She sipped her tea and regarded him for a long time, and Rosey was struck by the power of frank appraisal behind her eyes. It seemed to age her, and he felt a surge of sympathy for how the last few days must have affected her.
‘If you’re going to look for him,’ she said finally, ‘there are some things you need to know about.’
Mouth firmly, very firmly shut.
She glanced at the kitchen door, even though the house was empty but for them, and he knew that this was it – the thing she hadn’t told Mummy and Daddy. Her defence against the I-told-you-so’s. The thing about Andy which he needed to know if he were going to figure out why he hadn’t come back.
‘He’s been acting strangely for the last couple of weeks.’
And he listened with perfect stillness as she explained to him what had been happening.
Afterwards, feeling that he owed her something more of an honest explanation of himself, he said: ‘You should know, I suppose, that I was the one who found him. At the beginning.’
She stared at him in silence. He took the mug from her carefully before she could spill it.
‘Sixteen years ago,’ he continued. ‘I was in uniform, very new to the job, and we got a tip-off that a child had been abandoned in a house, and we found him. Simple as that. He was a very lucky little boy.’ It was only a small lie.
‘My God,’ she said in a very small voice. ‘It was true.’
‘You thought it wasn’t true?’
‘No! Not exactly. I mean, he wasn’t lying to me. He believed it, anyway. It’s just – it was so incredible, do you understand? Like something off the news. It’s just you being here now – it makes it more real. Physically real. What happened?’
Rosey glossed over the details, as he always had done. It wasn’t necessary for her to know everything, especially if Andy himself didn’t. Not even Pete Sumner knew the full truth, just that there had been a criminal element involved.
‘The thing is that most foundlings are babies, abandoned by young mothers who can’t cope and don’t know how to ask for help. It’s very rare that a child is found as old as Andy. There was some idea that he was the kid of a junkie who got into trouble and disappeared, but I don’t know. I only tell you this because I promised his father that if anything happened I’d look out for him. ‘Course, at the time I thought I’d still be in the force instead of civvies, but there you go.’
‘Do you think he’s in some kind of trouble? Can you really find him?’
He shrugged. ‘I still have a few mates who can help out with the odd favour or two. Just need somewhere to start.’
She took out her phone and paged through to the ‘received calls’ screen. ‘Will this do?’
He smiled. ‘I think it just might.’
5 Development
Rosey told himself that he shouldn’t be surprised to find that 144 Tyler Road had long since been torn down. He sat in his car and looked out at the demolition site where it used to be with the same kind of satisfaction that he might have felt had he been watching a rabid dog being put down – preferably by a bullet in the head.
‘Sow the ground with salt too, while you’re at it,’ he muttered, unaware that he was talking to himself.
A lone yellow bulldozer was methodically chewing its way along the empty street; a row of dead houses lined up neatly ahead of it, a trail of pulverised brick and splintered wood behind. The bright December sun created a false mist out of the permanent haze of brick-dust which he could smell even with the windows rolled up and the heating cranked to full. All the same, a chill seeped outwards from his bones. Soon other trucks and diggers would come to clear away the rubble and start laying the groundwork for whatever new development was planned here. Business park, supermarket, Rosey didn’t much care. Just as long as 144 was crushed into the dust.
He got out of the car and found a gap in the chain-link fence (a sign declared this as the property of a company he’d never heard of called Jerusalem Construction, that Heavy Machinery was in Constant Use and that trespassers could expect Heavy Penalties), approaching the rubble slowly.
He paced the perimeter of where the house had once stood, as if to assure himself of the actual physical limitations of the building which had once stood here: this wide and no more, that long and no more. His heart stopped when he saw something thin and metallic gleaming in the dust, but it turned out to be nothing more than an old nail. No magic. No terror. Just wreckage.
Two large men in hardhats stencilled with the words Site Security and carrying large walkie-talkies were approaching. They wore yellow hi-viz jackets and determined expressions. That was quick.
