Cry Baby

by Billingham, Mark

No friendship could survive this, could it?

  That’s if they had ever really been friends to begin with, as there had been plenty of times when Cat couldn’t help but suspect she was just around to provide light entertainment or chosen as a last resort; when Maria was bored or just desperate to get out of the house and other people were busy.

  ‘Cat? You still there?’

  She wondered if Maria had only ever been slumming it.

  Cat was still struggling for something to say, to decide if there was anything else worth saying, when she heard the knock at the door.

  She gasped and said, ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Oh . . . ’

  ‘There’s someone at the door.’

  ‘Right,’ Maria said.

  The word thrown away; disdainful almost, as though poor put-upon Maria didn’t believe her. Sulky, like the spoiled princess she was, because being so sophisticated and super-bright she knew that the knock at the door – which could mean news about Cat’s missing child, for Christ’s sake – was just an excuse to get rid of her.

  Like she was the victim here, tortured and hard-done-by, the one who was actually suffering.

  Cat put the phone down and walked across to the door.

  Dry-mouthed and all but panting, she opened it.

  She looked at the woman standing there, slowly lowered her head and shook it. Then both of them burst into tears.

  TEN

  Felix Barratt lived on the ground floor of a Victorian semi in Wood Green. He worked as a housing project manager for the local council – ‘It’s not the most exciting job in the world, but it suits me fine’ – and lived alone with only a cat for company, because, he’d told Thorne almost immediately, that was the way he preferred it.

  ‘I love the ladies, don’t get me wrong,’ he’d said. ‘Too much, sometimes, if I’m honest. But I don’t want someone telling me what I can and can’t do. What I can watch on the television, what to wear.’ He’d shuddered theatrically and grimaced. ‘No, thank you very much.’

  They were sitting in a fastidiously kept front room with crowded bookshelves, a collection of ornamental birds in a glass-fronted case and a view of the treelined street through a large bay window, at which Barratt glanced every few minutes.

  He had brought tea through in china cups. There were biscuits on a plate.

  ‘When you called in, you said you’d been in the woods yourself a little earlier.’

  ‘Correct,’ Barratt said. ‘I’d left the woods an hour or so before I saw the car. Nipped up to Muswell Hill, just to potter around the shops for a bit. I was walking back to my own car when I saw the man with the boy.’

  Though he was somewhere in his early forties, Barratt dressed like someone a good deal older. He wore brown corduroy trousers and highly polished brogues, a shirt and tie under a tweed jacket. Sunday best, Thorne thought, or perhaps he’d smartened himself up a little because there was a police officer coming round. Thorne was well aware that some people were like that, though in the end he decided that Barratt was probably not one of them. As someone who only ever looked smart when he absolutely had to, Thorne could never quite fathom those who did so as a matter of course.

  ‘Why all the way up to Highgate Wood?’

  ‘Sorry?

  ‘Well, I’d’ve thought Alexandra Park was a lot closer, that’s all.’ Thorne turned and pointed through the window. ‘It’s what . . . five minutes away?’

  ‘Oh, the wood is so much nicer,’ Barratt said. ‘It’s a lot older, a lot more established. There are great spotted woodpeckers and nuthatches. Treecreepers, now and again. Seventy-one different species, all told.’ He nodded towards the glass-fronted case. ‘I like birds.’

  ‘See any good ones?’

  ‘Good ones?’

  ‘Any good birds, yesterday morning?’

  ‘Oh yes, but sadly, nothing I haven’t seen before.’

  Thorne wrote it all down. ‘And can you remember which shops you went into? When you were pottering about?’

  Barratt sipped his tea. Thorne thought the man looked a little irritated, but if he was wondering why he was being asked so many questions when he was the one trying to help, the one who had come forward with important information, he kept it to himself. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘A couple of the charity shops. I popped into Woolworths, I think.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Thorne said, scribbling again. ‘This is all very helpful. I’ll come on to what you saw in a minute, but we do need all these details, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Of course, fire away.’ Barratt took another sip of tea, glanced towards the road again.

