by P. D. Viner
“Bevans,” a loud voice booms out.
Tom looks up to see an idiot juggling a trowel, a watering can and a packet of seeds. It’s impressive juggling but it all makes Tom feel so tired. Were it one of his team he would scream at them to have some respect. Instead he waves a tired hand at his friend and pulls his shoe up out of the mud. It squelches satisfyingly, like a movie sound effect.
“You’re meant to set an example,” Tom hisses to the tall pathologist when he gets over to him.
“I am. This is work-life balance. See?” He throws the items even higher, catching the can and seeds, but the trowel spins out of control and shoots into the ground. It sticks in the mud, pointing straight up like an arrow, sending a billow of muddy water up Tom’s leg.
“Whoops.” The pathologist laughs.
“Grow up, Dr. Keyson.”
Tom walks away, frustrated by the man who, he believes, doesn’t comprehend the concept of the chain of command. He seems to have no respect for authority. Tom wonders for a thousandth time if his new friend is autistic to some degree; brilliant people often are. And there’s no denying that Marcus Keyson is special; highly intelligent and charming, he’s the youngest pathologist working with the Met by ten years, but there is something a little odd about him, something cold and calculating, something that disconnects him from everyone else.
“Or is that just paranoia?” Tom asks himself. Or maybe even a little jealousy? Or is it just remorse? After being closed off for so many years, Tom had finally opened up a little to someone, and now he wished he hadn’t. It was stupid. Drunk stupid. Lonely stupid. Tom knows he shouldn’t drink, but his loneliness had got the better of him. He should have bought a hamster, not tried to have a friend. He’d gone so many years without one—why had he tried now? But of course that was the point, wasn’t it? It had been February 6—the anniversary.
“Why?” Keyson asked.
“No one is meant to drink alcohol on police premises.”
“They all do.”
“I don’t care about that. I’m the boss and I need to be beyond reproach, or at least look like I’m following the rules.”
With a shrug, the tall man pops the top off the bottle and takes a swig.
“Christ, Marcus.”
The pathologist pops another bottle and hands it to Tom, who takes it furtively and then sits at his desk and pulls out two mugs from the bottom drawer. He hands one to Keyson that reads KEEP ’EM PEELED. The second he keeps for himself. They pour their bottles into the mugs, then Tom puts the empty bottles into his drawer.
“World’s Greatest Dad?” Keyson points at Tom’s mug.
“I. It … My …” Tom stammers.
“Nobody expects the Freudian Inquisition?” jokes Keyson.
Against his better judgment, Tom laughs. “Okay, Siggy. I bought it for my dad, when he was still with us. I was about twelve. Big fucking joke.”
“You kept it. Waste not, want not?”
Tom nods but it isn’t the case. He kept it to act more like a warning, something he would see everyday. Be careful who you raise to the level of a god.
Tom sits at his desk, Keyson opposite him in the bollock chair, so named as you only sat in it if you were getting a bollocking. The two men raise their mugs and drink in silence. As they drink, a tear runs down Tom’s cheek.
“Is this why they call you the Sad Man?” Keyson asks, pointing to the tear.
“Jesus.” Tom pulls a box of tissues out of his desk. He takes one and wipes his face.
“Sorry,” Marcus Keyson manages to make an apology sound more like an accusation.
“I have no control of my eyes. I just tear up …” Tom doesn’t finish the thought—“I tear up when I think of anything sad.” Tom knows full well what everyone calls him; he even thinks of himself as the Sad Man, but no one says it to his face. That’s the problem with Marcus Keyson—no off switch, no self-censor. Tom picks up the beer and drinks the whole mug down in one go. The genie is out of the bottle.
“How old do you think I am?” Tom asks.
Keyson knows the answer, but remembers how surprised he’d been when he discovered it. He mimes supreme concentration. “Forty-eight?”
Tom smiles. “I’m thirty-nine.”
