by Simon Mason
“Thing is,” Smudge said, “he was in his own world all the time; he wasn’t wised up like the rest of us. Natural victim, that’s what he was. Someone could take advantage of a kid like that. What d’you reckon, Garv?”
Garvie said nothing. He smoked.
“Well, anyway,” Smudge went on, “question is, what happened?”
The others went on discussing it while Garvie smoked quietly. There were various theories already flying around the internet, some of them not entirely stupid. It could have been a straightforward case of mistaken identity. Or a race attack. Perhaps Gimpel had seen something he shouldn’t have and had to be silenced. He could easily have gotten involved in something he didn’t understand. But why was he in the storage facility with Magee in the first place? He’d been kidnapped, perhaps. Or tricked. Lured there under false pretenses, taken advantage of, like Smudge said. But it was hard to explain the bizarre fact that a schoolboy like Gimpel had been at that place with that man at that time, apparently dressed for school. At this point, really, there were only bizarre explanations. One was that he’d been killed in a shoot-out with Magee, to which he’d carried a gun in his violin case. Smudge, a reliable provider of bizarre ideas, thought it possible that Gimpel had sleepwalked to the storage facility. He’d heard of a man who sleepwalked to his car and sleep-drove fifty miles to a cheap hotel to meet a woman he’d never seen before in his life.
“That’s what he told his wife. He was shocked to find himself there. Think how shocked Gimpel would have been when he woke up in that storage facility. Especially when Magee then shot him. What do you think, Garv?”
Garvie had said nothing now for twenty minutes. Sitting on his rocking horse, he continued to smoke, gazing across the field toward the city lights downtown. The others watched him curiously.
“Not bothered, then?” Smudge said. “Not interested?”
Garvie blew out smoke, dropped his cigarette, ground it out.
“I am interested, actually.”
Smudge grinned. “’Cause of the sleepwalking, I bet.”
Garvie ignored him. He took out another Benson & Hedges and tapped it thoughtfully on his knee. He tossed it suddenly into the corner of his mouth, lit up, and blew out smoke in a long blue stream.
He said, “Go back to what you said about him. The sort of kid he was.”
“Natural victim.”
“Control freak, you said. A loner, even at home with his Polish grandparents in that flat somewhere in Strawberry Hill. Good with lists, bad with people. A planner. Capable of violence.” He puffed out a little smoke. “Doesn’t sound like a natural victim to me.”
They looked at one another. “We didn’t say any of that.”
“Course you did. You said he always sat on that bench by Bottom Gate. Strawberry Hill way, where the Polish shops are. Where else do you think he lived? And who do you think dressed him up like that and gave him an apple in a brown paper bag every day? No one born in the last fifty years. What about that thick old Polish accent? He’d lived here nearly all his life. He can’t have spoken much English at home. The other stuff’s just obvious. Kept his hair neat, tucked in his shirt, brushed his hair down flat. Obsessive, a control freak. Always sat in the same spot. Had a plan and stuck to it. Took pictures of people but never talked to them. Bad with people. What would he do with all those pictures, with his orderly mind? Put them in order, catalog them. Make a list. That’s what you said. And that’s the way he was.”
Smudge scratched. “Well, all right. But … capable of violence? This is Gimpel, Garv. You said it—he hardly dared speak to anyone.”
“Did you ever see anyone sit in his place on that bench? Did you ever see someone try to take his violin off him?”
Smudge admitted he hadn’t. It was universally accepted, if unexplained, that Gimpel was never parted from his violin: he even took it into the toilets with him. Smudge scratched again. “So … What’re you saying?”
Garvie got off the rocking horse, put his cigarette pack in his jacket pocket. He drifted as far as the edge of the shadow and paused. “I’m saying, don’t wonder how he was lured out there. Don’t wonder if he was taken advantage of.”
“What, then?”
Garvie smiled. “Wonder where he got his gun from.”
