Head Case

by Ross Armstrong

  Pillows, a chemistry set, clay model-making materials.

  The woman above. The child below.

  But there are no photos to be seen. As Bartu gets up wearily to make his apologies, I grab something from the drawer, stuff it into my pocket and follow him.

  Downstairs Mr Bridges has continued to wind himself up. He stands in his living room, barring our way, now apparently keen to stop us from leaving rather than get us out.

  ‘You cracked the case have you? Cagney and Lacey?’ he says.

  We have to get out of here. We’ve stayed too long.

  ‘Mr Bridges, thank you for your time today, please know that this was useful for us in light of the details surrounding the other missing girl in the area,’ Bartu says. Almost catching himself as he sees Mrs Bridges’ face fall into shock.

  ‘What other girl? No one’s mentioned another girl?’ she says.

  Bartu makes a move to try and get past Mr Bridges as she speaks, but he moves to the side, too, pinning us in the hallway.

  ‘No one’s told us this. What the fuck is going on?’ he says.

  It’s then I see Jarwar through the front window. I tug gently at Bartu, drawing him away from Mr Bridges and out of the light, while taking over the talking duties.

  ‘Mr Bridges, that was what we came here to tell you. While no one wanted to alarm you, we personally felt you should know. That’s on us. So forgive us if you would’ve rather been kept in the dark.’

  I peer out and see Jarwar almost at the door.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘We appreciate being told. No one has told us a thing. Not really.’

  ‘Well, may I ask that you don’t mention this to the inspector, as and when she arrives? This might seem irregular, but we trod on a few toes to bring you that information. In fact, it’s probably best you don’t mention that we were here at all. Can I trust you to do that?’

  I home in on Mr Bridges. I fix him like a fly on a drawing pin. He pauses, lost in this revelation and I sympathise. I guess things just got a little more serious in his world, maybe more serious than they’ve ever been and I of all people understand that feeling.

  By the way, after the lighter in the car and letting me speak during assembly time, this was Bartu’s third mistake. Not that I’m keeping count.

  ‘Yes, you can trust us,’ Mrs Bridges says.

  ‘Good. Now can we trouble you to use your back door?’

  We hurry through the garden, out of a bare wooden gate next to their shed and fall out into a back street. Mr Bridges, looking on as if we are a clump of hair being expelled from his U-bend, turns and moves into his living room and I imagine it’s the doorbell that takes him there.

  On a red brick wall facing us, I notice a small light blue symbol, delicately spray painted. As my eyes run along the wall, I see others subtly placed directly outside neighbouring gates. Some symbols repeat themselves as I analyse them in a small second. But no symbol is the same as the Bridges’. A circle (0) with two diagonal lines (//) through it. They could have been put there by workmen. Something to do with pipes that lie under the pavement. That’s what people would think, most people, who tend to explain away anomalies. And they could be right. Could be that. Could be nothing.

  Bartu breathes in hard as the gate slams behind us.

  And when I unfold the childish drawing of a house next to a playground, on cream A5 paper, which I found in the drawer under the bed, he breathes out hard, too.

  13

  ‘Tell me little one,

  Tell me you’re the one for me, Shoo, sha boo, my coochie coo,

  Come and set me free.’

  We need to hurry. School lets out at 3.15; I’d almost forgot that was how it worked. Feels like these kids are missing another third of the day in which they could be getting things done; learning, figuring out who they are and what they’re good at. The same things I’m trying to do.

  The sound of my left foot dragging along the ground sprays the street. Emre Bartu struggles to keep up, scanning the picture as he goes, then rolling it up like a teenage poster and putting an elastic band around it as I turn to see why he’s lagging behind. He places it carefully into his standard issue document holder. He doesn’t want it creased.

  ‘It’s identical. Right?’ I say, when he appears beside me.

  ‘Not quite. It’s the same scene, but the colours are different.’

  ‘Yes, but forget the colours! Other than the colours, it’s identical?’ I say, eyes to the distance.

  ‘Well… also the whole thing seems shifted to the right a little.’

