by Knight, Ali
A few moments later he came out into the lobby and found Nathan on security. ‘How you doing, Nathan?’
The perfect forehead pinched into a frown. ‘Nightmare, Darren, nightmare.’
‘What’s the problem?’ Darren put his possessions in the tray and walked through the barrier. He didn’t beep.
‘That.’ Nathan pointed at a tiny red dot on his chin. ‘It’s the size of Krakatoa and I’ve got a casting.’
Darren had to squint to see it. ‘Don’t worry, you can’t even see it.’
Nathan shook his head. ‘Studio lights, HD TV, nightmare,’ he muttered again. ‘Life’s so unfair.’
Darren was at that point thinking life was unfair to those who hadn’t been blessed with Nathan’s looks.
‘I mustn’t grumble, Darren, I know that other people are less fortunate, that in many ways I have been blessed.’ Nathan put his hand on his heart. ‘Others toil unseen.’ It was an Oscar speech in the making.
Darren heard a voice behind him. Berenice was leaving, putting her handbag in the tray.
She passed through the barrier. ‘You know, Nathan, you really look like someone, I can’t remember their name – who is it?’
He gave her his catalogue-model smile. ‘Bradley Cooper?’
Berenice looked startled. ‘No. I was thinking of that Polish cleaner who started recently. Piotr, is it?’ She picked up her bag, affronted at his arrogance, and walked hurriedly away.
47
When Darren got home his mum was packing her bag for her mastectomy. It was small, containing only what she really needed for her hospital stay. She was a practical, sensible woman in so many areas of her life, Darren thought – except one.
She was nervous, and he couldn’t help her with that. But he wanted to do something to support her. He took the rubbish out and glanced back up at the house. She had been nagging him about the clapboard for so long now. He’d already booked a couple of days off work so that he could be with her in hospital while she recovered from her operation. He could spend the rest of the time stripping and painting the front of the house.
He got excited about his idea.
He went out to the shed and rooted around among the dried-up tins of paint and the stiff brushes no one had cleaned properly. He was searching for paint stripper, but he couldn’t find any.
He was about to go shopping for supplies when his phone rang. It was Orin Bukowski.
‘You got a TV, young gun? I suggest you put it on.’
‘Just a minute.’ Darren went into the living room and put the news on. Details of how Molly had died had been made public. Darren listened to a reporter reveal that she had been smashed across the skull with a heavy, blunt object. Her injury was severe enough to kill her instantly.
‘What they will not tell you, and what I am going to announce in ten, is that for the angles to match with the height of prisoner 1072B Molly Peters would have had to be kneeling.’ Orin paused for effect. ‘You come join my campaign, we’ll buy better justice.’
Darren shook his head. ‘My mum’s about to—’
‘Go into hospital. I know. You want me to pay for a private room? You just have to ask.’
‘Thanks, Orin, but let us get through this first. I’m sorry.’
‘You’re not the one who needs to be sorry.’ Orin ended the call.
Darren sat down on the floor of the stuffy shed, warmed by the sun so the creosote in the wood released its musty, pleasant perfume. It was the smell of the summers of his childhood. Some of the paint supplies on the shelves had been here since Carly was still alive. Dust motes danced in the light through the ill-fitting slats. Darren felt the impotence and pain rise up in him again as he absorbed what had happened to Molly; tiny strips of light trying to illuminate a picture, but highlighting only horror. The only thing that stopped grief overwhelming him was his phone beeping. It was a text from Corey.
John de Luca, 91 Clapham Park Road, London SW4. U o me cuz.
Darren ran back into the house and upstairs to his computer. Number 91, the flat above the charity shop, was where John Sears lived. Were John de Luca and John Sears the same person? Why did anyone visiting a serial killer need two names? As he himself knew only too well, that would require a lot of fake ID.