‘Excuse me sir,’ said the first. ‘You are aware that this is private property?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry. I’m just going.’ That should have been the end of it. These guys weren’t going to make a fuss – he clearly wasn’t trying to nick anything, they could tell that. Depending on how bored they were, they’d send him on his way with a bit of face-saving macho bullshit and then go back to their tea and copies of the Daily Mirror.
‘One moment please, sir.’
‘No, really, I am just –’
But the second security guard produced his mobile phone, aimed its camera at him and took his picture.
‘Hang on a second. What was that for?’
The first guard looked at him blankly while his companion, who had not yet said a word, tapped at the keypad of his phone. ‘Security, sir.’
‘What kind of security involves taking my photograph?’
‘Most kinds, sir. Ever walked down a city street?’ There was a sudden, casual contempt in the man’s voice, and every policeman’s instinct in Rosey’s retired body began to scream at once. He turned to leave without another word, and found the first guard’s hand clamped around his upper arm. ‘As I said, sir: one moment, if you please.’
That was it. The man could be king of his own little rubble castle any way he liked – fair enough, as Rosey had broken through the fence, and he was content to play the alpha-dog game as a small price to pay for satisfying his curiosity about the house, but no hands were going to be laid on the man who had once swung Big Eddie. He turned, pivoted.
The kidney punch that the second guard delivered was precise and just strong enough to explode the crushed nerves near his fused vertebrae, and sudden volcanic pain erupted in his hips and down both legs. He screamed and collapsed to the ground.
The second guard’s phone began to ring. He listened, hung up and nodded to his companion. ‘It’s not him, but Mr Barber said he’s close enough. He’ll be here in ten minutes. Said to make our guest comfortable.’
The first guard looked down at Rosey, who writhed, sickened at how old he felt.
‘Oops,’ he said, without any detectable sympathy.
‘It’s okay. I think he was being ironic.’
***
The guards’ office was the standard template for site offices and used car yards – a squat, rectangular fibreglass and aluminium portacabin with a wonky desk and a paraffin heater which managed to warm the surrounding three feet to blast-furnace temperatures while leaving the rest of the interior feeling like a walk-in freezer.
Barber was a dapper, well-groomed man of indeterminate middle-age, wearing a long coat and the kind of pencil-thin moustache which Rosey had only ever seen in black and white films.
‘So,’ he said cheerily. ‘The police constable. I was expecting you to have paid a visit years ago. I must admit, I was beginning to give up on you.’
Rosey said nothing. Barber smiled. ‘Very good, Mr Penrose. You have decided that you don’t care who I am or what I want; you refuse to say a single thing after having suffered such shabby treatment. I must say I don’t blame you. Have these thugs even made you a cup of tea?’ He glared at the two security guards, w
ho glanced sheepishly at each other. ‘Thought not.’ Barber moved to fill a kettle.
‘No thanks. I’ve just had one.’
‘Hm. You’re now thinking that this is all very predictable bad-cop, good-cop stuff and that you’re still not going to say anything regardless of how many cups of tea you get. Not even –’ he flourished a packet of biscuits theatrically ‘– for custard creams. You’re a tough nut to crack, Mr Penrose, for sure.’
Barber busied himself with mugs, teabags, spoons. ‘Frankly, I give up. You’ve beaten me. I’ll tell you everything I know.’ He made himself a drink and settled back opposite Rosey, on a plastic school chair.
‘Actually, sorry, that was unfair of me. I’m sure that me being terribly clever and sarcastic is the last thing you need. I genuinely did want to simply have a chat. Sooty and Sweep here overreacted abominably and owe you an apology. Gentlemen?’
Mingled expressions of confusion, alarm, and embarrassment flushed their faces as they mumbled apologies like schoolboys and immediately found more important things to do. Rosey found himself having to contain a smile but remained stubbornly silent.
