The youth club had closed down ten or twelve years before. The building, essentially a red-brick shed with high, barred windows that had been adapted into a club in the 1950s, had eventually been demolished. I had never gone there – too young before Charlie’s disappearance, too overprotected afterwards. To my childish imagination, the club had seemed like a wonderland, a place where children ruled and adults were present by grace and favour. I had longed to be allowed to go, yearned to look inside. The high windows, so tantalising at the time, took on a distinctly sinister cast in retrospect. They had hidden more than innocent fun. I swallowed convulsively, willing myself to listen to what Vickers was saying.
‘Derek was violent in and out of the home and regularly
spent
short spells in prison. According to Danny, his family lived in fear of Derek, and his moods dictated the pace of their lives. When he was happy, they had learned to be happy along with him. When he was angry, withdrawn or drunk, they tried to stay out of his way.
‘In the summer of 1992, things had been pretty quiet and stable in the Keane household for a couple of months. Derek was preoccupied with some scheme to make money – some sort of motor-insurance fraud. He spent a lot of time away with his gang of pals, driving to different parts of the country to stage accidents. By his own account, Danny relaxed. When Derek wasn’t there, Charlie was free to come and spend time at the Keanes’ house. They preferred to meet there rather than here because they didn’t have to involve Sarah in their games.’ Vickers looked at me apologetically before he went on, but I wasn’t upset; it rang true.
‘On the second of July, young Charlie left here at some time in the late afternoon. There was no record of anyone he knew seeing or speaking to him again after the point that Sarah saw him, as you are aware. We now know that he didn’t go far. He went straight across the road to see his best friend.’
Mum was leaning forward, white bone shining through the thin skin stretched over her knuckles. If her hands hadn’t been clenched in her lap, I wouldn’t have known she was upset by the policeman’s calm recitation of the facts.
‘Unfortunately, Danny wasn’t at home. He’d gone to the supermarket with his mother, in part because he didn’t
want
to remain in the house alone with his father. Derek had come back from a long trip and was catching up on some sleep. Danny didn’t want to run the risk of waking him accidentally.
‘We believe that Derek answered the door when Charlie knocked on it. Rather than telling him to shove off, Derek asked him to come into the house. He could be pleasant when he wanted to be, and of course Danny had always hidden his abuse from Charlie. There was no reason for Charlie to be afraid.’
Vickers paused and cleared his throat. He’d been talking without a break for a while, but I recognised it as a stalling tactic. This was the hard part.
Get it over with
, I willed him silently.
Just say it
.
‘We aren’t sure what happened in the house, but we believe, based on what Derek told his son, that while they were alone together, something happened to Charlie. We can assume, given his past behaviour, that Derek took the opportunity afforded him by an empty house to abuse Charlie. However, Charlie was not like his usual victims. He was brave and intelligent and he had a close relationship with his parents. He knew what had happened was wrong. He wouldn’t be comforted, or frightened into silence. Derek must have panicked, knowing that he would be in serious trouble when Charlie went home and complained to his parents. By the time Danny and his mother came back to the house, Charlie was dead.’
The last word fell with a thud into the absolute silence in the room. Mum leaned back in her chair, one hand to
her
chest. She looked drained. Even though I had been expecting it – even though I had known it for years – the shock of having it confirmed shuddered through me.
‘Derek wasn’t what you might call clever, but he had cunning and an instinct for self-preservation,’ Vickers went on after a short, respectful pause. ‘He knew that you and your husband, Mrs Barnes, would be quick to sound the alarm when Charlie failed to return home. He hid Charlie’s body in the boot of the car – which, incidentally, would have been the riskiest part of his plan, as the car was parked on the driveway in front of the house. No garage with these houses, so no privacy. But he was lucky and no one spotted him. When Danny and his mother came home, the only sign that anything had happened was Derek’s strange mood. He was irritable and absorbed in his own thoughts. He sent Ada out to spend the evening at her friend’s house, telling her not to think of coming home before he sent for her. She tried to take Danny with her, but Derek forbade it, saying that he needed his son’s help. If Ada suspected later that her husband was responsible for Charlie’s disappearance, she never spoke of it to Danny or to anyone else, as far as we can tell.’