  We’re mute for a second, except for the scrape-scrape of my foot on tarmac, as I consider this.

  ‘By how much?’

  ‘A metre maybe,’ he says, making a scrunch-faced estimate.

  ‘Good. So they’re drawing something specific.’

  ‘Yeah. And they’re looking at it from slightly different angles. Do you think they’re being made to draw it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t care really,’ I murmur.

  ‘Right. Why’s that?’

  ‘Because I’m more interested in the colours.’

  He stops. I’d been leading him a merry dance, he only realises it now. Verbally and physically. We’re halfway there already without him asking a single question. His hand goes to his radio.

  ‘So… where we going now?’ says Emre Bartu.

  ‘Are you going to check in?’ I say.

  ‘Yeah. What’s wrong with that?’

  I pause while my brain clicks into gear. It can be a long process. Sometimes it’s like you have to turn the thing off and on again and wait for all the programs to start, like a PC circa 1995. I hear my heartbeat in my ears, my middle finger tapping against my leg.

  ‘I don’t think you should,’ I say.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why this new eagerness to conform?’

  ‘Best to be honest when we can.’

  I scan his face. I wish I could read it. But I’m not there yet. Perhaps he’s going soft, perhaps he’s scared, or perhaps he’s been feeding back to them all this time. Yes, that’s what I think. I’ve essentially been assigned to his care, after all.

  ‘Look, as well as the smell thing, and my trouble with faces, I can only focus on the small things. I can see the whole but it takes effort, conscious refocusing, like I’m looking at a Magic Eye picture. It means I can tell you something interesting about the drawing you wouldn’t have seen though. But if I tell you, you can’t check in.’

  He wavers, gripping the radio tight then putting his head against it.

  ‘It’s always easier to tell the truth,’ he says.

  ‘That’s a fallacy. And an overrated one at that,’ say I.

  Maybe this is all a difference in approach, in philosophy, but I’m suspicious about his motives now.

  ‘Okay. What’s interesting about the picture?’

  ‘First, promise not to call it in, promise never to do that unless I say so.’

  ‘Okay, fine.’

  ‘Let me hear it.’

  ‘Oh come on.’

  He rubs his hands together, more a shadow move than a gesture in respect of the cold. Shadow moves are meaningless physical gestures that serve to display inner conflict, discomfort or the possibility of untruths. Always look out for shadow moves.

  ‘Put your hand on your heart and swear on your girlfriend’s life.’

  ‘You realise we’re adults. And police officers.’

  ‘Everyone needs to keep their promises. Especially police officers. Anyway, we’re civilian support staff. We improvise. So, double swear promise, with no going backsies.’

  He mouths an expletive, unzips his standard issue vest and awkwardly lifts up his operational shirt. I can see his stomach. He’s in decent shape to be fair. He puts two fingers to his chest and shouts.

  ‘I double swear promise. On my girlfriend’s life!’

  ‘With?’

  ‘With no going backsies!’ he rasps.

>   ‘Cool. Let’s go.’

  I turn to see a kid on a skateboard has been watching us. I nod. We walk on, Bartu slightly behind, the shame not even starting to wear off.

  ‘So what’s the interesting thing you found, with your mind?’

  ‘Tell you later.’

  ‘But you said you’d tell me. I promised!’

  ‘I didn’t make any promises. You did. And even if I did, the truth is an overrated fallacy.’

  He must know where we’re going. The path leads all the way there. He’s just reticent to accept the inevitable.

  ‘You’re an arsehole mate,’ he mutters, uncharacteristically.

  ‘Maybe. But don’t get uptight. I’ll tell you soon enough.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When we’ve consulted the expert. After we’ve spoken to the kid.’

  ‘What kid?’

  ‘Asif Akhtar.’

  ‘Fucking hell, Tom. Over my dead body. We don’t have the right,’ he shouts as we walk along. A couple of old folks raise their eyebrows as they see uniformed men locked in heated sweary debate. Bartu clocks this and his shame swells some more.

  ‘We’re not going back to the school!’ he whispers.

  ‘Oh come on. We both know that’s not true,’ I say with a smile.

