by Jack Benton
Slim let her shake his hand then bid her goodbye. He wondered as he walked away whether he should have asked about Jim Randall. Maybe Elena knew the name, but in the meantime he wanted to keep Randall close to his chest, unveiling his cards one at a time to avoid them influencing each other.
He walked back toward the high street, but as soon as he was out of sight he doubled back and headed for the station.
There, he caught a train to Manchester.
22
Just after quarter to midday, he climbed down from a small but crowded train and looked around. It had been a while since he’d last willingly gone to a major city and he found himself feeling a little overwhelmed. He had always preferred small towns because it was easier to avoid the vices that always seemed to find him. Here, though, he was looking for just that: the seedier side, the underbelly. Whether the city would provide was another matter. A couple of hours on the internet at Holdergate Library had provided him with a list of the areas in modern Manchester considered most downtrodden by public opinion. From outside the station he caught a hopper bus into the city centre, walked to Piccadilly Bus Station and caught a commuter bus up to Church Street.
He’d been kidnapped, beaten up, and stabbed, and that had been since he’d left the military. He felt less fear walking through the tougher streets than he generally did walking through woods, almost as though it were the familiarity of a situation that soothed him. Having not so long ago been among the down and outs, he also felt something like kinship with the people living in Britain’s social cracks. It wasn’t long before he started to see the kind of people he was looking for.
A group of obvious drug users sauntered up the street in his direction. One absently requested change as they passed, but the others ignored him, his face perhaps marking him as one of them.
‘Hey!’ he called, turning around.
‘What do you want?’ said the nearest, turning around and spreading his hands as though spoiling for a fight.
‘I’m looking for information,’ Slim said. ‘I’m trying to track someone down.’
‘Who the hell are you?’
‘I’m a nobody looking for another nobody. Think you can help me?’
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled pile of banknotes and a handful of creased business cards which only had his name and phone number. He tossed a couple of tenners on the ground and watched the nearest man scramble to scoop them up.
‘I’ve got more if you can find me who I need,’ Slim said. ‘How does a grand sound?’
‘And what do you want in return?’
‘I’m looking for a dead man, information on him. A man called Jim Randall. He was on the street back in the seventies, maybe even the sixties. He died in 1977. I want you to find me someone old enough that they might have known that man. Someone who might have grown up on the streets during that time.’
‘You’ll be lucky.’
‘So will you be if you find someone.’
‘We’ll be in touch,’ the man said, grinning. Slim watched him turn and swagger away up the street, his companions close behind, bickering over the money the first man clutched in his hand. As they reached a corner, the first man glanced back over his shoulder and started laughing, as though sure he had played Slim for a mug.
When they had disappeared from sight, Slim shrugged and carried on his way. It was likely he would never see the men nor hear from them again, but it was a seed planted, and if he planted enough, maybe a tree would grow.
He headed on, looking for the next person who fit his criteria, a thousand pounds in crumpled used notes padding out his pocket.
He stopped in mid-afternoon for an early dinner, before heading out again as darkness descended over the city. After dark he expected to find his most likely candidates. Tracking down the homeless wasn’t hard, it was finding those with a connection to a man dead more than forty years that was tough. Slim’s best hope was to encounter someone who had sorted their life out, moved on from a troubled past.
With his money running out, he began making the rounds of homeless shelters, asking for information. A couple of people laughed and shrugged off his request as fanciful. One older volunteer took him into an office room, offered him coffee then promised to ask around.
It was as much as he could hope for. No one stayed on the streets for forty years. You either got off the street or you died there. Exhausted, Slim caught the last train back to Holdergate and barely reached his guesthouse on his feet. As he climbed into bed, though, he felt more grateful for the comfort of soft clean sheets than he had done in a long time.
23
‘A man came by yesterday, asking for you,’ the guesthouse owner, Wendy, told Slim over breakfast. ‘He gave me a business card to pass on. If you can hang on a moment, I’ll just go and hunt out where I put it.’
