Running Girl

by Simon Mason

  ‘I know it now. You were right, she was running scared. And I just gave her more trouble. I let her down.’ He shook his head, moaning. ‘I let her go. That’s the worst. She came to me and I turned her away. And I know where she was going too.’

  Garvie said sharply, ‘Where?’

  ‘To meet him. Her man.’

  ‘You don’t know that, Alex.’

  ‘I know!’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘ ’Cause after she left me I knew what I’d done. I knew, Garv. And I called her.’

  ‘Did you? When? What time?’

  ‘Ten past four. I looked at my watch ’cause I was wondering where she was. I called her and she picked up. She wouldn’t talk to me but I could hear her listening. And I could hear something else too before she hung up. Someone in the background. She was with someone, Garv. I could hear him.’

  Garvie got to his feet and looked at the ceiling, and when he looked back at Alex his eyes were glittering. He went over and banged against the cell door with the heel of his hand.

  ‘I’m going to talk to Singh, get you out of here, man. Back home. Or back to your lovely squat, if you prefer. All you have to do is tell them what you told me.’

  The door opened and the young constable smiled at Garvie with his friendly lopsided teeth. ‘Finished?’

  Hesitating on the threshold, Garvie looked back. ‘One last thing, Alex.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘After she hung up, did you call her straight back?’

  The boy looked puzzled. ‘No. But why—’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Get some rest. Catch you later.’

  As the boy leaned his head back against the wall and gave himself up to fresh despair, Garvie left the cell with the friendly young constable and made his way upstairs to the fifth floor.

  It was just midnight.

  29

  LOCATION: DETECTIVE INSPECTOR Singh’s office: DI Singh sitting behind his desk; Garvie Smith sitting on a swivel chair in front of the desk; operational chart, half empty; three blank walls; small smeary window; digital desk clock showing 00:09; overflowing in-tray topped by a copy of a newspaper with its headline circled in black pen: POLICE LOSE PLOT IN BEAUTY AND BEAST STORY.

  Aspect of interviewer: uptight; exhausted; deliberately expressionless.

  Aspect of interviewee: bruised; cute; deliberately casual.

  DI SINGH [long pause]: It’s time—

  GARVIE SMITH: Nice chair. [Swivels] Nice office too. Bit boring.

  DI SINGH: I spoke to your mother.

  GARVIE SMITH [stops swivelling]: Oh. Did you have to?

  DI SINGH: In fact she contacted us, half an hour ago. To report you missing. When she found out you weren’t at your friend’s house she was anxious. Understandably. She’s reassured now, and—

  GARVIE SMITH: Probably wild with rage.

  DI SINGH: As soon as we’ve talked, one of the night staff will drive you home so you can explain.

  GARVIE SMITH: Oh. Good. I love explaining.

  DI SINGH: Then you can explain to me what was going on outside the station with the man on the moped.

  GARVIE SMITH: What about Alex?

  DI SINGH: Alex has been very stupid. The gun, the visit to Pike Pond, the constant phone harassment. [Pause] Enough about Alex. I want you to tell me about this evening.

  GARVIE SMITH: Does he get compensation? For wrongful arrest?

  DI SINGH: We’re not discussing Alex now. We’re discussing you. I’ll ask the questions and you’ll do your best to answer them.

  GARVIE SMITH: By the way, have you checked out that Porsche yet?

  DI SINGH: Please. It’s time for you to stop interfering and start cooperating.

  GARVIE SMITH: How about I show you where her old running shoes are?

  DI SINGH [pause]: One thing at a time. Who was the man on the moped?

  GARVIE SMITH: Here’s a better question. Where did she get her new shoes?

  DI SINGH: Don’t play games with me.

  GARVIE SMITH: Or this one. Who was driving the Porsche?

  DI SINGH: I said No games.

  GARVIE SMITH: Why did she go up to Pike Pond? Why did she smile at Jess? What did she say to Alex? What did she need the money for?

  DI SINGH [silence, exasperated]

  GARVIE SMITH [suddenly pointing]: Look at your chart, man. It’s half empty. Thursday night? Blank. Friday afternoon? Blank. Friday evening? Blank. You’re asking the wrong questions, dude.

