Authors: Neil Cross
16
I
The next morning, they bought and watched a DVD copy of
It’s a Wonderful Life
. They agreed it was essential to find William Holloway.
To Shepherd it seemed impossible. Lenny conceded it would be difficult. He suggested it would be better to concentrate instead on finding Holloway’s wife and daughter.
People behaved oddly when a loved one had committed a crime. The more terrible the crime, the less accountable their reaction to it. Nobody wanted their husband or their father to be a butcher of young women. Holloway’s arrest and incarceration would prove beyond legal doubt that he was just that. So Lenny believed the women might have an idea of Holloway’s whereabouts, even if they hadn’t told the police about it. Or even each other.
But Holloway’s wife and daughter were themselves in hiding. It seemed to Shepherd that, if the super-evolved predatory instinct of the assembled tabloid press had not located them, their own chances were vanishingly slight.
Lenny scolded him.
‘Remember,’ he said. ‘An assumption is a thing you don’t know you’re making.’
They didn’t
know
the tabloids hadn’t found the Holloway women. It was just as likely that the papers were temporarily co-operating with the police, withholding certain information and deferring certain stories, perhaps in exchange for ‘leaked’ exclusives when the case finally broke. The papers’ very silence on the subject since the initial flurry of reportage might be a part of the police’s overall strategy.
‘But if they’re not hiding from the press,’ said Shepherd, ‘who are they hiding from?’
‘
Everyone
,’ said Lenny. ‘Would you want
your
friends calling, in the circumstances?’
Shepherd thought about Rachel.
‘No,’ he said.
Although Lenny had decided the problem was surmountable, the problem of how to go about actually surmounting it vexed him for several days. He rejected Shepherd’s suggestion that they simply hire a private detective. He held such men and their abilities in low esteem.
For the rest of the week, Lenny drank many cups of strong, white tea with one sugar and smoked himself to tension headaches, which he dispelled by watching
Fifteen to One
,
Countdown
,
Watercolour Challenge
and
Ricki Lake
. He ran his hands through his hair. He read and reread old newspapers that reported on the Temple of Light, the killing of Joanne Grayling, the events that followed. He plugged in the Playstation and sat crosslegged before the television screen, playing
Driver
for hours at a sitting. The tip of his thumb blistered and bled. He nibbled at the swollen balloon of skin. He popped Nurofen Plus into his mouth like chocolate raisins and muttered and cursed to himself as though Shepherd was not there.
Eventually, he had formulated his plan. He asked Shepherd to buy them two return train tickets to Leeds.
They travelled up on the Monday morning, first class. On the train, they swapped sections of the
Guardian
, spreading them noisily flat on the table. They took it in turns to make frequent visits to the buffet car and returned with super-heated hamburgers in Styrofoam clams, or cheesy corn puffs that took skin from the roof of the mouth. The people in business suits cast them sidelong glances. At some point, each of the business men and women yapped garbage into a mobile telephone. They spoke a form of English Shepherd barely recognized, full of puffed-up, bellicose instruction and military metaphor.
Lenny revelled in the incongruity. He wiggled his little finger at his ear, symbolizing the small, flaccid penises of everyone around them. When he’d finished the newspaper, he ostentatiously produced a tatty Penguin copy of
Crime and Punishment
from his overnight bag and settled back into his seat.
The train pulled in to Leeds station at lunchtime. They slung their overnight bags over their shoulders and walked through the city centre. Shepherd didn’t mind spending money on first-class travel, but he resented overpaying for a hotel room they would barely see, except to sleep in. So they booked in to a bed-and-breakfast on Upper Briggate, close to the Odeon. The obese proprietor wore a T-shirt several sizes too small; from its lower hem there emerged a great swell of purple striated, hairy flesh. He wheezed as if sexually exerted and gave every impression that renting rooms to strangers was a hazardous business and more trouble than it was worth.
They asked for adjoining single rooms. The proprietor rolled his eyes and exhaled. He apprised them curtly—as if suspecting it might be their fault that the lift was out of order. Cowed by his wrath, they crept shamefully up three flights of narrows stairs.
