The Two O'Clock Boy

by Mark Hill

  ‘Bollocks to it,’ she muttered. She logged out of the computer, picked up her bag.

  In his office, the duty sergeant was sat among a nest of monitors showing various parts of the building.

  ‘Heck of a day, DI Crowley.’ Frank Wanderly grinned. ‘I take a few days off and as soon as I get back all hell breaks loose.’

  ‘Go anywhere nice?’ asked Flick.

  ‘Just pottered about in the garden.’

  Most people would jet off somewhere warm to soak up some rays, but Flick could just imagine Nosferatu, who liked to work the late shift, walking around his garden in the dead of night with a watering can, moonlight gleaming off that shiny skull.

  ‘You have a good morning, Frank,’ she said, buzzing herself out to the car park.

  After the heat blasting from the station radiators, the cold winter air made her shudder. Flick would get a couple of hours’ sleep and take a shower, then grab breakfast on the way back in.

  In the car, she slumped against the driver’s seat, fatigue washing over her. Within moments she felt herself being dragged down towards sleep – and jerked out of her stupor. Forcing herself to sit up, limbs as heavy as lead, Flick vigorously rubbed a hand up and down her face, lifted the key to the ignition – just as the automatic gate to the car park rattled open, and Ray Drake’s Mercedes swung in, its headlights sweeping across the concrete. Drake climbed out of the vehicle. Its lights winked as it locked.

  If Flick had left five minutes earlier, she’d be on her way home. He couldn’t see her, she could just slip away, but she was anxious about his close scrutiny of the investigation. At the tower block and in the office there’d been little time to talk. She felt a responsibility, felt compelled, to give him an update. Maybe, at the same time, she could fish for a few crumbs of reassurance about the job she was doing.

  With a sigh, Flick slipped the key from the ignition, pulled her bag over her shoulder and slipped from the car.

  14

  Frank Wanderly peered at the clock above the door when he saw Ray Drake. ‘Another early one, Detective Inspector?’

  ‘Busy day ahead, Frank.’

  The sergeant jammed paper from his desk into a recycling bin. ‘You wait for one homicide and four come along at once.’

  ‘DS Crowley has certainly got her hands full,’ said Drake, impatient to get on.

  ‘Got to give her credit, though, she’s working flat out. She only left five minutes ago.’

  The years Wanderly had spent working till dawn beneath electric light hung on his pale face like a shroud. But he was an amiable man, who never seemed to resent the endless parade of drunks and derelicts that washed up at the station in the early hours.

  ‘How’s your daughter, Ray?’

  ‘Pretty good, thanks.’

  The phone rang. The sergeant’s hand hovered over it. Drake said quickly, ‘By the way, Frank, I forgot to put something in the Property Room earlier, can I borrow the key?’

  ‘Of course.’ Wanderly lifted a finger, one moment, and answered the call, ‘Sergeant Frank Wanderly. Who’s speaking, please?’ As he began his conversation, he spun his chair to a shallow metal cabinet on the wall. Inside were dozens of keys. He rifled through them, took one out and lobbed it at Drake. ‘I’m afraid they need to speak to CID on that particular issue …’

  His office was on the second floor, the MIT Incident Room was on the first, but Ray Drake took the stairs to the basement. Access to the Property Room was restricted. Once evidence had been logged, it was tagged and kept secure until it could be examined. Items from hundreds of investigations were kept there: seized drugs, stolen goods, weapons such as decommissioned firearms.

  The black bulb of a CCTV camera squatted above the door, but there was nothing Drake could do about that. No one was likely to check the recording. If they did, he’d repeat his earlier lie to Wanderly.

  The air conditioning chilled him as soon as he let himself through the heavy door. Fluorescents buzzed into noisy life to reveal a massive room with long freestanding steel shelves bolted to the concrete floor, every inch piled with evidence. Larger items were placed against the bare brick walls: a damaged safe, a fish tank, a cash register. A set of hub caps was wedged behind an acetylene cylinder.

  Snapping on gloves, Drake headed to the first aisle where the most recent evidence was placed. His fingers brushed over the plastic wrapping and boxes as he checked dates and barcodes.