  He falls into a hush as we go, staying half a step behind me, my leg dragging on the ground, making the sound of a ‘shh’ as it goes.

  *

  I sign us both in at front desk and smile at the gentleman receptionist behind the glass. Bartu stands upright, avoiding eye contact with everyone. Luckily, we’re seen as fairly odd anyway. But we also have high-vis body armour, utility belts and airwave terminal radios, epaulettes and matching hats, which seem to keep the questions to a minimum.

  I hand Emre Bartu a visitor’s badge and he grabs it without bothering to look, as if even the plastic and the safety pin has betrayed him and must actively be sulked at. It’s always unedifying to see an adult in a ‘moody’. I take no notice and power on. Otherwise he’d be starting to get me down.

  ‘Could you tell me what class Asif Akhtar is in again? I think it was err…’ I say. As if this was a scheduled meeting. An after dinner date.

  ‘Yep,’ the man says, scanning down a computer screen. He is thirty, balding, black NHS specs but in a hip, ironic way. He seems only half here, too, a husk waiting for three-fifteen so he can kick off home and work on his Electro-Folk album. Not for the first time since ‘the incident’ I feel like I’m the only one in the vicinity who’s really alive.

  We should be escorted by a member of staff, but as I’m guessing this guy is new and doesn’t listen to instructions, I decide to plough through and see if I can dodge the attentions of an escort.

  ‘Maths. So that would be in… M420. Maths block is that way.’

  He points a lazy finger in the direction of the doors through which we came, waggling it vaguely to the left, evidently keen to expend as little energy as possible on our directions, like Edmund Hillary conserving his strength for the way down. Then his eyes flick back to his computer, clicking the mouse officiously to signal he must return to important educational business. I catch the reflection of his screen in the glass behind him and see he’s on some website trying to buy a hat stand.

  My eyes only glimpsed his screen for the merest moment but the image seemed to lodge in my head like a jpeg. It’s a feeling I’ve never quite experienced before, photographic recall. Like one side of my brain was taking a polaroid and the other side was shaking it around until the picture became clear. It’s a thrill when it pulls tricks of its own accord. My palm pushes the metal panel on the lime green door and we vacate the reception hall just before a crowd of assorted brown suits and grey uniforms, all armed with their own prying eyes, hustles around a corner.

  ‘Have you got a hunch about this kid or are you just checking in?’ says Bartu.

  ‘A bit of both,’ I say, cold wind ruffling my hair.

  He snorts and looks the other way. I’m punishing him. We’re two lovers torturing each other for not showing enough affection exactly when and how we want it. As we head into the worn, maroon-carpeted interior of the maths block, I unbutton his document holder. It’s attached to his belt and he finds that a bit too intimate.

  ‘I’m not going to touch your penis.’

  ‘Yeah, I’d hope not,’ he responds immediately.

  His frown lingers on as we reach M420.

  At the wire netted glass of the classroom door we stop, wondering how to interrupt, our heads poking into view like a pair of meerkats.

  The teacher’s attention is drawn to us when he notices not a single one of his pupils has their eyes on the board anymore. They stare at us like soulless clones. A solid ripple of intrigue settles on them, not gossip, nothing salacious. These are maths kids. They try to work out the problem of us.

  Bartu pokes his head in the door as inoffensively as a man in uniform can.

  ‘Little word with Asif please,’ he whispers, a tortoise with the rest of the world as his shell. The teacher holds out a hand that says ‘be my guest’ and ‘if you must’ all at once. A gangly kid stands and the room hums with silent assumptions.

  ‘When was the last time you saw Tanya Fraser?’ I say, cutting to the chase in the sterile hallway.

  ‘Err. Like. Saw her saw her?’ he says.

  ‘Just saw her. With your eyes.’ It sounds more condescending than I mean it to.

  ‘Err. Reckon I saw her in the dinner hall. Day before she went missing,’ Asif says.

  ‘How do you know which day she went missing?’ I say.

  ‘Err. You told us. You told her whole year, they told everyone else. “Limping police guy”. That’s you, right?’