  ‘Did you buy anything?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘From Woolworths? Or anywhere else?’

  ‘No.’ Barratt smiled. ‘I was just killing time.’

  Thorne wrote that down and underlined it. ‘Why were you killing time?’

  ‘Well, the weekends can be quite boring, tell you the truth. Yes, I generally prefer my own company at home, but we can all get on our own nerves at times, can’t we? I’m actually happiest when I’m working.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘What about you?’ Barratt studied him across his teacup. ‘Looks like you enjoy your job.’

  ‘Some days are better than others,’ Thorne said. He lowered his notebook for a moment. ‘I can’t say that this case is what I’d call enjoyable.’

  ‘No, of course not. Not until you catch him, anyway. This man . . . ’

  Thorne watched Barratt lean down to stroke the ginger cat who had come padding into the room; he made kissing noises as he rubbed its ears. ‘Well, let’s hope that you coming forward with this information helps us do that.’

  Barratt sat up again and smiled. He raised his cup as if in a toast. ‘Amen to that.’

  Felix Barratt’s name had been run through the Police National Computer as a matter of course. Thorne knew that nothing so much as a parking ticket had turned up and his name was certainly not on their current list of known sex offenders. All the same, he was not drinking tea in Barratt’s front room solely in an attempt to flesh out the somewhat sparse descriptions the man had provided over the phone.

  It would not be the first time an offender had insinuated himself into an investigation or had attempted to muddy the waters by helpfully providing false leads for the likes of Thorne to chase up.

  A conveniently placed vehicle. A suspect who had never existed.

  ‘I was wondering if you’d remembered any more about this car since you rang in,’ Thorne said. ‘Red, you said.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. A bright red, like a post box, and very clean.’

  ‘OK, that’s useful.’

  ‘As I told the officer on the phone, one of those little ones, like a Golf.’

  ‘Or a Fiesta?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. I’m not great with cars, but something a bit sporty.’

  ‘Anything else? Any marks on the car? Dents or scratches?’

  ‘Not that I could see,’ Barratt said. ‘I was on the other side of the road.’

  ‘And what about the man you saw getting into the car?’ Thorne glanced down at his notebook, at the description Barratt had given when he’d called the appeals line. ‘Medium height, dark jacket . . . any idea if he was dark-haired, blond . . . ?’

  ‘He was wearing a hat,’ Barratt said. ‘I don’t mean a woolly one or anything, I mean it wasn’t particularly cold, was it? More like a cap, but not a baseball cap or anything like that.’ He paused, searching for the right word. ‘Jaunty, that’s it.’

  ‘If you had to guess at an age?’

  Barratt puffed out his cheeks. ‘I’m really not sure. Forties, perhaps?’

  ‘And what about the boy?’

  Barratt leaned back. The cat was still nosing around his ankles. ‘Well, like I said, he was six or seven, I think. It’s hard to be sure, isn’t it? Some children are taller for their age than others, aren’t they?’

  ‘You still can’t remember what he
was wearing?’

  ‘No and I’ve been racking my brains. It’s funny, but the man stuck in my mind and the boy just . . . didn’t.’

  Thorne said it was fine, that people always remembered certain details while failing to take in others. He did think it was a little strange that Barratt could not remember the distinctive-looking tartan anorak with a furry hood the missing boy had been wearing. But then there was always the possibility, of course, that the boy Barratt claimed to have seen had been wearing something rather more nondescript, because he wasn’t Kieron Coyne.

  ‘It was all just in passing,’ Barratt said. ‘I hardly took it in, really . . . didn’t even think about it until I saw that board appealing for information.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I thought they were related in some way, I remember that, because the boy was holding the man’s hand.’ Barratt leaned forward. ‘They knew one another, or looked as though they did, at any rate. That must be significant, surely?’

  Thorne stood up and thanked Barratt for his help, for the tea. ‘So, just to be clear, you saw our appeal board when you went back to the wood first thing this morning?’

