Running Girl (29 page)

‘And he doesn't say where?'

He heard her sigh. ‘Wait. Let me get the note.'

There was a silence.

‘All right. I have it here.
Sorry, Mum, had to go out. Bit of an emergency
. Exclamation mark. I told you that. Ah. On the back of the note he's written something else.'

‘What?'

‘
Badger Lane
.'

‘Badger Lane?'

‘Don't know it. Maybe it's where a friend of his lives.'

Singh said nothing. In the silence, Mrs Smith said, ‘Speaking of confidential information, are you going to tell me why you want to talk to him? Because if he's been getting into trouble again I'd like to know.'

Singh hesitated. ‘He's not in trouble, with us.'

And before she could ask what he meant he hung up.

Shan was looking at him strangely. ‘What's the matter, Raminder? Who's this boy? You mentioned him before. And what's that about trouble?'

Before Singh could answer, his phone rang and he answered it at once and stood listening in silence.

‘Yes?' he said. ‘Good. Very good. Where are you?'

The answer seemed to terrify him. He flinched, almost dropped the phone, and when he spoke again his voice was a strange hoarse whisper.

‘Pull everyone in. I want everyone there now.
Everyone!
'

‘What's up?' Shan asked.

Singh's face was white. ‘They've found Naylor's moped.'

‘Fast work. Where?'

For a moment Singh didn't seem able to speak, and Shan stared at him in astonishment.

‘Where, Raminder?' he repeated.

Singh found his voice at last. ‘At the end of Badger Lane,' he said. ‘Where the boy is.'

BADGER LANE WAS
an old country road, broken and unlit, full of mud and dead leaves. Used by joggers by day and the occasional fly-tipper and dealer at night, it ran from the back of the new houses in Fox Walk past boggy grass fields and scrubland to peter out eventually at the edge of the Marsh Woods.

Lit up in the beams of a stationary police car, Naylor's moped lay on its side in rough gravel under ash trees where the road gave way to a footpath. Singh went forward and opened the pannier and saw there was nothing in it.

Oblivious to the men waiting by the cars, he took out his phone and dialled, and listened once more to the voicemail recording: ‘Really can't be bothered to answer the phone right now ...' before turning at last, his face drawn and anxious, to address the others.

‘Listen to me,' he said.

They gathered around – Shan and his men, Bob Dowell and the back-up team, the men and women of the Dog Support Unit and the patrolmen who had found the bike – and when he finished speaking they fetched their lights and their animals and walked into the woods together. No one said anything. They went with slow, awkward steps, peering about them, crouching and bending through the tangled darkness made more confusing by the swooping beams of their lights. They went behind their straining dogs along the path, and spread out between briars and bushes in a rough line, stumbling in and out of hollows and splashing through streams, their breath fogging the night air around them. Long ago the wood had been allotments, and from time to time they found themselves clambering over tumbledown brick walls, and stepping on the jagged remains of greenhouse panes glinting underfoot, and stooping under archways of gigantically overgrown privet. No one knew the place and their progress was slow and uncertain.

Singh had told them that Naylor was dangerous, probably still under the influence of drugs. He'd also told them that he might have lured a boy into the woods.

For half an hour they forced their way, grim-faced and uncomfortable, through trees and undergrowth, doing their best to stay together, finding nothing except refuse, the charred remains of old campfires and rusty junk, but going on with the same unspeaking, crunching determination. Singh walked in the middle of them with Shan and a woman from the Dog Support Unit, saying nothing to either, though twice he took out his phone and called the same number as before, listening helpless and whitefaced to its voicemail message.

‘Really can't be bothered ...'

It was now a quarter past eleven. A cold rain set in.

Suddenly there was a shout.

‘Sir!'

Lights swept wildly in all directions.

‘There, sir!'

Momentarily the outline of a figure stood out in the darkness of a slope ahead, and at once disappeared.

Cries went up from several policemen. One ran forward and fell heavily, and Singh's voice could be heard shouting for calm over the uproar, during which they all caught another brief glimpse of the figure ahead dodging silently between trees.

At last Singh found his whistle. ‘Quiet! Stay where you are! Get your lights on him!'

