Driftnet

by Lin Anderson

  Pump pump pump pump and then her shoe began to loosen, swinging on her toes for a moment before it dropped onto the grass.

  When Jonathan got back to the house, after waiting a full half hour by the watch his father had given him for Christmas, Edward was at the front door, busy telling Fiona that he had arrived home minutes before her.

  From then on Jonathan knew everything his father said was a lie.

  The first email was from Mark. He must have sent it before he went out because it said, Yo! I’ve just put on the pulling juice and I’m off. Think of Shona Seaton’s tits and you’ll know where I am.

  Jonathan tried to think a reply that would make Mark laugh. But anything he said would be made up, and talking about your parents having sex rather than you having sex was sad. He wondered why Mark bothered emailing him. At school Mark was usually too busy being cool to be seen with Jonathan.

  Jonathan went for the vodka and this time drank it straight from the bottle. It was having the desired effect. He supposed he could tell Mark about the cold glass wank and the tits in the conservatory. It would be better than nothing. But he didn’t click on reply, instead he had another drink, knowing he was putting off the moment when he would open the second email.

  It had been going on for three months now. The first message had come apparently by accident. Jonathan had spent a week setting up his own homepage, putting in some of his likes and dislikes. It had been meant for a competition in a PC magazine but after he designed it he suddenly didn’t want to enter it after all. After it was uploaded, his homepage had brought half a dozen replies. Four liked the same football team as Jonathan and two told him to fuck off and get a life by supporting another one. Then things went quiet until the first message from Simon.

  Jonathan had spent a lot of time talking to Simon after that first message. It had been exam time and his father had been moaning on about Law again and what grades he’d have to get if he was going to do Law at Edinburgh or fucking Cambridge. Who wanted to go to fucking Cambridge? Who wanted to do fucking Law anyway, Jonathan said and Simon had agreed. You should study what you really like, Simon said, and if that was Art then that was what you should do. Simon even sent him information on various Art colleges and web page addresses where he could find out more.

  Jonathan never really thought about Simon’s age. Electronically, age didn’t matter. It was obvious they thought alike. One night he’d moaned on about girls. He’d been pissed off because Catriona Cummings had told him to fuck off, after he’d peed himself for a week worrying about asking her out. Simon had talked to him for a long time after that and a lot of what he said about girls was true.

  Jonathan laid down the bottle and tried to open the drawer of his desk. The handle was a little hazy and kept moving when he reached for it but eventually he caught it and pulled it open. He had put the first pictures he’d printed out in there under his school books. They were inside an old Algebra jotter. His mother would never look in that.

  The ink cartridge on the printer had been running out and the printouts were faded in parts but you could still see what they were doing in them. Jonathan riffled through until he found his favourite.

  He scrabbled about with his zipper but either the drink, the bad orange or the earlier pull had rendered his thing unconscious so he had another drink instead.

  When the second lot of printouts arrived he’d looked at them, then torn them up. The third set he’d looked at for a lot longer, then taken them and hidden them at the SSTD. He hadn’t been down there for over a week now and he had pretty much made up his mind to burn them.

  Jonathan stuffed the pictures in the drawer and looked at the screen. The unread email was big which probably meant it contained graphics.

  Jonathan finished the vodka, clicked on the screen and opened it.

  Chapter 12

  The envelope arrived by the first post.

  Rhona was already awake. The rattle of the letter box made her heart jump into her throat. She got up and hurried through to the hall. A large brown envelope lay on the carpet. She picked it up, carried it through to the kitchen and laid it on the table. Then she put the kettle on. She had waited seventeen years, she could wait a few minutes more.

  Her parents had never known about their grandson. Right to the end Rhona kept it from them. After her dad retired they had moved out of the city, back to the west coast where he was born. Rhona had spent her childhood holidays there, running along the shore, climbing the rocks he told her were the oldest in the world. As a student, Rhona had visited often, stealing long weekends from her studies, or a week in the summer. She loved the house with its white face staring out to sea. Being there was like being a child again, going fishing, walking the shoreline. She had taken Edward with her once. He had sat in the kitchen nursing a dram, talking to her parents. She had loved him then. But when they left, chugging along the road in their rebuilt MG, he had told her how he didn’t like the wilds, that he was a city boy. She never took him back. When she found out she was pregnant and they decided to have the baby adopted, she couldn’t face her parents and she made excuses when her mother phoned; pressure of work, she would see them in the summer when it was all over.

  The baby would have been five when her mother died. Rhona started going home at weekends to see her father and each time she returned there was less of him. Once or twice he came to Glasgow to stay with her and they went back to the Gallery, but now the bottom level was all he could manage. As they retraced their familiar routes, she watched his face light up and she knew she had cheated him of something very precious.

  Edward and she lasted six months after the adoption. That was all they could stand of one another. Love and hate. Hate and love. She hated him for persuading her (did he?), and hated herself even more for being persuaded. And Edward? He just hated the messiness of it all.

  The address on the envelope was in Edward’s handwriting. This was one job he hadn’t got his secretary to do. Rhona stared at it for a long time, then carefully slit it open, her mouth dry.

