Authors: Neil Cross
Outside, the boy made no attempt to disengage from them. They huddled under a streetlamp. Lenny sniffed back blood and scuffed his feet on the pavement.
Shepherd gave the boy a version of why they were in Leeds. He told him what happened at the police station in Bristol. He told him what kind of idiot he felt like.
The boy cupped his mouth and listened with his head hung low. When Shepherd was finished, the boy hugged himself and turned to face the park. Cars passed; a bus. People entered the pub; people left. Currents of takeaway scent eddied on the cold night air.
The boy looked at the sky. The city was encased in a bubble of water vapour and electric light pollution. Rucked, low clouds like dirty bedlinen.
He said: ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘I don’t know what to say either,’ said Shepherd.
He extended a hesitant hand and left it hanging in the damp air. He introduced himself again.
The boy searched his expression, shrugged. They shook hands. The boy’s name was Robert.
Robert turned to Lenny. He buried his hands deep in his pockets and kicked a crippled can of Coke along the pavement.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
Lenny threw Shepherd a look; a twist of the upper lip and a glimmer of derision.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said.
They followed Robert to a balti house a short way down the hill. It stood at the corner of a long, red-brick terrace whose end walls were plastered with faded and ripped flyposters advertising night clubs and gigs by exotically named student bands. They were the only patrons; the restaurant wouldn’t begin to fill until closing time. They were attended by two Indian waiters in white shirts and embroidered waistcoats. Each of them was handed a large, laminated menu and they were seated at a corner table wrapped in a floral, plastic covering.
They ordered three steins of cold Tiger beer. Despite the earlier pizza, the booze had made Shepherd and Lenny hungry. They dipped shards of poppadom into mango pickle while Robert talked.
Robert was a close friend of Caroline. They assumed this to be contemporary student-speak for boyfriend. By midnight the previous evening, news had reached him that two more journalists were in the Hyde Park, asking about her. Within moments of his entrance this evening, someone had pointed Lenny out to him.
Lenny smiled at Shepherd. ‘Told you,’ he said. There was a chitinous black crust of blood rimming one nostril.
‘What?’ said Robert.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Shepherd. He asked about Caroline.
Robert shook his head. He jutted out his lower lip and shrugged expansively.
‘What can I say? She’s having a nervous breakdown, practically.’
‘Have you talked about it?’
‘What do you
think
we’ve talked about? Everyone thinks her dad cut off a girl’s head. What do you think we talked about? It’s all there is to talk about. It’s all
anyone
wants to talk about.’
Shepherd put his elbows on the table. He balanced his spectacles on his brow and massaged his eyes.
‘She doesn’t think he did it?’
‘Of course she doesn’t think he did it. He’s her dad.’
Shepherd looked left and right.
‘We don’t think he did it, either,’ he said.
Robert snapped a poppadom and dipped it in mango pickle. He mumbled something.
They stayed for nearly three hours. By the time Robert stood to leave, the restaurant had filled, become raucous, then emptied again and fallen silent. They had shouted themselves hoarse; now they murmured conspiratorially. The waiters hung about impatiently at the bar.
Robert told them about Holloway’s trip to Leeds. How Caroline had told him that Derek Bliss’s company had been bought out by William Gull Associates Ltd, whose principal offices were in York. How, exhausted, Holloway had asked Robert to drive him there. Holloway was inside Gull’s office for less than twenty minutes, and emerged with blood on his shirt and reams of old paperwork stuffed into several distended carrier bags. How that night, he asked Caroline and Robert and two of their friends to examine this paperwork, searching out references to himself or his wife. How they had found nothing. How Robert had driven him back to Bristol the same night, because he was off work on the sick, claiming to have the flu.
‘He
looked
like he had the flu,’ said Robert. ‘That’s the thing.’
The next day, Joanne Grayling was murdered and Holloway disappeared with the ransom money.
Caroline and Robert gave full statements, after which two detectives from the Avon and Somerset Constabulary visited the York offices of William Gull Associates, Ltd. Gull told them that a complete stranger arrived one afternoon and started talking about someone called Bliss, of whom Gull had no knowledge. He seemed genuinely surprised when the detective informed him that Derek Bliss had been a partner in Executive Solutions, the company Gull acquired from Henry Lincoln.