Slim was running through a list of people who might know how to find him, everyone from Robert Downs to an ex-boyfriend of Lia’s who might have taken umbrage at his treatment of her. When he looked at the name printed on the card Wendy was holding out, he was so stunned he must have shown surprise, because Wendy said, ‘Not who you were expecting, I’ll suppose?’
Slim smiled as he took the card. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Thanks for keeping it.’
Tobin P. Firth. Beneath the name was just a mobile number. On the other side, in swirling letters: Children’s author.
‘I’m afraid I didn’t have anything he’d written so I had him sign a Harry Potter,’ Wendy swooned. ‘He seemed to see the funny side. Friend of yours?’
‘I’m not sure yet,’ Slim said. ‘We’ve never met.’
Wendy didn’t seem to find this odd, just shrugged and excused herself to go and clean up the dishes. Slim took the card and walked down the road to the small park at the end before he took it out again to call the number.
The call was answered on the second ring. ‘Slim Hardy, is that you?’ came a soft, almost childlike voice, and Slim could almost imagine he was talking to that same boy who had been the last to see Jennifer Evans alive.
‘It’s me,’ Slim said. ‘I’m honored that you got in touch. It was a surprise to hear you came to my guesthouse.’
‘When I got your message—well, perhaps it would be better if we talked in person. Where are you now?’
‘In the park at the end of the street from where I’m staying.’
‘I took a room across the street from you,’ came the reply. ‘I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.’
Slim had to remind himself that Tobin P. Firth was older than he. Boyish, with the look of years of soft living about him, Tobin was clean shaven, plump and wide-eyed. A little shorter than Slim, in a leather jacket that had probably cost more than Slim’s last car, he looked like an enthusiastic school kid about to embark on an adventure.
‘Call me Toby,’ he said. ‘Tobin’s just a pen name. It’s not even mine. And the P stands for “pen”, just to remind me.’
‘Sure, Toby,’ Slim said. ‘Slim is kind of a pen name of my own. Just no pens involved.’
‘I won’t ask,’ Toby said.
‘Don’t. It’s not an interesting story.’
It was a warm spring day with not a cloud in the sky. In the park’s corner, a light breeze was buffeting the long grass left by the turning circle of a wheeled mower. Slim sat across from Toby on a wooden bench with a view between two lines of houses of the high moors rising in the distance.
‘I tried to read one of your books,’ Slim said. ‘I’m afraid I’m not much of a reader. I try from time to time but I rarely get more than a few chapters in before giving up.’
Toby laughed. ‘You don’t look like the kind of person who’d be into young adult fantasy,’ he said. ‘More like gritty crime, I’d imagine.’
Slim nodded. ‘And I live it enough to not need to read it.’
Toby nodded, mumbling something illegible under his breath, and then let out a long sigh. ‘Let’s just cut to it, Slim. You want to know w
hat I saw. It doesn’t matter why on Earth of everything you could have done, you’ve chosen to dig up this mystery. You want to know what I saw, and I want to tell you.’
‘I’m glad.’
Toby squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘Goddamn, if that night didn’t alter the entire course of my life. And all I’ve ever wanted was to tell it how I remember.’
‘Tell me. It might mean nothing, or it might mean everything. What did you see that night, and what did Jennifer see?’
Toby whistled. ‘I never told the police, because I didn’t want to get my back whipped by my dad thinking I was a liar. I mean, I was a kid but I wasn’t stupid. I knew it couldn’t be what I thought, but that’s what I saw. And I knew it was serious. It was the police, not just some kids at school.’
‘What did you see?’
Toby looked at Slim, fixing him with a firm stare. ‘I saw a man vanish into thin air.’
