“What with the intrusive tabloids and the sensationalism and what have you...” he added.
“Yes, of course, you’re absolutely right.” He sighed. “It is something of an additional burden.”
They watched as the fat man from the van got out and wandered over to some bushes twenty yards away and urinated. Then Wayne and his colleague appeared and they got into the van and the fat man came back, nodded tersely to them and clambered into the driving-seat and they drove away down the drive towards the main gate.
Morgan looked at him, his eye-brows raised. Paul waited for a comment about the fat man or about the paintings but Morgan decided to say nothing about either of them.
“So... Paul... what can I do for you?”
“Where’s Sarah?”, he was going to say... but didn’t.
“I should have called ahead... I was just passing... I don’t know... I just wanted to give some... moral support, I suppose.”
“Decent of you, I appreciate it.”
“It’s just so... unbelievable.”
“Yes... yes, it is.”
He was wondering if Morgan was going to invite him into the house for a drink, and whether he would accept, when Morgan’s mobile rang with a low chirp. He reached into his trouser pocket, and then the breast pocket of his jacket and then gave up on the idea.
“Don’t you want to get that?”, Paul said.
“It’s probably just another journalist wanting a sound-bite.”
Right, Paul thought. Or maybe it’s the police with good news or even Sarah, who’s suddenly recovered from her amnesia...
“Well, I won’t keep you”, Morgan said. “I’m sure you have better things to do than sympathise with a fraught, harrowed husband... and once again, I’m sorry I snapped at you.”
Paul stretched out his hand again.
“Fingers crossed, eh? I’m sure the truth will be revealed...”
Morgan blinked away what may have been a glimmer of doubt.
“... and everything will turn out fine. My prayers are with you.”
“Thank you. Thanks for stopping by. I look forward to seeing you again in rather different circumstances.”
He held onto Paul’s hand for a second too long.
He gave Morgan what he hoped was a grim but optimistic nod and turned away. He could almost feel his back tingling under the weight of the other man’s gaze.
The street-lights were coming on as he drove back to the pub where he was staying. Again, he was feeling a little confused. He had enjoyed a certain puerile and perhaps perverse pleasure in Neil Morgan’s discomfort and couldn’t quite believe it wasn’t just pettiness and spite on his behalf. Where did that come from? Was Morgan just bearing the brunt of his own frustration and concern, or was something else going on? Was he merely imagining that the distraught husband appeared calculating and suspicious? He believed he had reasonably effective radar and had learnt to read people’s motives and attitudes with a degree of perceptiveness and good old Yorkshire nous... but... he didn’t know what to believe... or perhaps he did, and was afraid of what it might mean...
Such thoughts were swept aside as he drove past the site of the old Copacabana club, now a discount supermarket, and then the White Hart and the canal lock close to the bench where he had last drunk whisky, almost 17 years before... He hadn’t touched the stuff since. As he drove on, he thought of Tracy Booth and of Mrs Hartley and of Dave Middleton’s Dad who had been the one to read the charges to him as he lay in the hospital bed, Mum and Dad hovering by the door, looking appalled, not knowing what to do or say, waiting for an excuse to leave and to hide away their shame behind locked doors.
Chapter 12
The two cases had been tried separately. There was a fair amount of outcry and controversy, extensively covered in the press, as Mrs Hartley was a local celebrity and Tracy Booth’s name alone was worth more than a few garishly-headlined column inches. The Mayor - a friend of Greville Hartley’s – decided to use the case as a platform and spring-board for a new campaign against under-age drinking, drugs and debauchery, and he was to be used as an example. Despite the fact that everyone knew Tracy was a tramp and was actually two months pregnant at the time and that he had been fed a number of hallucinogenic drugs without his knowledge, he had ended up with a sentence of 18 months, to be spent at a Community Rehabilitation Centre until he was 18, with the last 4 in a Young Offenders Unit at one of Her Majesty’s prisons.
If he had wanted to be dramatic he could have said that being in prison – because that’s what it was, no matter how you wrap it up – was no worse than being anywhere else because it had felt like he was in prison anyway with Sarah gone from his life. But it wasn’t really like that...
Being locked up and removed from any contact with friends and family and being subjected to the rigours and humiliations of strict discipline and harsh authority – official or otherwise - is a pretty effective method for developing a sense of survival. And that’s what happened... His anger and resentment soon hardened into a form of fuck-em-all self-preservation and he grew a new and thicker skin. Without having any other options, it dawned on him that his old life was over and it was time to start a new one. He dreamt of escape. Not just from the squalor and the smells and the sordid promiscuity of the institution, nor even in a geographical sense, from Yorkshire, or from England, but escape into a whole new world, a new identity.
He spent his time hanging out with his co-detainees doing as much sport and gym-work as was permitted, but while he was on his own, he read: fact and fiction, history and fantasy, and he found a certain release in the words and ideas that described and evoked situations far removed from his own.