Gull stated that Holloway assaulted and threatened to kill him, and removed a great deal of important paperwork from the premises. When asked why he hadn’t reported the assault or the theft, Gull laughed and told the officer: ‘Come off it. I was a copper, too, lad. Once upon a time.’
Gull’s story was verified when the stolen files were identified among the belongings in Holloway’s bedroom. They were kept back as evidence. The police searched the rest of Holloway’s flat; they went through the hard drive of his computer, looking for deleted files and emails. Nothing was found that pertained in any way to the murder of Joanne Grayling.
They discovered that Derek Bliss had died several years previously, apparently of a fatal cardio-vascular accident while vacationing in Australia. His ex-business partner, Henry Lincoln, was now a travelling representative for a trade book publisher. He had a substantial mortgage on a mock-Tudor house outside Basingstoke, a company Ford Mondeo and two Representative of the Year awards framed in his hallway. He was mystified by the police’s visit. Lincoln had been a sleeping partner of Bliss. He knew nothing about the mechanics of running such an operation. The police thanked him. That line of investigation was suspended. At best, it would probably prove to be only peripherally connected to the Chapman murder. Perhaps Holloway had panicked, had second thoughts. Tried to call in some old debts.
Under further questioning, Caroline claimed no knowledge of Gull, or Derek Bliss; nor had Holloway’s ex-wife, Kate. Neither was able to suggest what Holloway’s connection to them might be.
‘I don’t know what he was doing up here,’ said Lenny. ‘But
something’s
not right with that picture, is it?’
Robert said he would try to arrange a meeting with Caroline.
The next evening, he met them in the narrow lobby of their bed-and-breakfast hotel. He told them that Caroline did not wish to be contacted. He would not tell them where she was or give them her phone number. But he promised to ask her one more time. He would contact Shepherd in a few days. Shepherd wrote down their home number for him. He and Lenny checked out of the hotel and caught a night train home. They watched their hollow-eyed reflections in the windows of the empty carriage as the train clattered and swayed towards London.
Three days later, Robert called.
Finally, she had agreed to meet them, on the condition that Robert take them to her. That way, they wouldn’t know her location until they arrived. They were to bring no cameras or other recording equipment. They might be gone for some days and would need several hundred pounds per head to cover expenses. Shepherd agreed to cover the costs—including Robert’s—and the two hung up cordially enough. Then Shepherd went to the box in the bottom of the wardrobe and counted his money again.
II
The evening prior to their agreed meeting at King’s Cross station, Robert knocked on the door.
He told Eloise from the doorstep that he wanted to verify everything Shepherd and Lenny had told him about themselves. He set his jaw firm and said he was sorry if it seemed rude, but that included where they lived.
Eloise nodded heartily.
‘Very wise,’ she said.
Robert was handsome. His olive skin was unblemished and though his woolly hair was thinning he looked small and young and vulnerable out there on the doorstep with his big brown eyes and shabby undergraduate chic. Eloise asked him inside. Entering, he ducked his head unnecessarily. He paused to investigate the framed prints in the hallway. Hitler as Grail Knight. Poussin’s strange pastoral
Et in Arcadia Ego.
Leonardo’s John the Baptist, with his cryptically elevated index finger and artful smile.
In the lounge, she invited him to sit. Shepherd was watching the news. A big toe protruded from a hole in his sock. She told him to make Robert a cup of tea. He got to his feet and hurried off to join Lenny, who was cooking.
Eloise yelled out to Lenny that one more would be joining them for supper.
Lenny’s voice reverberated down the hall. ‘I hope he’s not a fucking vegetarian.’
‘Are you?’ said Eloise.
‘No.’
Eloise cupped a hand to her mouth. ‘He’s
not
.’
‘Well,’ Lenny yelled. ‘Good,’ and made angry cluttering and crashing noises.
Eloise insisted that Robert sleep in the spare room. When finally he agreed, she went to the downstairs airing cupboard and gathered an armful of clean white bedding.
‘So,’ she said. ‘You’re the one who punched Lenny’
Robert shifted in his seat.
