‘I’m thinking of leaving.’
He says it simply, not as a provocative statement, and somehow that’s worse.
‘Why? What’s happened?’
We look at each other, and the shared vision of the past two months flickers between us. I nod.
‘It’s just that I never thought I’d ever have to see something like that. Accidents, yeah, bad enough, and especially those with kids, but they are what it says on the tin. Accidents. No one meant it. It was. An. Accident.’
I draw him.
‘Like what though? You’ve seen loads of dead people. Hundreds, probably.’
His eyes are glazed over.
‘In there. Those kids. Not just the dead ones. Calvin. I’ve got a son. I just feel like I need to spend more time protecting him. And my daughter. It’s just that the world’s suddenly such a fucking dangerous place.’
I pour another sachet of sugar into my tea. I can’t look at him.
‘It always was, but I read somewhere that we’re programmed toward optimism. It’s the only way we can survive. Anyway, aren’t you doing that here? Protecting them?’
He nods.
‘Mmm. But so were the parents of those kids. And other kids who’ve been murdered. No parent wakes up one morning and thinks that today they won’t protect their child. It’s inbuilt. The problem is how dangerous the world is. Full of nutters.’
We sip in synchronization.
‘Yeah. And in this case, they were organised.’
Mike snorts.
‘Exactly. Like-minded psychopaths. Must have been over fifty people involved. High profile too, by the looks of the evidence. Two or three boys taken a year, a young girl every now and then, tall those men coming to . . . It’s horrible. Unthinkable, what them kids went through. And not just the people who went there, either. They’re just the people who operated the whole thing over time. There’s a whole shadow land of shady fucking characters who visited there too. Well. We all know what happened there. I just can’t imagine what made them do it. With young boys and girls. Children. They must have known what the score is, what happens to them? It’s just too horrible for words. I know I have to do my job, but this, it’s shocked me to the core. It must have you too.’
I know he means the scenes at the Gables, but I know he means Sal too.
‘I had no idea, you know. About Sal.’
He touches my arm.
‘God, Jan, I know, how could you have? But how can you bear it, on top of everything else?’
I stir my tea again.
‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’
‘Anything else on Aiden? At least he wasn’t there, you know . . .’
‘Yes. He wasn’t. And no, nothing else. Nothing at all.
I tidy a few papers on my desk.
‘So are you really leaving, Mike?’
He sighs.
‘I don’t know what to do. This has changed everything. I used to think that people were basically good.’
‘We’ve all got our flaws, Mike.’
Too true. Mine’s sitting in the boot of my car right now. A big bag of stolen money.
‘Yeah, yeah. I know. But it’s almost as if the bogeyman’s around every corner. There’s always another weirdo wanting to have sex with kids, or to kill and rape women, or to shoot or stab someone for no reason.’
‘But we’re the police, Mike. We already knew that.’
He’s holding his hands out now, pleading.
‘But it used to be the exception. Didn’t it? The odd case. Now it’s fucking everywhere. All the stuff with young girls lately, now this, with young boys. Then the ticking time bomb with the old cases and the children’s homes. Same old story. All over the news, victims coming forward but can’t pin it on anyone because they’ve buried their tracks. People asking why we’ve not done anything about all this. But when it’s run by big-time fuckers like Connelly, they get other people to do their dirty work and hide behind them, living the high life. We’ve still got to work our way through the client list from the Gables yet, and someone on that might talk but I doubt it. I really doubt it. And Connelly’s still out there, with no charge sheet.’
I tap my teaspoon on the desk. I don’t even want to think about Connelly and his freedom. It makes me think about Aiden and Sal.
‘Few and far between. No murder without a body. Problem with that is, what if you’re clever enough to hide the body. Or bodies? What do we have then?’
Mike nods.
‘A few solved crimes and a shedload of unsolved. Lulls us into a false sense of security.’
