in the world capable of sustaining his interest. A dissatisfied boy, Singh thought. Difficult, selfish. He was clever, of course, but strange. Singh didn’t know whether to dislike him or pity him.
‘You saw they found her running shoes?’ he said. ‘A lot of her clothing too. He must have been taking things for a long time. Out of her locker with his pass key, as you said.’
Garvie didn’t reply, didn’t even turn in his seat, and Singh had a brief intuition of what it must be like to be Garvie’s mother.
Frowning, he drove on, staring ahead through the windscreen wipers into the rain-flickering darkness. After a while he began to talk again. Though he didn’t understand the boy, he wanted to bring things properly to an end, to make sure Garvie knew that the case was finally closed. He told him about the photographs of Chloe Dow they’d found on Naylor’s laptop, and how they’d discovered that he was a sex offender, and about Naylor’s records from Maltby going missing in Archives after his identity change. He explained that Naylor’s alibi had been bogus, that he’d actually been seen up at Pike Pond on Friday afternoon. They knew now that he’d been up there before, perhaps many times, taking pictures of Chloe running.
‘And I think we’ll find the stolen phone he was calling Chloe on,’ Singh said. ‘That’s the final piece of the jigsaw. Except for explaining that number in the call records there’s really nothing else to prove.’
Garvie said nothing to any of this. Singh couldn’t even tell if he was listening.
Leaving Badger Lane, they accelerated into the lights of Bulwarks Lane and went across Pollard Way into the Five Mile estate.
‘I can understand if you’re upset,’ Singh said.
Still Garvie ignored him.
‘You’re shocked. But you’ll be OK. It’s over now; you can stop thinking about it. You have to. It’s time to move on.’
Clearing his throat, Singh went on, ‘In my report I’ll acknowledge the ... assistance you gave us. I can call it assistance, I think. I’ll make it clear to your mother too, and to your school. But’ – he glanced sideways – ‘there’s something I have to say, something I’ve said before.’ He was never able to rid himself of his habitual stiffness, even at delicate moments, and he was aware of his own dry manner and clipped voice. He cleared his throat again as he reached for phrases remembered from the police handbook on code of conduct. ‘You really shouldn’t have got involved. You didn’t realize the danger you were putting yourself in. I hope you see that now. Listen, the police have a duty of responsibility to young people. There’ve been times, many times, when I couldn’t even guarantee your basic safety. Like tonight, back there,’ he added, remembering how Garvie had stepped up alone to the door of Naylor’s hut.
Finally he reached the end of Eastwick Road and parked across the entrance to the flats.
‘I’m sure you understand all this,’ he said, in what he hoped was a quieter, friendlier tone. ‘Think of your mother, if nobody else.’
After he turned off the engine they sat there together in silence for a few moments. It was twenty to one; Five Mile lay sleeping around them.
At last Garvie stirred, as if coming out of a trance, and looked at Singh for the first time since leaving the woods.
‘So Naylor, Johnson, whatever his name was. He was a sex offender?’
Singh looked at him curiously. There were times when the boy seemed oddly dim. ‘Yes. I told you.’
‘On the Sex Offender Register?’
Singh frowned as he nodded. ‘As I just told you.’
‘Then,’ Garvie said sadly, ‘he’s almost certainly not your killer.’
And without saying anything else he let himself out of the car and went through the gate to Eastwick Gardens, where his mother sat waiting for him.
42
THEY SAT FACING each other under bright lights across the kitchen table.
‘Talk,’ she said, and sat staring at him, oddly.
She was wearing her old blue flannel dressing gown and broken-soled slippers, and her strange expression made her face look out of place, as if it wasn’t really her own.
‘Talk to me,’ she said. ‘While you still can.’
‘I thought you were at work,’ he said uneasily. ‘I didn’t think you’d worry.’
‘I came back between shifts and found your note. While I was here the inspector called. I knew then there was trouble. I been here ever since, waiting.’
He was too tired to be charming and his mother’s odd expression was too disturbing, so he said as humbly as he could that he’d got into trouble again, with the police.
‘What trouble now?’
He noticed that his mother’s voice was strange too – so strange he almost decided to tell her the truth. But not quite. Truth was a slippery sort of thing. Besides, he didn’t know if he could trust himself to speak or even think about Naylor just yet.
‘Same as before,’ he said cautiously.
‘Meaning?’
‘Got caught with a bottle in the Old Ditch Road playground.’
He was expecting her to lay into him, to deliver a few home truths in her usual high-volume, maximum-impact style. But she said nothing, just stared at him in her new strange way.
‘Smoking the magic puff too?’ she said at last.
‘No, Mum.’
‘No?’
‘I’ve finished with all that.’
‘Finished with it, have you?’
He nodded.
After a moment she reached into her dressing-gown pocket and took out a small plastic bag and placed it on the table between them.
It was a ten-spot from Alex.
‘Found it in your room,’ his mother said.
He didn’t say anything to that.
‘But you tell me you didn’t have any with you tonight in the Old Ditch Road playground?’
‘I didn’t. I swear.’
‘Don’t worry, I know you didn’t. Because you weren’t in the Old Ditch Road playground, were you?’
Garvie sat silent.
‘I know where you’ve been,’ she said. ‘And I know what you’ve been doing.’
He saw her lip tremble and her eyes well up, and with a sense of horror he realized what her strangeness was. She wasn’t going to lay into him. She couldn’t. All her loudness and certainty had gone, and with them her authority, and he realized immediately that this was far worse.
He started to get up, but she shook her head and began to speak in that strange voice, quieter and harsher at the same time.
‘You see it now, eh? What it means, to be a mother. Means sitting here at midnight wondering where you are. Means asking what’s happened to you. Means telling myself tha
t whatever trouble you get yourself into it’s my fault. My fault you’re out all night, my fault you’re smoking that puff and running with those thieves and dealers, my fault you’re wasting all the talents you were born with. Mine, Garvie, not yours. I can lose you, but you can never lose yourself. You understand me?’
Tears ran down her face. Her cheeks puckered and glistened.
‘I’ll tell you what else it means. It means knowing what Mrs Dow is thinking now. That nutty woman you like to laugh at. Knowing what she’s thinking at night when she can’t get to sleep no matter how many pills she takes. Her daughter’s dead, but she’s alive to tell herself every night of the rest of her life that she’s lost her, and it was her own fault and nobody else’s.’
Her chin was wet, her nose was running.
‘And you now. Playing your games like it was a bit of fun, like it was a puzzle you can drop in the bin when you’ve solved it. Like it ...’
She said no more.
She sat with her hand across her mouth as she wept. Cheeks wet, eyes swollen, weeping angrily without noise, almost unrecognizable, almost a stranger, as if his mother were disappearing in front of his eyes.
He got to his feet so fast he knocked over the chair, but she put up a hand to stop him hugging her and, glaring at him wetly, rose from the table and went away, still weeping, across the living-room floor into her room and shut the door behind her, leaving him standing alone at the kitchen table.
She’d always said that one day he would go too far. But he’d never known what that really meant. He did now. He didn’t have to be a genius to know that his bad day had just got much worse.
43
AS THE DAWN came up murky green in Cornwallis Way, Detective Inspector Singh sat alone at his desk with the list of the meetings at the Centre for Public Service Partnerships in front of him. His tunic was dirty and torn, his turban soaked, his drawn face grey. But his posture was still upright, still unbending. He had never hidden things from himself. Without excuse or qualification he recognized that this was, by far, the worst day of his short, almost certainly doomed, career.