What was he up to? I picked up the penultimate tape and looked at it before inserting it into the slot. November 2000. Around four months before the last tape. This time something flickered on to the screen almost immediately. The same view from the dashboard. The camera was still concealed by a blue sweater or a jacket, and the cigarette packet had been crushed into a tight ball beside it. The windscreen looked slightly dirtier. But this was a different house, and it was daytime. Yet the same white van was sitting outside in the driveway.
This street was more affluent than the last and stood somewhere in the middle of a small village. The warm yellow Cotswold stone was unmistakable, as were the grey, sloping roofs. I didn’t recognize the village, though. It looked sunny but cold, and leaves were falling on to the green and on to the small lane in front of the house and on to the roof of the white van.
The camera stayed where it was. There was more impatient shuffling. A cough. Then ever so suddenly more light fell on to the dashboard as the car door opened. The car rose a bit as the occupant climbed out, and the man could then be seen through the windscreen of his car. And there, in a perfectly framed shot, stood, I assumed, Mr James Bray of the Bray Detective Agency.
Bray stared at the house and ran his fingers through his long but thinning brown hair. Then, with his head straining forward, he took a few tentative steps towards the van. He pushed his hands deep into the pockets of his old leather jacket and moved in the direction of the house next door. He stood behind a rhododendron bush for camouflage.
I paused the tape. Bray was in his mid-forties with soft brown eyes behind thick-rimmed black glasses. He was big, stocky and powerful, but he didn’t look all that light on his feet. The old leather jacket didn’t quite go with the old-man spectacles and newish-looking trainers either. I pressed ‘play’ and saw Bray throw a cigarette to the ground and stamp it out with the toe of his shoe, then stare at the sky in exasperation. His hands fell to his sides. Then he returned wearily to the car, which once more rocked under his weight. His hand seemed to reach automatically for the cigarette packet, but, as it was empty, he only threw it back and sighed loudly.
I waited, then pressed ‘forward’ and ‘play’. A few minutes later the front door of the house opened and someone approached the white van from the side. A hand reached for the camera and the focus shifted to the outline of the van. A man approached the back doors. He had a relaxed, swaggering gait. It was too far away to see his face, but there was a glimpse of black hair, white overalls and trainers as he swung the doors open wide.
The man disappeared inside the house and returned carrying a metal ladder, which he slid into the van’s roof rack. Once more he disappeared into the house. He came back a minute later, carrying large heavy bundles of yellowish cloth, which he hurled into the back of the van. He slammed the doors shut and waved in the direction of the front door, where a woman was standing; he seemed to be making some sort of joke to her. Then he got in the van and reversed out of the drive.
Bray scrabbled and grabbed the camera and placed it on the seat beside him; then came a blurred hunched shoulder and the sound of fabric rubbing against a leather seat – Bray ducking down, out of sight. The dim roar of a car passing nearby and very fast. The car shook. The camera was jolted as Bray reversed and began his pursuit.
The camera rolled dangerously close to the edge of the brown leather seat covers from time to time. Both Bray and the white van must have been going at quite a clip by the sound of it. Bray’s hand reached for the gear stick as the car surged forward; and then suddenly he braked. The camera rolled and fell to the floor. Bray absently reached for it. His face appeared for a second in the camera, filling the screen. Then it went dark.
I waited.
Bray’s wide, anxious-looking face reappeared. He placed the camera carefully once more on the dashboard and gently covered it with the sweater. And there it was: the white van. Parked halfway up on the pavement of a busy road on the outskirts of a village or small town. It looked as if Bray had tucked away his own car at the end of a side street. The straight outlines of the van could only just be made out in the growing darkness, which meant that some time had passed – though it was difficult to know how much. I could also see some kind of car park and a big square building: a sports centre perhaps. I could see the blue-green of a swimming pool in a large window at the side. And next to it there was something else: another, much larger building. It sprawled out on to the grey tarmac. Figures were pouring out of all the buildings. I froze, watching, listening. Children were screaming and laughing as they left the gates of a school.
