by Jay Stringer
TWENTY‐EIGHT
I wasn’t really aware of Sunday starting. There are all those songs about coming down on a Sunday morning. I didn’t come down; the world came up to meet me. Everything faded into blurry focus, and it was midday.
I left a voice mail for Becker saying I was ready for his help. And then I decided to talk to the person who would know Robin better than anybody. I remembered that his brother worked as a fireman. I thought back to the man I’d seen in the photographs, and it made sense. I could picture that solid frame in a fireman’s uniform, not exactly the heartthrob image that women always seemed to imagine.
The fire station was only a couple streets away from my flat, so I walked. I saw someone messing with the engine of one of the vehicles and took my chance. He was young, not much older than Robin, and he was doing something to the engine that involved a jug of water and a pipe cleaner. That’s about as technical as I get.
“Hey, man, Mike around?”
He stopped what he was doing and squinted up at me, trying to judge if I was on the level.
“Mike?”
Shit. Had I known his surname? If I had, I’d forgotten it. I searched for something I could use, something Robin had said.
“Yeah, Polski Mike, you know?”
He smiled and then stooped back to the task at hand. “Oh yeah, Fredo. He’s off shift, mate.”
“Fredo?”
“You know, like in Lord of the Rings? Well, Mike’s like those hobbits, big fucking hairy feet. You ever seen them? But he’s like the idiot version, so he’s not Frodo, he’s—”
I pretended it was the funniest thing ever. “Yeah, gotcha. I like it. That describes him, all right.”
“Don’t tell him I told you, will ya?”
“Don’t worry,” I said, touching my nose, “secret’s safe with me.”
He looked up at me for a second, realizing he’d not asked the obvious question.
“So, you, uh, you’re a friend of Mike’s, huh?”
“Right. Name’s Eoin. He might have mentioned me?” He shook his head, and I feigned surprise. “Aw, come on. He must have, no? Bastard. Ah well, cheers. I’ll swing by his house.”
“You’d be better trying his office.”
“But you said he was off—”
He smiled and turned back to his work. “His real office. The Bottle.”
“Cool, I’ll catch him there.” I stuck out my hand and asked his name. He told me it was Paul.
The Bottle was Ye Olde Leather Bottle, a great pub hidden away on Church Hill on the same road as Robin’s house. It was the kind of pub that’s becoming scarce; not on a main road, not a theme pub, and it didn’t have a fancy name. It was built in 1510, and it had seen most of the town grow up around it. It still stood as a monument to those times, its exterior white plaster walls supported by blackened timber frames; local legend had it as one of the places Dick Turpin stopped to water his horse on the famous ride from London to York. Inside, the walls were painted in browns and greens, and the only real decorations were photographs of old sports cars and an effigy of Turpin in a hangman’s noose hung near the bar. I hadn’t been in since the smoking ban, and without the haze of smoke at eye level the place didn’t feel quite right.
I spotted Mike straightaway, leaning against the bar and sipping a pint of mild. He looked a little older than he had in the photographs, his neck a little thicker and his hairline a little farther back. His cheeks were flushed from the drink, and his jeans were struggling to hold him in. I smiled at Dek, the barman, and ordered a Coke. Then I slid in next to Mike at the bar.
“Hey, it’s Fredo, right?”
He turned to stare at me, his glassy eyes showing that this wasn’t his first pint of the day. He looked me up and down with a blank expression. “Do I know you?”
“Oh, sorry, mate.” I put my hand out for a shake. “I’m a mate of Paul’s, yeah? Met you once before at that party—God, when was it?”
He took my hand and then pretended to recognize me, not that he bothered to make it a good fake. “Pete’s birthday, right?” I nodded, and he continued. “Yeah, that was ages ago. Good to see you. How you been, like?”
His northeast accent hadn’t dimmed at all like his brother’s. It was still full-on, and if it wasn’t for the beer slowing him down, I might have missed every other word.
“Good, man, good. Yourself?”