48
Darren cycled to Clapham and parked round a corner from the charity shop near the Common. The tinkling door jarred his nerves; the musty smell evoked old men in dressing gowns. He noticed that there was a video camera in the corner, trained on the shop floor. He couldn’t understand why a humble charity shop would need that level of security.
He was pleased to see that the woman who had helped him last time wasn’t in today. Instead, there was a black woman at the counter. She looked up from the pages of a paperback. ‘You dropping off, dear?’ Darren shook his head. ‘There’s men’s at the back there.’
He was unsure how to proceed, so he walked past a rack where pairs of creased and wrinkled shoes begged to be picked up, past belts on a rotating display and mismatched crockery struggling to find space on some narrow shelves.
‘Where do you put all the stuff you can’t sell?’ He began to flick through a rail of tweedy trousers no one could possibly want to buy in the hottest June for years.
The woman put down her book. ‘We get too much, that’s for sure. Some too dirty, some too worn. We bag it up and ship it to the Third World. I think they push it through huge machines and shred it and make new stuff from it.’
Darren was interested in that. ‘That sounds like a big industry.’
The woman smiled. ‘I don’t know, dear. But open that door behind you and take a look.’ Darren turned and saw through a partly open door a small storeroom piled to the ceiling with black bin bags brimming with clothes and bedding nobody wanted.
‘World is full of too much stuff, eh?’
The woman nodded. ‘Too much stuff around us, you know.’
The bell tinkled and the door opened. Two dark-haired women came in, both pulling suitcases. ‘Maybe it’s a bit like people, it feels like there are too many of them at times,’ Darren said.
The woman was being friendly. ‘Some of the people who come in here feel a little surplus to requirements, but we do what we can.’
Darren nodded, noticing a door to the right of the storeroom. It would lead to the stairs and the flat above.
Darren walked closer to the door and looked at some T-shirts on a rail. He was about to ask the woman about John when he heard the heavy tread of someone coming down the stairs from the flat upstairs. He grabbed a T-shirt off a rack and darted into the changing cubicle as the door to the flat opened and closed.
A man coughed.
The woman at the desk said hello, and whoever had come through the door murmured a greeting.
‘Quiet today?’ He had a south London accent.
‘Like always,’ she said. Darren heard a metallic creak. He looked down and saw under the bottom of the cubicle curtain the dusty work boots of Olivia’s befriender. ‘I haven’t seen you around much lately, where you been?’
‘Keeping out of trouble. By the way, I wanted to tell you, I think someone’s been trying to tamper with my post – I had someone trying to take out a credit card in my name. No one suspicious has been in asking about me, my name, anything like that? My bank says I need to be extra vigilant.’
The woman made a clucking noise of disapproval. ‘That’s terrible. I’ve seen nothing like that, but I’ll warn the others.’ Daren heard more creaks and shuffles. ‘You OK in there?’ she called out to him suddenly.
‘I’m fine,’ Darren said, taking a step backwards towards the mirror. The boots were back outside the curtain, pointing towards him this time.
Darren held his breath. The boots moved away and he heard the door next to the changing room open and shut behind him.
Darren pulled back the curtain and came out into the shop, the T-shirt in his hands.
‘That’s three pound fifty dear.’ The woman licke
d her finger and used it to open a plastic bag.
‘I heard that man,’ Darren said, shaking his head and pulling out the coins. ‘Same thing happened to my mum last year. Someone took out a credit card in her name and ran up a bill of seven grand. You can never be too careful.’
The woman grimaced. ‘They just want your personal information nowadays.’
‘So true. John, isn’t it? I had a chat with him a few weeks back when I came in. Has he recently moved in? If you’ve just moved it’s much worse I’ve heard.’
‘Oh, John’s been here years.’ She settled back in her seat and, just as Darren had hoped, looked ready for a long conversation. ‘When I first started the shop was—’
‘What are you doing?’ One of the dark-haired women was right behind Darren.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Why are you asking about John?’ Darren could see the women were sisters or twins. They were English, with flat south London accents. ‘Who wants to know?’
