The Red Road

by Stephen Sweeney

  “Evening, boys,” Dave’s father said. “Oh, there’s five of you,” he then added, looking about us.

  “Baz, I mean Barry, joined us in town,” Dave said. “He lives in South London.”

  “Barry Green?” Dave’s father asked. Baz nodded. “I saw your father today at work. Just in the canteen, buying a coffee. He was in a hurry, so we didn’t have time to chat.”

  “You’re home early, Dad,” Dave said.

  “Yes, I actually went out for lunch to celebrate the successful delivery of a project and ... well, I didn’t come back in until five. There was no point in doing any work after that, so we all just packed up and left for the weekend.”

  “Okay for some,” Dave quipped.

  “Hello, I’m David’s father, Jim,” the man then said, coming over to Rob and shaking his hand.

  “Oh sorry, Dad,” Dave said. “Dad, this is Rob. Rob, this is my dad.”

  “Nice to meet you, sir,” Rob said, automatically switching on all the airs and graces that were expected of us when in someone else’s home.

  “Good to see you again, Joe,” Jim said, coming to me after greeting Barry.

  There was something on the man’s breath as he spoke; it smelled strongly of alcohol. He had clearly had quite a few drinks during his extended lunch break, or perhaps just one before leaving for the day. I wondered if he had driven home.

  “You been in the pub, Dad?” Dave said.

  “I have, yes,” he admitted. “But I left the car at work and got on the Tube,” he added quickly as he saw all our eyes on him, clearly all questioning his decision to get behind the wheel after drinking.

  “What car do you drive, Mr Nurse?” Rob wanted to know.

  “Call me ‘Jim’,” Dave’s father smiled. “I drive a Porsche Carrera at the moment.”

  I noticed the other boys roll their eyes as Rob almost jumped excitedly out of his seat. “Really? Wow! What model? A 911?”

  “A 911, yes,” Jim grinned, glancing to the rest of us.

  “911 Classic?”

  “No, the latest 964. I’ve kept hold of the Classic, although it’s at my sister’s house right now.”

  Rob’s eyes nearly popped out of his head.

  “I considered the 930, but just preferred the 964,” Jim finished.

  “Can I see? Oh, damn, I forgot you’ve left it at work,” Rob said, sounding annoyed.

  Jim chuckled. “Really into your cars, I can tell.”

  “Always have been, always will be,” Rob said proudly. “They’re amazing. Got to love the noise of some of the engines in the sports cars when they’re going flat out.”

  “Yes, because you’ve been in so many,” Baz remarked.

  “Well, okay, I’ve only seen them on Top Gear,” Rob conceded.

  Jim chuckled again. “You can see it tomorrow. I’ll pick it up in the morning. I might get Terry to drive me down there, as I can’t stand getting on the Tube.”

  “I find them kind of fun,” Sam said. “We don’t have a subway back home. They can’t build one either, because we’re too close to the sea level.”

  “The London Underground is the oldest underground network in the world, did you know that?” Jim asked us.

  “Is it?” I said, politely breaking the immediate silence that had greeted the rather mundane fact.

  “Yes, it is. It was opened in the late nineteenth century.”

  “Oh, wow,” I said, this time with genuine interest. That was old. The other four appeared as equally impressed.

  “Eighteen ... sixty or ninety, I think?” Dave’s father continued. “It was actually running electric trains back then, too.”

  “They had electricity then?” Baz said.

  David’s father chuckled. “Yes, they actually had a lot of things back then that we take for granted today. Anyway, I’m going to go and take a shower. Are you all staying here tonight?”

  “I’m not,” Baz said. “I’m going back home.”

  “So, just the four of you as planned, then. Don’t mind sharing a room, do you? Then again, you’re probably used to it at school, and you’d be doing the same if you were there right now, anyway.”

  “We were thinking of ordering pizza for dinner, Dad,” Dave said as his father started out of the living room. “Do you want some?”

  “Um,” his father considered it for a moment. “Yes, I could eat. Only a small one, though. Lunch was quite filling, and it will only go to waste otherwise.”