Tom knows that forty-eight is a kind guess. Most people say early fifties. And that’s now—even when he was thirty, people guessed he was fifty. The first three times he tried online dating he was accused of lying about his age on the form. Once it led to a stand-up row in a Pizza Express. After that he started putting down forty-eight. He didn’t change the age he wanted, twenty-five to thirty-five, and was amazed that he got more responses when women thought he was nearing his fifties.
Beer number seven slides down. Now, both men are lying on the floor, heads almost touching. The time is uncertain; all they know is that the building is mostly dark and out of the seventh-floor window there is nothing to see. No stars and no moon, all hid by brooding clouds. Tomorrow it will rain. And the next day.
“Don’t look that way. The wind’ll change and you’ll get stuck like that.”
Tom laughs, more a schoolboy snigger, really. The beer has taken twenty years off him. “My mum would always tell me that. I thought it was just more of her crap—but it turned out to be true. Dani died, I cried, and all the fun was over. I got stuck like this.” He laughs a touch hysterically, but truthfully. It feels good to tell someone.
“When?” Keyson asks.
“1989. She was twenty-one.”
“You loved her?”
The tears run sideways and pool in his ears. He can only nod.
“And that’s what made you join the police? You wanted to win justice for her?”
“No.” He feels the guilt rise in him. “I’d already joined.” He can hear them: his mum, teachers, Dani asking him, “Why, why?”
“Why?” She wasn’t angry; she just didn’t understand it. Dani could not comprehend why he wasn’t going to take the place at Cambridge.
“Explain it to me,” she asked. But he couldn’t.
“I left school and joined. It was for her, though—it was for justice. For Dani. Somebody had hurt her and—”
Tom holds the pint glass. It feels awkward in his hand. The alley smells of urine. It’s dark and he can’t see much except for the pub over the road, which throws rectangles of light into the black street. He’s in the perfect position to see the front door, see when it swings open and he leaves. Tom knows the man is in there; he checked it out. Bix was there. Lego-and-dogshit Bix.
Tom had walked into the pub, bought himself a pint, taken a few sips, then left with the glass and crossed over to the alley. He’d tipped the beer down a drain and settled down to wait. At 10:50 he heard the last-orders bell clang. Soon. He stretched his stiff legs. A few minutes later a group of lanky men came out, five of them all looking the same as each other. Floppy hair, black T-shirts and jeans, leather jackets, canvas bags slung over a shoulder. Individuality—three cheers for that. They slapped backs, arms or palms before each one peeled off, heading in a different direction. Tom nearly set out to follow the wrong man, but at the last minute one of them shouted.
“Tomorrow, Bix!”
“Right,” Bix replied, and Tom saw his mistake; he should be following the other lanky, arty bastard. He switched to following him. He slammed the glass against the wall and it sheared in half leaving a jagged edge, a nasty-looking weapon. In ten minutes it would cut through the young man’s face. Ending his pretty boy looks forever.
The room is swimming a little. Tom thinks Marcus might have fallen asleep. He knows he should get up soon; his bladder feels distended, but it all seems like such an effort. The glass slices into skin, flesh—then grinds on bone. There is blood and a scream.
“I did something awful,” Tom’s voice slurs a little, part alcohol and part melancholy. “I did it for her, Dani. For her. To defend her. She’d been hurt and I knew he’d do it again, hurt more women. I stopped that.”
&nbs
p; That is what he has told himself for years. In front of Marcus Keyson, however, it sounds a little thin.
“I thought about it a lot afterward. I did my A levels—even applied to university with Dani. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d done. I joined the police,” he says in little more than a whisper.
He would like to tell Keyson what he did, that he glassed a man. But he cannot. It still shocks him today. And he avoids the obvious question: would he do it again? He hears the scream. The warmth of the blood. The bile rising in his throat. He knows the answer is yes.
“So, the love of your life was murdered?” Keyson’s voice sounds warm and surprisingly sober.