The slope in front of them lit up in the beams of two dozen high-power flash-lamps: a deserted patch of dense holly and young beech trees, their slender trunks pale against the darkness of the thicket behind. The rain was coming down harder now, crackling in the leaves and flickering like pinpricks of metal in the artificial light, and everything was dripping wet.

Singh called out, ‘Naylor?'

For a long moment there was nothing in front of them but black holly and pale beech trunks darkening with rain; then the figure appeared again, the police lights following him as he dodged from shadow to shadow, a figure in a red and yellow varsity jacket with a hood pulled low over his face.

‘Stay where you are, Naylor!' Singh called. ‘This is an armed unit!' There was the chinking noise around him of weapons being brought to bear.

Still the figure took no notice, and they saw now that he was coming closer. As they hesitated he floated through the last of the trees and out into full view, slowing down as he approached them, walking – to their astonishment – almost lazily down the rough slope towards Singh until he stood right in front of him and threw his hood back from his face and said, ‘Dude, do you want to keep the noise down a bit?'

Singh's eyes bulged. ‘Smith!' he said at last.

‘Good to see you too, man. But you're way too noisy. Naylor'll hear you.'

‘Naylor? Where is Naylor? And why are you wearing his jacket? And what the
hell
are you doing here?'

‘Calm down, man, you sound like my mother. I'm here 'cause this is where Naylor stashes his stuff. And this isn't Naylor's jacket. I thought you would've known that. The button's missing off the wrong sleeve, see? It's Alex's. You just missed him, by the way. He sends his apologies. I hate to say this, but he just didn't want to see you again.'

Singh couldn't control himself any more: he caught hold of Garvie by the arm and dragged him to one side. ‘What are you playing at?' he hissed.

Garvie regarded him coldly. ‘Listen, if you don't want my help you only have to say so. You don't need to start pulling me around by my friend's jacket sleeve. You could have had the other button off.'

‘Your
help!
You promised
not
to help.' Singh looked around. ‘I'll get a man to take you back to the cars.'

Garvie finished straightening his jacket and looked up. ‘You really want to blunder around in the woods all night? Or do you want me to take you to Naylor?'

There was a path nearby, and they followed the boy along it, keeping their lights to a minimum and their animals quiet.

‘It leads all the way back to Naylor's house,' Garvie said to Singh. ‘There's an opening in the fence he's hidden with brush.'

‘And where does it go to?'

‘You'll see. But you have to be quiet.'

For a quarter of a mile or more they went slowly in single file between trees, past an old quarry strewn with moss-covered boulders, a fallen cavern in a steep slope of alders, and weed-choked ponds, black and gleaming, deeper into Marsh Woods.

‘If this is a wild-goose chase ...' Singh said at last.

‘Shh.'

Garvie pointed, and Singh saw among the trees ahead a denser shape among the bushes.

Garvie whispered, ‘Naylor's hut. Alex found it yesterday and gave me a bell this morning. It sounded odd to me, and Alex was ... Well, Alex was odd too. I won't tell you what he was planning to do but it was scary stuff. Look!'

Now Singh saw the weak and narrow gleam of a light through a window. ‘He's in there?'

‘Last time I looked.'

Singh nodded and put his hand on Garvie's shoulder. ‘Now it's time for you to leave.'

‘What, and miss Singh of the Yard getting his man?'

Ignoring him, Singh moved away to talk to Shan and Dowell, and when he returned after a few minutes he brought a man with him who took hold of Garvie's arm.

‘Hey!'

Singh put his finger to his lips. ‘You have to go back,' he said quietly. ‘You know why as well as I do.' To the policeman he said, ‘Take him.' And without another look at Garvie, he turned to Shan and Dowell and began to talk.

A few minutes later the policemen moved forward, one by one, quietly creeping off the path round the side of the hut until they were all in position.

The rain had stopped, but the moon was obscured by cloud and everything was dark except for the one crack of light in the window of the hut. There was no sound from inside. Nothing. From his position near the door Singh looked around carefully one last time to check everyone was in place – and flinched to find Garvie standing next to him. When he opened his mouth, Garvie just put his finger to his lips, and grinned. It was too late for him to do anything about the boy now, and with a face of fury he turned again to the hut and called out with sudden loudness:

‘Naylor! Police! Come out!'