  “What would you like?” Dave asked, offering him the menu.

  “Just one of whatever you’re having,” Jim said, waving it away. “I want to go and shower and get all the grim from the Tube off me.”

  I could have used one myself if I was being honest. I had noticed that my snot and fingernails had turned black since arriving in London. I wasn’t sure if that was in some way linked to travelling on the Underground, but I was sure I had heard someone once say so.

  Dave placed the food order, the pizza arriving about forty minutes later. We gathered around the dining table to eat, talking about the film we had seen and what we had spent the day in London doing. I was quite impressed with the relationship that Dave and his father maintained, acting more like they were good friends, rather than father and son. An only child, and with his mother having divorced his father a few years before he had started attending St Christopher’s, maybe their relationship had just taken a different course to most.

  While the others were tucking into their pizza quite happily, Baz and I were picking bits off, Baz creating a small pile of unwanted scraps on the side of his plate. Whereas Baz had found the mushroom not to his liking, I had failed to see that my pizza came with olives; I couldn’t stand olives. The others were more than happy to gobble them up, however. Jim’s pet dog was lying on the floor by his side, and every now and again Jim would cut off a piece of pizza and feed it to him. Wonka was a friendly dog, a chocolate Labrador who wagged his tail non-stop.

  “Did any of you three know the ones they found?” Jim then wanted to know, looking to Baz, Rob and myself.

  “You did, Joe,” Baz said, pointing his slice of pizza at me. “One of them, I mean.”

  “Which one did you know?” Jim asked.

  “The sixth former,” I said. “Craig Priest was his name.”

  “He attacked you in the shower,” Baz added helpfully.

  I wanted to let Baz know that he was supplying a little too much information now, but my mouth was full of pizza, and I wasn’t able to swallow it in time.

  “Had a run in with him in the past, did you?” Jim said. “How did you feel about seeing him there?”

  “Sort of ... ambivalent? Is that the right word? Yes. I ... don’t really know what to think.”

  “You didn’t know the other boy, no?”

  “No,” I shook my head. “He was from the junior school. I don’t think that his identity has been revealed yet, has it?”

  Shakes of heads came from the others around the table.

  “A junior boy. That was the same as the last time around, wasn’t it?” Jim said. “Sounds to me like it might be the work of a local paedophile. The police will be questioning and keeping a close eye on all the known sex offenders in the area from now on.”

  I had no idea of the word that Dave’s father had just used.

  “A what?” Baz then asked, saving me the indignity of having to do so myself.

  “A paedophile,” Sam answered. “A man who fucks kids! Oh, sorry, Jim,” he then said, his ears catching up with his tongue and causing him to redden immediately.

  “Don’t worry, I hear worse than that every day at work,” Jim said, looking at Sam. “But, yes, it’s someone who sexually abuses children, and often kills them afterwards. You’d probably find it’s someone from the local town that the police already know about. Might not be a man, either. Could even be one of the teachers, or even one of the monks,” he shrugged.

  “Oh, I doubt that,” I said automatically.

  �
��Why?” Rob asked.

  “I ... don’t know. I just don’t see anyone from the school doing something like that.”

  “I’m willing to bet it was Quasimodo,” Rob said.

  “Quasimodo?” Jim asked.

  “It’s the name we have for one of the gardeners, due to the fact that he walks with a hunch.”

  “His real name’s Andre Kethlan,” Baz said.

  “How do you know that?” I asked, seeing the others around the table looking as equally taken aback.

  Baz shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve just always known that. I think he might have introduced himself as Andre to me a few times.”

  “What makes you think it’s him?” Jim asked Rob.

  “He’s a very strange man. He seems to be a few bricks short of a full load,” Rob said.

  “That’s because he is,” Baz pointed out.

  “Is he?”

  “Yeah. He stares at the boys all the time and is always touching them. Whenever he talks to me, he always wants to shake my hand and then doesn’t let go.”

  “He does like to make physical contact all the time,” I nodded, remembering how he would always touch me whenever I spoke to him. It was usually just on the shoulder or the arm. It was maybe something that he just did, but it still felt wrong.

