Ezz moved, feather-light, up the front path to the door and inserted something in the lock. He didn’t acknowledge Larkin, standing on the corner. Within seconds the door was open. Ezz was in.
Larkin stood in silence, holding his breath. Nothing happened. Suddenly, he saw a small flash of light from Noble’s window, fleeting; too brief for anyone else to have seen. The signal. He gave a surreptitious glance to either side, and thankfully found a deserted street with no walkers, cars, or twitching curtains. Taking a couple more controlling breaths, he crossed and entered.
With his surgically-gloved hand, Larkin carefully closed the front door behind him. He looked around, getting his bearings in the gloom. Off to the left he heard a swishing noise, then a thin beam of light clicked on.
“Couldn’t we just put the light on now that you’ve drawn the curtains?” whispered Larkin.
“No,” came the hushed monotone reply. “We don’t know that that’s his usual routine.”
“Sorry.” Larkin took out his own pocket flashlight, skimmed the area in front of him. White painted woodchip walls, bare to the dado, dark green from there to the skirting. Old, worn, brown check carpet covered the floor. A spring-shut flush door replaced the original panelled one. The hall alone screamed out Cheap Rent. He entered the front room.
The same white woodchip and brown checked carpet, complemented by a flecky, bobbly three-piece that had had its heyday long before Britain had embraced Thatcherism. Callaghanism, even. A charity-shop dining table and three chairs that looked like they wouldn’t last through a single meal occupied the back of one wall. Directly opposite sat a TV and video combination. Given the age and condition of what he’d seen in the flat so far, he expected them to be steam-driven. On close inspection he was surprised to find they were both virtually brand-new.
Kneeling down, his penlight in his mouth, he carefully checked the videos, stacked in their sleeves at the side of the TV. All home-taped; neatly inscribed, crossed out after viewing with a neat line with the programme that presumably replaced its predecessor printed underneath.
Coronation Street.
A wildlife documentary.
Kavanagh QC.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Larkin got to his feet and scanned the room with the penlight once more. His eyes fell on the bookcase. A few paperbacks: Agatha Christie, P D James, nothing interesting. On the next shelf down sat a small pile of textbooks. He picked them up and leafed through them. All on social work, particularly pertaining to the welfare of children. That was only to be expected.
He crossed again to the table, where there sat a portable word processor and an old box file, which he opened. Inside was a copy of the Jobs and Appointments section of last Wednesday’s
Guardian
, the day on which social work jobs were advertised. He flicked through, clocking the ones Noble had ringed. All to do with children, most of them as care warden in various homes. Beneath that sat a second sheaf of folded-up newspaper. Larkin unfolded it and found the Lonely Hearts sections from all the local papers. He scanned the pages, again paying particular attention to the ads Noble had ringed. They had all been placed by women, most of them divorced. All of them mothers.
A frisson of disgust ran through Larkin as he read. As he replaced the papers, he realised that his hands were beginning to shake.
The box file also contained a transparent folder of photocopied CVs. He picked one out and glanced at it. It was identical to the one Jane had shown him, except it had recently been updated to include his work at the centre. He glanced again at the two named referees. One name stood out: Colin Harvey. Where had Larkin seen that name before?
Suddenly the penny dropped. Larkin scanned down the pile of books on the shelf – and there it was.
The Care And Rehabilitation Of Persistent Juvenile Offenders
by Colin Harvey. Larkin opened the book, reading paragraphs at random. As he read on, a shiver went down his spine; ice melted on his neck. Harvey was discussing childrens’ allegations of abuse by carers:
Allegations of this nature should be treated with a healthy degree of scepticism. Workers in any environment can develop close
attachments, whether it be in offices, factories, whatever. Either sex, any age. But it must be remembered here that the children are exploring their sexual potential and beginning to realise the power that lies in their bodies. They are frequently mature enough to embark on sexual relationships both with other children and with adults. This can, of course, be quite natural. The child is often fully aware of what it is doing in having sex with an adult. It is seldom without consent or encouragement. It is rarely passive. It is never wholly innocent.
Larkin couldn’t believe what he was reading,
Kids are begging for it?
That was a paedophile’s argument.
He closed the book and checked Colin Harvey’s address on the CV. Northumberland. Significant, he thought, but he didn’t know quite why, yet.