Shepherd’s room was laid out like a bedsitter and smelled faintly of seared cotton. It was clean enough. The remote control to the ancient portable television was held together with cracked, yellowing sellotape. He dumped his bag on the single bed and joined Lenny in a similar room next door.
Lenny had done the research. Most of the city’s student population lived in the Leeds 6 postal district, just north of the city centre. The newspapers had reported that Caroline Holloway lived in the Hyde Park area, so they hailed a taxi outside the Odeon, huddled in their coats because it was beginning to rain, and asked the driver to take them to the biggest student pub in Hyde Park. It was a short journey. The taxi turned off the Headrow, past the Merrion centre and the bone-white university clocktower, the Parkinson building. Hyde Park itself, tree-bordered, flashed by on their left.
The pub was named for the park. It was a hangar of a place that stood across the road from a kebab shop, a Blues Brothers themed pizza takeaway, a boarded-up second-hand bookshop and a shop that sold vegetarian footwear. Inside, six pool tables and a bar that ran the length of two walls seemed hardly to take up space. Patrons roamed the worn carpets as if in an east European airport terminal. Knots of students played pool, hunched over tables, gaped at televisions mounted in high corners.
Lenny insisted that his plan was glorious in its artlessness: it relied for success on human weakness, and therefore couldn’t disappoint. Because Caroline Holloway was connected with a celebrated murder (albeit indirectly), she had become a campus celebrity. Celebrity was social currency. Even those who could not claim to have met her would exaggerate their connection to and relationship with people who did.
There were limited degrees of separation within such an interconnected community: the network of people who claimed to know Caroline would have spread exponentially, like mould on a slice of bread. People who knew her vaguely would claim to be among her closest friends. People who knew and didn’t like her would claim she was a wonderful person, a good friend. It would be socially stigmatic to admit, even to a stranger, that one was not in some way acquainted with her.
So Lenny’s plan consisted of buying drinks for students and engaging them in conversation, into which he would introduce the topic of Caroline Holloway. Eventually, he believed, they would track this intricate grid of hearsay and gossip back to someone who actually knew her. Thus they might eventually come to learn where she was.
Shepherd doubted it would work.
Lenny insisted he have some confidence in him.
‘And lack confidence in the probity of others,’ said Shepherd.
‘Come on,’ said Lenny. ‘We’re talking about
students
.’
Inside the Hyde Park, Shepherd got them drinks while Lenny set them up at a pool table. Lenny suggested they order drinks they didn’t like, thus regulating their intake. So Shepherd ordered himself a Bacardi and Coke and got Lenny an American Budweiser, a beer to which he was ideologically opposed.
Lenny gripped the bottle by the neck and said: ‘Ha ha.’
They set a proprietorial pile of £1 coins on the edge of a pool table. The blue baize was pilled like an old sweater. As the afternoon passed, the pub began to fill. Young men and women took their places at the other pool tables. Lenny offered a game of doubles to anyone who hung round, watching, or who looked on resentfully at the pile of cash that secured the table for many games to come. Some joined them, others chose not to. Either way, Lenny made little overt effort to ingratiate himself. He had a faintly menacing presence and was edgy and irritable while playing; but he played impressively. He ran jerky, quickfire rings round the more ponderous and less skilled Shepherd.
Judging the moment, Lenny would line up a shot and ask his opponent if they knew Caroline Holloway. Most simply said no, supped from their pints and played on. One or two leaned on their cue and told him to fuck off. Lenny never pressed the issue, and he never lost a game.
Although they continued to nurse their drinks, Lenny moved on to Guinness and Shepherd whiskey at about 7 p.m. Thus, when they left the Hyde Park some time after 10 p.m., they were tottering and befuddled. They queued in the takeaway, then found a bench on the underlit fringes of the park, sat down and ate their doner kebabs. Shepherd got chilli sauce and shreds of lettuce in his beard. To shake off the pub fug, they agreed to walk back to the hotel. Rain was intermittent and the streets of Leeds 6 were quiet. Buses passed them. Fiercely illuminated from within, they carried no passengers.
