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This book is for all the friends I didn’t see during its writing, including Mats ’n’ Jo
PART ONE
Killing Time
Opening lines are hard to write, says Felix Penney, and he of all people should know. The author of three writing manuals and nine crime novels, he is one of the most high-profile creative writing tutors in the UK, with a prestigious class at King’s College London.
‘How will you start your feature?’ he asks me, deftly pre-empting my questions for him.
‘With the setting,’ I reply, playing along.
‘Nice choice,’ he says. ‘A good, safe entry point for any narrative.’
And so, with Mr Penney’s blessing, picture if you will a small library on the outskirts of a mid-sized Berkshire town. It’s a standard underfunded community space with scuffed furniture and a pair of antiquated radiators leaking just enough heat to stop the cold from creeping to the bone. Dust motes hover in the thin winter sunlight.
I’m here to sit in on a session run by Penney that is fast gaining a reputation beyond these book-lined walls and, as his students arrive, I count myself extremely fortunate to have so little in common with them. For this is a course designed to explore the impact crime has had on their lives. Violent crime, for the most part.
‘Take ownership of everything you’ve been through,’ Penney urges his class. ‘Dig as deep as you dare. You’ll be amazed by the power you have to unearth the missing pieces of your story.’
‘I still don’t know how to begin!’ complains one woman, something of a slow starter given that this is the third time the group has met.
‘No one ever knows,’ Penney sympathizes and he inspires her by reading aloud the first chapter of another student’s work, one who is progressing rather better.
As he reads (the opening line is a doozy, just you wait), I find my gaze resting on the author. Sharp-boned and fair-skinned, she’s not as beautiful as she once was – by my reckoning, she’s closer to fifty than forty these days – but she has a quality to her that’s impossible to tear your eyes from. A charisma, a pathos.
I recognize the face, of course. And, to an extent, I already know the story.
At least, I think I do.
Michaela Ross,
Sunday Times magazine,
December 2021
SAINT OR SINNER
by Ellen Saint
Chapter 1
Kieran Watts has been dead for over two years when I see him standing on the roof of a building in Shad Thames.
It is October 2019, a Monday that should be unremarkable.
For those who don’t know the area, Shad Thames is a historic parcel of riverside London just southeast of Tower Bridge. Think step-back-in-time wharves with winches and walkways and cobbled alleys running red with the blood of bygone crimes (okay, that’s in poor taste. I apologize).
For those who don’t know the man, Kieran Watts is the monster who destroyed my life. Whose actions will torment my soul until my dying day, and perhaps even beyond – I wouldn’t put it past him. He is the reason I am writing this, the reason I am here. As I once said to my daughter, Freya, not missing the look of revulsion on her face: I will never forgive him.
I mean it. Never.
So, I’m in Shad Thames for work. It’s been raining overnight and the riverside palette is all soot and stone, rust veining the dark-painted ironwork. My new client is called Selena. She’s in her early thirties, white British mixed with something chic and southern European. She works in finance, which explains her acquisition of a fifth-floor flat in Jacob’s Wharf, one of the east-facing warehouse conversions overlooking St Saviour’s Dock. Though beautiful, the apartments have inconveniently small windows, calling for lighting expertise beyond what your average sparky will dispense, and I’ve been brought in by the architect commissioned by Selena to do her refurb. This first meeting is for me to get a sense of her lifestyle and personal aesthetic. Naturally, she wants it both ways – the candlelit romanticism of smugglers conspiring in shadowy corners and the radiant, flattering light beloved of the millennial narcissist (her words, not mine).
But you don’t need to hear about that. Rest assured I’ll light her beautifully. What’s important here is what happens after the consultation.
We are sitting at her breakfast bar by the window, with cups of espresso and shortbread cookies she claims to have baked in the microwave, when she says, ‘You wouldn’t need your trickery up there, would you?’ And she gestures to the building directly opposite.