“Aye, not bad. You know how it is.” He raised his half-drunk pint. “Day off.”
“You guys are crazy, you know that? Running into burning buildings. You’re meant to run out of them.”
“Oh, aye, well, that’s still the plan, like. Run out after running in.”
We both laughed, and I pointed at his pint to see if he fancied another. He nodded yes, and I asked Dek for a fresh pint. If Mike noticed that I wasn’t drinking, he didn’t show it. After he’d taken his first sip at the fresh drink, I continued.
“What’s your real name, by the way? I’m guessing it’s not really Fredo.”
“No, that’s just some dumb shit the lads came up with. It’s Mike, Mike Banaciski. Just call me Mike.”
“That Polish?”
“Yeah, my granddad moved over after the war, like. We been stinking up the north ever since.”
“So what made you move down here, then? I mean, must be more exciting in Newcastle than round here?”
“It was Durham, actually. But you know how it is, a change is good. Even if you buggers have a silly accent.”
“Yours is pretty strange, too.”
He raised a toast to that. After another hit of beer, this one a long pull, he answered my question again without any prompting.
“Plus the kid—my brother, Robin? He was getting in a lot of trouble, like, so I wanted to move him away, get a fresh start.”
“You looking after him on your own?”
“Aye, our parents both died a few years back. Just the two of us now.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
He nodded and looked into his drink for a moment. Then his head straightened up, and he peered straight into my eyes. I stepped back, wondering if he’d realized I was scamming him.
“Here,” he said. “You’re the one was selling the eckies at the party, right?”
What the hell, did I look like a drug dealer? I just shrugged, a nonanswer. The more he thought he recognized me, the better my trick would work, but I didn’t want to encourage anything.
“Listen, you got anything? I’m having trouble sleeping, right, and I could do with something to knock me out when I get home.”
I shook my head and said I’d quit. He pulled a face that said, Oh well.
“But, hey,” I said. “Not sleeping? I get that, too. I end up going for walks round town at two in the morning, trying to get tired.”
“Sign of a worried mind, me mam used to say.”
“That what it is with you?”
“Oh, aye, always.” He laughed. “That kid of mine, I swear he’ll be the death of me.”
“This is Robin, right? What’s he doing to you? Staying out all night, bringing girls home, playing loud music?”
“I wish. If it was any of that, I could understand. I mean, I’m a guy, right? Been there, done that. Nah, he’s hiding something. Getting just like me old man, bottling things up. Ever since our mam, well—”
He didn’t have a chance to become maudlin. The television, high up behind the bar, was showing news footage of another PCP rally. A demonstrator had thrown an egg into Marshall’s face as he was doing his meet and greet.
“Too right, too, fucking pigs.” Mike jabbed a finger at the screen. “Think they forget we’re all immigrants here, aye?”
“I’m guessing he can’t count on your vote?”
“The things my granddad went through, and my dad, too, it’s a disgrace. I mean, freedom of speech is fair enough, but it feels wrong, you know? Letting people like that talk on. There are people out there who’ll believe them.”
He lo
oked down into his drink again, and then he seemed to snap out of it. He looked up at me with a grin, raised what was left of his drink, and said, “To Pete.” Then he pointed at my half-drunk glass of Coke. “You drinking like a woofter?”
“Driving,” I said.
“Ah, come on, you can have one. That’s legal.”
“I tell you what, next time, yeah?”
I found that part of me meant it. Another time, another place, Mike and I could probably have drunk the pub dry, talking about family and football.
He squinted at me then. “You know, you’re not the guy I was thinking of. You sure it was Pete’s party?”
I said, “You know, maybe you’re right.” I told him it must have been somewhere else. He accepted it and ordered himself another drink. I gave him a friendly pat on the back and was going to leave him to it when I noticed something else. On the counter beside him he’d laid out the contents of his pockets. His wallet, his mobile phone, his house keys. Lying beside them was an iPod, but the earbuds weren’t the white ones that came with it. They looked new.
I remembered Ruth: I lost my iPod. And the earbuds I’d found at the scene.