24
There was an olde-worlde pub called the Ironmonger’s Arms on the corner of the street opposite the church, eaves that might have been fake overhanging where a man stood talking on his mobile phone and sucking on a vape. Inside, Slim ordered a pint of Stella for Toby and a pint of alcohol-free for himself, praying he could hold himself together. He excused himself to take a bathroom break where he splashed water on his face, and when he came back, Toby had already drank half his beer and bought in two more. Slim stared at the two full drinks, unable to be sure which was the first one he had bought, and fearing what Toby, unaware of Slim’s condition, might have ordered. In the end, he picked up the nearest, taking a small sip, finding it had that coppery tingle of alcohol. He moved his hands away.
‘Control,’ he whispered.
‘I wasn’t about to tell the police because I knew they wouldn’t believe me,’ Toby was saying. ‘So I said nothing about it at all. I didn’t want them to think I was lying, and like I say, my dad was a hard bastard if I misbehaved.’
From the way Toby took a long drink after his explanation, his eyes gazing off into space, Slim felt sure only half the story was being told.
‘You were six years old,’ Slim said. ‘I fell off my bike and split my elbow around the age of five, but that’s practically my only memory of the first few years of my life. How can you be sure of what you saw, so long after?’
‘I don’t need to be sure,’ Toby said, slugging back another quarter of a pint and then wiping his mouth on his sleeve as though he were still six years old. ‘I have proof. The photograph.’
‘I’ve seen it,’ Slim said. ‘All it shows is the footprints in the snow. There’s no proof Jennifer saw anything.’
Toby shrugged and took another swig of beer, making Slim, trying to hold himself together by taking small sips of his pint, wonder who had the drinking problem.
‘Yeah, that’s the one I gave to the police,’ Toby said, looking up to meet Slim’s eyes. ‘The one of the photos in the snow. I was happy enough to hand that one over.’ He took a long sigh that seemed to involve his entire upper body, and Slim wondered if he was about to cry. ‘But that wasn’t the only one. There’s another.’
Slim was sure the photograph would look clearer if he was sober, but it was too late for that. He had done better than expected, consuming at his best estimate less than half that of his drinking partner, but he still found himself staring at the photograph through a drunken haze, aware that nearby, bestselling children’s author Tobin P. Fifth was sobbing into his sixth or seventh beer.
‘I’m not afraid anymore,’ Toby said, wiping his eyes. ‘That bastard can’t hurt me. He can’t call me a liar, call me useless, a fag, a sissy, because I’m right. I was right all along. Wasn’t I? Wasn’t I, Slim?’
Slim tried to say something about helping Toby find a therapist, but he wasn’t sure what words actually came out. All he could do was stare at the picture in his hands.
‘It’s not the original,’ Toby said, wiping his eyes. ‘I keep that locked away. This is an enlarged version. You can keep it.’
‘It’s blurry. Is that the copy or my eyes?’
‘The original is the same. I had a few copies done at a photo shop a few years back, in case I ever lost the original. It’s as good as it could be.’
‘Well, thanks.’
Toby stabbed a finger at the picture, almost hard enough to crease it. ‘See? I wasn’t lying. I took these pictures back to back, less than thirty seconds apart. There’s Jennifer. There’s her tracks. But the man … no tracks.’
The man. The first picture, taken moments before the second, showed Jennifer turning on her heels, arms flailing out to her sides as though she were about to do a pirouette. Where her feet scuffed the snow was clearly visible.
And there at the top of the picture, arms folded as he stood in the shadows beneath a line of trees that overhung the fence bordering Holdergate Park, stood a man. Visible in the first picture, gone in the second. No sign of tracks, nothing.
Slim looked up. ‘And you saw this? You saw him vanish?’
‘I was taking a picture of the street,’ Toby said. ‘She wandered into shot just as I was lining it up. I guess she looks a little blurred because of the length of the exposure, plus the light was poor. She was moving, you see? That’s why. After she ran off, I liked the way her footprints had left a trail, so I took another. Only then did I think about what had happened, so I looked around for her, but assumed she had gone back to the train. I didn’t really look at the pictures until we were back on board a couple of hours later, after they had cleared the line. Someone was serving up soup in the waiting room, so my mother called me in.’
