‘How long!’ Adam answered. ‘This is a long shot at best. I’ve no idea if there’s even anything here.’ He looked down at his computer as the search finished. The screen started filling with images. He flicked through them, the first pages full of pink flesh and women either topless or naked, often with a naked man in close attendance. The flesh gave way to another folder, this one of black and white scanned photos of a young man and a woman on their wedding day, then photos in faded colour of the same couple with two young boys, then pages of recent pictures of smiling child faces. Pictures of grandchildren talking to granddad using the webcam. There were scanned utility bills and newspaper cuttings and magazine articles. There were images of cars and parts from auction and review sites, but not one single image of a Rover or car documentation.
Then the phone started ringing. They both ignored it.
He looked up at Brian. ‘There’s nothing. We’ve got every kind of image except what we’re looking for.’
Brian moved anxiously. ‘Nothing? Maybe you missed it?’
Adam shook his head. ‘I’ve got a filter here for every type of document that could be an image or could contain an image. There’s a load of stuff but nothing we’re looking for.’
The phone stopped ringing and immediately started again.
‘You’ve got to find something, Adam. This guy was into cars big time. There’s pictures upstairs that were in albums, copies of documentation like they were prizes. Everything but the Rover. There’s got to be something and we need to find it quick. I’d bet half the neighbours have sodding keys and whoever’s ringing is about a breath from deciding matey upstairs needs medical attention.
Adam held his head in his hands and tried to think. ‘If we assume he keeps copies and they’re not on the laptop, maybe they’re precious enough that he would keep them somewhere else.’
Brian began to look more hopeful. ‘What like?’
‘That’s the problem, it could be anything from an external disk or a flash drive on his key chain.’
Brian had no idea what Adam was talking about but he did know what a key chain was, quickly getting up and climbing the stairs. The phone stopped ringing and stayed silent for a short while.
Adam walked through the debris of the dining room to the living room, looking at everything without really seeing anything, mentally stepping through the imagery of what he had seen in the house. Where would the images be stored? And then he saw a broken picture frame and stopped. He had seen something but where? He walked through the house trying to give the image context, searching through the kitchen and then the hall, the smell of gas and burned flesh growing stronger as he climbed the stairs. He looked through the main bedroom, stepping around Brian who was busily sifting through drawers. He checked the bathroom and then braced himself and stepped into the spare room.
He tried to avoid looking at the body, holding his breath against the nauseating smell. He edged around the hobby table to the scattered litter at the foot of a high bookcase. He bent down and sifted through magazines and old LPs on the floor. He picked up a black picture frame, the modern digital kind. The sort where you plugged in a memory card and sat watching a slideshow. He flipped it over and ejected the card and ran quickly back downstairs.
Thirty seconds later he was paging through image after image of cars and documentation. He sorted them in date order and jumped to the last of the images. There were about ten of a gleaming green Rover taken from all angles outside the house, two yellow signs in the back window he could not read but could guess what they said. He shook his head at the irony as he highlighted all the files and copied them to his laptop. He pulled the vehicle documentation full screen, the new owner details written in neat handwriting.
Simon Thompson,
an address in
Cleethorpes
, which was a place Adam knew of without knowing where it was.
The phone started ringing again.
He called Brian, failing to keep the triumph from his voice. And then something else occurred to him, a discordant note he had not dwelt on because he had not been looking for photos of people. He flipped back to the images on the old man’s disk drive. He sorted them in date order and jumped to the bottom. There were lots of pictures in the webcam folder of smiling grandchildren. The image that stood out was the very last one. It had been taken three hours earlier, was badly distorted and from a low angle looking up. It showed half of one face and then all of another from the chin upwards. It must have been taken as the laptop was drop kicked, the webcam built into the lid. The picture was so blurred it contained no identifiable detail save for the fact both looked like white men with blond hair.
Brian appeared, followed by the smell of gas. He leaned in to look at the image on the screen as Adam looked up at him. The smell of gas was stronger than it had been.
‘What’ve you done Brian?’
‘I haven’t done anything that wasn’t already set in motion. But we have about a minute before this whole place gets busy burning.’
The doorbell rang, the sound joining the cacophony of the ringing phone. They both looked to the living room and the beam of a torch shining through the window. It pulled away as a shadow tried to peer through the curtains.
Brian’s voice was now urgent. ‘You need to pack your stuff and we need to go.’ He released the catch on the patio and slid it open by an inch. Adam disconnected the old man’s drive and left it on the table, closing the lid of his laptop as he slid it into the bag.
‘Follow me out,’ Brian said. ‘Then run for the back fence, get over it and track back around to the car. I’ll be right behind you.’ Brian opened the door and Adam, without a thought, ran across the grass, ducking beneath an empty washing line he saw at the last second, high stepping through wet mud to a low mass of thick branches that backed on to the tall fence. He reached up and dropped the bag over and tried to get leverage. His foot found purchase as he heard a shout from the house that was not Brian and then footsteps right behind. Then Brian was beside him and over the fence. Another shout from behind but closer as Adam tried hoisting himself up, the beam of a torch jumping across the fence. He could hear laboured breathing getting closer, then a contained
whump
and shattering glass and a brief flare of orange that filled the night. Then he felt a hand on his jacket as Brian lifted and dragged him over and bundled him to the other side.
FORTY-SEVEN
Simon closed his eyes although it was dark already, the whiskey in his mouth a moment’s distraction from the conflict of his mind. The images of flesh flickered fast, the dark within slithering wetly, whispering its sweet nothings as it squeezed free the need that washed through his veins.
He was conflicted of course. Some part of him fought. A part that clung to what he used to be. It was a wistful fight though. A fight lost before it started, this need was too much of what he had become, this dark that writhed inside.
There was no great mystery to
why.
