He grunted. ‘And why shouldn’t we stay? We don’t do no harm.’
She gave him a quick look. ‘You don’t understand, do you, Jonathan, they don’t like us up ’ere.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Because most people don’t live in caves no more.’
‘More fools them,’ Jonathan sneered. ’Avin’ mortgages for places when there’s good, dry caves for the takin’.’
‘They don’t like us bein’ ’ere because we is different. People only trusts what is the same as themselves. We is different, so because we is they don’t like it. That’s why they wants us to live in one of the council places in the town. Conformin’, the social workers calls it.’
‘Well, I don’t want to live in one of them council places,’ he said, flinging another stiff brown blanket around his shoulders. ‘I is perfectly comfortable livin’ ere. These moors ’ave provided an ’ome for me all o’ my life ’ceptin the years I spent in the war. I won’t never leave now.’ His voice was low. ‘Perhaps you’re right. We should leave well alone. Then maybe they’ll leave us alone.’
‘Huh.’ She grunted and sat back on her haunch.es, a motionless figure watching the search.
‘It might already be too late,’ she said quietly, an hour later. ‘Look.’
A red car was winding along the road, furiously swinging round the corners. At the foot of the crag the car screeched to a halt. A slim woman with yellow hair climbed out, with a man holding bulky camera equipment, and another man dressed in a thick, white sweater and Wellington boots. The woman glanced upwards and Alice and Jonathan moved back inside the cave, hidden from view by the tall rock that stuck out into the skyline like a dark, granite tombstone.
The three put their heads together, then one of them returned to the car and pulled out a large floodlight lamp.
The two in the cave watched fearfully. Alice spoke first. She was crying now. ‘Why did they have to bring the child here? Why did they have to come to our part? We don’t want you here.’ She stood up. ‘Go back.’
The camera crew clumped around the car seemed to be in deep discussion. A decision was reached and slowly the man with the huge camera began aiming it at the wide sweep of moors and moving it slowly around ... the granite crag of the Winking Man, the jutting rocks, down the smooth hillside and finally into the massive dish of the valley far down below as though viewed from an aeroplane. He seemed to keep the camera trained, for a while, on the distant town of Leek. Then he removed the bulky equipment from his shoulders, and the woman stood in front of the camera and, lit by the white lamp, spoke into it.
Jonathan shook his fist from the mouth of the cave. ‘Leave us be!’ he shouted. ‘Leave us be. Go back!’ His words were lost in the wide sweep of the moors, dotted by the men in white and the strange trio clustered around their massive equipment
Jonathan was flailing his hands around in panic. Alice folded him into her arms and held him to her, rocking him like a child.
‘This is it,’ she said. ‘The end. We’ll not be left in peace now.’
Joanna was sitting opposite Mike in her office, a large notepad in front of her. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘The preliminary forensic report on the shoes is that they were brand new. Had been worn for six or so hours at the most. Probably along a street... traces of dog faeces, dust and a small amount of mud. A few dark fibres, probably from a carpet, and some longer ones that just could be from the inside of a car. Apparently these particular sports shoes retail at about sixty pounds. Compared to the rest of the boy’s clothes they would seem expensive. He could definitely not have walked a single step on those moors. He was killed elsewhere, Mike, and then brought to the Roaches. We have to assume he was taken there by car with the sole purpose of burning the body. I think it’s reasonable to assume that the killer was hoping to destroy the body completely. It’s just possible that the arrival of the army diverted him from finishing the task. He might have still been there when the army arrived.’
Mike objected. ‘We asked them, Jo. No one noticed a car there.’
Joanna crossed the room to a huge map of the area. ‘There is a back road,’ she said. ‘Look ... The army drove up here, approaching from this side.’ She ran her finger along the main Leek to Buxton road.
‘But the killer, carrying the body of the boy plus petrol, would have had to cross the top of the Roaches,’ Mike objected again. ‘Why should he do that?’
