Blood Guilt

by Ben Cheetham

Eve watched with an air of resigned sadness as Harlan shakily swilled back the painkillers. She said nothing. There was nothing left for her to say. After a while, he closed his eyes and fell back asleep.

  Eve woke Harlan up three more times during the night. The final time, it was getting light and she held a tray with toast and tea on it. After a silent breakfast, Harlan went through to the bathroom. He still felt headachy and dizzy, but when he looked in the mirror he saw that his pupils were no longer dilated with concussion. When he left the bathroom, Eve was waiting for him in the hallway. She had her coat on.

  Harlan managed a thin smile, although a heavy, hollow ache wrung his chest at the thought of her leaving. “Thanks.”

  Eve nodded, turned and left.

  From the living-room window, Harlan watched Eve get into her car and drive away. Swallowing a sigh, he dropped onto the sofa and watched the morning news. Still no mention of Jones. Garrett was doing a good job of keeping a lid on the whole affair. It was only a matter of time, though. Not that there was much chance of Jones going to the media – characters like him thrived in the shadows. But every police department had its leaks.

  What are you going to do now? Eve’s question came back to Harlan. The answer was simple. He was at a dead end, and there was only one thing he could do – turn around and go back over old ground, see if he’d missed anything. He retrieved his phone from the table and called Jim. “Tell me about Neil Price.”

  “I’ve already told you everything you need to know. He’s clean as a baby. Never even had a speeding-ticket.”

  “Everybody’s got some dirt somewhere.”

  “The guy doesn’t do drugs, he doesn’t gamble, his computer’s clean. The only thing we dug up on him even vaguely interesting is that he got into some credit-card debt in his early twenties.”

  “How much?”

  “I can’t remember exactly. Nine or ten thousand, I think. But he finished paying it off a couple of years ago.”

  “No outstanding loans?”

  “No. His credit-record’s clean now.”

  “What about to loan sharks?”

  “Not that we know of.”

  “Yeah, but we know he has the potential to get himself into debt.”

  “Don’t we all? I’ll bet if I added up how much I owe on credit-cards, car loans and all the other crap, it’d be a good few thousand quid.” Jim let out a sigh. “Look, I’m telling you, Harlan, he’s just some poor kid who got caught in this mess through no fault of his own. And besides, I don’t think he’s got it in him to pull something like this.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “If you’d met Price you’d know what I mean. He’s the kind of guy who lets people walk all over him. He lives with his parents on the Manor. His mum’s this little mouse of a woman. But his dad’s a real tyrant. An unemployable drunk. The impression I get is that Neil and his mum spend most of their lives running around after him.”

  “Maybe that’s the angle, maybe Neil’s sick of being a doormat. We’ve come across dozens of people like that – people who live passively with anger and resentment for years until suddenly one day, pop!”

  “He’s not got the anger in him. I questioned him myself, pushed him real hard and he just took it. It was pathetic really. I almost felt sorry for him.”

  A hint of a surprised smile tugged at Harlan’s mouth. He’d never known Jim feel sorry for himself or anyone else before. “You must be getting soft, mate.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe I’m just getting too old for this kind of work. I tell you, Harlan, some days I’m so tired – tired of dealing with scum like William Jones and putting in fifty or sixty hours a week for sod-all – that all I can think of is getting out of this job. But what else would I do, eh? This is all I know.”

  “How is Jones?”

  Jim gave a low whistle of contempt. “Oh he’s fine. Garrett wanted to put him up in a safe-house, but he refused. So now a couple of uniforms are sat on him day and night. If you ask me, there’s something warped about us baby-sitting that–” He broke off at a voice in the background. After a moment, he came back on the line and said, “I’ve got to go. Something’s going on. I’ll talk to you later. And Harlan, remember our deal, if you find anything out…”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ll call you.”

  Chapter 12

  Careful not to wet his bandage, Harlan showered and shaved. Then, pausing occasionally to steady himself, he dressed and made his way down to his car. According to the doctor, he shouldn’t drive for another twenty-four hours or so. But the thought of doing nothing was even more nauseating than his concussion. The effort of concentrating on driving made his head reel. Several times he was forced to pull over and wait for the world to stop spinning in front of his eyes.