  Barratt stood up and watched his cat skitter away. ‘As I told you, weekends can get a bit dull. Sundays are even worse than Saturdays.’

  On his way to the door, Thorne took one last look at the glass-fronted cabinet and made a mental note to find out just how many species of birds there were to be spotted in Alexandra Park.

  ELEVEN

  The woman, who sat Catrin down on the sofa and passed her a small pack of tissues from her bag, was tall and slim, with spiky blonde hair that was dark at the roots. She wore skin-tight stone-washed jeans and a black bomber jacket over a denim shirt. Her high cheekbones and delicate features were every bit as striking as always, but the absence of make-up revealed the shadows beneath her wide eyes and what were usually called ‘laughter lines’ like brackets around her mouth, though she was not generally a woman who laughed a great deal.

  Fifteen years earlier, in a different world, she might have been a model, but in north London in 1996 the closest Angela Coyne came to the catwalk was the pictures in Cosmopolitan, while she made her living selling cut-price household goods from a market stall in Shepherd’s Bush.

  ‘Did Billy tell you?’ Cat had put a call through to the prison the night before and Billy had rung her back half an hour later. She dabbed at her eyes. ‘He sounded so upset.’

  Billy Coyne’s big sister nodded. She had already stopped crying, sucking up the snot as she’d marched in and wiping her face with the back of her hand. ‘Yeah, he called a couple of hours ago, but I knew before that. The police were at the stall first thing asking me questions. When did I last see Kieron, what was I doing yesterday lunchtime, all that.’

  Cat looked up at her. ‘I’m sorry, Ange. That’s so stupid.’

  Angela shrugged. ‘Makes sense, when you think about it. At least it shows they’re doing this properly.’ She held up a plastic bag, clanking with beer cans. ‘Right then.’ She walked out to the kitchen to put four cans in the fridge and brought the other four back to the table. She sat down next to Cat and opened one for each of them, took cigarettes from her bag and offered the pack.

  Catrin took one and leaned across for a light, but she struggled to keep her hand steady, remembering the last time she’d held a cigarette between her fingers. The morning before, in that playground. Josh in tears and her starting to run.

  She stifled the sob that rose up suddenly, smiled when it turned into something like a hiccup, then laughed when Angela did. She said, ‘It’s good of you to come, Ange.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. Why wouldn’t I come?’

  ‘All the same.’

  ‘He’s my nephew, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’m his Auntie Ange, right? And you’re more like a sister than a sister-in-law.’ She took a fast drag and hissed out the smoke. ‘I mean, I know we’re not, really, but you know.’

  Cat nodded. ‘Good as,’ she said. ‘And yeah, more like sisters.’

  The woman turned to look at her. ‘I always wondered why you and Billy never tied the knot. I was thinking about that the other day.’

  ‘I wanted to,’ Cat said, ‘but Billy seemed to think we’d be better off not bothering. Something about benefits, about it being easier if we weren’t married. I don’t know.’

  ‘Yeah, he’s usually pretty clued up about all that stuff and how to work it. Shame he doesn’t think about some other things a bit more.’ Angela swallowed beer and shook her head. ‘My baby brother doesn’t know his arse from his elbow most of the time.’

  Cat grinned, but the laugh died in her throat. ‘I do miss him, though.’ She brushed a worm of cigarette ash from the cushion and her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I wish he was here right now.’

  Angie leaned to lay a hand on her arm, dug long fingernails in. ‘I know.’

  They sat close together on the sofa, drinking and smoking, and said nothing for a minute or more. The old woman downstairs had her TV cranked up and they could hear the closing moments of whichever horse race she was watching, the voice of the posh commentator rising up a notch right at the end.

  ‘I hope the old girl’s won a few quid,’ Cat said. ‘Last time she backed a winner she brought Kieron some sweets.’