  DI SINGH [angrily]: And I suppose you think you can fill in all those blanks for me.

  GARVIE SMITH [pointing]: Thursday night she was at Imperium. Think what you like, but being dropped off by Abdul near Market Square at six thirty doesn’t mean she stayed there all evening.

  [Silence]

  GARVIE SMITH: Friday afternoon, two o’clock till two thirty she was at Jessica Walker’s trying to borrow running shoes.

  DI SINGH: You don’t know that. [Hesitation] How do you know that?

  GARVIE SMITH: Then she took a bus out to Limekilns. Number twenty-seven. Check it out. Got to Alex’s at three.

  DI SINGH: What?

  GARVIE SMITH: Ask him. He’ll tell you now. They argued. She said something to him. And she left at three thirty. [Pause] There you go [pointing], you can fill it in a bit more now.

  DI SINGH [long silence, looking first at Garvie, then at chart]

  GARVIE SMITH: I can fill it in for you if you’ve got a marker pen.

  DI SINGH [quietly but angrily]: Listen to me now. Even if you’re right about where she was at those times – and you’ve just given yourself a lot of questions to answer – you still don’t understand. This is not a game. We’re not playing at being policemen. A girl has been killed. There is a point to what we do, and that point is to find out what happened, not here [hitting chart], not here [hitting chart], not here [hitting chart], but here [hitting chart hard] on Friday evening, when she was killed. Do you understand? That’s what I’m focused on. You tell me she left Alex Robinson’s at three thirty. But I want to know what happened next, here, between four and nine, when she was murdered. And you can’t tell me that, can you?

  [Silence]

  DI SINGH [breathing heavily]: You can’t tell me where she went or who she met.

  GARVIE SMITH [quietly]: Yes, I can even tell you that.

  DI SINGH: And you can’t tell me that because ... [Falling silent] What did you say?

  GARVIE SMITH: I can tell you exactly where she went after leaving Alex’s. And I can tell you who she was with at four o’clock.

  DI SINGH [long pause]: Who?

  GARVIE SMITH: Me.

  The silence in the office was the silence of shock – like the stunned silence that greets public announcements of disasters, or the hand-to-the-mouth silence of women finding lipstick on their husbands’ collars, or the small frightened silence of the medical consultant’s private room – and in this silence Garvie took out a Benson and Hedges and lit up, and said, ‘Next thing is, you’ll be asking me what happened.’

  Still nonplussed, Singh looked vaguely at the smoke, up at the smoke detector in the ceiling, back at Garvie. He opened his mouth.

  ‘Relax,’ Garvie said. ‘They hardly ever go off. And I’m just about to tell you something useful. I said before, I’m only trying to help.’ He scrutinized the end of his cigarette for a moment. ‘Course,’ he went on, ‘you’d’ve known all this already if you’d bothered to interview me like everyone else.’ He took a drag, exhaled and focused. ‘Four o’clock,’ he said at last, ‘not long after final bell, I was up on Top Pitch. Trying to unwind after a hard day in the classroom.’

  Singh came to life and felt around his desk for his notebook. ‘Alone?’

  ‘Till Chloe arrived. I was unwinding nicely. Then she comes up the slope from Bottom Pitch, looking ... strange.’

  ‘Strange how?’

  ‘I’ll come to that. It was a surprise to see her at all, to be honest. We weren’t talking that much. Nothing
heavy. I just wasn’t expecting her.’

  He drew deeply on his cigarette, tilted his head and blew smoke at the ceiling. Stared at it for a moment or two. He said, ‘Looking strange ’cause she wasn’t looking like Chloe. Not just that she’d lost her mascara and her hair was all over the shop and her face looked like putty. Because she didn’t seem to care or even to notice. That was the weird thing. You know? As if she’d forgotten how to be Chloe.’

  ‘What did she want?’

  ‘I would have thought that was obvious by now. Money.’

  ‘Money?’

  Garvie shrugged and blew smoke.

  Frowning, Singh said: ‘Money for what? She was in trouble? Is that why she was panicking? How much money did she need? A lot?’ His pen hovered above his notebook.