  Harlan didn’t need an A-Z to find Manor Lane. He knew it all too well from his days on the force. It dissected the Manor – an estate with a bad rep as a playground for binge-drinking, mugging, joyriding, happy-slapping hoodies. Neil Price’s parents’ house was at the lower end of Manor Lane, with a view overlooking the traffic-clogged Parkway and the industrial sprawl of Attercliffe and Tinsley. Harlan drove slowly past it and pulled over a few doors down on the opposite side of street. The house was a dirty red-brick semi with a small front lawn that managed to be both threadbare and overgrown. A beat-up Volvo was parked outside its front door. The neighbouring house, like numerous other houses dotted around the huge estate, was boarded up with metal sheets. Harlan reflected that there was certainly no shortage of places thereabouts to stash an abducted child. Both sets of upstairs curtains were drawn. Harlan guessed that Neil and his dad were respectively sleeping off a night-shift and a hangover. The downstairs curtains were open and the flicker of a television was visible. As he’d passed the house, he’d seen a late-middle-aged, mousey-faced little woman sat in an armchair.

  Harlan tuned the radio to the news, and settled back to watch the house. He wasn’t worried about people wondering what he was doing there. Manor Lane was a busy road. Moreover, its residents were accustomed to turning a blind eye to what went on outside their front doors. Not that most of them weren’t decent, honest people. Only they’d become hardened, worn down or simply desensitised by the relentlessness of their lives. And they were sick of being tarred with the same brush as the criminals. It all added up to a toxic cocktail of distrust, apathy and silence.

  Harlan wondered how Neil Price had fared growing up on the estate. For someone as obviously sensitive as him, life must’ve been a bitter pill to swallow. Places like the Manor had a way of finding and homing in on weakness like a predator to prey. A gawky, skinny misfit like Neil would’ve been an easy target for the other kids to tease and bully. Surely somewhere beneath that timid exterior there was a store of pent-up anger and frustration simmering away. Or maybe Jim was right, maybe Neil really didn’t have it in him. If the former was the case, Harlan was determined to find a line of attack to draw it out of him.

  Harlan’s attention was drawn to the radio by the sound of Garrett’s voice. He realised why Jim had to get off the phone so suddenly as, after the usual preliminaries, Garrett said, “The abduction of Ethan Reed clearly embodies peoples’ deepest fears about the safety of their own children. I understand peoples’ frustration and anger about the perceived lack of progress in this case, but vigilantism will not be tolerated in this city. Those engaged in such activities will be caught and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. We ask people to trust us to do our jobs. Over the past few weeks the incident room has been inundated with calls from members of the public who’ve provided us with information. This information is being scrutinised by teams of specially trained officers who are exhausting every avenue we’re provided with. Our officers clearly won’t be able to do that job as effectively if they also have to deal with citizens taking the law into their own hands.”

  Harlan shifted his attention back to the house as Garrett continued to bang on about how his officers were resolutely following up eve
ry lead, whilst telling the media nothing about what those leads were. The obvious assumption was that the release of such information would compromise the investigation. In truth, Harlan suspected it was because the leads amounted to the same as what they had on day one – zip, zilch, fuck all.

  Shortly after midday, a set of upstairs curtains opened and Neil appeared at the window. He stood looking out at the street a moment, rubbing his eyes and yawning. Then he turned and moved from view. Half-an-hour or so later, he emerged from the house and got into the Volvo. Harlan slid down in his seat as the Volvo reversed onto the road and drove past him. He waited until the car was almost out of view, before accelerating after it. He followed at an inconspicuous distance as Neil headed through Attercliffe towards Susan’s house. He pulled over at the end of her street, out of sight of her house. There was a chance that when Neil left he wouldn’t come back this way. But it was a chance Harlan would have to take. Susan’s house was almost certainly under surveillance.

  At three o’clock the Volvo reappeared with Susan in the passenger-seat. Harlan tailed it to a nearby comprehensive school. Children were streaming out the gates, some getting into cars and buses, others heading home on foot or bicycle. His stomach squeezed unexpectedly at the sight. Many were the age Tom would’ve been by now. Some even looked like he might’ve looked. Many times Harlan had tried to comfort himself with the thought that Tom’s early death had saved him from the cruelty and pain of the world. That might’ve been true, but seeing the chatting, laughing, shouting throng drove home how hollow that comfort was.