Mum was nodding, her eyes unfocused. ‘But she must have guessed. I remember, you see, she gave me flowers,’ she murmured, mostly to herself. ‘Pink carnations. She couldn’t even speak to me. Pink carnations.’
Knowing that Mum was capable of going on like that indefinitely, I spoke over her. ‘But Danny stayed at home. When did he realise what had happened?’
‘When his father showed him Charlie’s body,’ Vickers
said
grimly. ‘Derek waited for nightfall, which must have been pretty stressful as sunset would have been late enough at that time of year. Then he made Danny get into the car with him. They drove a couple of miles towards Dorking, to a place in the middle of nowhere, where there’s an alleyway that ran behind a little development of houses. There was an access point there for railway workers that led down to the train tracks. Derek had a friend who was a British Rail maintenance worker, who’d told him about it. It wasn’t overlooked by houses – the embankment is heavily planted with trees and bushes at that point. The railway was a branch line that wasn’t in use at the time. It was a great place to dispose of a body.’ Vickers sighed. ‘I don’t think Danny has ever got over the shock of opening the boot of his dad’s Cavalier to see his best friend’s body lying there. Derek didn’t give him any warning, just told him to help carry the torch and the shovel while he carried Charlie onto the embankment.’
I couldn’t bring myself to feel the pity that Vickers obviously expected. I was sure it had been traumatic for Danny. He’d had a horrendous childhood. Fair enough. He had still let my parents live in agonising ignorance of what had happened to their son. He had kept his father’s secret, well into adulthood. He had told the truth only when he was backed into a corner. If I hadn’t seen Charlie’s necklace, Vickers wouldn’t have known there was anything to ask him and Mum could have gone on hoping against hope, dying a little bit more every day. And then there was Jenny. He had absorbed the lessons his father taught him. The abused boy turned into an abuser. The murderer’s son
turned
into a murderer. I couldn’t feel anything for him but loathing.
Mum stirred in her chair. ‘How did Charlie die? You didn’t say – how did he kill my boy?’
Vickers looked uneasy. ‘We don’t know, I’m afraid. We won’t know until we find the body and do a post-mortem, and even then, after all this time, we will only find skeletonised remains. Bones,’ he clarified, misinterpreting the look of horror on my face. I understood the term, all right; I just couldn’t understand why he would say it in front of my mother.
But instead of disintegrating as I had expected she would, Mum was nodding. At that sight, I had, if not exactly a light-bulb moment, a slowly dawning suspicion. It was just the faintest inkling that the woman I had thought I knew wasn’t what I had believed her to be. There was strength there, strength and steadfastness, even if I hadn’t seen or recognised it before.
Vickers was continuing to speak, drawing back a curtain that had fallen sixteen years before. ‘It took a long time to dig the grave. Danny guesses that it was over two hours before his father was finished. The ground would have been hard and full of roots; it wouldn’t have been easy to get down to any sort of depth. But he must have been determined, because he did a good job. Most graves of that sort stand out a mile. Animals get into them. They smell the decomposition, dig up the bodies – or parts of them – and give us a clue that there’s something to investigate. Or you can see the excavated earth piled up on top of the body and you can tell something’s been stuck in the ground
there
; a burial mound is pretty much unmistakable. I’ll say this for Derek Keane: he found a good spot where not many people went and he dug a deep enough hole, and that’s probably why we never found Charlie.
‘There was also the fact that his wife and child were too frightened of him to think of telling anyone that he had been involved. There again he was clever, because he’d involved Danny in disposing of the body. Ada wouldn’t have wanted her son to get in trouble, however convenient it might have been to find a way of locking her husband up for ever. He did keep her out of the house while he was dealing with Charlie’s body, so she might not have been sure. Even if she had her suspicions, she didn’t take it any further. And Derek had Danny frightened of his own shadow. The boy never said a word to anyone. He was convinced he’d be slung in jail too. His father made out to him that what he’d done would actually be seen as worse, because while Derek had acted on the spur of the moment, Danny had helped him to bury the body in cold blood.’
‘Poor child,’ Mum said and I looked at her, surprised and not a little shocked, before realising that she didn’t know about what he had done to Jenny. I thought Danny was evil, pure evil, and I wasn’t really interested in why he had turned out that way.