Tom is pulled from the nauseating memory. “Yes. Her last year at university. When she graduated we would have been married, but …” The air above him feels heavy as he lies alongside his confidant, looking up at the ceiling.
“Durham. She was reading classics. I hate Durham.”
“Really?” Keyson sounds a little wistful, enough that Tom rolls his head slightly to look at his friend. “I love it.”
“All surface. It looks beautiful but underneath … there are maggots.”
The two men are quiet for a few minutes, each lost in his own memories. Tom hears his new friend sigh and looks across to see tears running down his cheeks toward the floor.
“Are you …?”
“I was at boarding school,” Keyson begins. “I’d gone from the age of five. I was the sad child with big eyes who waves goodbye to all his friends at holiday time and spends a boring break with the sadistic form master and kindly matron.”
“Your parents?”
“Gone.”
That single word is all he says on the subject of his parents. There is a minute of silence as the two men reflect on this new level of intimacy between them.
“One year, maybe I was nine, I was invited home for Christmas by one of the other boys. We weren’t even that close and I thought it was a cruel joke at first, but at the end of term a car came and collected both of us and our trunks and we went to his home for the holiday.”
“Durham?”
“Yes. The boy’s father had spoken to the headmaster. It had begun a little selfishly, really. The boy had lost his mother and his father was concerned for him. He thought that if he had a friend to play with, that Christmas would be … tolerable.” He pauses and lets that word fill the air around them. Tom knows how keeping busy makes life tolerable.
“Anyway, it was the best two weeks of my whole life. Sad?”
“No … no.”
“I went home with Paul every holiday after that. His father bought us bunk beds and, well, they were my family. My father and brother.”
“You still see them?”
The pause tells Tom everything he needed to know. “I’m really sorry.”
“I loved them both. Gerald, Paul’s father, inspired me—he was the coroner there, the most dedicated man I ever met.”
“In Durham?” Tom feels ice shift in his chest.
“I followed him into the work, something to prove, I suppose. Oh …” Both men suddenly feel a weight push down on them. “Christ, Tom, your girl died in Durham.”
Simultaneously both men imagine Gerald’s scalpel cutting deep into a young woman’s chest. Marcus Keyson reaches out and puts his hand on Tom Bevans’s arm. Such a little gesture but Tom could not remember the last time anyone showed him such kindness. Tom feels his own hand begin to stretch and, with the lightest of touches, he rests his hand on the other man’s arm. Together, swimming in the memories of those they once loved, they lie and stare at the ceiling.
TWENTY-TWO
Tuesday, February 7, 1989
There is a strange crackling from the body on the bench. It happens three times before the figure moves, rolling slightly to free a hand from the black cocoon. It pulls out a squat brick with an antenna, and holds it close to what must be a mouth.
“PC Bevans” is all it says, in a voice syrupy with tiredness.
There’s a long pause. Tom pushes himself up on his park-bench bed, keeping the sleeping bag pulled up to his neck. His shoulders are killing him and his lower back feels compressed, as if he’d been carrying a rock uphill for the longest time. He waits for the voice in the machine to tell him the news.
“They … found ’er.” The voice just peeks through the static. “Call just came in from Durham CID.”
Tom knows the news is not good. He shakes his head free of the last cobwebs of fatigue.
“She’s dead?”
The silence says it all.
“Mate, I am so sorry,” Sarge finally manages.
“How can they be sure?” Tom asks, deadpan—dead.
“An anonymous tip-off just before midnight. A male. He said they’d find Dani Lancing at a private address in Durham. A car went straight there and found the body, the first officer on the scene called it in.”
Tom’s stomach pitches.
“But are they sure it’s her?”
“The first OS had taken the file—all the missing-persons photos. He said he was sure it was her but they called the flatmate over anyway. She made the positive at about one this morning.”
From somewhere an owl hoots. Tom’s mouth feels rank. He spits into the grass.