Larkin felt a flashlight on his face and turned; Ezz was silently beckoning him into another room. Larkin rearranged everything as he had found it, and followed him.
The bedroom. Again, cheaply anonymous: plain duvet over heavy wooden bed, old, mahogany wardrobe full of Noble’s clothes, smelling faintly stale and sweaty. Ezz pointed to a locked door beside the wardrobe.
“I’ve been through everything in this room,” he murmured. “Nothing. If there is something it’ll be in there.”
“Can you open it?” Larkin asked.
Ezz didn’t even bother to answer. He turned to the door, clamped the torch in his teeth, drew something silver and glinting from his pocket and got to work. Within seconds the door was open.
The door led to what had once been a walk-in cupboard. Now, however, it was a shrine. The walls were plastered with pictures of children. Some had been clipped from catalogues and magazines: children in swimsuits and shorts, colour and monochrome, smiling for the camera. These were interspersed with pornography: children having sex with adults, fear in their eyes, tear-tracks down their faces. Blu-tacked over this collage were a number of polaroids. Children naked, vacant-eyed, staring numbly at the lens, a brick wall painted black as backdrop.
At the far end of the room was a table covered in a white cloth with a plastic recipe-book stand in the middle. Propped open on it was a kiddie porn mag, with two stumps of candle at either side. A
mirror rested on the table behind the lectern, its edges decorated with more cut-out pictures of children. On the floor in front of the table were several wadded-up paper tissues. Larkin’s stomach turned over. He got the picture.
“Look,” said Ezz from behind him.
Larkin turned, trembling, to see Ezz pointing towards a shelf of video tapes. Larkin played his flashlight over the spines.
Boys To Men. Special Love. Young Olympians.
It went on.
Larkin looked at Ezz. The skinhead was always quiet, but he seemed now to contain a perfect stillness. A dangerous calm. Like a dormant volcano: one wrong tectonic shift and all hell would break loose.
“Ezz?” whispered Larkin.
Nothing. Ezz stared straight ahead, eyes boring into the videos. Through the videos, past them, to something beyond.
“Ezz?” Larkin moved his hand out to touch him, and suddenly felt his fingers being bent right back. Ezz had barely moved, yet he had grabbed Larkin faster than a striking cobra. Slowly he turned to face Larkin, his grip not slackening. His eyes were fixed, rage-filled, homicidal.
“Ezz, man, it’s me!” Larkin gasped. “What you doing?”
Ezz’s eyes slowly came back into focus. His grip relaxed and Larkin snatched his hand away.
“Fuckin’ hell!” said Larkin, flexing his fingers painfully. “You don’t know your own strength.”
“Have you seen what you came to see?” asked Ezz, his face unreadable in the shadow.
“I think so,” said Larkin, staring at the man in bewilderment. “Let’s go.”
They left everything exactly as they found it. No one saw or heard them leave.
They walked down the street, not speaking. When they reached Heaton Park, Ezz stopped; Larkin, recognising his cue, dug his injured hand into his pocket and pulled out his wallet.
“Here,” he said, drawing out the pre-arranged sum. It disappeared so fast, Larkin wasn’t sure he’d ever held it. “Thanks. I think,” he said.
Ezz nodded, once. “I want to know what happens to this bloke.”
“I’ll keep you informed,” said Larkin, but Ezz had already disappeared into the darkness.
Larkin went home. He was shaking uncontrollably now; the relaxation of his controlled adrenalin rush combined with his disturbing discovery was taking its toll.
As he entered his attic room, the red eye of the answerphone was blinking. His heart flipped over as he remembered the last batch of messages. This machine was becoming synonymous with disaster. He hit Play. One message.
A long pause: bar noise in the background. Then, “I don’t know if you’ll get this.” Moir. “I’m in Ruby’s Arms. I’m drinking alone.” Another pause. Larkin knew Moir would never be so straightforward, so transparent, as to ask him to come for a drink. But things must be serious – desperate even – for him to call. The final part of the message confirmed it. There was an Atlas-like sigh, then: “The boy – Jason. It’s a murder inquiry now.”