“That thing any good?” I said.
“This? Don’t know how to work it, to be honest. I’ve borrowed it off Robin. He keeps saying I should get one, so I’m seeing if I use it enough to justify buying one. But it’s got all his shitey music on it.”
TWENTY‐NINE
Becker returned my call as I left the pub, and I jumped straight in with a request for him to do some background checks for me. There was a pause on the line when I could almost hear his eyes roll before he said, “What, are you scared of the Internet or something?”
Scared? No.
We never had gadgets around the house when I was growing up. My father didn’t care much for any of them, and my mum was only really interested in record players. So I’ve never really trusted computers, and I don’t like living with them. I can access the Internet through my phone because I have thumbs and a brain, but I don’t like reading on the small screen.
I can also operate coffee filter machines and microwaves. But that doesn’t mean I want to do it all day long.
Other things I’m not comfortable with include spelling and planning ahead. The local library wasn’t open on a Sunday, but then most local libraries were no longer open at all. There was one failing Internet café in town, with a closed charity shop on one side and a Chinese takeaway on the other. That’s where I headed.
I paid for an hour’s use. As I sat at the computer, I realized I had no idea how to spell Robin’s last name. I sent Salma a text message, and while I waited for a reply, I got on with other work.
David Kyng didn’t bring up much straightaway. There was a cheap-looking website for his business, and a couple of social networking profiles that seemed to be him but which I couldn’t view. I cursed Becker. Why had he told me that everything I needed to know about Kyng would be easy to find? There was nothing. Then I noticed that the search engine had an option at the top of the page that suggested other spellings of his last name.
Out of curiosity, I changed the search to David King, and the screen almost collapsed under the weight of the results. The top couple of hits were useless. There was a scientist and a real estate guy. A solicitor. But then it got interesting. Old news stories about arson and football violence. King was apparently infamous, the kind of guy who was mentioned by name in football hooligan memoirs. It was impossible to tell which football team he really supported because he seemed to have attached himself to hooligan firms from every team in the northeast at one point or another, from Newcastle down to Hull. There were no news stories that suggested any kind of race hate, or any affiliations with the Extreme Right. He just seemed to be an angry young fanatic looking for a fight.
A couple photographs showed him as a young man, his body lean and brutal, his head shaved, and his eyes cold and dark. Even though the guy was fat now and the years hadn’t been kind to him, there was no mistaking that this young skinhead had grown into David Kyng. He’d change one letter and hoped the past would drop away, but it was clear he still liked looking for fights. I wondered how he’d become attached to the PCP. Maybe because it was a place he could find men angry enough to manipulate.
I typed Paul Pearce’s name into the magic box and found very little. He popped up on the usual social networking sites, but the listings were protected. I found a few mentions in local news stories about school-related events, and some schoolgirl had written an entry on her blog where she talked about having a crush on him. So much for secret crushes. I remembered carrying a torch for my French teacher for three years—a torch that only me and my bedsheets had known about. I guess that kind of secrecy is old-fashioned.
Eventually Salma texted me the correct spelling of Robin’s last name, and I started looking into his background. A lot of boring teenage trivia popped up: endless blog mentions and message board posts that informed me of his appreciation for metal and Japanese horror movies. I tried a search that combined his name with the town of Durham, where Mike had said they were from, and my page filled up with news stories.
None of them good.
Mike had lied about their parents. One of them, at least. Their father was very much dead; that was certain. He’d been a firefighter and had died in the line of duty while fighting a house blaze fifteen years ago. There were pictures of the grieving widow at the funeral with a baby and a very mixed-up-looking young boy. The images bought back memories for me of surviving caravan fires with my family. But I found nothing to suggest that their mother had died.
I still had plenty of time to kill on my prepaid hour, so I started digging into places I probably shouldn’t. I read up on Father Connolly, and I tried his name in combination with the Gaines family. There were a few hits: old public funeral listings, a couple of charity events that linked them. The buzz of my phone startled me, and I saw it was Becker. I packed up and went outside to call him back.