There was a bit of a silence after he said this. And by the time Smudge had opened his mouth again Garvie had gone, and they were watching him disappear across the grass toward the gate.
First thing Monday morning there was a special assembly at Marsh Academy. It began at nine thirty, to give staff and students time to clear the new security procedures and make their way through the groups of police stationed at the school gates and the entrances to the main blocks. There were even policemen on the stage alongside the teachers; they stood immobile and impassive in front of a screen showing a greatly enlarged school photograph of an unsmiling boy with wet-looking hair and a tight grip on his violin, as Mr. Winthrop, the principal, addressed year eleven on the subject of Pyotor Gimpel, who had been, Mr. Winthrop said, a diligent student, a dutiful son and grandson, and a valued member of the Marsh Academy community.
“He trusted, as we all do, that life would at least treat him fairly. But that trust,” Mr. Winthrop said emotionally, “was betrayed.”
There was silence in the hall, from the teachers and policemen onstage, and from the students sitting in rows in the auditorium. And, coincidentally, there was silence between three boys not in the hall at that moment, not in school at all, but walking down a country lane past the sewage plant. Smudge, Felix, and Garvie Smith. They went through the gate in the tall wire fence into East Field industrial estate as far as the access road and came to a standstill, and stood there staring.
Not only the storage facility but also a radius of fifty meters of waste ground around it had been cordoned off behind scrub-clean plastic screens, three meters high, as if the whole area had been wrapped up ready to ship to a nearby laboratory or art gallery. Coveralled officials wearing face masks, boots, and gloves went in and out, fetching and carrying and looking busy.
“You got to give them credit,” Smudge said. “I mean, look how white it all is. You don’t usually get that effect this side of Christmas.”
There was a group of press photographers drinking coffee on the broken-up grass strip off the road, and uniformed constables with dogs going up and down sniffing things. Garvie gave them a wide berth. He wasn’t keen on dogs, especially not police dogs, particularly not large ones.
“It’s not their bite you’ve got to worry about,” Felix said, “it’s their bark. It can really put you off if you’re in the middle of something.”
They walked past police vehicles parked haphazardly along the strip, some with their strobes still going.
Felix said, “Will your uncle be here, Garv?”
Garvie shook his head. “Been and gone by now. Forensics are the early birds. Yesterday morning he’d have been here. Just the lab grunts now. Maybe the inspectors.”
Felix said, “Like that Singh guy who bust you up last time?”
Garvie sighed. “I told you before, it was all a misunderstanding.”
Past the empty police vehicles they walked as far as two unmarked cars, one a top-of-the-line Humvee, the other a nondescript Ford. In the Humvee were two policemen, who turned to look at them.
Felix said quickly, “Let’s go and play somewhere else.”
The car window came down and a face appeared.
“Hi,” Garvie said, strolling over. “Did you find out where the kid got his gun from yet?”
Detective Inspector Dowell got his face in order. “I’ll give you three seconds to step away from the car, son. And about a minute after that to get off the estate.” His Scots accent was as tough as tire rubber.
Ignoring him, Garvie looked past Dowell to the other man, impeccably uniformed, who sat nursing a bandaged arm.
“Inspector Singh. Nice to see you again.”
Singh just looked at
him.
“Good luck with all this, by the way,” Garvie said. “Think you’ll need it.” He paused. “Looks to me like it might be tricky.”
Out of sight, they loafed around the estate. It was, as the media had reported, semi-derelict. The layout was as simple as a tic-tac-toe board: four crossroads at right angles within a rectangular perimeter, half a dozen lots between intersections. The roads, wide enough for trucks, were pitted and cracked, the strips between them and the sidewalks bald and studded with industrial litter. Some of the buildings were brick, some prefabricated. All were run-down, most unoccupied. There was a wholesale timber merchant still operating, a couple of car shops, the warehouse and the storage facility; the rest of the buildings were disused. Although it was adjacent to the highway, just south of the sewage plant and only a twenty-minute walk through fields to the edge of Limekilns, the whole place felt remote, its quiet broken only by the occasional freight train going by on the nearby goods line with a tortured-metal noise of squeals and clunks. It was one of those places that seem apart from everything else, separate and lost.