  Angela swallowed what was left in her can, smacked down the empty and opened another. ‘When they catch whoever’s done this . . . ’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The mongrel’s life won’t be worth living . . . won’t be worth anything, wherever he ends up.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘It’s what happens to that sort inside, isn’t it? They’re targeted.’ Her mouth tightened, those laughter lines deeper suddenly, and dark. ‘Well, you know that.’ She nodded, bringing the can to her mouth. ‘Something, I suppose.’

  ‘I mean, do you think someone’s got him? Got Kieron?’

  ‘Well, Christ, I hope not . . . but it doesn’t do any good to kid yourself, babe.’ Angela Coyne stubbed out her cigarette, reached into her bag for another and let her head drop back against the thick leather cushion. ‘I mean, they’d have found him by now, wouldn’t they?’

  TWELVE

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ Maria said. ‘I’m a bit . . . all over the place, if I’m honest.’

  Her ex-husband walked into the kitchen, dropped his jacket across one of the barstools and sat down, clearly still comfortable in a house he’d lived in until five years before. ‘Why on earth didn’t you call yesterday, when this happened?’

  ‘I was hoping it would have sorted itself out by now.’ Maria sat down opposite him, at the other end of the island. ‘That he’d have turned up, you know?’

  ‘How’s Joshy doing?’

  ‘He’s in bits. Well, of course he is.’ Maria hopped off the stool and moved to the door. ‘Let me tell him you’re here.’

  Jeff Ashton waited, listening to his ex-wife’s feet on the stairs as she ran the two flights up to their son’s room. She was back a few minutes later and if she thought it strange to find him casually opening and closing cupboard doors, as though checking to see how well the contents had been organised in his absence, she didn’t say anything.

  ‘He’ll be down in a minute.’ Maria sat down again and her shoulders dropped. ‘He’s still really upset.’

  Ashton looked up and shouted his son’s name. He waited, then raised his arms in exasperation.

  ‘It’s understandable, really.’ She watched him as he sauntered back across the kitchen. ‘You know how sensitive he is.’

  Ashton nodded, as though he knew only too well. He sat down again, looked at her. ‘What’s he been like? Before this, I mean.’

  ‘The same, really. He can’t settle. He bit a little girl at school last week.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I thought they were going to suspend him.’

  Ashton leaned towards her. ‘Listen,
why don’t I take him for a few days?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Give you a break. I mean, this has obviously upset you.’ He waited until she looked back at him. ‘You look frazzled.’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’ Maria sat up straight and pushed back a hank of hair that had fallen across her face. ‘Let’s stick to the arrangement.’

  ‘I’m only offering to help, Mazz—’

  ‘I know, but . . . you take him the weekend after next. Last thing he needs is for his routine to get messed up on top of everything else.’

  Ashton nodded, as though he could see the sense of it. He stood up again, walked to the fridge and helped himself to a small bottle of water. ‘How’s your friend? What’s her name again?’

  ‘Cat,’ Maria said. ‘Her name is Cat.’

  Jeff had never liked Catrin very much, Maria knew that. Among his many faults, he had always been something of a snob and had clearly wondered why, how a GP’s wife could be friends with a woman who seemed content to live on state handouts. Whose partner was in prison, let’s not forget that. Maria had tried to explain and, while not going as far as reminding him that she wasn’t exactly overburdened with close friends any more, had pointed out that she wasn’t contributing a great deal to society either. Not while she was living in a house that someone else had paid for; a lady who lunched and went to the hairdresser once a week, scraping by on the money Jeff doled out to her every month. She and Cat, she had told him, had a lot more in common than he, or anyone else, liked to believe.

  ‘It must be horrible for her,’ he said now. ‘Makes me go cold, just thinking about it.’ He sat down again. ‘If it had been Josh, you know?’

  ‘It’s what I thought, too.’

  They talked for a few minutes about standing orders for utility bills, about when Maria’s car might need servicing and about some mortgage-related accountancy issue that Maria was far too stressed to take in properly. When they had run out of domestic matters to discuss, she asked him how he was.

  He looked at her.

  ‘Seriously. How are things?’

  ‘Well, there isn’t anyone else, if that’s what you’re asking.’