  With a growing sense of unease, Drake moved methodically down the length of the shelving. Several minutes later he still hadn’t found the shoebox. For all he knew, the cuttings were still in the office upstairs, strewn across a desk. He couldn’t remain down here much longer – the camera would record the time he spent inside.

  And then he saw it. The box had fallen behind a pile of boxes. The plastic wrapping wasn’t sealed, which suggested not everything inside had been logged. Maybe no one had looked at it yet. Removing the lid, he saw the transparent plastic folders. Inside each of those, a cutting.

  He scanned each one, flicking through the flopping plastic, skimming the headlines and first paragraphs: SUICIDE … BLAZE … JUDGE … CRASH …

  What he saw of each article, piecing together names and dates and stories, only increased his disquiet. It was no wonder Kenny Overton had abandoned his research, no wonder he had yearned to go abroad, far away. And yet, Drake suspected, it wouldn’t have made the slightest bit of difference. Moving to the ends of the Earth wouldn’t have saved him. Familiar names, people he hadn’t thought about in decades – now erased from the world, and long forgotten – detonated dread memories …

  Of Tallis, of Sally – he hadn’t thought about Sally in a long time, and felt a pang of guilt – and of all the doomed kids at that home.

  Drake found what he was looking for, the oldest cutting in the file. Slipping it from the plastic, he eyed the photograph that could be enough to end his career and destroy his relationship with his daughter if Flick’s investigation swung in the wrong direction. His eyes lingered on the kid on the edge of the dismal group of people who posed on that fateful day.

  A boy from a lifetime ago.

  Connor Laird, slipping into the shadows. Cringing from the camera’s flash, half turned, one pale eye glaring.

  There was a barcode at the top of the plastic sheet. The clipping had been logged. He couldn’t just walk away with it.

  ‘Guv?’

  The metal door boomed shut. Drake’s heart leapt.

  ‘Just a moment!’ His voice was a throaty croak. ‘Give me a second!’

  ‘Guv? Where are you?’

  A woman’s voice. Footsteps approaching on the concrete. He stepped back to see Flick Crowley at the end of the aisle.

  ‘Flick!’ he said, in as cheery a voice as he could muster. ‘Let me just put this back!’

  Drake stepped close to the shelving, smothering her view of the clipping. He quickly folded the paper below the photograph and tore, coughing to cover the sound of the dry paper splitting apart along the crease.

  ‘Just one …’ Stuffing the photo inside his breast pocket, he replaced the rest of the cutting in the plastic and shoved it into the box. Pushed the box back into the wrapping. ‘… moment!’

  When he looked up, Flick was at his side. He had no idea how much she had seen.

  She frowned, looking at him, then down at the box.

  ‘Frank told me you’d gone home,’ he said, gulping down his agitation. ‘I was just reading this stuff.’

  She blinked at him. ‘I thought you were at home, sir.’

  ‘I’ve been in my office all night.’

  She gazed at him curiously. Her eyes dropped to his gloves, and he peeled them off as casually as he could.

  ‘That’s the research Kenny gave Ryan.’ She nodded at the box in his hands. ‘Anything interesting?’

  ‘Ancient history,’ he said. ‘Old newspaper cuttings, mainly.’

  She reached out for it. ‘I’ll take a look.’

 
‘Leave it till morning.’ He struggled to keep the annoyance from his voice. ‘You look done in, Flick, why are you still here?’

  ‘To tell the truth, I don’t think I’d be able to sleep.’ She took the box off the shelf, shivering in the chill of the air conditioning.

  ‘I’m not asking you. Go home and sleep. You’re not going to get anything done by running yourself into the ground.’

  He reached for the box, but Flick held it tightly. ‘I’m here now, I’ll just take a quick look.’ When he stared, she said: ‘Shall we go? It’s freezing down here.’

  The heavy door to the Property Room clanged shut.

  ‘Do you think this is the end of it? Now the Overtons are dead?’

