by Neil Cross
Later, with a stripy beach towel wrapped round his hairy belly, he padded up to the attic room and deodorized his armpits. He lay some freshly laundered clothes out on the bed and steamed dry.
He was trying not to think what he was thinking. His head swirled and eddied with complex connections.
He dressed in clean cargo trousers and a short-sleeved, checked shirt. He opened the creaking sash window. A cloud of the city filled the room. Late afternoon, late summer air; exhaust fumes and uncollected rubbish gone sweet with decay.
Downstairs, Lenny and Eloise were waiting for him. Lenny brought in a pot of tea and some Hob Nobs.
Eloise said: ‘How did it go?’
Shepherd sat. The sofa creaked like a sea-going galleon.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’
She sat facing him, in an armchair whose covers had been repaired with duck-tape.
‘Was it that bad?’
He knuckled the tip of his nose.
‘It was awful.’
Stupidly, he thought for a moment that he might cry.
He told them about it. Eloise thought it was comical, in a pitiable way. But she was good enough to suppress her smile and nod and make supportive noises. Lenny was outraged. He stomped up and down the room, cursing. He punched his hand like Burt Ward playing Robin.
‘It’s disinformation,’ he yelled, with passion. ‘It’s fucking disinformation.’
Shepherd protested.
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘It was all quite genuine.’
‘You were set up—’ Lenny brought himself to a standstill. He was breathing heavily with the exertion. Beads of sweat on his upper lip. His hair stuck up. He cupped an elbow and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘That bloke,’ he said, ‘that presenter. I know him. He’s a known sceptic. Well known. Well, I say sceptic. So-called sceptic. I wonder whose pockets he’s in.’
Eloise laughed. ‘He’s not in anybody’s pocket,’ she said. ‘For God’s sake, Lenny. It’s a fucking late-night talk show on digital TV!’
Lenny pitied her naivety.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Oh, no, no, no.’
Eloise laughed.
She said: ‘Haven’t you had enough?’
Lenny said: ‘So, you think it’s coincidence that it was on Sky? Of all channels? You think that’s accidental? Grow up, Eloise.’
She held up her hands in disbelief. ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Whatever.’
She shook her head.
‘I don’t believe this,’ she said. ‘You’re just losing it, Lenny.’
‘Losing it, bollocks,’ he said. ‘This is an injustice. It’s a set-up. Putting Jack on screen with Rex Dryden is an attempt to discredit him …’
‘How can you discredit him any further?’ She caught Shepherd’s eye. ‘Sorry, Jack.’
(‘That’s all right,’ said Shepherd, but nobody was listening.)
‘Because Jack’s the real thing,’ said Lenny. ‘And Dryden’s a self-professed fraud. He’s a fucking spiv. He’s a wideboy. He’s wider than the sky. Having them on together is guilt by association.’
‘And why would they do that? Why would they bother?’
‘Because Jack was close to the truth. Jack was on to something.’
‘On to what?’ said Eloise. Her voice had ascended an octave. She turned to Shepherd and said: ‘I’m sorry, Jack, but I have to say this. He was wrong, Lenny. He didn’t get anything right.’
‘But he was nearly right.’
‘There’s no such thing as nearly right!’
Lenny munched malevolently on a Hob Nob.
Eloise stood. She forced a smile that quivered unsteadily.
‘Can’t we let this drop now?’ she said. ‘And get on with our lives? Can’t we just, you know, move on? I can’t remember a time when this wasn’t happening.’
‘Oh God,’ said Shepherd, who also wished it would stop. ‘Please yes.’
‘There,’ said Eloise. She pointed at Shepherd as if Lenny might not know where he sat. ‘There you go. Let’s call it a day, right here and now. Let’s not even watch the stupid programme.’
Lenny fell into an armchair and muttered something about Wittgenstein.
Eloise’s shoulders sagged. In her normal register, she said: ‘I fancy a drink. Does anybody fancy a drink?’
Sulkily, Lenny wiped crumbs from the corner of his mouth.
‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘I’ll have a Guinness.’
‘I meant,’ said Eloise. ‘Let’s go the pub.’
They agreed it was a good idea.
The Cricketer’s Arms was on the next corner, and it was early enough to get a table—although the only one available was placed in the corner, beneath the large, wall-mounted television. The sound was on mute, but the bar staff kept glancing towards the screen. The All-Blacks were playing.
Shepherd put £50 behind the bar. Eloise objected politely.
He said: ‘It’s my birthday.’
She said: ‘Is it really?’
He shrugged. ‘Why not? It might as well be.’
She squinted at him. Then she reached over the table and pinched his upper arm.
She said: ‘You’re really weird, sometimes.’
He rubbed at the pinch. Then he tugged at his earlobe.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘So would you be.’
‘Well, yes,’ she said. ‘I expect I would be.’