On February 1st 1999 he emerged from Deerbolt Prison in County Durham to find that no-one was there to greet him. He’d hardly been expecting a riotous reception committee, with a brass band and a stretch limo to whisk him off to a home-coming party, but he was still a little shocked, not totally prepared for the absence, despite the fact that the only contact with his parents had been a couple of desultory letters saying how hard it was to get away, and a single visit, just after his arrival... but he knew that Greville Hartley would have been putting pressure on them to let him stew. And that they would have folded to his demands.
He had two addresses in his pocket, given to him by a kid called Rory who had petrol-bombed his old school ‘just because I felt like it’. The first was for the kid’s uncle’s farm in Sussex, where he was to be taken on as a labourer, and the second was for a man in London who had various contacts in civil service circles and certain skills with a computer and a printer.
The journey south took two days. He hitched lifts with truckers and sales reps and students, eating in motorway cafeterias and sleeping on back seats and lay-by benches. When he got to the farm outside Hayward’s Heath he was given a room and a hot meal and told that any friend of Rory’s was welcome there and that if he wanted, they could quite easily lose the paperwork involved in his employment. He agreed. After two months, he went up to London and had his photo taken in a booth at Victoria Station before he went to the second address. Three weeks after that he had a perfect copy of a birth certificate in the name of Paul Riley and he began his new life, with a new Social Security number, passport, driving licence and credit cards in the months that followed.
He contacted no-one back in Yorkshire. He was done. He was free.
The Prison Service had an address for him but that was soon a dead-end. The paperwork was indeed lost. Rory’s family didn’t know where he had run off to. Paul Boyd quite simply didn’t exist anymore. There was no trace of him. And Paul Riley was born, with only a few carefully repressed memories to remind him of whence he had come.
Chapter 13
Halifax, Tuesday April 23rd 2013
When he arrived back at the pub after seeing Neil Morgan, the manager hastily informed him that the bar would be closed until further notice due to a plumbing problem that had shut down all the fridges, apologisi
ng profusely and offering to comp him dinner the next night.
He wanted a drink, and he actually wanted to talk to someone, and he didn’t have a wide range of possibilities.
He got a bottle of warm beer from the bar, where men in overalls were handing each other tools and wondering what to do with them, and he sat outside in the smoking area and called Dave Middleton.
“How are you, Paul?”
“I’m fine, how are you?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m about five minutes away from the White Hart.”
“What are you doing here? ... Or is that a daft question?”
“I’m just visiting...”
“Right... You’re in luck, Cath’s taken the kids to her mother’s. I’ll see you there.”
Over the past twelve years the two men had met only three times; once when Paul had attended Dave and Cath’s wedding in 2002, another time in London when the couple had returned from a holiday in France, and the last time just a year ago, when they’d taken the kids to Alton Towers and Paul had happened to be close by, reviewing a two-star Michelin restaurant for a Sunday supplement.
Dave was 33 now, the same age as Paul. He was going bald and was barrel-chested and when he wasn’t on duty he favoured loose clothes; baggy cargo pants with XXL linen shirts hanging over them and comfortable shoes, often sandals.
When he walked into the White Hart, Paul was already sitting in one corner with half of his first pint in front of him.
“You look like a German tourist on a cut-price safari”, Paul said.
“Fuck off. You want another one?”
“Go on then.”
Dave went to the bar and came back with two pints of Theakstons. Paul raised his glass. Dave raised his. They nodded at each other and drank. Then they sighed and licked their lips.
Some things never change.
“So….”
“So….”
“So how’s the family?”
“Not bad. Where’d you get the tan?”
“I was in Morocco for two weeks last month.”
“It’s all right for some.”
“I was accompanying a group of super-models on a photo-shoot for the Pirelli calendar.”
“Does that even exist any more?”
“Probably not.”
“Mmm, too sexist.”
“So did you see the devastated husband on TV?”
Dave put down his pint and turned to look at his friend, shaking his head.
“And before you ask me what I’m hoping to achieve,” Paul went on, “… I’ve already been asked and I don’t have a good answer. I’m just here, so indulge me.”
Dave sighed and played with his beer mat.
“I did see it, yes.”
“What did you think?”
Dave shrugged.
“What’s to think? The bloke’s cut up, he’s not functioning properly, he’s hyper, it’s not an easy position to be in, people act in different ways…”
“He’s a fucking ham and he’s playing games.”
“What makes you say that?”
“He was using every trick in the book, playing to the audience… starting off with a joke: ‘I wish I’d never seen your faces’… and then the hands spread out like he’s about to launch into the soliloquy from Hamlet, and the invisible tears he brushes away and the line about counting the minutes and then the list of synonyms he’d pulled from a Thesaurus because he couldn’t express what he felt about his wife in an original and sincere way…”
“So… correct me if I’m wrong… but you’re not feeling all warm and sympathetic about the bloke who married the only woman you’ve ever loved?”
It was Paul’s turn to sigh.
“What do you know about him?”
“Not a lot.”
“Are you on the case?”
“I’m not working it… I know what’s going on… which isn’t much.”