‘I’ve thought of a reason,’ Joanna replied. ‘He might have known that the army would be arriving later for exercises and wanted to conceal his car from the main road.’
‘Then why take the body back towards the road to burn it?’
‘We have to go out there,’ Joanna said. ‘And we need to speak to the army – find out whether they always do their exercises in the same place. Also ...’ she jabbed her finger at the end of the small track that led to Flash ‘I think there’s a farm here. It might be a good thing to speak to the farmer and to the landlord of the Winking Man.’
‘If he wasn’t disturbed by the army it is also possible that he left the body burning, assuming it would be completely destroyed,’ she continued. ‘I’ve spoken to the fire people, and they are sure that the body would not have been destroyed in half an hour, but the boy would have been unrecognizable by his clothes or his features – even his fingerprints – or by anything other than dental records.’ She looked at Mike. ‘That would still have been before six thirty a.m.’
‘I want to see Private Swinton again,’ she said suddenly. ‘I still believe that the body was burned to destroy forensic evidence. And one sure piece of evidence was the tattoos on his fingers. It could be an embarrassing link for Private Swinton. But there was not quite enough petrol, the clothes were not saturated and the ground was very damp. So luckily we have a body only partially destroyed.’
‘But we still don’t have a name for Burning Boy,’ Mike said.
She glanced at him, startled. ‘Is that what you’ve called him?’
He looked apologetic. ‘It was Scottie who called him that, said it reminded him of Moses and the Burning Bush – you know, the mountain in the Ten Commandments ... It looked sort of bleak and very high ...’
She stared at him. ‘Have the boys found out anything about the source of the shoes?’
‘Not so far.’ He grimaced, glad to leave an uncomfortable subject. ‘It would be half-day closing yesterday afternoon, wouldn’t it?’
‘And the children’s homes?’
‘They’ve covered a couple – going to some more this morning. Nothing so far.’
‘At what time have we scheduled our briefing?’
‘Ten.’
She stopped for a minute then sighed. ‘That poor child. I hate to think what he must have gone through – for all of his short, sordid, horrible little life.’ She looked at Mike. ‘Don’t you get a feeling in the pit of your stomach when you see these kids on the streets?’
Mike grinned. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I feel I want to lock them up now – before they start on their life of crime.’
‘We’re failing them,’ she said, ‘these kids. They don’t set off from the same starting line. Some of them never get across the line. They don’t even run the same bloody race. Life is different for them right from the word Go.’ She leaned back in her chair, sighed, closed her eyes. ‘They never discover the meaning of words like love and trust, truth, honesty, kindness ...’
Mike cleared his throat noisily. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Joanna, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to be too idealistic.’
‘Perhaps we’d be better coppers if we were a bit more idealistic,’ she said.
Mike crossed the room. ‘We start off being idealistic. A couple of years later we get cynical. Guess who makes us that way?’
‘But we don’t do anything to help them.’
‘Because it isn’t our job, Joanna – that’s why.’
‘But there isn’t really anyone.’
‘T
here’s plenty of people,’ Mike said. ‘They just ignore their chances.’
She looked quizzically at him. ‘You really think so?’
‘Parents,’ he said.
‘But if they had parents surely all this wouldn’t happen to them.’
‘Sometimes,’ he said darkly, ‘it’s the parents who are doing it to them.’
She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘sometimes, and sometimes it isn’t.’
Eloise scuffed through hot, dry sand along the steep path that led to the sea while her parents watched.
Jane spoke first. ‘You can’t do it, Matthew,’ she said. ‘You can’t leave.’
He frowned at her. ‘Jane,’ he said. ‘Please. Don’t make it hard.’
Jane Levin’s face tightened as she watched her daughter wade into the sea, up to her waist. ‘I won’t make it easy, Matthew,’ she said softly. ‘There is nothing – absolutely nothing – I won’t do to keep you.’ She drew in a long, deep breath. ‘I will rake up every single speck of dirt that I can think of.’ She stopped and looked at him. ‘I will embarrass you in any way I can.’ She turned and glared at him. ‘I will make any life you might try to build together miserable. I am warning you now, Matthew. You – are – my – husband and you will stay my husband.’ She stared out over the sparkling sea. ‘I like the life I lead Matthew. I’m comfortable at the farmhouse and I intend staying there.’
