The Two O'Clock Boy

by Mark Hill

  ‘They’re welcome,’ Gordon spread his arms wide, ‘any time.’

  ‘I just want to see—’

  ‘I’m not going to ask you again,’ said Gordon.

  But Ray didn’t want to go. He wanted to see Sally, and he didn’t understand why he wasn’t allowed. When he was small, Ray had depended more than he liked to admit on her affection. Goodness knows he got little enough from his parents. They loved him, he was sure of that, but just weren’t wired to show it. The environment he grew up in was stifling, prohibitive. From an early age he attended a series of expensive prep schools where he was taught to be – expected to behave as – a young adult. Sally had spent a lot of time with him. With her he could behave how he wanted, just be a small kid, she had no expectations of him. The thought of losing her to this place … sickened him.

  But he had no choice, and he had to go.

  Nodding at Connor, he said, ‘How are you enjoying it here?’

  But the boy didn’t answer. There was a frightening intensity in his eyes. Ray had met lots of bullies, there were plenty of them at school – you learned quickly who to avoid, and Ray had always been a good judge of character – but he didn’t understand this kid at all. There was a truculence to Connor, a wilfulness. It was insecurity or malice … or maybe something worse.

  Ray nodded at Amelia, who stood on the stairs, and was about to go when the office door opened.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Sally asked sleepily. She was dressed, but her hair pressed against her cheeks, twisting around the sunglasses she wore.

  ‘You never called me,’ Ray said, with relief. ‘I was worried!’

  ‘This is a wonderful, heart-warming moment,’ Gordon growled. ‘But please, Sal, take the boy out of here. Now.’

  Sally pushed Ray outside, and they sat on the steps, looking down on the street and the train track. Reggae music pumped lazily from one of the squats.

  ‘I asked you not to come here,’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t call.’ All the tension of his encounter with Gordon whipping loose inside him, he struggled to keep a whine from his voice.

  ‘Sometimes I don’t get the chance,’ she said. ‘I’ve responsibilities, things to do.’

  ‘I need to know that you’re okay.’

  ‘You don’t have to worry about me.’

  ‘But I do. This place …’ He darted a look over his shoulder. ‘It’s wrong.’

  ‘I asked you not to come here. I expressly asked you.’

  ‘You’re not the same person.’

  ‘No, I’m not. Because I’m not a child any more, Ray, I’m an adult, and being an adult isn’t a whole lot of fun sometimes, as you’ll find out.’

  ‘Not around here it isn’t – or being a kid, for that matter.’ He nodded at the sunglasses. ‘Take them off.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what to do.’

  ‘Why not?’ He couldn’t help himself, and tried to grab at the glasses, but Sally jumped up, holding them to her face.

  ‘Because I’m not going to be ordered around by you!’ She went to lean on the railings, out of his reach, and they stayed there like that, both of them upset, until she said: ‘If you want to meet we can do that, every couple of weeks or so, but not here. I promise to ring, but I don’t want you to come here. I mean it this time, Ray.’

  That was fine with him. He didn’t want to come back anyway. There was stuff about this home that he didn’t want to know about – those deliveries he saw Connor and Elliot making around the borough, for a start – and if he did ask her about it, she might well refuse to see him again, and he couldn’t bear that. Sally was right: this was no place for him. He’d be going back to school in a couple of months, would be gone for the best part of the year, and schoolwork would consume all his time and energy. When he came back to the city, with a bit of luck she would have moved on, and they’d both be able to forget about this wretched place for good.

  ‘I’ll stay away, but you have to call me,’ he said. ‘Twice a week.’

  ‘It’s a deal.’ She placed a finger beneath the glasses to rub an eye and when they lifted momentarily he thought he saw a tinge of yellow beneath an eyelid, which made him feel sick. ‘Just because I’m here, with Gordon, doesn’t mean I’m going to stop caring about you.’