‘And the evidence was there all the time. All someone had to do was take an interest. Pull it together.’ I look at him. He’s sullen and disheartened, the way I had been when my old boss had explained it to me, and I suddenly realise the reality. I need Mike. I need him as my partner. ‘The plus side is us, mate. For every one of them, you know, big time, boys at the top, there’s someone like you and me who will do anything to help stop them. All we can do is keep on keeping on. Yeah?’
He nods and waits a while, then he swings around to face me.
‘So do you think Aiden’s dead, even though they haven’t found a body? Because that’s the test, isn’t it? Will you carry on looking for him? When nobody knows for sure, it’s the hope that keeps them alive.’
I answer him quickly.
‘No, Mike. I don’t think Aiden’s dead. No.’ Dead to me, though. Dead to me. ‘And I’ll never stop looking for him.’ It isn’t over.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It’s quiet at the station so I go home early. I need some time to find out where everything is in my house, to see what’s missing and what’s been added. As I drive back, alongside Northlands, I look to the skies.
Even after the airport, it’s a habit. Looking for CCTV, mentally mapping the cameras and their ranges. They’re all shiny and new, part of a vamped-up system, replacing the spray-painted lenses and twisted metal that failed us previously. Looking for the messages along the telegraph wires and on the phone masts.
They’re back. Not so many, but a couple of hats slung over the newly strung wires. We’re going digital now, aren’t we? Going back underground. What will the birds do then, when there are no wires? I wonder how people managed to pull down the cameras and some of the wires in the first place. It must have taken a lot of effort.
Someone must have wanted to make a clear path out of Northlands for Connelly. Someone who’s still here.
Bonfire night’s been and gone, this year without bodies burned up at the Gables, and at least I’m thankful for that. I’m looking for the birds, the various kinds that haven’t flown away for winter, but are still sitting here on the high wires, watching. Ever watching.
They’re here and there, and every now and then I see a crow or a baby magpie. One for sorrow. As I drive away from the city and into the suburbs the numbers of birds increase, as if they somehow want to live where we are, scavenge in our yards and gardens, ready to swoop at any minute.
Bessy loved them, her birds. But look what love does to you. Look what love did to Bessy. The same birds she loved pecked her eyes out, probably before she was cold.
I park up and slam the car door. Fucking neighbours. They’re all at the windows, seeing that DS Pearce is doing today. Is she being tailed by some gun-toting crazy today?
Their disgusted faces somehow blame me for the behaviour of someone who was trying to kill me. But I’m quickly learning that this is what this fucked-up world is like. Don’t turn your back or someone will peck your eyes out.
I go into the house, still lit by the orange glow bulbs Sheila had bought. I wonder if they are the same ones as I look around. I move some CDs to their old home. They’re all sorted into alphabetical order, so I shuffle them and move them around. Same with the books. It’s as if someone has come into my home and filed my life.
The kitchen is well stocked with food that I don’t eat, but I leave it in the cupboards and in the
fridge. The floor has been cleaned and, by the look of it, regrouted. Not a trace of blood anywhere. But you can tell. There are little signs. A chip out of the lounge doorframe, where the blunt instrument that killed Sheila was swung. I run my fingers across it slowly.
I go upstairs. My room has been practically rebuilt, all the cupboards match now. My clothes have been hung in some kind of colour-coordinated system, and I pull out a white dress and push it in the middle of the black jackets and trousers. My bed has been screwed to the wall, something Sal never got round to when we bought it.
There’s a box in the corner of the bedroom with ‘odds and ends’ written on the top of it, and it contains some old wedding photographs that, it turned out, had been trodden on until the glass in the frames shattered onto the carpet. My toiletries are in a newly fitted corner unit, taller than the other one. I peer behind it and run my finger against the new plaster.
Aiden’s room. I stop at the door. This is the only recognisable place in the house. I’ll never know if he was here that day. I’ll never know if he witnessed the carnage. Everything points to the fact that he was.