“Lovely, isn’t it?” Smudge said after a train had gone by. “I think my eardrums are bleeding. What the hell was Gimpel doing out here?”
Scanning around, Garvie said nothing. Smudge said, “Okay, let’s look for clues.”
They went around the perimeter wire, kicking their way through drifts of litter, keeping an eye out for the police, Smudge giving a running commentary on his thoughts.
“This Magee must’ve abducted him somehow, I reckon, drove him out here, where it’s nice and deserted, bundled him out of the car, up the road there into the storage facility, and bang. Like an execution. There’s a witness saw most of it, apparently.”
Felix said, “What about the camera, Smudge?”
“What camera?”
“CCTV, by the entrance. We just passed it. Police haven’t said anything about a car.”
“Maybe they drove in a different way.”
“There is no different way. It’s the only entrance. That’s right, isn’t it, Garv?”
Garvie said shortly, “No other way for a car.”
They walked on in silence until they came to a hole in the fence.
“Wait a minute, I get it now,” Smudge said. “They didn’t come in a car, they came on foot. Magee pushes him through this hole here in the fence, drags him up the road there, bundles him into the storage facility and—”
“Assuming he gets past the SAFEWAY,” Felix said.
“What do you mean, SAFEWAY?”
“Security.” Security was one of Felix’s main areas of expertise. “SAFEWAY systems, Smudge. Multidiscipline hardware and software, wireless and hybrids. Not top of the range, like the SECO at that warehouse up there, but they’re all right. Only problem is, they don’t come with Crash and Smash. If you can find the control panel in sixty seconds after kicking in the door, you can just switch them off. And usually they’re in the most obvious place. Another thing,” he said, warming to his theme, “two o’clock’s the perfect time to break in. Police shifts change then, see. Plod just wants to go home. Even if the alarm goes off, you can race the police response, beat him every time.”
Smudge looked disgusted by this sudden large amount of technical information. “In other words, Magee probably could get past it, which is what I said. You got to remember, Felix, this was murder. No one was racing anything. So, to get back to what I was saying: He pushes him through the fence, drags him up the road, crash and smashes through the alarm hybrid thingy, bundles him into the—”
“Course,” Felix added thoughtfully, “once you’re in, you’ve still got to get through the internal security doors. They can be a bugger. Though to be fair, with a bit of advance warning, you can fix them with a piece of thin card sticky-tacked in the right place to the inside of the doorframe. Cuts the current, see?”
“Fascinating,” Smudge said. “You should run a school club: Science for Thieves. Anyway, as I was saying before I was interrupted: He pushes, drags, crash and smashes, bundles, sticky-tacks, et cetera and … bang. Classic execution really.”
They walked on, past a car workshop and a defunct fresh-fish wholesaler, still advertising on a faded wooden board WORLD’S FINEST SEAFOODS, STATE OF ART PREMISES and FREE PARKING, until they were back at the entrance, and Smudge said to Garvie, “You’re a bit slow today. Didn’t you spot nothing?”
Garvie shrugged. “No more than the obvious.”
“Go on, then.”
“Five big sheets of cardboard against the back wall of one of the workshops.”
“Yeah?”
“Neatly tied plastic bag full of empty soup tins under the fire escape.”
“So?”
“Half a dozen flattened cans of Special Brew thrown in the bush next to it.”
“Yeah. It’s called litter.”
“Someone sleeps rough here. He eats cold soup from tins and drinks Special Brew and sleeps under cardboard to keep warm.”
“Yeah, course. Obvious. So?”
“The witness mentioned by the police is almost certainly a vagrant.”