  Bartu withholds a laugh but I don’t think it’s funny. I think it’s commendably accurate. I focus on clear visual stimuli, too.

  ‘Yes. Exactly. How did you decide that’s when she went missing? I didn’t give anyone that.’

  ‘Two days before you came in, that’s when her class said she’d been away from, so that’s what we all reckoned. That was the word.’

  Crowd sourced intelligence. Very good. Kids are smart. Occasionally they’re smart, I mean; let’s not go overboard. But they’re smart occasionally because they talk. They can arrive at some useful things using social cross-referencing, but it means their stories are all similar. They know what ‘the word’ on the whatever is, then they draw their opinions using that as their pool.

  ‘Okay. And are you still… close?’ Bartu says. Intrigued enough to throw his oar in.

  ‘Nah. Say hello and stuff. But that’s about it. She’s nice, but I don’t know her anymore, not really.’

  He’s an interesting kid. And he’s good with adults. I hope he hasn’t done anything stupid.

  ‘You knew her a year ago,’ Bartu says, beating me to the punch.

  ‘Yeah. Funny, innit? Things change fast around here,’ he says.

  ‘Great. That’s all we need. Thanks,’ I turn to leave.

  Bartu, leaning against the wall, throws out a stunned ‘Err…’

  ‘You sure that’s all?’ Asif says, amiable, accommodating.

  I look to Bartu. He shrugs.

  We could ask about their relationship.

  We could ask about residual anger on both sides.

  We could ask if she got in with the wrong crowd.

  If there was anyone in school that seemed to have a thing for her.

  Or anyone that didn’t like her or seemed just a little offbeat. But…

  These questions will have been asked before, recorded by officers with more qualifications and on a better hourly rate. We don’t do the obvious stuff. That’s not our niche. And you’ve got to have a niche. I make to go again and so does Bartu, then I grab at his document holder and turn back to the kid suddenly.

  ‘Have you seen this before?’ I say.

  I hold the picture out for him. Bartu pulls my hand back so the picture is a more acceptable di
stance from his face, and turns it around. I had it upside down.

  ‘Nah. No, I ain’t. Sorry.’

  ‘Where would you say it came from?’ I say.

  Bartu raises his eyebrows internally but this is crowd-sourced intelligence. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just an opinion from someone far more up on school matters than I.

  ‘Err. Art class. Year 7?’

  ‘Year 7, huh? Good. That’s good,’ I say.

  ‘Why d’ya say that Asif?’ Bartu says.

  ‘Colours are kinda stupid. Purple grass. Yellow sky.’

  ‘Are they? Oh right,’ I say.

  I saw the colours were wild but I didn’t exactly know what they depicted. Purple grass. Yellow sky. Hmm…

  He’s an accidental Georges Braque, the experimental Frenchman with a will to make his world look a lot more Technicolor. Colours express emotions. Fauvism it’s called. But for the Fauvists it was a style; for our artist, it could be the only way they can see the world.

  I turn and leave. Asif says a ‘Bye’ somewhere behind us.

  ‘You don’t think we should ask him anything else?’ Bartu says as we leave the building.

  ‘Why? He either did it or he didn’t. Right?’ I say.

  ‘Yes. That’s the point, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose. You think he did it?’

  ‘No idea. We didn’t ask. You?’

  ‘Me, personally?’

  ‘Yes, you personally. We risk wandering around here without a chaperone and you barely asked him anything!’

  ‘I didn’t need to ask him anything. I needed to smell him.’

  His hand goes to his face and I can tell this bit is going to feature pretty heavily in his evening account of the day to his girlfriend.

  ‘Of course, you needed to smell him. Any conclusions?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Care to enlighten me?’

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  He smiles. He likes me. He’s back. I can tell. I just know.

  ‘Can you at least tell me the other thing now? What the picture told you earlier? Since I made my promise.’

  ‘Yes. Okay,’ I say, drawing breath.

  It’s only fair I suppose, but I let it hang in the air just for a few moments longer because I enjoy these bits. Me knowing, others not knowing. They’re a pleasure not often explored.