  ‘It’s a contract job,’ Drake said. ‘Kenny, Phil, maybe even Ryan, was involved in some criminal enterprise that backfired.’ He dropped the gloves in a waste bin. ‘So, yes, I think it’s over. Don’t over-complicate things, Flick.’

  She hesitated, her fingers drumming a question on the wrapping around the box, but when he held open the door to the stairwell, she walked through. Drake wondered how much she’d seen in the Property Room. Flick Crowley was a copper who rarely deviated from well-trodden systems of investigation. That could buy him time to discover what was going on. But he also knew she was a clever and stubborn investigator, and it would be foolish to underestimate her.

  His skin prickled with foreboding. Something was set in motion all those years ago. An evil from that home had been revived, he was certain of that. And if he didn’t take measures, it would be the end of him.

  On his way home he pulled the car to the kerb, and dropped the newspaper photograph down a drain. Watched the faces of the kids – Amelia, Connor, Elliot and the others – soak into the dank water and tear apart.

  15

  1984

  Elliot listened to Gordon’s heavy steps pound on the stairs.

  Bang, bang, bang.

  Hands trembling, he pulled the thin blanket over him. In the darkness, he could barely make out the silhouettes of the other kids. They lay unmoving in their beds, frozen with fear. Usually Elliot would sleep like a log. But this time he knew – his guts churned at the thought of it – that Gordon was coming for him.

  His smashed nose hurt like hell. He wished it had been fixed properly, at a hospital. After Connor’s attack, Gerry Dent had laughed and said he should get it seen by a doctor or it would look like an exploded tomato for the rest of his life. But Gordon refused point blank, so the Dents patched it up as best they could. For days, the dressings on Elliot’s face were a sodden mess of mucus and snot. When the bandages finally came off, his nose didn’t look right.

  ‘We all get the face we deserve eventually, Elliot,’ Gordon smirked. ‘You just got yours early.’

  Elliot clenched his jaw, determined not to cry. The one thing he wanted from life was a family, lots of kids, which he’d bring up right – not that he’d ever admit it, wild horses wouldn’t make him tell anyone – but there was little chance of that happening now, not with this nose.

  If the pain made his eyes water, the embarrassment was even worse. At least none of the kids had the nerve to laugh at him to his face.

  Since Connor arrived, everything had gone wrong. Gordon had taken a shine to the new kid, chose him now to make his special deliveries, and Elliot was out of favour. And that meant he was fair game if Gordon was drunk or in a bad-tempered mood, which was nearly all the time, these days.

  He gave Connor the evils at every opportunity, but Elliot’s so-called mates, turncoats like Ricky and Jason, didn’t have the stomach for a fight. They saw something in the new kid’s eyes, a coldness, an unpredictability, that made them keep their distance.

  If the business in the kitchen was anything to go by, Connor was sneaky. Elliot’s left eyelid fluttered every time he heard the pots and pans jangle on their hooks. But the day would come when he would get his revenge, he just had to bide his time. Keeping his temper in check wasn’t easy. He was a chip off the old block. His old man had been lightning quick with his fists, Elliot had learned that the hard way, right up to the moment his father dropped dead from a heart attack, leaving him to rot in this dump.

  If Elliot had learned one thing from his dad, it was to use his size and strength to get what he wanted. As a result, it had always been him who had been Gordon’s eyes and ears about the place, who got to lounge about the office, reading comics. That was where you wanted to be – at Gordon’s side, not shoved in with the rest of the kids – because it meant you didn’t have to fear the heavy tread of his shoes on the stairs in the dead of night.

  Bang, bang, bang.

  ‘He gave you a bloody good hiding, Elliot,’ Gordon said that morning, chuckling. ‘He messed you up good, boy.’

  ‘He took me by surprise.’ Elliot glared at Connor. It still hurt when he spoke, and there was a persistent ringing in his ears.

  The manager sat with his feet on his desk. The door to the small room behind him, with its dirty mattress and ribbed green radiator, was closed. Elliot guessed Sally was in there, asleep, or off her face. When she first arrived, Sally had acted as a kind of buffer between Gordon and the children, shielding them, taking the edge off his temper, but now she seemed to spend most of the time in that room, sleeping so deeply and for so long you’d think she was never going to wake up.