  As Harlan dragged in a shaky breath, he spotted Kane. The boy was slouched by the gates, hands thrust in pockets, eyes down. Susan got out of the Volvo and approached him. He followed her back to the car, dragging his feet, still staring sulkily at the pavement. Harlan could easily guess what the problem was – before Ethan’s abduction Kane would, more often than not, have made his own way home, but now he was forced to endure the daily humiliation of being collected by his mum.

  Neil returned to Susan’s house. Again, Harlan waited outside her street. Thirty minutes passed. An hour. Neil reappeared on foot, carrying a bulging carrier-bag. Harlan got out of his car. As he tailed Neil through the noisy, fumy rush-hour streets, the dull nagging ache in his head intensified to a severe throbbing. Neil handed out leaflets from the bag to everyone he passed. One man shoved the leaflet straight into a bin. Harlan retrieved it and saw a grainy black-and-white image of Ethan’s smiling face. Occasionally, Neil went into a shop – no doubt, to ask if he could put a missing-person poster in the window. Slowly but surely, Neil worked his way to the Baptist tabernacle. The preacher, Lewis Gunn, met him at its entrance. They shook hands and went inside.

  Glad for the chance to rest and let his headache subside, Harlan sat on a bench from where he could watch the church’s door without being in its direct line of sight. His head felt heavy and sluggish, as if he’d just woken from a deep sleep. Time dragged by. His glazed eyes began to drift. His head lolled. An image of Tom came into his mind – not Tom as he’d been, but as he might be now if he’d lived. His hair cut into a trendy style. A few zits and a hint of bumfluff around his mouth. His cheeks starting to lose their puppy-fat. But his smile the same. And his eyes…his eyes…Harlan felt his chin touch his chest. Jerking his head up with a sharp intake of breath, he saw that a double-decker bus had pulled over a hundred yards or so along from the church. People were boarding it, their features obscured by distance and the grime on the bus’s windows. He caught a glimpse of a coat the same colour as Neil’s. Was it him or was it just a coincidence? He jumped to his feet, squinting. But the coat had already disappeared into the stairwell. As the bus pulled away, Harlan made a mental note of its number – 77.

  Muttering reproachfully to himself, he resumed watching the tabernacle. With every passing minute that Neil didn’t emerge from it, he felt more certain it was him he’d seen. The daylight started to drop. Lampposts flickered into life. Number 77 buses chugged by at regular fifteen-minute intervals, heading to Grenoside – a solid working-class suburb on the north side of the city. By half-past five, Harlan knew Neil was no longer inside the church, not if he started work at six. “Shit,” he said, standing. As he headed off in the direction of his car, he reflected that he’d been an ex-cop so long he’d forgotten the number one rule: there’s no such thing as coincidence.

  Harlan drove back to the tabernacle and waited for a number 77 bus to pass. When one did, he followed it. Crawling through the traffic-clotted streets, the bus made its way to Grenoside, passing offices, shops, terraced houses, Hillsborough football ground, seventies high-rises, modern apartment blocks, a suburban shopping centre, more terraces, semis, a new housing estate. Then, finally, the edge of the city – fields dotted with sheep; scattered farmhouses; purple-flowering moorland; and the vast blue-red expanse of the twilight sky. The bus pulled into a turning-circle. It sat there for ten minutes before setting off back towards the city centre.

  Harlan walked the circumference of the terminus, peering into the closely clustered ranks of pine trees that almost completely encircled it. Nothing to see but tree-trunks and pine needles. He took a deep breath of the cool, head-clearing air, then returned to his car and the city.

  He drove to the Northern General Hospital and cruised the car-parks until he found Neil’s Volvo. After parking in view of it, he bought coffee and doughnuts from a nearby shop. But even that wasn’t enough to stop his eyelids from drooping. Realising sleep was going to win out anyway, he set the alarm on his phone for midnight, reclined his seat and closed his eyes. It seemed mere seconds later that the alarm woke him. The Volvo was still there. He reset the alarm for five-thirty AM and fell back asleep. When he next awoke, he banished the fuzzy edges of sleep with the cold dregs of his coffee. Shortly after six, Neil appeared in his porter’s uniform, his narrow shoulders scrunched against the chill morning air. He ducked into the Volvo and drove away. Harlan tailed him back to Manor Lane.