‘It’s all right,’ Matthew said. ‘I’ve arranged a flat.’
Matthew shifted uncomfortably and Jane smiled.
‘And Eloise?’
Matthew looked at her taut face, at the thin, mean lips, and wondered. Had he ever kissed them and found them soft and yielding? No – at least not that he remembered. He buried his face in his hands and groaned.
Jane watched Eloise in her scarlet bikini, snorkel mask and rubber fins slip her breathing tube in her mouth. Then with a splash she was gone and she followed the pipe and the chain of bubbles as the child inspected the rock bottom to the bay.
They both watched the flippers kicking with a loud splash and the little pipe move along the ripples like the periscope of a diminutive submarine. Eloise’s blond hair floated like beautiful, pale seaweed. And Matthew wondered when would be the best time to speak to the child.
Jason Fogg was lying on his bed.
‘I heard it on the radio ...’ He frowned at Kirsty. ‘What if it’s Dean?’
She gave a snort. ‘Don’t be bloody daft,’ she said. ‘Why should it be? There’s thousands of kids his age out there ...’ She paused. ‘What exactly did they say on Radio Stoke?’
Jason stared at the carpet, concentrating. ‘A boy, about ten, blond hair ... Oh yeah, they said he was wearing black jeans.’ He glanced at Kirsty. ‘My jeans are gone. He was always takin’ them. They was too big for him,’ he complained.
Kirsty tugged at a piece of her dark, tangled hair. ‘That don’t mean much. Loads of kids wear black jeans. Oh come on, Jason,’ she said, ‘he’ll turn up.’ She looked confident. ‘I know he will.’
At thirteen and a half Kirsty always resorted to a blind, determined optimism, doggedly convincing herself nothing was wrong – all would turn out all right in the end. The truth was for her it never had turned out all right in the end, but she would have tagged the phrase, ‘so far’ on to any statement about her future life.
It was different for Jason. He had had one stroke of luck but failed to recognize it until the last year, three years too late. At eleven he had been fostered with a possibility of adoption. However, the huge dose of smother love, together with a cheerful and determined father – two parents who had felt they had a right to delve into all four corners of his life – had been too much for him. The extreme claustrophobia of the relationship had ended with a screaming, shouting, throwing episode at three o’clock in the morning after his foster mother had found him with his hand down his pyjama trousers and woken him from sleep. The on-call social worker had been called there and then. And, amid allegations of not being nice, Jason had been returned, confused, to the small children’s home, the social worker telling him all the way back that he had done nothing wrong. His child’s mind had formed the question: ‘So why are they kicking me out?’
‘Back to The Nest,’ he had said with a large slice of bravado. But inside he had been crying and deeply puzzled. ‘If that’s parents,’ he had said to Dean that night, ‘you can stick ’em.’
And Dean had agreed. He understood. He knew about ‘Happy Families’ ... a couple of religious fanatics who had had the idea of saving a child. Pretty little Dean, with his choirboy looks and innocent eyes, had seemed ideal. But in the first twenty-four hours he had used dirty words so many times they had stuck their fingers in their ears to block it out. Jason gave a lopsided grin. And when Dean had used the ‘F’ word to the vicar after church on Sunday morning they had felt they’d bitten off more than they could chew and marched him back to the children’s home with marks on his bottom from where they had tried to beat some ‘decency’ into him.
Dean’s second home experience had been, for him, easier to understand. The woman had been a hatchet-faced tyrant who worked in a local slaughter house. All the affection the boy had received had been from her husband who kissed the child, gave him sweets, shared his bed.