Unless he told Sal exactly where Ruby’s chain was. I go over it again for the millionth time, the photograph, the CCTV high five. The smiles and the larking about. I open the drawer and pull out a black snapback cap, Aiden has worn this. My beautiful son, the boy I loved so much and he loved me back, had worn this cap.
I look at it closely. How can it still be here and he’s gone? Not so long ago he was lying on this bed and I was reading him a bedtime story. Now he’s missing from my life. From this room. I sit on his bed. Had I missed it somehow? Had I been totally blind to one side of his personality, one where he could disregard me completely? How had this happened? How had the beautiful child who said that I was the best mum in the world, how could he forget about me?
I don’t cry, because there’s no point. And anyway, the pain’s so deep inside me that it hurts to breathe. Crying won’t help, it’ll just stop me getting through another day, ground me with my red eyes and my blocked nose. Fuzzy head.
That’s what my time away has taught me. Whatever happens, you are going to wake up tomorrow and you have to carry on. You can either cry yourself to sleep and be useless in the morning, or you can hold it inside.
So I’m holding it in now as I put the cap back in the drawer now, and shut it. I think about Sal and how he quickly came to the conclusion that Aiden had run away. Too quickly. He knew where he was all the time, but he played along with it. All to get information. It was obviously him who had ruined Operation Hurricane.
I think back and wonder when all this could have started. He’d always resented me working, and when we split up he told me that he had changed jobs and that Aiden could no longer stay during the week, but he could stay all weekend if he wanted to.
He bought the flat and decked it out with fancy furniture. I had assumed that he had used the money from my buying him out of the house. It probably goes right back to when Ruby died. He’d sat with Aiden while I took her to the vets. When I came back, Aiden was sobbing in his room and Sal was smirking at me.
‘He hates you now.’
I’d tutted.
‘Fucking hell, Sal. What’ve you told him?’
Sal was laughing.
‘The truth, Janet. The truth. That you’ve murdered his dog.’
I’d gone to Aiden and he’d refused to speak to me or look at me. Tears turned to cold anger, then to brooding, and eventually, when I tried to talk to him about it he just shook his head at me.
I’d given Sal the benefit of the doubt, that, so soon after the divorce, he wasn’t using the ‘child as a pawn’ classic response. I ignored him. But he’d planted a seed then and God only knows what lies he’d fed Aiden since then.
Over the past month I’ve picked my phone up twenty-seven times with the intention of telling Jim Stewart all about where Sal had gone and that he had Aiden with him. About what they had done. But each time stopped myself. Because this way, there was a chance that I would see Aiden again. At least this way he would be free to come back when he time was right. If it ever was.
I go back downstairs and switch on the TV. It’s almost as if I’m living in a hotel, except for Aiden’s room. Of course, I’ll keep it like it is for a while. Until I feel a little bit stronger. I’ll keep his Manchester United bedspread and what was left of his collection of football cards. All his board games, although all of them require more than one player. All his school books.
Because, when he comes back, he might want them, and somehow it’s proof that I’m a good mum. I am. A good mum. At the bottom of my soul I know how this has happened. It takes a long time to unravel itself every time I think about it, as if it needs to be coaxed out.
Because once it is through and revealed, it can never be hidden again. Not completely. As soon as I saw the note in Sal’s flat I knew exactly what this was about. ‘I Win.’ And he did win. In fact, he said he would. The day I asked him to leave, he told me he would. He promised me that he would take my son.
‘Our son, Sal. He’s our son.’
‘Right. Our son? Not that you’d notice. Anyone would think that you just recruited me as a sperm donor, while you worked and played Mummy on your days off, I provide you with a little plaything.’
It was one of the only times I lost my shit with him and I didn’t come worst off.
‘But I love him. I love our son.’
He nodded and brought his face close to mine, very close.
‘My son now. Because I’m going to make it my life’s work to take him away from you.’
He’d turned and walked away and I’d gone upstairs to look at my sleeping boy. It seemed ridiculous at the time, divorce talk. I reasoned with myself that every acrimonious divorce was full of threats like this, and I was just glad to see the back of Sal.