  She pulled out two sheets of paper. The top one was a copy of a birth certificate. Her hands shook as she read the words. Liam James MacLeod, born 2.35am Monday 2nd January, 1985. She had never seen the birth certificate before. Edward had registered the birth. No use brooding, he’d said, it’ll be easier if I do it and then you can put it all out of your mind. We have to get on with our lives. Rhona touched the writing. In the mother’s box was her own name, Rhona Elizabeth MacLeod. The father’s box was empty. Edward had said it was better that way.

  ‘Then I can’t come back when he’s a millionaire and ask him for money,’ he’d said with a laugh.

  The second sheet was a short sharp note.

  ‘I enclose a copy of the birth certificate. As you know, a birth parent has no statutory rights to trace events or gain access to Court papers. However I have found out that the adoption was processed a month after the birth. Contact was then made with the registrars and an adoptive certificate was issued in the name of Hope. A friend of mine in the police force tells me that the dead rent boy has been identified as a James Fenton from Manchester.’

  Of course there was no connection between the two boys. Edward was right. She had been imagining things. Liam was out there, alive and happy. Edward had sorted everything out. Tidied up her life for her. Again.

  By the time Gavin MacLean arrived at eight o’clock, Rhona had already drunk two gins. One while she sat in the bath and cried, the other as she got dressed, dried her hair and repaired her face.

  When the buzzer went, she looked out of the window. Gavin was standing on the pavement. He waved when he spotted her and she waved back. When she emerged at street level, they both stood awkwardly for a moment.

  ‘This is a bit embarrassing,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  He was even taller than she’d thought, his hair blonder now that it was no longer wet, but his eyes and smile were the same.

  ‘You look nice,�
� he said.

  ‘I’m not so wet as last time.’

  They both smiled. ‘I thought if we ate first, it would break the ice.’ He looked faintly nervous. ‘So I booked an Italian.’

  ‘Fine.’

  She decided as they walked along together, that she would offer to pay half. Keep things even between them.

  ‘You can pay half,’ he said, reading her mind, ‘if it makes you feel more comfortable.’

  As they crossed the road, he took her arm to guide her between the traffic. His hand was big and warm and it suddenly reminded Rhona of crossing the road with her dad.

  Rhona looked at Gavin blankly. Whatever he had said demanded an answer and she hadn’t a clue what to say, because she hadn’t been listening to him for the last five minutes.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  He poured her some more wine and she lifted her glass and sipped it, avoiding his eyes.

  ‘I have… there’s something on my mind at the moment,’ she apologised.

  ‘Work?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. It seemed easier.

  ‘Want to talk about it?’

  ‘I don’t want to depress you.’

  ‘You won’t.’

  He smiled to reassure her.

  ‘Well,’ she began. ‘I’ve been working on a case recently… a boy found murdered in a flat.’

  ‘The student?’

  ‘Yes,’ she looked up puzzled. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I read the papers, and watch television.’

  ‘Of course.’ She felt silly. Of course the whole of Scotland knew about the murdered boy. ‘It’s just,’ she paused, ‘this one got to me a bit. He looked like someone I know. That’s all.’

  ‘I see.’ He reached over and touched her hand. ‘Shall we skip the film?’ he said.

  ‘Please.’

  He waved the waiter over and asked for the bill.

  ‘Look. Why don’t we go back to my place, listen to some music…’

  ‘I don’t want you to think…’

  ‘I don’t.’

  Back in his comfortable flat drinking coffee, Rhona told him that she should be in Paris with Sean. She didn’t say why she hadn’t gone and he didn’t ask. Instead he told her a bit about himself. He was forty, not married but had lived with someone for a long time, seven years in fact.

  ‘I kept asking her to marry me and she kept saying no,’ he explained, pulling a face. ‘She had this thing about marriage. Her father was in the Merchant Navy so he only came home every six months. Her mother brought up the three of them on her own. When her father came back, he ‘wanted his place’, as she put it, and her mother agreed. The kids didn’t. Eventually her younger brother had a stand up fight with him in the house. She always said she would never marry.’

  ‘So why did you break up?’

  He hesitated as if searching for a reason. ‘We got to this place where the road sort of ended. She got an offer of a job down south. We said we’d keep in touch but we didn’t.’

  ‘I think women and men are incompatible,’ Rhona said. ‘Different agendas.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘It’s true. Maybe being gay is the answer.’

  ‘Maybe it is.’

  They looked at one another and laughed.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said.

  ‘Right. I’ll phone for a taxi.’

  He went with her to the front door. Outside the air had turned warm. Scotland had at last remembered it was the first week in June.

  ‘I never asked you how you got my home number?’ she said.

  Gavin looked embarrassed. ‘I hacked it,’ he admitted and when she looked puzzled he went on. ‘Everyone’s on a file somewhere. I can find out just about anything I want to know about a person from a computer, just like you can from their bodily fluids.’

  ‘1984 and all that?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  The taxi drew up.

  ‘Can I hack in again sometime?’ he asked.