  “Does he live at the school?” Jim asked.

  “He lives with the monks, but in a separate part of the monastery,” Baz explained. “They look after him and give him work and stuff.”

  “And you say he’s a bit mentally retarded?”

  “He has a previous conviction from when he tried to rob a bank, using a banana.”

  I snorted my Coke at that, laughing extremely hard. Rob, Sam and Dave were doing likewise. “What?” I asked.

  “It’s true,” Baz insisted. “I’m not making this up.”

  “He tried to hold up a bank using a banana?” Jim smirked.

  “Did he think it was a gun?” Rob asked.

  “No, he just thought that no one would notice,” Baz said. “He didn’t hold it out in the open, but had it under a tea towel that he’d taken from his mother’s house. That’s what I was told, at least.” He picked another piece of mushroom off his pizza, putting it aside.

  “I don’t think it’s him,” Sam said. “He might be weird, but I doubt it’s anyone from the school.”

  “Most likely it is someone from the school,” Jim countered. “They know the grounds the best, everything that goes on, and can pick their targets without raising suspicion.”

  “So what about Craig Priest?” Baz wanted to know.

  “Why he was killed, you mean?” Rob said, finishing off his Coke and starting to pour himself another glass. “Maybe he interrupted the killer and they killed him as well.”

  “What would Craig Priest have been doing outside at that time?” Dave asked, pushing his glass over to Rob to request a refill. Baz, Sam and I followed suit.

  “Does he smoke?” Sam asked. “Because if so, perhaps he was just going for a late-night fag. It must have happened then. Would make sense, too, given that the bodies were found early in the morning.”

  “That’s most likely,” Rob said. “Otherwise, you’d need to have a pretty strong reason to go and do something like that to someone.”

  I saw all four of the other boys at the table glance in my direction, Dave’s father cottoning on a short moment later.

  “We’ll probably never know,” I said.

  ~ ~ ~

  We finished the pizza and began to load the dishwasher, Dave’s father telling us that he needed to check some electronic mail that he was waiting on from the US. I had heard about electronic mail and was quite interested to see how it worked, but Dave suggested that we take the dog out for a walk. He seemed rather keen on doing so. I knew what that meant.

  We began walking the neighbourhood, Rob’s eyes almost on stalks as we passed by the expensive-looking mansions and houses, and seeing the equally expensive-looking cars parked out the front. This, to Rob, must have been like attending a motor show, except without the chance to take any for a test drive. With that in mind, I decided to keep an eye on Rob, in case he did decide to see if he could get inside one.

  “Best avoid the Heath at this time of night,” Dave said as Wonka trotted happily along beside us. “Loads of gay men up there, and we want to avoid getting bummed.”

  “Really?” Rob asked.

  “Yeah, they all go ‘cruising’ up that way,” Dave said.

  “Cruising?”

  “It’s when they walk around, looking for other gay men to pick up,” Dave said, with a look of disgust on his face.

  “Gross!”

  “Yeah,” Dave said. He then looked around to see who else was about, before taking a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket, extracting one of the sticks and a lighter from within. He wasn’t a heavy smoker as far as I knew, but he had had two already today.

  “Oh, give me one,” Sam said. “I’ve got some back at school I can repay you with.”

  “And me,” Rob said, wrenching his eyes away from the cars parked in the driveways of the houses we passed.

  “Sure,” Dave said, handing one to each in turn. “Don’t touch any of the cars, Rob. Most of their alarms are really over sensitive. There were a couple ringing for over half an hour last night. It was really bloody annoying. Baz?” Dave presented the pack to him.

  “No, thanks,” Baz said.

  “Do you not smoke at all?” Sam asked.

  “No.”

  “Ever tried it?” Rob asked.

  “Not interested, to be honest,” Baz said, sounding defiant and quite proud of his choice.

  “Fair enough. Crotty?” Dave asked.

  “No, thanks,” I said, waving them away.

  “Go on, try one. No one’ll see.”

  “Oh, I just don’t smoke either,” I lied.