‘I’m not asking about anything—’
The woman took a step towards him. ‘Don’t play dumb with us. Who’s asking?’ The other woman shut the door to the shop and flicked the Yale lock closed. The black woman pushed her chair back against the wall, watching.
‘No one, I’m not asking anything.’
There was a very tense silence. ‘You won’t talk? I know who can make you.’ The woman closest to him turned towards the door that John had disappeared through and Darren lunged for the exit.
One of the sisters screamed out John’s name and Darren could hear heavy footsteps thundering down the stairs above his head. He grabbed at the shop door, twisting the Yale lock. The other woman tried to pull him back from the door. ‘Who are you?’ she shouted. ‘You won’t get away with it!’
Darren had to turn and shove her hard to get her off him so he could open the door. She stumbled backwards into a rack of clothes, which began to roll away from her, leaving her in a tumble of hangers and shirts on the floor.
The door to the flat at the back flew open and John Sears or de Luca came through it. Darren finally got through the front door and sprinted away down the street. He didn’t stop running until he was nearly in Stockwell, when he realised he was still carrying the bag with the T-shirt in it. He was about to throw it away when he actually took a look at what he had purchased. It was a black T-shirt with a picture of a man smoking a massive reefer.
He waited an hour before he dared circle back to the Common and collect his bike. His pulse was still racing as he unlocked his chain. What had Orin called befrienders? They are a security breach of the first order. Who was this man, why had he changed his name and why were those women – his sisters, surely – so protective of him? He was still no nearer to an answer when he had cycled back to Streatham and bought the equipment he needed to start decorating the house.
49
In the morning Darren and his dad took his mum to St George’s. Darren stood by the car as his mum got ready, watching Dad pick the smashed bodies of gnats off the car paintwork. Mum was always last out of the house, needing to check the door and windows were locked. A text beeped on her phone – a ‘thinking of you’ message from a friend, no doubt.
Darren picked up her hospital bag and put it in the boot of the car. He got in the back seat. Even now he was an adult, his position relative to his parents in the car hadn’t changed. Dad drove carefully, leaving Darren to wonder if he was already over the limit for drink-driving.
At the hospital they watched Mum have her IV fitted and the nurses did a lot of kindly patting of forearms and making of light jokes designed to put the men at ease. Melanie would be in surgery for three hours and recuperating afterwards for a few days. She was wheeled away and the Evans men were left alone with their demons.
Dad told Darren to go home; he would wait in the hospital until she woke up.
Darren did what his dad wanted. He went home and decided to start on the front of the house. He was still badly shaken by what had happened in Clapham in the charity shop. The women were aggressive and protective, but what it all meant he couldn’t fathom. He had to stay busy to stay on top of his panic about so many things: the threat of discovery at Roehampton, the fact that his face would be clearly visible on the security camera in the charity shop – and the darker fears, the horror of what had happened to Molly and what might have happened to Carly.
Darren planned his DIY in detail. He opened up his new cordless paint-stripper gun and plugged it in to charge. He dragged the ladder from the shed to the front of the house. He got his phone out and got some tracks playing. He took out a new scraper and stood back, examining the scale of the job. It looked big. He rolled a joint. The sun was hot and pleasant. He had a cup of tea.
He played around for a bit with the paint-stripper gun; it made a pleasing noise, like a jet engine passing overhead. He climbed the ladder and applied the jet of heat to the cracked and peeling paint. It began to come away in strips, falling to the paving below him. He used the scraper to get into the grooves between the splits of wood. He climbed down the ladder and moved it along a few inches. He became distracted by a beetle crawling across the paving slabs between the bubbled paint remains. He climbed the ladder again and pulled away more peeling paint.
He started to sweat. He got the munchies. He went back into the house and rummaged through a variety of cupboards for biscuits or cereal or chocolate, knocking over packets and leaving boxes on the table.
He smoked the joint.