It’s a slender modern structure slotted between two warehouses, its top protruding like an elongated head on broad shoulders. Each floor has a large lozenge-shaped window overlooking the water, with a second full-height one to the right running up the building in a reflective stripe. Though all its units must get their share of natural light, the top flat has what looks like an atrium or skylight behind a roof terrace that spans the full width of the building.
‘There must be a great view of Tower Bridge from that terrace.’ I bite into a cookie and sugar grains melt on my tongue. ‘It’s an unusual building, isn’t it?’
‘Went up in the early Nineties, apparently,’ Selena says. ‘I don’t know how they got permission to build so high.’
‘Oh, it was the Wild West back then. Some of us remember it first-hand.’ I raise my eyebrows at her and she does the same back. I smile.
Seek out people who improve your mood, Ellen, a counsellor once advised, but it was too soon then. I understand better now.
‘It’s the tallest building in Shad Thames, I think,’ she says. ‘And he’s the king of the castle, look.’
Craning to glimpse the man who has come out onto the terrace and stands at the clear glass balustrade, I find that my first thought, as it always is when I witness someone poised inches from a sheer drop like that, is, He’s going to throw himself off. He’s going to lean forward, look down and hear the call of the void, exactly as I would. Then he’ll jump.
I say as much to Selena and she exclaims in horror. ‘But why would he want to jump?’
‘Not him, me. If I were standing where he is. Don’t worry, it’s nothing to do with feeling suicidal. It’s a condition. They call it high place phenomenon.’
‘What, it’s like vertigo?’
‘That’s more a sensation of spinning – like in the movie. This is a kind of irrational impulse. But not everyone has it.’ I gesture to our man on the roof terrace, as still and poised as an elite diver about to go for gold. ‘He obviously doesn’t.’
‘Well, it wouldn’t be the best place to live if he did,’ Selena says, with a smirk, as he turns and walks the length of his terrace to its river-facing corner.
That’s when it happens. The impossible. The grotesque. There’s a self-consciousness to the way this man lifts his chin, an exaggerated bounce to his step, that I recognize. That makes me put my hand to my mouth to muffle a gasp, my heart punching a savage rhythm in my chest.
It’s him.
The desire to flee collides with a compulsion to keep my eyes fixed on him, to learn all that I can in the time available. Absorb the clues. The distance between us is too great for me to be able to make out his features, though I can see his hair has been bleached, and he’s a good couple of stone lighter than I remember from when I last saw him, almost two and a half years ago.
No, it
can’t be him. If there’s any link at all, this must be a relative of his. He said he had no family back then, but that doesn’t mean none existed. This could be a cousin or a half-sibling, someone he never even met.
He stretches his arms to the sides and raises them above his head, bringing his palms together in some sort of meditative pose. He was never so composed in the past – even in court, he fidgeted constantly. I feel bile slide through my throat and up into my mouth.
‘You okay?’ Selena asks, a stitch of concern between her brows. ‘Is it the vertigo thing? Let me close the window…’
I swallow, drop my hand from my face. ‘No, no, I’m fine. Do you… do you know that guy?’
‘Not to speak to. I’ve seen him, though, in that café on Mill Street. He always buys the biggest bucket of coffee. Wait, maybe we did speak once, I don’t remember. Why?’
‘He reminds me of someone.’ It’s a struggle to control my facial muscles and I feel myself grimace. ‘Someone I didn’t think was… in London.’
Selena moves to the window for a better look, obscuring my own view. ‘He looks pretty young, doesn’t he? Must be a banker. No, something in tech – a banker wouldn’t still be at home at ten in the morning. Or maybe he’s a rich overseas student, there are so many of them around here. Russians, mainly.’
I silently burn for her to get out of the way, but by the time she does, he’s disappeared. ‘Where did he go?’ I ask, foolishly.
‘Back inside. Don’t worry, he didn’t jump. If he did, would he land in the water? These walkways are pretty narrow.’