  Maybe that’s what this was all about. He wasn’t worried about Sally at all, just about himself. Maybe he couldn’t face the fact that she was free to make her own mistakes, had her own life to live, her own life to ruin. She was able to go where she wanted, could drift to the ends of the earth and never come back if that’s what she wanted. Myra and Leonard allowed him no such uncertainty. He would go back to school, and then to Oxford, and he would become a barrister, end of story. His whole life was mapped out for him, and there was nothing he could do about it, unless something drastic happened, unless something cataclysmic occurred to completely alter his destiny. That was why he felt so emotional – she was free and he was trapped.

  Ray wondered whether, in the years to come, when they were both adults and he had his own life and family and responsibilities, they would still be friends. He prayed that they would.

  ‘It’s a deal,’ he repeated under his breath.

  Sensing his misery, Sally sat down, putting an arm around him. To his relief, she changed the subject. Reminded him of an afternoon in the park when he was small and fell in a pond – the look on Myra’s face was a picture! He laughed at that, and they started talking about the days they spent together when he was barely taller than her knees – forgetting about Gordon and the Longacre – until dusk, a good three hours later, when she told him she had to go back in.

  Ray stood and noticed his hands were covered in glitter from Amelia’s notebook. He wiped his them down his legs as Sally opened the door to go back inside and when he looked up he saw, or thought he saw, Connor Laird standing in the gloom of the hallway, like a mirror image, his expression hidden in shadow.

  When he trotted down the steps to go home, Ray was relieved he didn’t have to go back to that place ever again.

  21

  Flick worked into the evening, only nipping out of the office to pick up a Happy Meal, which she devoured at her desk as she trawled through the automatic number plate recognition data Steiner had compiled. Chewing on the burger, her thoughts drifted back to those cuttings Kenny Overton had painstakingly collected. The people he believed had been at the same children’s home decades ago, and who had since died.

  Despite the fruitless meeting with Amelia Troy, and Ray Drake’s displeasure at her wasting time on what he insisted was a dead end, something nagged at her about the cuttings, but she knew she’d be walking on thin ice if she diverted resources into looking into the deaths of those people. The fact that Drake’s parents had visited the Longacre must have rattled him more than he was letting on, and she couldn’t shake the memory of him in the Property Room. Flick would never be one of life’s maverick coppers – she’d spent her whole career slavishly playing by the rules, not exploiting them as her dad had done – but she absolutely hated loose ends. She needed to be satisfied in her own mind about those articles, and it was a bitter irony that the one person who could probably provide details about the Longacre was the last person in the world she wanted to see: her father.

  The fries made her feel queasy, so she threw the greasy pocket in the bin and read interview reports. A couple of names kept cropping up in the investigation. According to one of his mates, Phillip Overton had owed money to a loan shark. He’d kept the debt quiet, hadn’t even told his brother. The money, a couple of grand, was eventually paid back at the usual astronomic rate of interest, but not before a couple of nasty encounters with the street lender.

  Flick called Eddie Upson into the office.

  ‘How long ago are we talking?’

  ‘About six months,’ he said. ‘Phil played football at a local leisure centre. A couple of his teammates saw him have beer chucked in his face by the guy in a pub.’

&nb
sp; After grabbing a few hours’ sleep, Upson was chipper this afternoon. It was Flick, who’d worked through the night, who felt – and probably looked – like something from a horror show.

  ‘Got a name?’

  ‘The Golden Eagle.’

  ‘The loan shark, Eddie.’

  ‘Dave Flynn,’ said Upson. ‘Sounds a dashing kind of guy. Vix is chasing up an address now.’

  Door-to-door interviews at the two crime scenes hadn’t turned up any new leads. At Ryan Overton’s estate, where a distrust of the police was endemic, it was especially tough to get information. The pensioner who lived in the flat that had been used to gain access to Ryan’s balcony was in Gdansk, and not due to return until the following week.

  There was a stack of other interviews and evidence reports for Flick to plough through. Peter Holloway’s scene-of-crime analysis was pending. Pathology results weren’t due for another twenty-four hours, and she’d been warned not to expect any results that would smash the investigation wide open.

  At the end of the day, Holloway sat in her office, legs crossed neatly at the knees. ‘Nothing so far,’ he said.