  ‘She didn’t say. Easy enough to work it out, though. Don’t you think?’

  Singh didn’t look as if he was finding anything easy. The muscle in his cheek twitched, twice.

  ‘Forty-nine ninety-nine,’ Garvie said.

  Singh’s face looked as if it was starting to come apart.

  ‘The price of a pair of new running shoes,’ Garvie added.

  A few days earlier a more self-confident Singh would have exploded. Now he looked as if he no longer knew how to explode. His eyes fled all around the room as if looking for an exit, and found themselves, panting slightly, back with Garvie.

  ‘New running shoes?’ he repeated hesitantly as if testing the words to see if they would bear his weight. Garvie said nothing. He smoked.

  ‘New running shoes,’ Singh murmured again. He was still looking at Garvie, but he wasn’t talking to him any more. His face was turned inward, as if hunched over a problem, and Garvie watched him, letting him talk.

  ‘Why did she want to buy a pair of running shoes?’ Singh asked himself. ‘Because,’ he answered himself, ‘her old ones had been stolen. But why did she need to buy a new pair straight away? Because she was going up to Pike Pond. Yes, but why was she going up to Pike Pond?’

  His knuckles clenched around the pen.

  ‘Because,’ he said, ‘she had to. Because she’d already arranged to. Because she was going to meet someone up there and couldn’t be late.’

  He focused on Garvie. With a new sense of purpose he opened his notebook and leaned forward. ‘This is important,’ he said. ‘Tell me everything she said to you. Everything. Try to remember.’

  Garvie let out a long, slow breath of smoke and watched it drift above him, blue tissuey rags against the fluorescent glare of the panel lights in the ceiling.

  ‘Remember?’ he murmured. ‘Oh, man. All I do is remember.’

  Her eyes were washed-out, tiny lights wobbling in them as she looked down at him, and he knew she’d been crying. That was unusual. But it wasn’t the strangest thing. The strangest thing was the faint beige shadow on her throat. It told him something far more interesting. It told him that she hadn’t looked in a mirror since taking off her make-up the night before.

  ‘Hey,’ she said. She dumped her bag and sat down next to him.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Though you might be up here. Self-medicating.’

  ‘Want a puff?’

  ‘Do I look stupid?’

  She looked in need of a puff, but he didn’t tell her that. He waited for the silence to slow her down before asking, casually, ‘What’s up?’

  She just shook her head.

  ‘Let me put it another way. What do you need?’

  ‘Money.’ She gave a little laugh.

  ‘I wish I had some to give you. Anything else?’

  ‘Yeah. A bit of luck.’

  She chewed her nails and looked around, peering down towards C Block, squinting into the hawthorns behind them. The blue polish on the nail of her left-hand index finger was scuffed.

  ‘Men, eh?’ Garvie said.

  She made a small, contemptuous coughing noise.

  ‘Welcome to your life,’ Garvie said.

  ‘It’s different this time.’

  ‘It’s always different. I remember how different it was.’

  She ignored him. She carried on looking about her, checking the school, checking the trees. He carried on smoking and she got to her feet.

  ‘Got to get going.’

  ‘If you find any of that money, let me know where it is.’

  She looked down at him thoughtfully, eyes weirdly bright, and he looked up at her, waiting.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Garv, do you ever wonder if we—’ She bit her lip.

  ‘If we what?’

  She shook her head. Made a little snorting noise. ‘Nothing.’

  He flicked the glowing scrap of spliff into the long grass. ‘Don’t make it sound so pathetic, Chlo. Nothing’s the only thing I’m any good at.’

  She laughed then, once, a short, sharp bark. ‘Least you always made me smile.’ And when she turned from him, her hair swung round in that perfect blonde curve, the way it always did, an arc of light against the dark shadow of the trees; a moment to lift the heart. Then she was gone.

  Singh was impatiently tapping his notebook. ‘Come on. You must be able to remember something.’

  Garvie looked at him with pity. ‘Here’s one thing. Something she said as she left.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Cheer up, it might never happen.’

  Singh’s pen hesitated above his open notebook.

  ‘Stuck in my mind,’ Garvie said. ‘Thing is, I was cheerful already. You see, she wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to herself. It might never happen. But I think she already knew it would.’