Shepherd, who was not much of a drinker, woke late with a hangover. He rolled around the narrow bed for a while, not long enough, then crawled to the bathroom and hunkered under the wretched, rusty discharge from the showerhead. He sat in the tub, hugging his knees and let tepid water trickle intermittently over his scalp and down his spine. His beard was odorous with lamb fat, stale cigarette smoke and chilli sauce. He could smell his own breath. He soaped his beard with complimentary shampoo that had the look and consistency of semen.
He dressed and banged on Lenny’s door. They went to find a café. Lenny was trembling. He had puffy, violet rings round his eyes.
In the café, Lenny broke the snotty meniscus of egg yolk with a triangle of fried, white bread. ‘Fuck,’ he said, and put his head in his hands. He removed a strip of Nurofen Plus from his jacket pocket and popped six pills into his mouth. He dry-swallowed and offered the strip to Shepherd, who chastely declined, sipping from his orange juice.
By the time they got to the Hyde Park, their heads were clearing and they were resolved, if not actually ready, to start again. This time they took a break early in the evening, eating pizza from the box on the park bench they’d occupied the previous night.
Towards closing time, Lenny asked a hulking rugby boy who’d just lost four frames if he knew Caroline. The boy was built to Shepherd’s approximate dimensions, with a quiff of curly blond hair. He wore chinos and a checked shirt. His face was flushed cherry-red. He set his pint glass on the baize and took a lowering step towards Lenny.
Lenny leaned on his cue. From his pocket he took a small aerosol of mace. He showed it to the boy, who examined it minutely. He called Lenny a cunt and blundered off to join his exclusively male companions in the farthest corner of the pub, where he began publicly to exaggerate what had just happened. Within a week or two, it would become a gun that Lenny showed him.
Someone tapped Lenny on the shoulder.
He turned. A casually dressed, elegantly balding young man squared up to him. The young man asked Lenny who the fuck he was.
Lenny collected what dignity he was able.
‘My name is Lenny,’ he said.
‘Why are you looking for Caroline Holloway?’
‘Do you know her?’
‘Nobody here has a story to sell.’
‘Oh, mate,’ said Lenny. ‘I’m not a journalist. Do I
look
like a journalist?’
‘What does a journalist look like?’
‘Fair point. Well, I’m not.’
‘Whatever. Fuck off.’
‘Look—’ said Lenny.
The boy punched him.
Lenny fell over.
Silence descended upon a section of the crowd.
Lenny got to his feet. He rubbed at his jaw.
‘What the fuck was that for?’
The young man punched him again.
He didn’t fall over this time, but he stumbled back several steps, spilling the head from a number of pints. A circle of onlookers formed.
‘Fucking
stop that
,’ said Lenny. His shoulder and thigh were wet with spilled lager.
The young man raised his fist.
Shepherd was aware of the disturbance. Long familiar with the dynamics of playground fights, he pressed through the cluster of onlookers and put himself between Lenny and the young man. He asked what was going on.
The young man craned his neck to look Shepherd in the eye. Some of his righteous defiance melted away. His fist fell to his side. He gauged Shepherd’s dimensions: the fierce-looking beard, the shaved head; the wire-rimmed spectacles.
‘Fucking hell,’ he said.
Lenny pointed at the young man.
‘He hit me.’
‘What did you say to him?’
‘Nothing!’
‘You must have said
something
? Shepherd looked at the young man. ‘What did he say?’
The young man took a step back.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘Well, OK,’ said Shepherd. ‘If you say so.’
‘I think he broke my nose,’ said Lenny.
‘No he didn’t.’
Shepherd didn’t take his eyes off the boy.
The boy jammed his hands in the pockets of his windcheater. He looked downcast and apprehensive.
Lenny let go his nose and glowered at Shepherd.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘You sound like my headmaster.’
‘Oh, sod this,’ said the young man. ‘I’ve had enough of this. I’m off.’
As a final gesture, he pointed a theatrically indignant finger at Shepherd’s nose.
‘Just stop it. Go away and leave us alone.’
Shepherd took the risk.
‘I’m the man who phoned Caroline’s dad,’ he said.
The boy stopped. Before he could formulate an answer—Shepherd could almost see his mind working—the landlord arrived. Bow-legged and fruitily enraged, he threw them out.