His voice echoed briefly and fell away into the quietness of the dark wood. There was still no sound from inside the hut.

‘Police!' he called out again, even louder, with the same result.

Everything was peaceful and still, far too still, and out of nowhere a thought struck him so hard it made him wince.

‘Naylor?' he cried questioningly, and this time his voice was anxious. But before he could act Garvie had stepped forward alone to the hut door and pulled it open, and it was too late to do anything but run after him, with Shan, Dowell and the others close behind, crowding into the hut, all shouting, weapons raised as per training, only to come to a sudden stop in the small room, let their arms fall to their sides and stand in silent shock around the body of Naylor, aka Paul Johnson, hanging from the roof.

IT WAS LONG
past midnight. Garvie sat silently in the police car as Singh drove slowly down the potholed Badger Lane away from Marsh Woods, and the rain came down again in steady gusts out of the low cloudy sky.

‘I called your mother,' Singh said, ‘to let her know you're on your way home.'

Garvie said nothing. He hadn't said anything since the discovery of Naylor's body in the hut. He slouched against the car door, gazing vacantly out of the window, his black hair wet against his forehead.

They bumped down Badger Lane. Singh was beyond tired, empty but alert, as if he would never need sleep again – just as well, since he knew he wouldn't get to bed that night. Later he would return to Marsh Woods to meet the chief pathologist and the forensics team. One reason for taking Garvie home immediately was to prevent his uncle meeting the boy at the crime scene. But at least, he thought to himself, in a few days it would be over. All that remained now was the summing up – the filling in of the last few gaps in the reconstruction, the media liaison, the ordering of the files – then the legal processes would take over and he could leave the Dow case behind and give in to his exhaustion.

He glanced over at the boy sitting silently next to him gazing out of the window at the wet grey sky as if there were nothing in the world capable of sustaining his interest. A dissatisfied boy, Singh thought. Difficult, selfish. He was clever, of course, but strange. Singh didn't know whether to dislike him or pity him.

‘You saw they found her running shoes?' he said. ‘A lot of her clothing too. He must have been taking things for a long time. Out of her locker with his pass key, as you said.'

Garvie didn't reply, didn't even turn in his seat, and Singh had a brief intuition of what it must be like to be Garvie's mother.

Frowning, he drove on, staring ahead through the windscreen wipers into the rain-flickering darkness. After a while he began to talk again. Though he didn't understand the boy, he wanted to bring things properly to an end, to make sure Garvie knew that the case was finally closed. He told him about the photographs of Chloe Dow they'd found on Naylor's laptop, and how they'd discovered that he was a sex offender, and about Naylor's records from Maltby going missing in Archives after his identity change. He explained that Naylor's alibi had been bogus, that he'd actually been seen up at Pike Pond on Friday afternoon. They knew now that he'd been up there before, perhaps many times, taking pictures of Chloe running.

‘And I think we'll find the stolen phone he was calling Chloe on,' Singh said. ‘That's the final piece of the jigsaw. Except for explaining that number in the call records there's really nothing else to prove.'

Garvie said nothing to any of this. Singh couldn't even tell if he was listening.

Leaving Badger Lane, they accelerated into the lights of Bulwarks Lane and went across Pollard Way into the Five Mile estate.

‘I can understand if you're upset,' Singh said.

Still Garvie ignored him.

‘You're shocked. But you'll be OK. It's over now; you can stop thinking about it. You have to. It's time to move on.'

Clearing his throat, Singh went on, ‘In my report I'll acknowledge the ... assistance you gave us. I can call it assistance, I think. I'll make it clear to your mother too, and to your school. But' – he glanced sideways – ‘there's something I have to say, something I've said before.' He was never able to rid himself of his habitual stiffness, even at delicate moments, and he was aware of his own dry manner and clipped voice. He cleared his throat again as he reached for phrases remembered from the police handbook on code of conduct. ‘You really shouldn't have got involved. You didn't realize the danger you were putting yourself in. I hope you see that now. Listen, the police have a duty of responsibility to young people. There've been times, many times, when I couldn't even guarantee your basic safety. Like tonight, back there,' he added, remembering how Garvie had stepped up alone to the door of Naylor's hut.