18
‘No lo puedo creer,’ I mumbled to myself in the warmth of my kitchen.
The doors of the white van suddenly opened, the man got out and slammed the door. He had changed out of his overalls and was wearing jeans and a heavy-looking donkey jacket. I could see the smudge of a pale face above the blue upturned collar of his jacket.
Bray reached for the camera and placed it firmly in the bottom of what looked like a thick brown satchel or sports bag. The camera was pushed forward until its lens was facing into a small neat hole cut into the bag’s front.
Almost immediately, the camera was swung round and hung from Bray’s right shoulder. There was the sound of the car door opening and then being closed with some care. For a few moments there were shots of nothing but the pavement and the road along with a stretch of grey afternoon. Then a glimpse of grass on the other side of the pavement. Then children.
They were laughing and talking excitedly to each other as they passed by Bray, giggling and shouting out as they headed on home. One of the boys dropped a blue schoolbook, picked it up and frowned as he wiped the mud from the front with the sleeve of his coat. Another boy punched him in the arm. The boy’s face screwed up in an exaggeration of pain. More small knots of children unravelling as Bray’s hulking shadow walked through their midst in the direction of the school.
But Bray didn’t go to the school. Instead, the camera paused as he waited to cross the road. Then came another lane with houses on either side, and then a much quieter suburban-looking street – at the end of which was a dilapidated fence and a muddy path leading to a small grassy slope and a park. The man’s figure trudged ahead of the camera on the wet grass.
Bray crested the top of the rise, and he could be heard to be breathing heavily. For a few moments everything was still. But Bray, obviously realizing he had become exposed to view, ducked into the cover of a small copse of trees at the top of the rise. He moved towards the brown slats of an old wooden fence; I could hear the sound of undergrowth slapping against the sides of the camera bag. The camera stayed where it was for the moment, while Bray caught his breath.
Bray placed the bag on to the ground – I could see fallen twigs and leaves – and took out the camera. He crept forward to the edge of the trees and zoomed in on the scene below.
At the near end of a wet field stood an old cricket pavilion and leading up to it was a crumbling whitish mass of concrete that, I supposed, once might have been steps. Suddenly, the camera moved forward as Bray, no doubt on his haunches, pushed himself through the undergrowth and to the edge of the trees. The camera zoomed in. There were kids, around five or six of them, gathered on the broken steps. A handful of girls and a few lads. The boys were around fifteen. Maybe sixteen years old. The girls looked around the same age.
They were wearing their school uniforms. Some were smoking, holding the cigarettes in their hands and making a big deal about offering each other a drag and playing with their lighters.
The man Bray was following was already nearly amongst them. He had taken off his jacket and it now lay draped across his shoulder. They seemed to be expecting him. He approached them and started talking. His swagger became more exaggerated, stagy. The boys laughed, pleased to see him. They had a football, and they began to kick it around. The man kicked the ball between one of the boy’s legs, raised his arms in the air and ran in a circle.
/> ‘Goal!’
I watched. The man stood in goal for a while, and then they switched positions. The ball slid along the grass and landed near the foot of the pavilion, where three of the girls were sitting on the remains of the stone steps. One of the girls stood up and kicked back the ball. The boys laughed again.
Sitting away from the others, on her own, was a thin girl, perched on the edge of a broken-down bench, staring at her knees. Bray zoomed the camera on to her and kept it there. She was pale, with thick brown hair and an elfin face. She looked a little bemused, as if she wasn’t sure what she was doing there. Although it didn’t seem all that cold, she seemed to be shivering.
She was, I realized, the only one not watching the boys play. In fact, she seemed to be very purposefully not looking in their direction at all.