‘You didn’t see Jennifer?’
Toby shook his head. ‘No. I assumed she’d gone to sit back on the train.’
‘But did you see this man? Out there on the street?’
Toby looked up. ‘He was standing right there, just watching the parking area at the front of the station as though he was waiting for someone but didn’t want them to see him first. Yeah, I saw him. I looked down to take the picture. I was actually trying to cut him out, but I’d never used a camera before and it was a Polaroid, so you had a wait before you knew what you’d taken. Then out comes Jennifer. Starts walking across the road, looks up, sees this guy, turns on her heel and bolts. The guy didn’t move, just stood there. I lift the camera, take another shot. I’m looking through the lens, he’s there. Look up … he’s gone. Vanished. I went outside to take a look, but there was no sign of him, just Jennifer’s tracks in the snow.’
Slim didn’t know what to make of Tony’s explanation, but he suspected by the speed Toby was throwing back drinks that his memory had become somewhat distorted over the last forty-two years.
‘What did you make of it all at the time?’
‘I was a kid. Yeah, it was spooky, but all just a big adventure. Even more so when I saw those pictures, and it wasn’t until a long time after that I really understood what was going on.’ He looked down. ‘I mean, until I got home, and then … well.’
Slim frowned. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know what had happened later, but Toby had left the situation dangling, and Slim felt it polite to ask.
‘I … I knew I shouldn’t have gone out in the snow,’ Toby said, breaking out into sobbing again. ‘I had new shoes. I wasn’t to get them mucky. And the camera … it was a present. I wasn’t looking after it well enough.’ The look of utter horror in Toby’s eyes made Slim wish he’d never got in contact. ‘He made me sorry,’ Toby whimpered. ‘He made me sure I’d never do it again.’
Other customers had begun to notice them. Slim, usually the drunkest in any drinking party, muttered an apology in the direction of the bar, and then helped Toby outside into the sunshine. They walked down the street, and Slim was happy he could feign sobriety long enough to buy a bottle of brandy from a corner shop. They went over to Holdergate Park and found a bench in a quiet corner where they shared the bottle. Slim, feeling miserable and just wanting to drink alone and i
n peace, found himself consoling an increasingly rambling Toby as the writer descended into a chaos of suppressed memories, few of which were clear, and even fewer of which made much sense. By the time Slim had finally directed Toby home, he was left wondering if he could believe a single word the writer had told him, or whether he was simply part of the plot for a new book Toby had decided to brainstorm on a whim.
It was dark when Slim finally stumbled back to his lodgings. He crawled up the stairs, slipped into his room and collapsed on the bed, aware that he was beginning to lose control once more, something he couldn’t afford to do if he wanted to keep a handle on the case.
As he remembered something Toby had told him just before they parted, he wondered if perhaps what he had thought would be a clean and simple missing persons case was turning out to be an investigation darker than his sanity could handle.
Toby, bloodshot eyes filled with tears: ‘I still have the scar behind my ear where he broke the camera over my head. Mother had already gone into the house. He told her I slipped in the snow.’
25
The hangover was all-consuming. Slim vomited into the little sink, cleaned it up as best he could, then drank as much water as he could handle, vomited that, and then repeated the process, hoping to clean out his guts a little. He showered and dressed, making himself as presentable as possible, before stumbling downstairs for the guesthouse’s complimentary breakfast.
Feeling a little better with some greasy fry-up in his stomach, he went to the park at the end of the street and called Kay Skelton, a former army friend who now worked in forensics.
‘Slim, is that you? It’s been a while. How are you doing?’
Slim smiled, always happy to hear Kay’s voice. ‘I’m surviving,’ he said. ‘Working a new case in the Peak District. I wanted to pick your brains about photography. I’m wondering about exposures and lighting. How they could make a person appear in one picture, then gone in the next.’