  ‘You think ... she knew she was going to die?’

  Garvie didn’t answer. Slowly he took out another Benson and Hedges, and Singh sat watching him, waiting, tense.

  ‘Who called her at four eleven?’ Garvie asked abruptly.

  Singh blinked with surprise. ‘What?’

  ‘I gather you’ve finally got the calls record. Alex called her at ten past. And someone else called exactly one minute later.’

  Singh collected himself and stared at Garvie. His face seemed different, not so bottled up, not so coldly Singh-like. As if slowly coming to a decision, without taking his eyes off the boy, he reached out and pulled a dossier towards him across the desk and rested his hand on it. ‘Yes, we got the calls record. It arrived, finally, last night, just before I visited your uncle. No recordings of course, just the times and durations of the calls. But I know without looking which caller you’re talking about.’

  ‘Traceable?’

  ‘No. It’s a stolen phone.’

  ‘But it’s him, isn’t it?’

  Singh said carefully, ‘Whoever it is, he called Chloe thirty-seven times between one fifteen Thursday night and eight on Friday evening. That’s more even than Alex.’ For the first time he was looking at Garvie as if, despite all that had happened, he no longer wanted to scare him into submission or pack him off to a correctional facility. ‘Tell me what you know, Garvie. You saw her take the call? What did she say?’

  ‘It wasn’t what she said. She didn’t say anything.’

  ‘What was it, then?’

  Lighting up, Garvie blew out smoke and sighed. ‘Oh, man. It was the way her face changed.’

  He sat very still, watching the smoke uncurl from the cigarette in his fingers, and Singh watched it too. At last Garvie said quietly, ‘Like watching someone realize their time’s almost run out.’

  30

  SOMETHING HAD CHANGED between them and they both knew it.

  The clock on Singh’s desk said 00:43. There was a part of Garvie that was bone tired; there was another part of him that was already asleep. Most of him ached. He looked at Singh, pale-faced and long-nosed, no longer so uptight – or upright – and thought he must be tired too. It was as if, in their tiredness together, they had found a sort of understanding.

  ‘You’re a very unusual boy,’ Singh said quietly.

  ‘You’re pretty unusual yourself
. Though you can be a bit snippy, to be honest.’

  Singh didn’t appear to hear him. He said, ‘Tell me now about the man on the moped.’

  Garvie sat there thinking for a long time while Singh waited patiently.

  ‘What man?’ he said at last.

  Singh started. He shook his head. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Don’t do this. Not now.’

  ‘What moped?’

  ‘Don’t, Garvie. No more of that nonsense.’

  ‘All right, I tell you what, I’ll do a deal with you.’

  ‘A deal? What deal?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what was going on outside with Mr Muffin the Moped Man if you let me see something.’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’

  Singh did not at that moment look like a man who liked guessing. ‘Her shoes?’ he said.

  ‘No, not her shoes. I know all about her shoes. The note.’

  ‘Note?’

  ‘The note she left when she went running.’

  ‘It’s classified. I can’t show you the note.’

  ‘You don’t have to show it me for long: I’ve got this photographic memory.’

  Singh collapsed back into his chair and a shiver went through his previously immobile face. For a moment it wasn’t clear if he was going to ask Garvie to leave or break down and weep. Garvie thought probably the latter. Instead, he did something totally unexpected. He smiled. A crooked, bewildered, surrendering smile.

  Garvie had never seen him smile before, and it was a shock. ‘Don’t see what’s so funny,’ he said. ‘I keep saying, I’m only trying to help.’

  Singh shook his head. ‘If you can’t find what you’re looking for it’s because you’re looking in the wrong way.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Police Manual.’

  ‘It would be.’

  ‘The truth is everywhere and eternal, even in the saying of a child.’

  ‘That’s the Police Manual?’

  ‘No. The teaching of Guru Granth Sahib.’

  ‘Yeah, well. Less of the “child”, if you don’t mind.’

  Singh nodded briskly. He sat upright again. ‘All right. Perhaps I’m now insane, but, against all the rules, I’ll show you the note. For one minute only. Then you tell me everything about the man on the moped. That’s the deal.’