As she leans steeply out of the window to remind herself of the dimensions of her own building’s waterfront, I suppress a shudder and get to my feet.
‘Time for me to get going.’
She walks me out and I step into the lift gratefully, like someone being airlifted from a war zone. Only now, alone in that mirrored box, do I allow myself to receive at full voltage my anguish at the memory of a boy called Kieran Watts and the power he had over my son Lucas. The sheer predictability of Lucas’s response to his God-given cool.
Of course, by this stage in the game – middle age – we know cool is just another way of saying restless, reckless.
Careless.
The lift gives a queasy little lurch before coming to a stop. The doors part and I step out. The lobby looks the same as it did when I arrived, but the floor feels like sand moving beneath my feet and I press a hand to the exposed brick wall to steady myself.
It can’t be Kieran Watts, I tell myself. And if anyone can be sure of that it is me.
Because I’m the one who killed him.
Chapter 2
That got your attention.
Well, hopefully. Otherwise I might as well give up this writing lark right now and sign up for some other form of therapy. Get my catharsis by an easier method, because this one is hard, really hard. Already I feel as if I’m using bodily fluids for ink – the blood of my son, the tears of my daughter. My own bottomless tap of adrenaline.
So I’m the first to admit that what was set in motion after that visit to Jacob’s Wharf was basically one disastrous mistake after another. I can hardly deny it, can I? But at least hear the story from the horse’s mouth. Appreciate the context.
Let me take you back to when I first met this man, in September 2012. He was a child then, or a man child, as they are at sixteen, and he’d joined Lucas’s school for sixth form, a ‘cared for’ pupil who by law rose to the top of the admissions list. And quite rightly, too – don’t get me wrong, with any other disadvantaged youngster I’d have been as compassionate as you’d expect of a parent at Foxwell Academy, Beckenham. The catchment was a classic suburban bubble of wholesome parenting, all scratch cooking and helping with the homework; soft clean sheets and fluffed pillows. We wished everyone’s kids could have the same advantages, we honestly did – just so long as it wasn’t at the expense of ours.
‘Does he live in a children’s home?’ I asked Lucas, when his head of year emailed us with the news that our son had been assigned as a buddy to this vulnerable new classmate. I wasn’t aware of such a residence in our area, but I knew from a feature I’d read in the Guardian that they were often friendly, cosy places, nothing like the bleak institutions of public imagination.
‘No, he’s got a foster mum,’ Lucas said. ‘A woman called… I don’t know, something funny. Over in South Norwood.’
‘Quite a way to come for school.’
‘He gets the tram. And he’s going to learn to drive as soon as he’s seventeen. His foster mum’s paying, so yeah.’
So yeah. Lucas always used to finish a sentence that way. Even now, I feel a twist in my gut when I hear someone with the same verbal tic.
He didn’t know the details of the new boy’s birth parents, but I soon heard on the grapevine that the mother had had learning difficulties and drug issues and hadn’t been allowed to keep him. His grandmother had taken him for a few years, but, following her death from cancer, he’d been in a series of foster placements. He’d scored unexpectedly well in his GCSEs and his current placement had been extended so he could take A-levels. Lucas, at this time an academic star with a reputation for being a team player, was a natural choice of buddy for a youngster who I pictured as diffident, if not damaged.
‘I hope you’re being kind,’ I said. ‘He’s had a tough start, poor kid.’
‘Suppose.’
‘Does he seem sad?’
‘Sad? Kieran? No, he’s a real laugh.’
Lucas was a typical sixteen-year-old kid, not exactly renowned for his empathy – or maybe it was just that his generation took everything in its stride. Identity politics were taking off then and, amid a dizzying array of new ways to be defined, not living in a traditional nuclear family was so old-school as to be scarcely worth a mention.