  ‘You’re telling me that the perpetrator went in and out of the Overton house, and in and out of Ryan’s flat, without leaving any trace evidence?’

  Holloway’s glasses dropped to his chest. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger, DI Crowley. The intruder or intruders took considerable care.’

  Flick was incredulous. ‘No prints, no hairs or flakes of skin.’

  ‘It’ll all be in the report,’ Holloway said. ‘Our perpetrator was in Ryan Overton’s flat for a matter of seconds rather than minutes, and knew what they were doing. This is a person who has prepared meticulously, and who, I suggest, has a more than passing knowledge of forensic procedure. That’s not necessarily to say they have professional insight. Television crime dramas feature forensic techniques; texts are freely available on the internet and shared on social media. Pay attention to the basics and it’s relatively simple to cover your tracks.’

  She struggled to keep the disappointment from her voice. ‘Thanks, Peter.’

  Holloway stood. ‘One day into the investigation and you look awful.’

  ‘I have an underactive thyroid,’ she said defensively.

  ‘Remember to eat occasionally, DS Crowley.’ He eyed the remains of her fast food in the bin. ‘Something nutritious.’

  ‘I will.’ She cracked a window, conscious of the greasy burger smell. ‘I think that’s everything for now.’

  In the evening, with the Incident Room emptying, Flick was shutting down her computer when she noticed a Post-it note curled beneath the wheel of her chair. Printed in Kenny Overton’s clumsy capitals was the name RONNIE DENT, and an address in Euston. Curious, she typed in Dent’s name and to her surprise found that a string of his previous convictions – assault, shoplifting, drink driving and drug offences – had been Back Record Converted, transferred from paper files to the Holmes 2 computer database, along with his employment history. There, right at the top, was a mention of the Longacre home.

  With the investigation stalling and few leads showing promise, she’d put off going to see Drake for as long as possible. But when she finally mustered the courage to go upstairs, just before eight, his office was empty.

  Tiredness washed over her as she drove home. Pulling up at traffic lights to turn left towards her flat, the indicator ticked heavily in her head. She really needed a good night’s sleep. But Nina hadn’t phoned and Flick couldn’t rid herself of the suspicion that there was something her sister was keeping from her. Besides, the bed in Nina’s spare room was much more comfortable than her own knackered futon. A horn blared behind her – the lights had turned green.

  Flick cranked the indicator right, and swung the car in the opposite direction.

  22

  Something was approaching.

  He felt it pulsing, no more than a fleeting movement at the corner of his eye, edging out of the shadows. This phantom, this reckoning, almost upon him.

  The past was crashing into the present. Decades ago, something had been set in motion, a terrible force gaining momentum. Feeding, becoming stronger. All the while Ray Drake had been building something precious. He was a son, a father – and a husband who had been forced to watch his wife fade away before his eyes, her cells eviscerated by disease. And now he sensed a greater catastrophe – with the slaughter of a family just yards from his own police station.

  A curtain had been lifted to reveal an evil design. He had to be ready.

  Drake pulled up outside Jordan Bolsover’s luxury Docklands apartment building and killed the engine, listened to the end of one of Laura’s Bach suites, letting her music flood through him and calm his jangling nerves. When the last note faded, the distant burble of traffic and churning river barely penetrated the quiet of the car.

  Nestled behind cubes of shrubbery, the building was bathed in a blue light, which danced and rippled across the surface of the Thames. It was typical of City-boy Jordan to have a swanky riverside pad. Drake made a point of doing his homework on every man who came into his daughter’s orbit, and didn’t like what he found in his credit rating. Jordan spent money hand over fist. There was the apartment, the sports car, the exotic holidays, the membership of the exclusive gym where celebrities pounded the treadmill safely removed from the Great Unwashed. Jordon’s expensive bespoke suits were tailored to accentuate each of the muscle groups in the torso he’d sculpted with the aid of a personal trainer. Back when they still spoke, April told Drake that Jordan was buying into a syndicate to own a thoroughbred. The low six-digit salary that Jordan earned would barely cover all these outgoings.