By the time he texted Chloe to ask if he could come over he had been working on the house for three hours and had stripped a door-sized section back to the bare wood. He felt ridiculously pleased with himself. Dad phoned to say Mum was out of the operation and in recovery; it had gone as well as could be expected.
He had another joint.
He arranged to visit Chloe after he’d seen his mum.
He picked up his tools and took them into the kitchen, leaving them on the kitchen table. He didn’t notice he’d tramped hundreds of flakes of burnt paint into the house. He tried to carry his bike through the house from the garden and tripped over the paint gun charger that was plugged in in the hall. He yanked the plug out of the wall and took the charger in to the kitchen. He began to pack a bag in case he stayed at Chloe’s house later, then changed his mind; he needed to be with his dad.
He got confused. He remembered to put the joint in the bin, but put the stripper gun in his rucksack. He couldn’t find his phone. He put his bike keys in his back pocket and the stripper in the kitchen drawer. He locked the house and cycled away, leaving the ladder propped up against the front of the house.
Mum looked so small and vulnerable in the hospital bed after her mastectomy that Darren stopped short and his eyes filled with tears. A nurse was moving about beside her, and she reassured him and Dad that she was OK.
They sat together for an hour and then Mum said she was tired and needed to sleep.
‘Mum, I’m going to Chloe’s house now,’ Darren said.
He saw her give Dad a look. ‘Who’s Chloe?’
He shrugged. ‘Just someone I met at work.’
She grinned. ‘When do I get to meet this someone?’
He shrugged again. ‘Someday.’
‘Don’t wait too long, my days might be numbered.’
He left to the sound of Andy shushing her and urging her to stay positive.
‘I like your T-shirt,’ Chloe said.
‘Yeah, it’s kinda cool.’
Darren was wearing the T-shirt he’d bought from the charity shop as he lay on Chloe’s sofa. He was trying to get up but Chloe kept pulling him back down.
‘I tried to friend you on Facebook, but I couldn’t find you.’
He froze. Here was yet another problem he hadn’t thought through.
‘I don’t do social media.’
‘Oh.’ She frowned. ‘Didn’t you say in Devon that you did?’
He panicked. Trying to remember what he had an
d hadn’t said to her was proving impossible. He was not naturally a liar and he hated doing it. He needed to never go back to Roehampton, come clean with Chloe and move on with his life.
‘I’ve been thinking a lot about Duvall,’ Darren said. ‘How easy is it to keep a secret, do you think? I mean, if you did something really bad, like Olivia has done, could you never tell anyone?’
Chloe lay back on the sofa and thought about it for a while. ‘I could keep a secret for ever. Easily.’ He fancied she was staring right through him.
‘Really? I’m surprised.’
‘Yeah. If it was important enough. And it seems to be very important to Olivia to keep the secret about where those girls are.’
‘So why did she reveal where Molly was?’
Chloe sighed. ‘I don’t know. Some at work are saying that she did it to get less time in solitary for killing Linda, but I don’t think it’s that. It’s about power. Power over something we don’t understand and maybe never will.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Or maybe it’s all about you, Darren Smith.’ She smiled and ran a finger down his nose. ‘Maybe it’s all about you.’
50
Great Yarmouth
Olly felt cold, his skinny nine-year-old shoulders shivering, even in June. It felt like a gale was blowing off the North Sea. The water had merged with the sky, one massive slab of grey with just the bobbing boats to cut the monotony.
He scratched the wall with his fingernail, wore it down till it hurt the end of his finger. Beggs would be along in a minute, a football under his feet, and they would go and hoof it about on the playing fields. Beggs didn’t understand why Olly liked to lean here and watch the boats, why he liked being alone. The harbour held riggers and outboard motors and grappling poles and lobster pots, and he just liked the colours of the boats, liked the way they bobbed and swung and moved in the water. He never told anybody this; Nan would call him a poof from her armchair before taking another drag on her Richmonds, and being called that was the worst thing in the world. So he watched the boats alone.