  ‘Only if I can test your bodily fluids.’ She realised what she’d said after the words were out.

  He laughed and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Any time.’

  When Rhona got back to her flat, the green message light was flashing on the ansaphone. She pressed the play button. It was Sean. There was background music and half way through his message, a high-pitched giggle, then a girl saying ‘Sean’ in a pleading voice. He said he would try again tomorrow night and reminded her of the club phone number. Rhona wondered why he hadn’t given her the number of the flat where he was staying. Maybe he was staying with the giggly girl.

  The second message was from Edward, hoping she had received the envelope.

  ‘I sincerely hope, Rhona, that this will be the end of the matter.’

  Rhona said shit very loudly. She went through to the bedroom, opened the envelope and took out the two papers and looked at them again. If Gavin MacLean could find out all about her by hacking, maybe he could find out more about her son.

  And, she decided, Edward Stewart could get fucked.

  Chapter 13

  Bill Wilson had had a sleepless night. Twice he’d gone downstairs and sat watching a late night movie until he’d started to drop off. But as soon as he got back into bed, he was wide awake again. Once light began to peek through the slit in the curtains, he gave up and got up for good. On automatic he made himself coffee and sat down at the kitchen table.

  Halfway through his second cup he heard someone walk along the upstairs landing to the toilet. It wasn’t Margaret’s step. He’d left her sound asleep. Twenty years living with a policeman had trained her to ignore his nocturnal habits.

  A bedroom door clicked shut and then there was a series of taps and a long thin cackling whine and he realised that one of the kids was logging on to the Internet.

  If all the kids were doing that, he thought, playing with the Internet while their parents were asleep, it would be hellish easy to access whatever they liked. He stood up and then sat down again. He’d already talked to them both about it.

  Jamie Fenton had by all accounts been a good student up until two weeks before his death. He’d been staying in a new hall of residence, Dalrymple Hall, built with a little help from the generous Sir James Dalrymple. Paedophiles could get at vulnerable kids through the Internet, but the Computing Department at Glasgow assured him that the labs were supervised to ensure no dodgy surfing, as they called it.

  Mrs Fenton had told him Jamie couldn’t afford to buy a computer. He was on a grant and a student loan and she couldn’t give him anything herself. Since they divorced, her husband hadn’t given their son anything.

  When Bill brought up the subject of sex, Mrs Fenton became agitated. Her son was normal, she protested. He had a girlfriend in Manchester, a nice girl that he went out with when he was home.

  They’d got no leads from his fellow students either. Jamie was a loner and spent most of his spare time in the computer lab. He was constantly broke. He’d been trying to borrow money to see himself through to the end of the session. It was tough being a student now, tougher than in his day, Bill realised.

  He stood up and rinsed his cup at the sink. The early morning sun reminded him of his promise to Margaret to cut the grass. The paper boy skidded to a halt on his bicycle and came whistling up the path. Bill picked up the paper from the hall floor and spread it out on the kitchen table. The last thing he expected was to see his investigation blown wide open.

  Helen Connelly answered the phone.

  ‘Helen? It’s Bill Wilson. Sorry to phone you this early. Is Jim about?’

  ‘He’s still in bed Bill. He wasn’t in till late. Something special came in last night. They held this morning’s edition for it.’

  Bill tried not to swear. It wasn’t Helen’s fault she had an idiot for a husband.

  ‘I could waken him if it’s important?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Right.’


  He heard the phone being carried up the stairs and then the sound of Jim being shaken. His own name was mentioned then there was an ‘oh, fuck!’

  ‘Morning Bill.’ A bright and cheery voice. ‘You’re up early.’

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing running that story?’

  A moment’s silence then a throat being cleared.

  ‘The story’s true.’ Connelly was standing his ground. ‘We got it from a good source…’

  ‘I know it’s true.’

  ‘So… what’s the problem?’

  ‘The problem is,’ Bill took a breath, ‘thanks to you these people now know we’re on to them. And what do you think they’re doing?’ Without waiting for an answer, he spat it out. ‘They’re covering their tracks deleting every pornographic file from here to eternity.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Is that all you can say? Oh!’

  ‘I got a call last night. The source was good so I put it in. It filled a slot.’

  ‘It filled a slot! There are weans out there getting their slots filled right this minute.’ Bill’s voice shook with anger.

  ‘My job is to print the truth.’

  ‘The truth…’ Bill paused. ‘The truth is you’ve screwed this investigation.’

  When Bill reached the office, the story had got there before him. The woman from the university had already phoned wanting to know who had given out confidential information painstakingly gathered over three months. She had been incandescent, Janice said. Whatever they’d found out was useless now.

  He spread the paper out masochistically on his desk.

  Glasgow Paedophile Ring Nets the Innocent.

  Jim Connelly could certainly write a headline.

  Chapter 14

  Chrissy missed Rhona. Tony was alright but after a while you got bored by his tales of holiday conquests and drinking sprees in Mexico, especially if the nearest you would ever get to Mexico was the Mexican restaurant Amigos.