  The money wasn’t an issue, but Drake didn’t like Jordan, who was arrogant and narcissistic. It drove him crazy to think that his little girl could fall in love with such a man. But Drake also knew that was exactly why she’d fallen for Jordan – because it sent him nuts. The more April knew Drake despised her boyfriend, the more her bond with Jordan strengthened.

  Laura hadn’t liked Jordan either, but she’d told Drake to back off and let the relationship cool of its own accord. Laura knew how to let problems burn themselves out. Drake loved his wife and trusted her instincts absolutely, but she was gone now, and he needed to keep his daughter close.

  His mobile rang. The screen flashed: CALLER UNKNOWN. This was the sixth call. Each time he picked it up he heard a child’s weeping.

  But the electronically altered voice was too low, too stylised for it to be a child, and this time when he connected the call – and said, ‘Ray Drake’ – it spoke.

  ‘I don’t want to speak to you, put the other one on.’

  ‘You’re talking to—’

  ‘I said put him on!’ barked the voice.

  ‘Who is this?’ Drake listened to the electronic squall, his heart racing. ‘Tell me who—’

  The line went dead. A moment later, Drake scrolled down his contacts list until he found the number he needed. After several rings, the call was answered.

  ‘Lewis,’ he said. ‘How goes it?’

  ‘Ray,’ said Lewis Allen. ‘This is out of the blue. What’s the time?’

  Drake could hear conversation in the background, the clink of cutlery. ‘It’s late, Lewis, I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re doing me a favour,’ said Allen, voice low. ‘We’ve got neighbours round. Hold on a sec.’ Drake heard the laughter fade as Allen moved into another room and closed the door. ‘That’s better, I can hear you now. It’s been a long time, Ray, and you were never one for social calls.’

  ‘Amelia Troy,’ said Drake. ‘Remember her?’

  Lewis Allen whistled. ‘How could I forget? It was a big deal at the time. Her husband was some big artist or something. Well,’ he snorted, ‘I say artist, but I use the term loosely.’

  Drake and Allen went way back, had walked the beat together as young PCs, and joined CID at about the same time. Then Allen moved to the nick at Bethnal Green, where he’d
investigated the circumstances of the overdose of Troy and Binns.

  ‘Remind me how they were found, she and her husband,’ said Drake.

  ‘Why are you asking after all these years, Ray? Got new evidence or something?’

  ‘It’s April,’ said Drake. ‘She’s doing an essay, some evening college thing. I said I’d ask you. It escaped my mind and she’s got to have it done by tomorrow.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Allen, playing along with the lie. ‘The emergency dispatcher got a call.’

  ‘From who?’

  ‘Binns. He and the wife took an overdose, and the last thing he did before he fell unconscious was to call 999. You listen to the call, he was incoherent, could barely speak. The signal was traced to a warehouse they lived in, him and Troy. The paramedics found ’em laying on a bed, surrounded by junkie paraphernalia, syringes everywhere.’

  ‘And Binns was dead.’

  ‘He was done for when they arrived. Troy was barely alive, and was raced to hospital. Just in time, by all accounts. She was one lucky lady.’

  Ned Binns was a troubled soul who took vast quantities of drugs. His wealth and marriage to Troy had opened up whole new opportunities for self-destruction. Allen and the other coppers who attended the scene concluded it was just another tragic overdose, and their decision was subsequently supported by the coroner’s verdict.

  But Drake had to be sure.

  ‘Was Amelia Troy ever charged?’

  ‘A file was sent to the CPS. Binns was a loose cannon, a bipolar smackhead. The rumour was he used to knock her around.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Drake.

  ‘It was decided she needed psychiatric help, not prison. If he hadn’t made that call, she’d be dead.’

  ‘Binns was at death’s door, but he managed to call 999?’

  ‘I’ve seen druggies do some seriously unexpected things,’ Allen said. ‘Journalists tried to sniff out all the salacious details, but there was nothing fishy about it. They overdosed, Ray, simple as that.’