  At seven o’clock the mousey-faced woman opened the downstairs curtains. She stood smoking a cigarette at the living-room window, the elbow of one arm cupped in the other hand. She turned suddenly and moved from view, as if someone had called for her. The morning dragged by. Some of the residents of Manor Lane headed out to work or school. Others came crawling home. As on the previous day, Neil surfaced at noon. A few minutes later, the other set of upstairs curtains opened too, revealing a man who looked like Neil might look in twenty or so years if he spent the intervening time soaking himself in booze. The mousey-faced woman appeared and proffered him a mug, which he pushed away. Moments later, Neil hurried from the house to his car. He drove to a nearby off-licence, bought some cans of lager and a couple of bottles of whisky, and returned home. He handed the booze to his mum at the front door, then got back into his car. Again as on the previous day, Harlan tailed him to Susan’s. Again, the two of them fetched Kane from school. But today, instead of going home, they went to the tabernacle. Lewis Gunn and a dozen or so other people were waiting for them in the church’s car-park, all of them wearing t-shirts printed with Ethan’s face. The preacher shook Neil’s hand and embraced Susan.

  Harlan watched the group hand out missing-person posters in the city centre. Susan and Lewis Gunn also spoke to several journalists and the entire group posed for pictures, holding a banner that read ‘ETHAN STILL NEEDS YOUR HELP’. If nothing else, Harlan reflected caustically, his ‘vigilantism’ had fanned the media’s interest back into flame.

  At half-five Neil left the group and headed off to work. He parked in the same spot. So did Harlan. He bought more coffee and doughnuts, and a newspaper. The eye-catching front-page headline ran: ‘Police’s Failure To Catch Kidnapper Prompts Vigilante Attack’. Beneath it there was a picture of Garrett at a press-conference. It gave Harlan a small measure of satisfaction to note that there was a sheen of sweat on Garrett’s forehead. He skimmed over the article. What little information the reporter had about the so-called �
�attack’ on Jones they’d got from a neighbour who’d heard him shouting for help. Jones himself had refused to speak to reporters, except to shout, “Leave me alone!” through his letter-box. The remainder of the article was made up by Garrett’s platitudes, wild speculation about Jones, and the opinions of locals, which ranged from the relatively mild ‘He had it coming to him’ to ‘I just wish that whoever it was had done the job properly and killed him’.

  Frowning, Harlan tossed the newspaper aside. Part of him was irritated by the publics all too predictable indifference about what’d happened to Jones. But another part of him understood it completely. After all, people raising kids on Jones’s street could hardly be blamed for wishing him dead.

  The night passed the same as the former. With small variations in routine, so did the following day, and the day after that, and the day after that, and so on. For a week, except for a brief visit to his parole officer, Harlan stuck to Neil like shit to a shoe. Neil spent his days doing things for other people – fetching booze for his dad, ferrying Susan and Kane around, handing out leaflets, meeting with Lewis Gunn. The only time he took for himself was a Sunday night visit to The Three Tuns – a little backstreet pub near the Cathedral – where he played darts with two men, whom Harlan assumed to be Brian and Dave. Both men were a good few years older than Neil. Neither of them seemed to fit the kidnapper’s description. One was blond. The other, although dark-haired, was short and squat. They had beer-guts and receding hairlines. They downed pints while Neil stuck to cokes. They made a slightly odd trio – the beer-guzzling lads and the gawky oddball – but they seemed to get on well enough. No doubt, reflected Harlan, this had something to do with fact that Neil was the best player amongst them.

  During this time, Harlan didn’t hear from Garrett. Not that he’d expected to after the precautions he’d taken to make sure he didn’t leave any physical evidence behind. Of course, there was always the chance someone had seen him hanging around Jones’s house, but if they had it was doubtful they’d be able to identify him. And even if they could identify him, it was unlikely they would, not considering how hated Jones was. The general consensus on the street was that the vigilante was the hero, not the villain.