Lucas’s own family arrangement certainly raised no eyebrows. He lived with me, his stepfather Justin and half-sister Freya in a lovely old Edwardian villa a mere fifteen-minute walk from his father’s flat on a 1980s housing estate. He shuttled between us – we always use that word, don’t we? Shuttled – or, in reality, strolled, while smoking the roll-ups he hoped we didn’t know about.
Before I go on, I ought to describe Lucas’s appearance, because most people have only ever seen the photo the papers used, the one of him on the beach in Greece. Damp hair, bare shoulders, a huge grin splitting his tanned face. Breathtakingly alive. During that first term of sixth form, he was only three or four years off the age his father had been when I met him and the resemblance was striking. Lucas had the same ink-black eyes and silky dark hair swept from his face like a spaniel, while his heart-shaped face came from my side of the family. He looked young for his age, I’d say. (Later, when the actor Timothée Chalamet came on the scene, Freya said he would play Lucas in the movie of his life, but I don’t suppose we’ll ever see that. Not unless someone buys the screen rights to this.)
As for Kieran, I heard him before I saw him. Letting myself into the house one evening after work, a few weeks into the new term, I caught the sound of a great rattle of laughter coming from the den, a rich baritone I couldn’t place. I poked my head around the door and, finding Lucas with his friend Tom, game consoles on laps, asked if they wanted a snack. Only then did I notice a third boy, sitting on the floor on the far side of the sofa.
‘Hi, I don’t think we’ve met before. I’m Lucas’s mum, Ellen.’
‘Hey.’ He offered me neither his name nor any eye contact.
Lucas took pity on me. ‘This is Kieran, Mum.’
‘Oh, so you’re Kieran? I’ve heard a lot about you.’
The new boy laughed, mockingly, though it was not clear if he was mocking me or Lucas or simply the notion of anyone choosing to talk about him at all.
Smiling, I stepped further into the room to see him. I admit I was surprised by his appearance. Right from the start there’d been a daredevil theme to the anecdotes about him – he’d scaled the high g
ates that stopped pupils from leaving the premises at lunchtime; he’d skidded down the centre of the tram when rainwater got in and received a round of applause from the other passengers – and I’d imagined some tall, golden-haired athlete, as heroes often are at that age. Kieran Watts was nothing like that. Short and fleshy, with deep red hair that he had a habit of tugging at and skin bumpy with acne, he was, at first glance, many people’s idea of unheroic.
The boys were playing Grand Theft Auto V, or whatever the big violent game was that year, and seemed to be waiting out an internet interruption, so I lingered to chat. ‘You’re new to Foxwell, aren’t you, Kieran? Settling in okay?’
‘It’s all right,’ he said, as if dismissing an idiotic question.
‘The teachers there are so great, aren’t they?’
Kieran sent a glance Lucas’s way and mouthed what I was fairly sure was, ‘What the fuck?’
‘I’m not sure he’s that bothered about the teachers,’ Tom explained (I liked Tom).
‘Well, he should be,’ I said, cheerfully. ‘Where did you do your GCSEs, Kieran?’
Again, Lucas spoke for him. ‘Not round here. His old school was in Croydon. Horville Senior, wasn’t it?’
‘Whoreville, with a “w”,’ Kieran drawled and the other two snickered.
‘Wait, the connection’s back,’ Tom said, brandishing his controller.
‘Fucking yes!’ Kieran yelled, with sudden energy. ‘Let’s go!’
I withdrew. It was clear from this interaction that the boy lacked any interest in making a good first impression, but I doubted this was anything to do with his being in foster care. Plenty of kids were self-conscious at this age and hid behind swearing and juvenile banter. Even so, I didn’t like the idea of Freya overhearing quips like that ‘whoreville’ one.
Half an hour later, Tom came to say goodbye and Lucas called to me from the hallway. ‘Going out!’
‘Where to?’ I asked, hurrying from the kitchen, and he shot me a look of adolescent terror: Don’t show me up in front of my friends.
The Heights Page 1