‘Yes,’ he said, eventually.
‘Nice one,’ said Eloise. ‘I expect he deserved it.’
Before breakfast the next morning, Shepherd went out to pick up the hired MPV.
Lenny waited outside, hugging himself on the pavement, especially so he could laugh at Shepherd when he put the cumbersome vehicle to the kerb. Then he slapped his upper arms, opened the boot and began to throw in the luggage.
‘We look like people with special needs,’ he said. ‘On a fucking day trip.’
For reasons she had not chosen to disclose, Eloise went with them. Shepherd suspected she wanted to keep a tempering eye on Lenny. She wore an old, three-quarter-length leather coat that smelled like an Oxfam shop, and tatty Dr Martens with mismatched laces.
She closed the door of the house, double-locked it, and joined them in the back of the MPV. At first, the three of them sat in a line, but Shepherd was too big. He shifted up a row and spread himself out. Robert took the wheel and Lenny closed the sliding door.
While Lenny, Eloise and Shepherd bickered about what radio station to listen to, then what CD, Robert drove them to the south coast. He drove without speaking, his little bald spot turning left and right as he read the road. His eyes flitted occasionally to the rear-view mirror.
They reached Folkestone. On the Eurostar, they crossed to France beneath the cold, brown Channel. Turning on to French roads, Robert spread a map across his lap. Flattening the map in order to refer to it, he several times swerved into oncoming traffic.
Fearing for their continued existence, Eloise rested her chin on the driver’s headrest, close to Robert’s ear, and suggested to him that she navigate.
Robert said: ‘I can’t let you do that.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘I’d have to tell you where we were going.’
‘Oh,’ said Eloise. ‘For goodness sake.’
She turned to the rear and rolled her eyes. But she found no succour there. Lenny’s expression implied that Robert’s objection was quite sensible.
‘But we’re going to die,’ she said.
She suggested to Robert that he divide the journey into stages: then she could navigate, leg by leg, without needing to know their eventual destination. Robert said he would think about it. While he was thinking about it, he almost ploughed headlong into an oncoming Honda Civic.
Later, when he felt able to meet her gaze, he glanced in the rear-view and said: ‘OK. Good idea.’
With the vehicle still in motion, Eloise grabbed her bag and scrambled over to the front seats. She spread the map on the dashboard. Driver and navigator shared a family pack of lemon bon-bons. By virtue of her position, she had authority over the stereo. She put on some Mozart. Lenny hated Mozart. He was a Wagner man, if anything.
Late in the afternoon, they arrived at Chinon, a medieval village set beneath the ruins of a long-destroyed chateau, through which tourists now roamed. Robert had reserved big, noisy rooms in the Hotel du Point du Jour, on the quai Jeanne d’Arc. Shepherd opened his window and stared at the street below. He remembered taking school coach trips to France. The unique disquietude of attempting to exert command over forty adolescents on foreign soil.
In the morning, he rose early and took a walk. He was the last of them to arrive at breakfast: Lenny was folding and stuffing whole buttered croissants into his mouth and Eloise was sipping bitter coffee while reading about the town in a tourist pamphlet, copies of which were scattered liberally over the hotel. Robert had arrived shortly before Shepherd. He was untucked and downcast. The previous day had taken its toll on him.
Lenny passed him a basket of warm rolls, complete with little packets of butter and jam.
‘Eat,’ he said.
Robert rubbed his belly and swallowed a belch.
‘I don’t eat breakfast.’
Lenny waggled the bowl. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Eat.’
‘He won’t shut up until you do,’ Eloise told him, so Robert gave up and sat down to join them. They made further room for Shepherd at the small table: they squeezed elbow to elbow, ripping rolls and spreading butter with blunt knives; slurping and spilling orange juice and coffee.
Shepherd was happy.
The autumn made the countryside mournful and strange, but Robert seemed more relaxed at the wheel, and (having survived the previous day) his passengers were more at ease about being driven on the wrong side of foreign country roads by someone who had not been eligible to vote at the last general election. Robert described a slow, circuitous route, descending on their unknown objective in a loose spiral. More than once, Shepherd noticed minor landmarks—certain signposts and crossroads—they had already passed, coming in a different direction.