The football game stopped abruptly. The man picked up his jacket and sauntered off towards the pavilion. He passed the girls sitting on the steps. The girl sitting on the broken bench seemed to shrink in on herself. She clutched the blazer in her lap more tightly. But the man sat next to her on the bench. He reached for her and put his arm around her. The girl flinched, but she seemed frozen, unable to move. Then he turned his face towards her, trying to kiss her. This seemed to snap her out of it, because she sidled away from him. He let her go with a laugh. I felt sick to my stomach. The camera tracked outwards, as Bray steadied his grip, and then finally zoomed in on the man’s face as he stood up.
When I saw that face, my stomach gave another nauseated lurch and my thoughts went straight into Spanish, then English, and then Spanish and English at the same time, until I couldn’t think at all. I breathed in and then out came a long, uninterrupted stream of profanity. Then, still not able to believe what I was seeing, I said all of it over again, only more loudly. I reached for the remote and pressed ‘pause’.
I carried on staring at the screen, trying to calm down. I sat at my kitchen table, resting my chin on my upraised fist. Well, it was pretty obvious what he was doing there. Just like old times. There was no doubt about it. The son of a bitch hadn’t changed a bit.
19
I decided to call Bray straightaway and used the mobile telephone number at the top of the agency’s invoice. Bray answered the phone in mid-sentence. In the background were sounds of brittle laughter, clinking glasses. A pub or a busy restaurant. The voice at the other end of the line was very direct and underpinned with a fading London accent. As soon as I mentioned Frank Hurst, Bray asked me politely to please wait and took the phone outside. I could hear a door swinging open and then footsteps in gravel. I wasn’t quite sure where to begin. With Rebecca or with the man Bray had been following? I suppose that I was still a little shocked by the ordinariness of it all. By the slightly damp Wednesday-afternoon feel of the footage on the videotape. By how easily that man had got so close and with such apparent ease to those teenagers. And in the open too. The video was still paused. Seen in profile, the man’s nose was aquiline. His arm was draped around the girl’s thin shoulders. I had to turn away, so that I was staring at the cold night gathering outside my kitchen windows.
‘You were working for Frank Hurst then, Mr Bray,’ I said, deciding finally to begin with Rebecca. ‘He first got in contact with your agency because he was trying to find his daughter?’
‘Yes, well, agency,’ Bray said sheepishly. ‘We’re a pretty small outfit. It’s just me, really, most of the time. All of the time, actually. After Rebecca went walkabout, Hurst called me and asked me to try to find her.’
‘But why didn’t he try the police?’
‘He had a pretty low opinion of the police, I’m afraid. Besides, she was seventeen or eighteen by then, so she was old enough to do whatever she liked. And there wasn’t much he could do about it. He’d had a go himself, but realized it was no use, so he thought he’d let me have a try. More or less gave me a blank cheque to find her. But she’d gone – disappeared. I told him I thought she must have moved away from London. Probably shacked up with some fella somewhere. Told him she could be anywhere. He wouldn’t have that, of course. But I’d have found her if she’d still been in London.’ He paused. ‘So she hasn’t come forward, then?’
‘No. Not yet,’ I said a little uneasily, but I didn’t know why. I leant against the edge of the worktop in the kitchen and forced myself to stare hard at the television in front of me. ‘But there’s something else I need to talk to you about,’ I said. ‘He got you to do some other work for him as well, didn’t he? Another job, after you’d finished looking for Rebecca.’
‘How do you know?’ Bray said sharply, and then, realizing, said, ‘The files. Hurst kept them.’
‘Yes, and some videotapes.’
‘Well, like I said, I couldn’t find her. But he was happy with the work I’d done for him. He said he was pleased with the way I’d kept him up to date and informed. He said he trusted me.’ Bray sounded quite proud about it. ‘So he phoned me later on and asked me to do something else for him, if I could do with the extra work. I didn’t really understand any of it to begin with. I asked him to explain but he wouldn’t. He just wanted to know what they were up to.’
‘They?’ I said.
‘Yes. Some men.’
‘So it wasn’t just Gardner?’
‘So you know him?’ Bray said, taken aback.
‘Yes. But there were others, you say. He asked you to follow more than just one man?’
‘Yes, but that was only part of it. What he really wanted to know was what they were up to.’