Deftly, he thought, Shepherd changed the subject. He asked after Eloise’s working day. Much of her attention recently had been given to a young autistic girl who possessed an unusual musical proficiency. After hearing a piece of music once, Mary could play it by ear, no matter how intricate the melody. Yet she was without interactive skills. She suffered brain blindness, an inability to conceive what someone might be thinking, or indeed that it might be possible for another to think. Her playing was without nuance; a clattering blitz of melody. Already the local television news had been in to film her. At her parents’ suggestion, she played the Rachmaninov Piano Concerto that had featured in Shine. There had been articles in the Evening Standard and the Sunday Telegraph. A BBC documentary crew were interested in following her progress for a year.
Eloise was unhappy about Mary becoming a minor local celebrity, made worse by her parents’ willingness to financially exploit her. Lenny didn’t think they could be blamed. He agreed it was distasteful—but it wouldn’t harm the girl. She was beyond humiliation. She was an android.
(This irritated Shepherd, who wondered why Lenny couldn’t just shut up for once and agree with Eloise.)
Eloise balked. She and Lenny quarrelled in a baiting, animated fashion that only a friend could know was amicable. Shepherd was largely excluded, but at least they weren’t talking about Joanne Grayling or William Holloway. Then Lenny went to the bar to refresh their drinks.
Eloise nodded in the direction of his knotty spine.
She said: ‘He cares more than he lets on.’
Shepherd looked into his empty glass.
‘Some men are like that,’ he said, draining a dreg that was not there.
‘He’s a bit of a puritan,’ she said. ‘Deep down. He has these very high moral standards. He expects too much of people. So he pretends to expect nothing.’
‘I hadn’t thought of it like that,’ said Shepherd.
Lenny squeezed through the pub crowd clutching their drinks and four packets of crisps to his chest. A man with long, thinning hair and a leather jacket began to pump money into the CD jukebox. They were forced to endure ‘Stairway to Heaven’ at ear-bleeding volume.
Lenny bellowed: ‘Have you been talking about me again?’
Eloise took her drink. She shouted at him: ‘There are other topics of conversation.’
He kissed her forehead.
‘Of course there are,’ h
e shouted back.
She reached up to slap the crown of his head. He slumped heavily on the greasy circular stool.
Shepherd spoke loudly into his ear: ‘Eloise was telling me what a caring person you are,’ he said. ‘Deep down.’
‘Was she now?’ Lenny yelled. ‘Well, it’s pretty deep down, then.’ He looked at his sternum. ‘Deeper than I can see.’
Eloise said: ‘You’re an arsehole, Kilminster. You X-Files geek.’
He smiled, a bit sadly, and opened a packet of crisps. He shouted into Shepherd’s ear, spitting moist cheese-and-onion crumbs.
He said: ‘A million times nothing is still nothing, you know?’
Shepherd wanted to laugh, but then he saw that Lenny was quite serious and he felt lonely and foolish. He remembered with photographic clarity his visit to Andrew Taylor’s house.
The pattern, the old pattern, was hissing and spitting behind his eyes. It would not go away. He was weary with the unending bleakness of it.
He said: ‘Let’s drink to that,’ and went to the bar. He returned with a bottle of champagne and three slightly grubby tulip glasses.
Eloise said: ‘What’s all this about?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Let’s raise a toast.’
‘To what?’
‘To Joanne Grayling.’
Shepherd poured. The glasses swelled with mousse.
They clinked glasses.
‘To Joanne,’ said Eloise.
With the evocation of her name, the atmosphere contracted. Shepherd topped up their drinks.
He said: ‘I have a confession to make.’
He saw that Eloise had anticipated him.
He turned away from her desperately entreating gaze. He looked at Lenny instead.
‘William Holloway,’ he said.
‘What about him?’
Shepherd sighed. For a moment he considered the wisdom of speaking.
Then he said: ‘He didn’t do it.’
Lenny set down his glass.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Stairway to Heaven’ came to a merciful conclusion. Their ears rang with tinnitus.
Shepherd leaned over the table.
‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ he said.
Eloise rolled her eyes. She downed her champagne and slammed the glass down hard on the table. Another song came on the jukebox. ‘Losing My Religion’.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘If you’re going to start this bollocks all over again, I’m off.’
She searched their expressions for any sign of hope. Then she swore under her breath and hastily gathered up her bag and jacket from the empty stool. She stormed from the pub. They watched her leave.
Then Shepherd told Lenny all about it.
16
I
The next morning, they bought and watched a DVD copy of It’s a Wonderful Life. They agreed it was essential to find William Holloway.
To Shepherd it seemed impossible. Lenny conceded it would be difficult. He suggested it would be better to concentrate instead on finding Holloway’s wife and daughter.
People behaved oddly when a loved one had committed a crime. The more terrible the crime, the less accountable their reaction to it. Nobody wanted their husband or their father to be a butcher of young women. Holloway’s arrest and incarceration would prove beyond legal doubt that he was just that. So Lenny believed the women might have an idea of Holloway’s whereabouts, even if they hadn’t told the police about it. Or even each other.
But Holloway’s wife and daughter were themselves in hiding. It seemed to Shepherd that, if the super-evolved predatory instinct of the assembled tabloid press had not located them, their own chances were vanishingly slight.
Lenny scolded him.
‘Remember,’ he said. ‘An assumption is a thing you don’t know you’re making.’