  ‘Connor’s got brains and balls.’ Gordon tossed the desk paperweight. It made a smacking sound in his palm when he caught it. ‘So you’re going to show him where to make deliveries around town.’

  All Elliot had to do was grab that paperweight, a glass globe speckled with bubbles, and swing it into the kid’s face. Then they’d see who had the brains; then they’d see who had the balls.

  Gordon jumped to his feet to spin the dial on the office safe. When the door chunked open, he took out packets of brown paper, sealed with shiny zigzags of sticky tape, and heaped them into an Adidas sports bag.

  ‘I want you to show Connor the ropes,’ he said. ‘The addresses, the routes, introduce him to the customers. And then you’re done.’

  Elliot whined. ‘Gordon—’

  ‘And then you’re done, boy.’

  ‘I can find them myself,’ Connor said.

  ‘No. My customers don’t talk to just anyone. Elliot will make the necessary introductions.’

  A tornado of resentment twisted inside of Elliot. He would be the same as all the other kids now, and that was a bad place to be.

  Bang, bang, bang.

  The manager crouched in front of him. ‘I understand what you’re feeling. Your nose has been put out of joint in more ways than one. But look on the bright side, lad – no more walking to the ends of the earth. You’ll be able to relax, get to know the other boys and girls.’ He squeezed Elliot’s shoulder. ‘We’ll always be mates. But Connor … he’s got that little extra something.’

  That afternoon, Elliot and Connor walked across the borough, sticking to the least populated byways. They passed abandoned factories and railway sidings, squeezing through fenced-off gaps on streets bombed forty years before. They looked like a couple of restless teenagers aimlessly roaming across the city, except that Connor carried the sports bag containing the brown packets. They made deliveries to houses and estates, underpasses, squats and even business premises. Elliot begrudgingly introduced Connor to twitching men and women who could barely look them in the eye. Connor studied them carefully, memorising faces, routes and meeting points, taking it all in.

  The two boys barely said a word to each other all day. Elliot was sulking and Connor kept himself to himself, and anyway spent most of the time looking over his shoulder.

  Because they were being followed.

  Sure enough, there was a figure hanging back in the distance, hiding around corners. Elliot was terrified they were going to get arrested, slung in prison, and it was with relief he saw it was only that posh kid who was always hanging around the home waiting for Sally, the one called Ray.

 
; ‘What does he want?’ asked Elliot.

  Connor didn’t answer. He watched the kid carefully but kept moving, and by the end of the afternoon, nearing their last delivery at a snooker hall down by the marshes, it looked like the boy had drifted away. By then Elliot was hot and itchy and tired, and when his nose throbbed, which was basically all the time, it reminded him of what Connor had done to it. He’d had enough. He hurled himself onto a park bench beside the canal, unable to keep his mouth shut any longer.

  ‘Why you hanging about here, anyway?’

  Connor stared. ‘You’re the one who’s stopped.’

  ‘I mean, why are you at the home? You don’t belong. Nobody knows you’re there. You could piss off any time.’

  Wasps buzzed around the rusted frame of a shopping trolley poking from the brown water. Connor dropped the bag and stood on the edge of the canal path. Elliot was gripped by the urge to shove him into the water, but something told him he’d live to regret it.

  ‘I don’t want to go anywhere else.’

  ‘Why not?’ Elliot couldn’t believe his ears. No one in their right mind would want to be at that place, with the casual cruelty of the Dents and Gordon’s beatings, and what happened late at night when he was drunk and his heavy steps echoed on the wooden stairs. ‘It don’t make no sense. I’d be off like a shot!’

  ‘Because …’ Staring at his own elongated reflection on the surface of the stagnant water, Connor’s reply trailed off. He was a weird one, all right.

  Perhaps it was the fact that he didn’t even bother to answer that enraged Elliot, but all the frustration he felt – his busted nose, the ringing in his ears, the way Gordon treated the new kid – boiled up inside of him. He jumped off the bench and picked up the bag. He swung it high, meaning to lob it in the water – but at the last moment he came to his senses and dropped it to the ground.