“How had …? What’s the cause of death?”
“Don’t know. There’ll be an autopsy later.”
Silence. Chill.
“Had she been …?” Tom tries to ask.
“Oh, mate. I don’t know.” Sarge sounds like he might cry; he hates breaking bad news. It was part of the reason he’d taken the desk job in the first place—so he didn’t have to deliver the worst news to people and watch as they disintegrated before his eyes. But he owes something to this young policeman. He grits his teeth.
“She was tied up when they found her … Tom, I’m sorry. That’s all I know, the full report will be in later. Sorry.”
“What about her mum and dad?” Tom’s voice barely registers.
Sarge twists the volume dial and asks him to repeat.
“Her mum and dad, who’s going to tell them?”
“Durham CID are sending someone down. They wanted one of their own to see her parents and talk to the papers—you know, with everything that’s gone on.”
“Oh yeah. The reporters.”
They had been like flies on shit the last couple of weeks, plastering Dani’s picture all over the front page. Hounding them, wanting anything, everything. And that bastard from the News of the Screws—he’d been the worst—disgusting. Well, at least he wouldn’t be bothering them again.
“When will the Durham team be here?”
“Hour, maybe two. They’re going to meet the DS at some cafe on the way. Get a quick briefing, then the pair of them will drive in together. I think the plan is to get there at about six. I think they’re gonna ask the parents to do a secondary ID of the … of Dani. But they’re dealing with it as a known victim.”
“Thanks, Sarge. Over.”
Tom feels frozen. He puts the radio down on the bench and swings his legs off. He puts them tentatively on the ground—pins and needles run up and down like electric charges. He feels like a zombie, dragging around a dead body because he’s too stupid or too cowardly to lie down. The radio squawks once more.
“I’m re-jigging the rota. Don’t come in till Thursday night,” Sarge says through the static.
Three days to recover from the loss of your one true love.
“I need to bring the radio back.”
“Thursday’s fine. Go home, Tom.”
“Sarge.”
Tom takes his thumb off the radio and lets the silence engulf him.
He sits for about forty-five minutes, not really thinking, not really doing anything. It’s still dark. Last night the moon had been so bright, but it’s gone now and Greenwich Park is purple and navy. Tom can just about make out shapes. He hobbles over to a bush and pees into it. He hopes none of it is splashing onto his boo
ts, but really, what does that matter? Once again he’s slept in the park like a tramp. He had the idea after Dani had been missing for six days, to keep a walkie-talkie with him at all times. He talked to Sarge about it and he agreed that whoever was on duty would let Tom know any news that came in. The first few nights he’d been at home but he couldn’t sleep, worrying that if a call had come in he couldn’t get there quickly enough. He wanted to be at the Lancings’ the second there was news. So he started to take a sleeping bag onto the heath, only a five-minute walk from their house. It was cold, but nothing that the four-season Everest sleeping bag couldn’t deal with.
He used his uniform as a pillow, wrapped up in a soft waterproof, and he always remembered to take a change of underwear and a sponge bag. If he was on duty, he’d wash at the station house; if not, then there were public loos that opened at 7 a.m. on the other side of the bridleway. Normally that was fine, but this morning it isn’t good enough. His teeth need a good clean and his chin’s scratchy with a lot more than Mickey Rourke stubble. In the dark he can’t see that the hairs poking through his skin are pure white, like those spreading out from his temples.
Maybe three weeks ago. Maybe then, he would still have been described as a boy: the pale, skinny boy. Of course, nobody who knew him would say it to his face, but he heard it. Old ladies would see the uniform, stop him in the street and then argue with him, insisting he was a tall child dressing up. One even threatened to call the real police. He’d tried to grow a beard, but it had been a disaster. He had been thinking about ordering a pair of glasses with clear glass to see if they made him look older … That was three weeks ago. This morning, no person on earth would mistake him for a boy.