“’Bout time,” he answered on the fourth ring. “Where you been?”
“Reading.”
“Hell, if you don’t want to tell me, I don’t care. Listen, I did those background checks you asked for—”
“You never heard of the Internet?”
“Smart arse. You want to know what I’ve found, or you want to talk about porn? Because that’s probably all you know about the Internet.”
Fair point.
“Anyway. I looked into your guys. First up, forget the teacher. He’s fine. He’s got a bit of an ego problem when he gets behind the wheel of a car, likes to go fast and show off. He’s got a few fines and tickets pending in the PNC, but there’s nothing else on him. He’s clean.”
“Robin?”
“Yeah, okay, that’s more of a thing. There’s nothing official, mind you, but we do have a flag file on him.”
“What?”
“Yes. I called the guy who opened the file, up north somewhere outside of Newcastle—Chester something, sounds French, never heard of it. Anyway, he says that it’s all off the record, but Robin’s a bit of a problem child. Apparently, he went off the rails when he was in junior school. His mum ran away, left the big brother to raise him. He got into all kinds of trouble at school, but then it got serious and he had to move.”
That’s what Mike had said, too, in different words.
“What kind of serious are we talking about?”
“Girls. Apparently one of the girls at his school was assaulted—that is, with a capital R. Nobody was ever arrested, and she refused to cooperate with the inquiry. Then a coworker at the cinema where he worked weekends. Same story again—no official complaint, no case to build. But the police had a quiet word with his brother, told him to take the problem somewhere else.”
“Well, he certainly did that.”
He paused again. “This is a start, but we’ll need more. What else have you got?”
“Indigestion.” I hung up.
TH
IRTY
The sun had faded away by the time I pulled up and parked on Hobbs Road. I was across from Pearce’s house, and in the darkening evening the light from his television was casting a glow. Fast-moving lights and shadows played across the hedge in his front yard.
I slipped in the same CD I’d listened to with Salma, smiling to myself when I remembered her description of the music. I drummed my fingers on the wheel in time with the beat and sang along with the lyrics, mostly getting the words wrong.
I was trying not to think about the issue at hand, but it wasn’t working. I couldn’t keep the questions out of my head. Finding the guy responsible worked in theory. But once you found him, then what?
Doing the right thing would ruin people’s lives. Families would get deported, and some young women would be pressured into talking to the police and going through a humiliating trial and media circus. And that was if I found evidence.
I got out of the car and crossed to the trashbin where I’d seen Pearce throw a small plastic bag the night before. Condom? Soiled clothes? Could I get lucky and finish it right here? It was a council bin, a black plastic unit with a hole at the front just big enough to slide in my arm. Metal, plastic, chocolate wrappers, and paper. A few damp things slipped across the back of my hand, and I had to fight off revulsion to press on. My hand closed on a plastic bag, and I pulled it out.
Dog shit.
Great.
Elementary, my dear Watson.
I climbed back into the car and wiped my hands on a disposable napkin from a pack I keep in the glove box. As I put the pack back, I saw Boz’s gun, daring me to touch it. I lifted it out and held it between my hands, turning it over a couple of times. It felt more substantial than it had before. I pulled out my phone and found Laura’s number without pressing the call button. I stared at it for a moment. I pulled Gaines’s business card from my pocket and typed in the number. Then I chickened out for a second time. Before I could worry about what that meant, I saw movement outside Pearce’s house. I slipped down low in my seat and watched him stepping out of the front door and down the two shallow concrete steps to the path. The lights were still flickering away in the living room, so somebody was still home. His body language changed as he walked to the street, an extra spring appearing in his step. Up closer, I could see age starting to show on him. His shoulders were pushed back a little too far, as if that sort of posture might disguise that his midsection was beginning to look soft through his tight shirt. One look at a guy doesn’t always tell you much, but in this case, it was enough to see that Pearce was vain. Clinging to illusions of a younger age before his body threw him off the edge.