Larkin made his way down the scuffed steps into Ruby’s Arms. The place was an after-hours drinking club, unlicensed but officially tolerated, located in the basement of a big old house in the Gallowgate area of Newcastle. Ruby’s was somewhere to go when there was nowhere else left. It had been there for years and harboured a mix of customers that appeared bizarre to an outsider but perfectly natural to an insider: gangsters and hard men doing done deals in darkened corners, actors and theatre people, a liberal sprinkling of career drinkers with no homes to go to. Or at least not a place they chose to recognise as such. This, Larkin knew, was the category that Moir fell into. And also, increasingly, himself.
He spotted the big man seated by himself at a corner table in the main room. Through a doorway to his left was the pool room; to his right the toilets. Straight in front of him, the bar. This was where Larkin headed. He ordered two Budvars and sat down opposite Moir, who grunted in acceptance of the beer.
“You found him, then,” Larkin said. Not so much a question as a flat, hopeless statement. Moir nodded and gulped beer greedily from the neck of the bottle.
“Where?”
Moir took another swig, sighed. Then he started his story.
He had received a call from the force in Durham, they’d found a boy’s body in Hamsterley Forest, a local beauty spot. A labrador belonging to a picnicking family, the Duncans, had started scrabbling at the fresh earth in a patch of recently-planted saplings. The eleven-year-old daughter of the family, Gemma, had gone to chastise the dog and found it licking a small white hand protruding from
the ground. Her screams had alerted the rest of the family; her father, Graham, had contacted the police.
By the time Moir and his team had turned up, the Duncan family had been sent home after giving anguished statements. The area had been cordoned off and was now swarming with white-suited Scenes of Crime officers. The body was in the final stages of disinterment as Moir strode up, flashing his warrant card at the officer in charge, Detective Inspector Brody.
“This look like your boy?” Brody had asked him.
Moir watched as the decomposing body was prised from its grave. He swallowed hard against the stench, forcing himself to look. The body was rank, black and bloated, entropy doing its inevitable, pitiless work. The height and hair colour looked about right, but until the lab boys could get to work there would be no way of knowing for definite. Except Moir knew. Instinctively. It was the moment he had been both expecting and dreading.
“Can’t be certain,” he replied, as business-like as possible, “but I reckon so.”
“Hope so,” Brody said sardonically, “otherwise we’ve got another one.”
Moir nodded absently, then turned to his detective sergeant. “Get everything you can from the body here then get it shipped back to Newcastle for examination. Tell them to drop what they’re doing – this has to take priority.”
“They won’t like that,” the DS said.
“I don’t give a fuck,” said Moir, never taking his eyes from the small body.
Moir questioned Brody about the Duncan family statement. Shock first, then eagerness to help, anxiety in case they were implicated. Then, finally, once they realised they weren’t suspects, the father had talked of suing the police for causing distress to his daughter. “I wished him all the best,” Brody said.
Moir asked about the grave itself. It had apparently been dug after the saplings had been planted and recently enough for the fresh earth not yet to have drawn attention. Footprints? They were looking into it – nothing as yet. What about the tree planters themselves? Again, being looked into, but nothing much hoped for. Early indications were of an opportunist burial. A shallow grave.
Having retrieved all he could from the scene, Moir had then travelled back up to Newcastle to await the results of the forensic tests and the post mortem.
Preliminary results came through quickly: it was Jason. Next came the part Moir had been dreading even more than finding the body: informing Mandy Winship and asking her to make a positive ID of her dead son.
He drove around to her flat; he was hoping to postpone the moment, but unfortunately she was in. She seemed to have aged since he last saw her and the flat, not much to start with, had clearly been left to go to hell. As he was talking to her, an overweight, middle-aged man, wearing nothing but a pair of old, stained Y-fronts, appeared from the bedroom. She shouted at the man to leave; without protest he grabbed his clothes and slammed the door behind him.
Moir looked at Mandy perched in a cheap dessing-gown on the edge of her worn, old armchair beside the unlit gas fire, shaking, chain-smoking one Embassy after another, hunched into a self-protecting foetal ball. His heart went out to her. She wasn’t the angry, ignorant person she had been on his last visit, the kind of person Moir came across and despised in a professional capacity every day on the other side of the wire; grief had changed her. He saw now that she was just an ordinary woman, poorly brought up, badly educated, with low self-esteem; ill-equipped to survive life’s pitfalls. A woman created by her ancestry and environment, unable to move forward, stuck at the fag-end of society. But above all, a woman who had just lost her child.