Barber sighed. ‘I know everything about who, where, why, when and how you are, Mr Penrose; that’s the long and the short of it. Nothing which isn’t already in the public domain, don’t worry about that; I haven’t been snooping. Well, not much. It’s alright if you don’t want to talk. I wouldn’t be able to trust anything you said anyway. All I really want to know is whether or not you’ve had any contact with young Andrew Sumner in the last few days. He’s popped up again, you might say. Sort of keeps popping up in a really rather irritating manner. Oh I know that you’ve had nothing to do with him since the day you brought him out of that house, but those sorts of connections between people have a way of shaping events much more strongly than you’d believe.’
Rosey concentrated on the glow of the paraffin heater.
‘I could threaten you, of course – I know you have family – but you too have all sorts of connections, and that would only escalate matters and take a great deal of time and effort which I can ill afford at the moment, especially since you are what one would properly call a peripheral line of enquiry. Yes,’ Barber chuckled. ‘Quite peripheral.’ He dunked a custard cream and nibbled at it. ‘I am, however, extremely thorough, and I have more direct methods of making enquiries.’
‘Sounds like a threat to me,’ Rosey replied evenly. ‘Mate, if you know so much about me, then you also know that messing around with someone whose friends are all cops is a very silly thing to do.’
Barber brushed the crumbs fastidiously from his coat and produced from one pocket a long, flat, metal stationery tin. ‘It wasn’t really a threat. I was going to do this anyway.’
From the tin, he started to unfold a long strip of linen. ‘The wonderful thing about the human aura, Mr Penrose, is that it displays the soul directly, truthfully, without the murky lies and ambiguity of words – it is a language of the spirit for those who know how to read it. You’re a policeman; you know about lie-detectors and galvanic skin response and such. That’s just one surface manifestation of what I’m talking about. These, however, are capable of getting to the, ah, deeper truth of things.’
Rosey saw that the strip of linen was threaded along its length with serried ranks of gleaming acupuncture needles. He panicked then but, before he could leap from the chair, found that the guards were a lot closer than he’d thought, and they held him firmly.
Barber was humming happily to himself as he laid out his instruments. Rosey recognised the tune. It was, of all things, Jerusalem.
‘England’s other national anthem, they call it,’ said Barber, as if reading his thoughts, and Rosey was starting to think that might be entirely possible. ‘But I’ll bet you already knew that. I bet you’re a bit of an old rugger-bugger, Last-Night-of-the-Proms sort, aren’t you?’ He laughed softly. ‘Still, you have to love the irony of it. Blake was a revolutionary and a heretic who was accused of treason, and it’s his words we love as one of our most patriotic songs. It’s so deliciously perverse.’
He stopped what he was doing and hunkered down close with a conspiratorial air. ‘Here’s something I bet you didn’t know. You know that famous line, the one about those “dark Satanic mills”? Everybody assumes he was writing about the Industrial Revolution and what-not. However…’ and he leaned in so close that Rosey could smell sweet, strangely old-fashioned cologne ‘…it’s all part of a longer poem called ‘Milton’, and in his handwritten manuscript for that poem, the first time he mentions Satanic mills there’s a little sketch, just a little doodle, not much more, sort of in the margins – and guess what it is. Go on, guess.’
Rosey didn’t move. Didn’t even blink.
Barber leaned in even closer, so that their noses were almost touching. ‘It was a picture,’ he whispered, ‘of Stonehenge.’
The snort of laughter which escaped Rosey was completely beyond his control. In the frozen moment afterwards he was also convinced it would be the last sound he ever made, aside from screaming. But Barber was nodding and grinning.
‘I know! I know! Mad, isn’t it?’ He moved away, back to his needles, selected one, and returned.
‘I know why these terrify you, Mr Penrose, and you’re right to be scared. But no, I’m not the man you put in jail, am I? You must be awfully confused.’ He laughed, but there wasn’t even the pretence of human bonhomie in the sound now – it was simple cold mockery.