He could place a pin on the key markers of his life, the catalogue of decisions and bad choices made over time that had gradually shaped his mind and his need, the genesis for this journey a schism in a happy childhood. He had no complaints, not really. Parents have their own agendas, their own frailties to be kept hidden. They had paid their price.
He could not recall what
she
looked like any more. Not the finer detail. Just her short dark hair, her dark eyes that turned him marshmallow inside. Her smile, that turned him inside out. Even then she had possessed some grace, tempting him with her bare child limbs as she peered shyly around his bedroom door, wearing one of his T-shirts, too big for her and reaching down to her knees.
‘Can I come in?’ she would ask. He could still hear her voice.
‘Sure,’ he would say. She would glide around the periphery of his room, plucking at comics and examining the plastic figures adorning his shelves.
‘What does this one do?’
And he would tell her. ‘He has vision that is like the sun. He has to use glasses to stop from burning everyone.’
She would move around the room, eventually gravitating to him, dropping restlessly onto the foot of his bed and sitting cross-legged, pulling the shirt down over her knees with a self-conscious smile.
‘What do you want to do?’ she would say.
He would look down at the book or comic he was reading and close it. ‘What do you want to do?’
‘It is up to you.’ Her accent was almost too English to be English.
He knew her for just under two years from the first day she arrived to the day she had not been there anymore. So quiet at first, busily watching. There was something different about her. Skin that always looked like summer and eyes that stretched wider, seemed bigger. Those eyes had cost Jimmy Sanders his life, although nobody knew. She had been there only two weeks when she crashed through the door and disappeared upstairs. She had cried a lot, but not like that. Eventually his mother pulled the truth from her. Jimmy Sanders had spent every day at school from the first calling her a
Chink
.
Simon could not explain what he subsequently did, not then. Nothing had really mattered to him before, especially not girls. She had been explained away by his mother as the daughter of his father’s friend, over from Singapore. She would be staying for a while. After two weeks they had barely exchanged more than soft grins, but for some reason an attack on her seemed like an attack on him. An invasion of his world, an encroachment on something he was responsible for. It was an instinctive reaction. He knew now why that was. But not then. Everything is instinctive when you are twelve.
So he warned off Jimmy. Most kids paid attention when Simon gave warnings. But not Jimmy. He was untouchable with a supporting cast of the disaffected. He kept up his chants and took to pushing her around. One afternoon she came home with the buttons ripped from her shirt and that night Jimmy said goodbye to his friends, walking between pools of street light with smoke trailing behind.
Simon confronted Jimmy but he would not listen. Maybe he just saw Simon for the age he was and not for what he was physically. In Jimmy’s mind Simon’s twelve years were no match for fifteen. Physically there was no match. Jimmy was Simon’s first, silent and mouth gaping. His eyes wide with disbelieving horror right until they lost focus. The remains of Jimmy Sanders washed up on Hunstanton beach three years later. Very few missed him and nobody called her a Chink any more.
Nights in those days were about the music downstairs, the distant jukebox thump and the chime of slot machines, the endless voices merging to each other. Living above a pub was all Simon knew, these were the sounds of his every day. When sleep reached out for him it did so with gentle hands, but it was a foreign world to her.
The first time she appeared in his doorway, she was shivering and naked, although all he saw was an inquisitive face and an elbow, a fleeting glimpse of a shoulder and a bare hip. ‘Do you have a spare T-shirt?’ she asked.
‘Sure,’ he said, knowing full well she had some of her own. He stepped across and pulled one from his drawer and threw it to her. She scooped it up with a fleeting flash of flesh and disappeared. The next night she reappeared with the shirt hanging large over her slight frame. The three fish hovering just where he imagined her legs joined her body.
‘Can I come in?’ she asked. She always asked, each and every time.
That winter they played checkers and cards and read books to the accompanying groans of the radiator and the distant cacophony of the pub. Sometimes they would sit side by side on the bed watching TV or just looking out at the night sky. These were his favourite times. She would tell him about her world which seemed so alien to him and now so far away to her. A world of sun and warm rain that fell so hard it was like standing in a shower. And heat that she said was like a hundred hair dryers. Where all the people looked different, not like this new world where almost everyone was white and a few were blacker than the night. Her world, she said, was everything between.
Winter became spring and then a summer that stood out in his mind, especially for three weeks in which she said the daytime sun and the midday rain reminded her of home. He took to sitting on the bed in just his shorts, at first from the heat and then because she was fascinated by the stretch of muscle across his body. He liked that and the touch of her fingers as she traced the contours, although he had no clue why it should feel so good.
In those hottest weeks she did the same, wriggling out of the shirt and sitting there in just her knickers. Although he had not dared trace the shape of her body as they played cards and sat looking out of the window, every accidental touch of their legs and arms full of charge and unfathomable meaning.
Simon turned thirteen and she stayed twelve, still flat and lean save for the emerging shape of hips and legs, despite it taking the rest of the summer for him to actually notice. And then one day she pulled free her top, despite the sun being a distant memory and the radiators groaning their discord. And the dots connected. Simon reached across and gently held her arm and pulled her towards him. She whispered,
At last
. And they wriggled down and held each other close, getting warm with hands on bare skin. A wealth and land unknown. Both feeling within that something else must happen but not knowing
what
.
They discovered
what
the following spring and she was gone before the summer was over, taken from him one morning amid a heavy air after they fell asleep with limbs entangled.
The irony, the irony pinched Simon inside. His kindred spirit, two beating parts of a whole. The irony, he drank to the irony.
The daughter of his father’s friend!
She was the dirty secret whisked away amid parental horror. Like they as children were the ones to feel guilty. What did his parents expect? Telling neither child the fragile secret lest it escape, for fear a family might be seen for what it was.