‘Why did he tell you all this now?’
Vickers shifted a little on the edge of the sofa. I gazed at him imploringly. I didn’t want Mum to know I had been involved. The thought of explaining it all to her made me feel faint.
‘Ah … we got some new information that led us to
make
enquiries with Mr Keane. I think he’d been waiting to be asked, to be honest with you, Mrs Barnes. Pretty much as soon as our interrogators mentioned Charlie’s name, he told us everything. We were talking to him about another matter as well, and I think it’s fair to say he wasn’t as forthcoming there.’ He shot a meaningful look in my direction and I suppressed a sigh. Of course Danny wouldn’t own up to Jenny’s murder – not when there was no one else to blame.
‘How can you be sure he isn’t making it all up?’ Mum’s voice was steady, but her eyes looked strained.
‘We believe that he’s telling us the truth, Mrs Barnes, or I wouldn’t be here,’ Vickers said gently. ‘He doesn’t have any reason to lie to us about Charlie.’
I cleared my throat and the three of them turned to look at me. The policewoman started, as if she’d forgotten I was even in the room. ‘What happened to Danny’s mother? Derek killed her too, didn’t he, a few years after Charlie?’
Vickers sighed. ‘There was a lot of local gossip about the younger boy, Paul. People were saying that he wasn’t Derek’s son at all, that he had been conceived while Derek was in prison in 1995. The dates didn’t match up, and there’s no way Ada would have dared to be unfaithful to her husband, even if he was tucked away in Pentonville. But the rumours were enough to send Derek off the deep end. Ada ended up at the bottom of the stairs with a broken neck and there was a ton of evidence she’d been roughed up. They should have charged him with murder, but they reckoned they’d get a conviction for manslaughter.’ Vickers
shook
his head. ‘Juries can be funny about domestic murders. You never know which way they’ll jump. It only takes one loudmouth with suspicions about his own wife to start sticking up for the defendant and you can lose the lot. They’re like sheep – where one leads, the others follow, even if it’s against all common sense. He got five years; he was out in three. And not long after that, his luck ran out.’ There was a definite note of satisfaction in Vickers’ voice. ‘He wasn’t back more than a couple of months before he met his maker. He fell down the stairs in his house late one night, after coming back from the pub, and cracked his skull. Never woke up.’
Vickers couldn’t have missed the coincidence. That was how Ada had died. I wondered, unease prickling up and down my spine, if that had been Danny’s first murder. But from what I had heard that evening, Derek had deserved it, and more. No one would have mourned Derek Keane’s passing.
‘So there’s just the two boys left. Danny was eighteen when his mother died, and he pretty much brought up Paul on his own. They looked at taking Paul into care, but Danny managed to convince them to leave him where he was. For better or for worse, there was a trend at the time to keep families together.’ Vickers shrugged. ‘You might think he would have done better in a foster family, or if he’d been adopted. With a heritage like that, he’s never really had much of a chance.’
We sat for a moment in silence, contemplating the fate of the Keane family. Then Mum stirred. ‘What happens now?’
I glanced at her, then looked again, really stared. Her face had smoothed, somehow – lost that clenched look I hated so much. Just for a moment, I could see the woman I only knew from photographs taken before Charlie disappeared, and she was beautiful.
‘Now we find Charlie,’ Vickers said levelly. ‘We’ve arranged to search the area Danny described to us, starting tomorrow morning at seven. We’re bringing him along so he can show us where he remembers his father digging. The pair of them walked some way from the access gate. I’m hoping that he’ll recognise the place when he sees it, so he can help us to narrow the search area. Otherwise we’ll be there for weeks.’
‘Don’t you have high-tech searching equipment, like on TV?’ I asked.
‘That stuff never works. In my experience, you either get inside information or trip over the body. But we’ve got Danny, and he’s cooperating. We’ll find Charlie. Don’t you worry.’
He stood up, joints protesting with a volley of cracks that sounded like small-arms fire, and extended a hand to my mother. ‘I know this must be a terrible shock for you, Mrs Barnes. Can I suggest that you let my colleague here make you a cup of tea?’