‘I’ve killed many people with these – youngsters, mostly, and in ways that would make you want to blind yourself for having seen them.’ The cold in the room deepened, as if pouring off the man. ‘As I said, you are entirely peripheral to the matter at hand, but he might come to you, and that is the only thing keeping you alive. I have no intention of killing you. However, I must be sure about what you know. I will be sure.’
‘Who – what – are you?’
‘I am a developer, Mr Penrose. I develop land. I also develop people. The two are often contiguous. Who knows? I might even be able to do something about that little back problem of yours. Call it an early Christmas present.’
Barber raised the first needle, and everything after that was bright and burning.
***
Rosey stood at the chainlink fence and watched as the bulldozers grumbled back and forward, pulverising the ground flat. The grim satisfaction he took in seeing this was undermined by what felt like the beginnings of a headache.
Driving home, he was nagged by the feeling that something important somewhere was out of place, until he suddenly realised how quickly it had grown dark. Either he had reckoned the time wrong, or he’d spent longer than he’d thought brooding over that house, because he was certain he’d gone there in the early afternoon, straight after seeing Ms Bishop, and now it appeared to be early evening.
By the time he got home, his head was throbbing fiercely. Definitely a touch of flu coming on. He had been planning to make a start on tracking down the phone number which Andy had called her from, but for some reason thinking about it only made his head hurt worse, so he took a couple of paracetomol and decided it could wait until the morning.
One thing though: his back didn’t hurt nearly half so much as usual.
6 Staked Out
It was a routine matter for Rosey to trace the number of the phone box from which Andy had called Laura. He found it much as he expected: wrecked and filthy, although presumably somebody had been along since Andy had used it and finished the job, because the receiver was completely dead.
More plod-work with a photograph up and down the shops on either side of the street brought predictably disappointing results. Nobody had seen him, or if they had, couldn’t recall having done so. Short of Andy having actually robbed anyone, he would have been totally inconspicuous.
Most places these days had CCT
V for security (and why did he get a funny prickle of déjà vu when he thought that?), but he had neither the authority nor the time to bother.
It was while he was passing the entrance to a narrow side street between Ranjit the Wine Lord and the Ichbal & Paramanathon Cypriot Real Estate Agency that he saw the graffiti rainbow-scrawled on the brick walls either side, and his pulse quickened at the recognition: repeated everywhere, in a hundred different colours and sizes, was the motif of a spoked wheel.
The name of the street, almost illegible beneath layers of spraypaint, was Moon Grove.
As soon as Rosey set foot off the main pavement he became uncomfortably aware of how much darker and quieter it was. The scribbled walls of the shops on either side gave way to service alleyways rancid with overflowing wheely bins, and then – in a contrast so sudden it actually made him do a double-take – a short cul-de-sac of rambling, boarded-up houses. At the furthest and dimmest end, a vacant lot sat proud by virtue of its emptiness, like the stump of an amputated limb. It had a gravity and authority, as if it were the apotheosis of neglect to which the other mouldering buildings aspired.
It drew Rosey completely, like the dead zone on Wychbury hill.
He saw weed-choked piles of crumbling brick and, further back, the jungled shadows of a long-overgrown garden. He explored it as fully as he could, right the way back to a sagging wooden fence, and found nothing but more empty remains. There was no sign that anybody still lived here, just the broken mementoes of small, desperate acts of escape: alcopop bottles, solvent cans and used condoms.
This was a mistake. The graffiti had just been a blind coincidence. The boy clearly didn’t want to be found, and he should just leave it at that.
Which was exactly what he did. There was a limit to how much he could be expected to do. Hundreds of people went missing every day across the country, and despite a few well-publicised cases of idiots getting caught after faking their deaths for the insurance, the truth was that if a person was serious about disappearing, it was all but impossible to find them.
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