“He’s selling off paintings from Calderwood Hall.”
Dave’s eyebrows went up.
“How d’you know that?”
“I was there, I saw them being loaded into a van. By some young Booths”.
“You’re kidding! What the fuck were you doing there?”
“I just popped round to be warm and sympathetic.”
“Right.”
“Are you looking at him? Because in my book, the bloke’s as bent as a seven-quid note.”
“And your evidence for this would be what exactly?”
“Fuck all. A gut feeling.”
“I thought it was us coppers who were supposed to trot out that kind of crap.”
“So?”
“So what?”
“Is he a suspect?”
Dave took a nonchalant glance around the bar.
“Of course he’s a fucking suspect. He’s the only suspect we’ve got. Rich wife goes missing… duh! Didn’t you ever watch Columbo?”
“And?”
“And what? The bloke’s clean… squeaky… He’s alibied up to his bollocks on the train and there’s no signs of collusion or conspiracy… You might not like his face or his manner but there’s absolutely no evidence of him being involved at all. And believe me, we’ve looked and we’ve checked and we’ve double-checked and there’s nothing there. Fuck all. Her disappearance really is a mystery.”
“Have you tapped his phones?”
“You what? Jesus, that’s brilliant! We’d never have thought of that!”
“All of them?”
“Hang on Paul, just hold it for a second. You’re losing the fucking plot, mate. I can understand you being concerned, I can, really… And I can understand you wanting to be here… But you’re grasping at straws. You’re barking up the wrong tree. You’re barking, full stop!”
“I’m obsessed?”
“You’ve been obsessed as long as I’ve known you. And we all know where that got you!”
“I think that tab of acid you gave me might have contributed to that.”
Paul turned away for a moment, biting his tongue.
Dave paled.
“I apologised for that.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Didn’t I? I thought I had…”
“No, but… listen… I’m sorry. I never expected or wanted an apology, I never blamed you. Linda Deighton, maybe… and her ketamine tequilas… I saw her last night, by the way…”
“Oh aye? How’s she looking?”
“A bit burnt out but very presentable. If you like that sort of thing.”
“She’s been around the block a bit.”
“I can imagine.”
“It must have been my old man I apologised to.”
“You told him?”
“The least I could do. I thought he might cut you some slack.”
“Fat chance.”
“I know, he was under some serious pressure to throw the book at you.”
“All three volumes.”
“Fuck me, what a night…”
“Yeah, surfing…”
“You what?”
“You were surfing the curtains…”
“I don’t remember that. I don’t remember much at all…”
Paul finished his pint and remembered it all.
He stood up and went to the bar and returned with two more Theakstons.
Dave chinked his glass against Paul’s, proposing a toast.
“Terry Booth’s dead.”
“You’re kidding! Fuck me, some excellent news for once! This is a good month for stiffs; first Maggie Thatcher then Terry Booth! Who’s next I wonder?”
He suddenly thought of Sarah and the blood drained from his face and Dave looked at him and knew what he was thinking.
“Don’t even go there, mate, we’re not there yet.”
Paul sighed.
“So how did he die? Nice and painfully I hope?”
He had a vision of crushed teeth and dribbles of blood.
“Heart attack, in his sleep, aft
er porking a rent-boy in a motel off the M61.”
“Terry Booth? Who’d of thunk it?”
“Yeah.”
“So, a peaceful passing with a loved one. There’s no justice.”
“It’s a tragic loss.”
“Yeah, I’m devastated… 10 years, 6 months, 4 days, 2 hours and 23 minutes since I last saw him… and yes, I have counted the minutes!”
He wondered if Dave would do the maths and work out what he was talking about. Not the moors adventure. Something else.
Dave turned, his eyes wide, a finger tapping his temple.
“You’re a couple short of a six-pack, you are… You’re not still doing acid are you? I mean your brain’s obviously fried to fuck?”
Paul grinned at him. And thought of his payback against Terry.
“The Booth picture-mover told me Tracy’s expecting number eight…”
“Aye, she’s still looking good though. If you like that sort of thing.”
“Did she marry someone close? Uncle, cousin, brother?”
“Surprisingly, no. A guy from Sheffield, decent enough bloke actually, a travel agent or something.”
“But she kept her name?”
“He’s called Jeff Longbottom, what would you do?”
The two men drank their beer in silence for a while and then Dave got another round in and they chatted about mutual friends, football, Dave’s two kids and their plans for another, Paul’s job… picking up where they had left off the last time, knowing they would do the same the next time, whether it was next week, next year or the day Huddersfield Town won the Champions League.
They could hear the dramatic music and then cheers from the next room as the semi-final between Barca and Bayern kicked off.
“So who are you these days?”
“I’m still Paul Riley, for work anyway… but I got a passport in the name of Paul Boyd a few months back. So I can be me when I want… If I want.”
“Two passports? I could do you for that…”
“I’ll tell your Dad it was you that let his tyres down that time…”
The King's Shilling Page 9