‘Up to?’
‘Yes. He wanted to know where they were and what they were doing. And he wanted me to keep an eye on them. Check up on ’em. That was all. And, of course, if they moved he wanted to know about that too.’
‘So these men – they were all local?’
‘Yes.’
‘How many?’
‘Three.’
‘Three,’ I said quietly.
‘Yes.’
‘And who were they?’
‘God, I can’t remember the name of the first one. Not off the top of my head. It’ll be in the file. Anyway he’d moved. Gone to Canada. Ontario. No. Hold on. Actually Vancouver, I think it was. Had family over there, and the neighbours said he’d got a job out there and wasn’t coming back. Gone for good. And they were all glad to see the back of him, which I thought was a bit funny to begin with. So I told Hurst and he said all right and then he gave me another name.’
‘Edward Secoy,’ I said softly. ‘That was the name of the first man, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, that’s it. Well, of course, as a DCI, you’d know what was happening on your patch. And I bet you can name the next one too.’
‘Another local?’
‘Yep. From over in Broadway.’
‘Ben Tanner,’ I said straightaway. ‘But he was dead, right?’
‘Yeah, that one was even easier. Croaked in his sleep.’
‘Heart attack.’
‘Yep. Full marks again. So I phone Hurst and tell him. All right, he says, and then he gives me the last name.’
‘Christopher,’ I said. ‘Christopher Gardner.’
‘Yeah. A decorator. I had to follow him all over the place.’
‘Anything else?’ I said. ‘Anything more specific he may have wanted you to look out for?’
There was a pause. ‘Yes,’ Bray said finally. ‘He wanted to know if there was a place they often went to – a storeroom or an old warehouse. A place out of the way and that no one else knew about. A secret place. That’s what Frank called it. Sounded a bit silly. It was like something out of a book for little kiddies. I asked him if he could be a bit more specific. Of course, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into then. He said he didn’t know. Could even be really out of the way, like. A field. A wood. Anything. And if there was, I was to tell him straightaway. But I could pretty much do as I saw fit. As long as I kept him posted, kept an eye on ’em and billed him for the hours I put in, that was fine by
him.’
‘But you must have made the connection between the three men eventually.’
‘Yeah. Didn’t take long. You know – the looks I got when I started asking about ’em.’
‘But you didn’t tell him?’
‘No – wasn’t my job to. I just did what he asked me to do and kept an eye on this Gardner fella. I followed him on and off a few times a month for about a year, I think. Then, after a while, he seemed to lose interest, so I stopped.’
‘Even when you followed him to a school?’
‘God. You saw that?’ Bray said thinly.
‘Yes.’
‘Hurst didn’t seem all that bothered. He asked me for Gardner’s telephone number when I sent him the tape. And I gave it to him along with his address. He was going a bit loopy by then, I think. I went to see him. Like I said, I’d twigged what it all meant by then. I was angry. I didn’t want to get involved in any of that. And seeing Gardner with those kids … well … it was just fucking awful. But Hurst wouldn’t even let me through the front door.’
‘You didn’t consider contacting the police when you saw Gardner with that girl?’
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. ‘If I’d gone to the police, they’d have asked me why I was following Gardner. So no. But I did have a long chat with that girl when Gardner was gone. He … well, he tried to kiss her. You saw that. She swore that it was the first time. I said I’d be watching, and that if I saw anything like it again I’d report it to her school. And for good measure I told all her mates that if I caught any of them hanging out with Gardner, they’d have me to deal with.’
‘All right. And after Hurst got you to keep an eye on these three men, he never asked about Rebecca. You were to abandon that altogether?’
‘Yes. He’d pretty much given up on her by then.’
‘And you were to concentrate on Gardner?’
‘Yes. But it wasn’t a full-time gig or anything like that. It was … well, he said it was at my own convenience. So, to prove I wasn’t wasting his money and I was on the job, I videoed some of it and sent the tapes to him along with reports on what I’d found.’
The Drowning Ground Page 12