“Okay. And?”
“His testimony is likely to be vague and untrustworthy and won’t stand up in a court of law. So, as I said to Singh back there, it’s going to be tricky.”
“Yeah, well. They’re saying it’s straight up. They got the guy already, remember.”
“Not being rude to them, Smudge. But they don’t know how to think.”
Lighting up, they loitered by the gate, waiting for it to be too late to go back to school before lunchtime. Felix speculated on the contents of the storage facility units. Smudge pulled faces up at the CCTV camera until he cricked his neck.
Leaning against the gatepost, he said reflectively, “I tried to talk to him once, Gimpel. Couple of years ago. Saw him on his bench, and I went over, gave him some old chat about the weather or something, I forget what, and he just stared at me. Just stared, on and on. Like I was the weird one.”
Felix and Garvie gave Smudge a look.
“No, but. He didn’t say anything. Just looked at me. And I was like, I do not know what you are thinking.”
“And is that an unusual experience for you?”
“I can read people. Not Gimpel, though. That’s my point. Gimpel was … I don’t know. I don’t know, see, because I couldn’t read him.”
As they stood contemplating Smudge’s insight, the police Humvee came quietly along the road on overlarge tires and stopped alongside them. The window went down and Inspector Dowell’s face appeared, as before.
“Why aren’t you three in school?”
Smudge and Felix looked modestly at the ground.
“Doctor’s note.”
“Study leave.”
Dowell looked at Garvie, who had said nothing. “You?”
“Field trip.”
“To an industrial estate? Studying what?”
“Police competency. Anthropology, special option.”
Dowell’s eyes locked on to Garvie’s. His face changed color around the edges. “Tell you something, son,” he said in a low growl. “I’m going to remember you.”
Garvie shrugged. “Yeah, well. I’m going to try to forget you.”
There was a moment when Dowell seemed to reach for the door handle, but his in-car radio came on, and he gave Garvie a last stare, wound up the window, and pulled away down the rutted driveway that led to the main road.
“Got a death wish, have you?” Smudge said to Garvie. “The man’s a nutter. Didn’t you see his eyes? Didn’t you hear what he said?”
“He said he was going to remember me.”
“No, he didn’t. He said he was going to make it his business to seek you out and hunt you down and crush you into tiny bits of human rubbish. For a bright boy, sometimes you really don’t pay attention.”
“He’s right, Garv,” Felix said. “Now he’s clocked us. Best place for us is a long way from here.”
&nbs
p; Garvie considered this.
“Let’s go,” Smudge said.
They turned to go out the gate and Garvie turned the other way and began to walk back down the access road toward the cordoned-off storage facility.
Smudge and Felix looked after him, baffled. “What are you doing? That’s, like, the wrong way.”
“Should’ve realized earlier,” Garvie said over his shoulder. “How much they need my help.”
He opened the door of the Ford and slid into the passenger seat and sat there looking at Singh, who took no notice but carried on impassively reading his notes. After a moment a muscle twitched in the policeman’s cheek.
Without looking around, he said evenly, “What are you doing in my car?”
“This your car? You’re kidding!”
Singh remained silent.
“It’s not a very nice car. It’s not as nice as that car you had before.”
Turning sharply, Singh glared at Garvie, who gazed back at him innocently, and at last the policeman swallowed his fury. He shook his head, almost laughed.
“No one else! Only you! Only you could barge in here and say something so … so … Well? What do you want?”
Garvie said, “I can help.”
Singh rearranged his bandaged arm and composed his face. “No,” he said. “You can’t. I told you before, a crime is not a game. It’s not a puzzle for bored schoolkids to try to solve.”
Garvie didn’t reply. He nodded at the cordoned-off area in front of the car. “You’ve wrapped it all up nicely, I’ll say that for you.” He paused and went on. “It said on the news you’d been called out to an alarm going off at a warehouse somewhere. Up there, I suppose.”