  “What’s wrong with you two?” Dave asked, looking between Baz and I.

  “When did you start smoking?” I asked Sam, shifting the focus of attention.

  “I only do it sometimes,” Sam said, lighting his cigarette and taking a small drag. “I mostly just sell the others to the first and second years. I sold one for a pound the other week.”

  Dave laughed. “Really? Who to?”

  “Neil Booth,” Sam said.

  “The fat lump in the second year?”

  “Yeah,” Sam grinned. “He was desperate, and no one would sell him any.”

  The walk ended up being a little longer than originally planned, with Dave and Rob each enjoying a second cigarette, chaining them off the first. Wonka had no complaints. The longer the better in his eyes. We stopped off at a corner shop on the way back to buy chewing gum, in an attempt to mask the smell of the tobacco. I never believed this actually worked; no one’s parents were that ignorant.

  Jim had the TV on when we returned to the mansion, preparing to watch a football match. Like Dave, he was a Liverpool supporter, one of the few boys at St Christopher’s that took more than just a passing interest in the sport. I had never really paid much attention to football, rugby and cricket being the main sporting events at school. Football was played, but the inter-school matches never really made any headlines, and they were so infrequent that they largely passed by unnoticed.

  Tonight, Liverpool were playing a match against Genoa. Jim was sitting with a glass of beer in his hand, poured from a rather tall can that was resting on a little table next to his chair. ‘Carling’, the label on the can read.

  “UEFA cup? Wasn’t this on on Wednesday?” Dave asked. “We watched it,” Dave nodded to Sam.

  “It was, but I taped it. I was too busy with delivering that project at work and have only just had a chance to catch up. Don’t tell me the result!” he added quickly, sticking a finger out towards his son. “I’ve been avoiding the sports pages for that very reason.”

  “First Division game tomorrow night,” Dave said.

  “Yep!” Jim grinned happily. “Do any o
f you boys follow football?” he asked of the rest of us.

  Shakes of heads all round.

  “No, it’s all rugby and cricket at St Christopher’s, isn’t it? Do you boys fancy watching the game with me?” he asked.

  “Sure,” we said after looking to one another and shrugging. We weren’t really up to anything else.

  “How old are you boys?” Jim asked after we had found places to settle, Dave bringing a bean bag down from his room for Sam to sit on.

  “Sixteen,” we said. It was mostly true. Some of us were still fifteen, but we would be turning sixteen in the coming weeks.

  Jim pondered for a time before asking, “Would you like a beer? I think you’re old enough to be fair, and I know you’re not going to do anything bad.”

  “Yeah!”

  “Oh! Yes, please!”

  “Really? Cool!”

  Jim chuckled. “That’s about the same thing I said when I was your age. It was my dad that took me to the pub for my first half pint, though.”

  “Really, Dad?” Dave said.

  “Back up in Yorkshire. It was almost the done thing back then. Your grandma was absolutely furious. Can’t do that these days. David, go and fetch five cans from the fridge, would you?”

  Dave did so eagerly, returning from the fridge bearing five additional cans of Carling, still affixed to the plastic holder they had come in. We eagerly cracked them open.

  “Actually, David, could you get some glasses, too?” Jim asked. “It’s better you don’t drink it straight from the can.” He next showed us how to pour the beer, tilting the glass at an angle and pouring the contents of the can slowly into it. We did as shown, some pouring a little faster than others, and the beer fizzing up too much.

  “Oops!” Baz said, putting his hand over the glass to stop it from bubbling over and dripping onto the coffee table. “Sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, just try not to get it on the carpet,” Dave’s father waved his hand dismissively, his focus now mostly on the TV.

  The players were starting to exit the tunnel, the commentator talking about each of them, mentioning past performances, any injuries that they might have sustained, and the occasional mention of something that had been happening in their personal lives. Hooper, Jones, Rush, Barnes were some of the names I heard and saw on the screen. With my focus on the beer I had been given, the information mostly washed over me. It probably would have anyway, to be honest. For someone not into the sport, it was quite a lot to take in all at once, and I had forgotten most of the names of the players by the time it came to kick off.