They didn’t know the tabloids hadn’t found the Holloway women. It was just as likely that the papers were temporarily co-operating with the police, withholding certain information and deferring certain stories, perhaps in exchange for ‘leaked’ exclusives when the case finally broke. The papers’ very silence on the subject since the initial flurry of reportage might be a part of the police’s overall strategy.
‘But if they’re not hiding from the press,’ said Shepherd, ‘who are they hiding from?’
‘Everyone,’ said Lenny. ‘Would you want your friends calling, in the circumstances?’
Shepherd thought about Rachel.
‘No,’ he said.
Although Lenny had decided the problem was surmountable, the problem of how to go about actually surmounting it vexed him for several days. He rejected Shepherd’s suggestion that they simply hire a private detective. He held such men and their abilities in low esteem.
For the rest of the week, Lenny drank many cups of strong, white tea with one sugar and smoked himself to tension headaches, which he dispelled by watching Fifteen to One, Countdown, Watercolour Challenge and Ricki Lake. He ran his hands through his hair. He read and reread old newspapers that reported on the Temple of Light, the killing of Joanne Grayling, the events that followed. He plugged in the Playstation and sat crosslegged before the television screen, playing Driver for hours at a sitting. The tip of his thumb blistered and bled. He nibbled at the swollen balloon of skin. He popped Nurofen Plus into his mouth like chocolate raisins and muttered and cursed to himself as though Shepherd was not there.
Eventually, he had formulated his plan. He asked Shepherd to buy them two return train tickets to Leeds.
They travelled up on the Monday morning, first class. On the train, they swapped sections of the Guardian, spreading them noisily flat on the table. They took it in turns to make frequent visits to the buffet car and returned with super-heated hamburgers in Styrofoam clams, or cheesy corn puffs that took skin from the roof of the mouth. The people in business suits cast them sidelong glances. At some point, each of the business men and women yapped garbage into a mobile telephone. They spoke a form of English Shepherd barely recognized, full of puffed-up, bellicose instruction and military metaphor.
Lenny revelled in the incongruity. He wiggled his little finger at his ear, symbolizing the small, flaccid penises of everyone around them. When he’d finished the newspaper, he ostentatiously produced a tatty Penguin copy of Crime and Punishment from his overnight bag and settled back into his seat.
The train pulled in to Leeds station at lunchtime. They slung their overnight bags over their shoulders and walked through the city centre. Shepherd didn’t mind spending money on first-class travel, but he resented overpaying for a hotel room they would barely see, except to sleep in. So they booked in to a bed-and-breakfast on Upper Briggate, close to the Odeon. The obese proprietor wore a T-shirt several sizes too small; from its lower hem there emerged a great swell of purple striated, hairy flesh. He wheezed as if sexually exerted and gave every impression that renting rooms to strangers was a hazardous business and more trouble than it was worth.
They asked for adjoining single rooms. The proprietor rolled his eyes and exhaled. He apprised them curtly—as if suspecting it might be their fault that the lift was out of order. Cowed by his wrath, they crept shamefully up three flights of narrows stairs.
Shepherd’s room was laid out like a bedsitter and smelled faintly of seared cotton. It was clean enough. The remote control to the ancient portable television was held together with cracked, yellowing sellotape. He dumped his bag on the single bed and joined Lenny in a similar room next door.
Lenny had done the research. Most of the city’s student population lived in the Leeds 6 postal district, just north of the city centre. The newspapers had reported that Caroline Holloway lived in the Hyde Park area, so they hailed a taxi outside the Odeon, huddled in their coats because it was beginning to rain, and asked the driver to take them to the bigge
st student pub in Hyde Park. It was a short journey. The taxi turned off the Headrow, past the Merrion centre and the bone-white university clocktower, the Parkinson building. Hyde Park itself, tree-bordered, flashed by on their left.
The pub was named for the park. It was a hangar of a place that stood across the road from a kebab shop, a Blues Brothers themed pizza takeaway, a boarded-up second-hand bookshop and a shop that sold vegetarian footwear. Inside, six pool tables and a bar that ran the length of two walls seemed hardly to take up space. Patrons roamed the worn carpets as if in an east European airport terminal. Knots of students played pool, hunched over tables, gaped at televisions mounted in high corners.
Lenny insisted that his plan was glorious in its artlessness: it relied for success on human weakness, and therefore couldn’t disappoint. Because Caroline Holloway was connected with a celebrated murder (albeit indirectly), she had become a campus celebrity. Celebrity was social currency. Even those who could not claim to have met her would exaggerate their connection to and relationship with people who did.
There were limited degrees of separation within such an interconnected community: the network of people who claimed to know Caroline would have spread exponentially, like mould on a slice of bread. People who knew her vaguely would claim to be among her closest friends. People who knew and didn’t like her would claim she was a wonderful person, a good friend. It would be socially stigmatic to admit, even to a stranger, that one was not in some way acquainted with her.
So Lenny’s plan consisted of buying drinks for students and engaging them in conversation, into which he would introduce the topic of Caroline Holloway. Eventually, he believed, they would track this intricate grid of hearsay and gossip back to someone who actually knew her. Thus they might eventually come to learn where she was.