His next experience had been the one that remained to haunt him. Because he had been happy, fostered by the dirty, fat creature, blessed with thirteen other foster children. The dirt didn’t matter. The poverty and food didn’t matter either. The fact that he shared the bedroom with five other boys never mattered. But the social worker believed that all these things did matter and Dean was returned to the children’s home. After that he simply refused to go with anyone else and ran away every single time they suggested it. As he told Jason and Kirsty, ‘If I can’t stop with Mrs Swires they can stick it.’ And when they finally suggested the humiliation of putting his photograph in the newspaper together with an appeal for a ‘family’, he knew that something drastic would have to be done.
‘But,’ Jason muttered to himself very softly, ‘Dean had been all right in the end.’
The sports shop had a sale on of expensive trainers. Half-price, the vivid pink signs said, and PC Roger Farthing looked at the prices and wondered who the hell could afford these sorts of shoes – even at ‘half-price’. Outside in a basket, were some odd pairs, tied together by the laces. With a policeman’s awareness of crime he thought it was a bloody silly place to leave expensive shoes.
He picked up a pair, white with purple and gold flashes on the sides, huge tongues lolling out, and marched straight into the shop. It was fluorescent bright and sparkling white everywhere with a lime green carpet on the floor. There were racks of T-shirts and baggy jogging pants, tennis rackets, golf balls.
The thin man in a short-sleeved white T-shirt looked up.
‘Are you the owner of this shop?’ the PG asked.
The man nodded.
PG Farthing took out his pencil. ‘Your name?’
‘Keithy,’ he said. ‘Keithy Latos.’
Farthing wrote it down. ‘We’re making some enquiries about a pair of shoes,’ he said, and dropped the trainers on the counter ‘Like these.’
The man’s eyes flickered, dropped quickly to the shoes then looked up. ‘Where did you get them from?’
‘The basket outside.’
The man picked them up. ‘Like these, you say?’ PG Farthing nodded, watching the man carefully. He had a slight tremor and the laces tapped against the shoes. They were parallel-laced – unlike the child’s.
‘Have you sold a pair of these, size sevens, in the last couple of days?’
The man had small eyes, like a pig’s. He avoided Farthing’s gaze as though desperate to conceal something. ‘Why do you want to know?’ he asked carelessly.
‘In connection with a serious crime.’ Farthing had learned this phrase at police training college.
Latos licked his lips. ‘Serious crime?’
&n
bsp; His eyes were darting all over the place. And Farthing knew instinctively he had both bought and read the morning’s newspaper.
Keithy gulped for air. ‘Sold – no.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘In fact, nobody’s bought any like this for a couple of weeks.’ He eyed the policeman anxiously as though it was important he was believed. ‘Gone out of fashion,’ he said. ‘Why do you think I’ve stuck them out the front half-price? No one wants those sort any more – old hat. They all have to have Nikes now. Even half-price no one wants them.’
Roger Farthing thought quickly. ‘You haven’t had a pair nicked, have you?’
‘Don’t know,’ Keithy said carelessly. ‘How many’s in the basket?’
They both went outside the shop and PC Farthing waited while Keithy picked out the shoes, heaping them up into his arms.
‘Yeah,’ he said uncertainly. ‘There could be a pair missing.’ He looked at Roger Farthing. ‘What size did you say?’
‘Sevens.’
‘Could be,’ he said.
‘Don’t you know for sure?’
‘Not till I stocktake.’
Roger Farthing could have cheerfully strangled the man. He drew out the photograph then of the dead boy and watched Keithy’s face blanch.
‘My God,’ he said, looking shocked at the policeman. ‘This kid’s dead, isn’t he?’ He looked again at the picture.
‘Isn’t this the kid they found up on the Roaches?’
‘Yes,’ Roger Farthing replied, ‘wearing a pair of trainers exactly like these.’ He indicated the shoes on the counter.
Keithy stared at them, his Adam’s apple suddenly bobbing up and down.
‘I’d be grateful if you’d do a stocktake immediately. It’s important we know where the boy got the shoes from.’
Keithy swallowed noisily. ‘Course,’ he said.
Catch the Fallen Sparrow Page 6