Even when Aiden started to stay with him most weekends, I just imagined boy’s days out at football and KFC. I never pried into what they did together. I simply upped my weekend work hours, not wanting to be in the house alone. I won’t let my imagination go there. Not to where Sal has introduced Aiden to Connelly. Probably been to the Gables.
But I had worked one thing out. Sal knew the score, he knew exactly what was going on. So he was simply doing what he said he would. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. By keeping Aiden by his side, he was keeping him safe. Nothing would happen to him in the bosom of Connelly’s underworld, not with Sal heavily involved. Nothing except my little boy gradually becoming used to crime until it seems normal, enjoying the privilege that comes with towing the line Connelly’s empire directed.
He’s not coming back. A pool of terror wells up inside me as I hear myself thinking that I’ll never see Aiden again. I could die without ever seeing my son again. He was alive all the time, hiding somewhere until Sal said it was time to go. I probably spoiled it by finding the passport. They would have been gone by the time we found out what was going on at the Gables if I hadn’t found it.
I haven’t quite spun round to ‘how could he do this to me’ or what I could have prevented because my mobile rings and then my house phone starts to ring. I answer the mobile first. It’s Mike.
‘Jan. Mike. Can you meet me at Bicester Ave at ten? Pat Haywood’s been found suspended from her loft ladder. Still alive but in a bad way. A neighbour says someone saw a man exiting the property at the back.’
Mopping up, we call it. Clearing the debris after a horrendous crime has been committed. Because there are more people affected than the criminal and the victim. It’s like a wave effect, touching the lives of everyone around them.
‘Yep. I’m on it.’
I click off the phone and answer the still-ringing landline.
‘Jan Pearce.’
‘Jan, it’s Jim. We’ve got a situation on Northlands. Pat Haywood. Can you get there as soon as you can? I’ll send backup. I’ve already called Mike.’
‘Yes, sir. I’m on my w
ay.’
So. It’s all back to normal. We all know where we are, and we’ve all got a job to do. Mike’s still here, for now, and what Jim doesn’t know he won’t miss. I’ve got something to do before I attend, though.
I’ve been carrying around the £44,000 with me everywhere and now it’s time. I push it into the same shoulder bag that I had with me that day at Bessy’s and hurry out to my car. I drive up to Mosely and stop outside Pauline Green’s house. I get out and look through the window.
A woman who I expect is Pauline is sitting at the table with a small girl. Her husband is reading the paper and looks up as I pass the window. I knock on the door. The little girl pulls it open.
‘Nana. There’s a lady here.’
Bessy’s great-granddaughter. Pauline’s behind her now.
‘Come away, Elizabeth. Yes, love, can I help you?’
I don’t miss a beat.
‘Yes. I’m with greater Manchester Police.’ Her hand goes to her mouth. ‘It’s OK, nothing is wrong. It’s just that there have been a lot of burglaries around this area and we’re just advising residents how to keep safe.’ I show her my warrant card, with my finger over my name.
‘Come in then, love. Come in.’
I stand awkwardly in the tiny lounge. Her husband holds his hand out.
‘John Lewes. This is Pauline, my wife. And Elizabeth, our granddaughter.’
I nod and breathe out deeply. I look around their tiny home, warm and welcoming, smelling slightly of rice pudding. Finally. Something that isn’t broken. I’d like to sit down in the easy chair and rest, just for a moment. It’s making me smile when I know I should look like I’m on serious police business.
It’s obvious that this family love each other. John has a protective arm around Pauline’s shoulder. She’s small, like Bessy, and Elizabeth is standing slightly behind her. They’re protecting each other. They’re all relaxed and a way that I realised I haven’t seen for the longest time; they’re happy. I can just feel it and it’s seeping into my soul and warming me.
‘Lovely to meet you. I’m just here to advise you to keep all your windows and doors locked. And if you want to register your valuables with the police, make a list and phone the station.’
Random Acts of Unkindness Page 28
