“I’m an Assassin,” he said. He knew she was toying with him now, there was nothing stupid behind those furtive eyes, but still he couldn’t disguise the pride in his words.
“Uh-huh. And would Assassin be an important role in the game?”
“Very. It’s very, very important. The Assassins lie in the shadows, they watch, they wait, they know secrets.”
“Do they now?”
He nodded, his chin up, trying to assert confidence.
“And would an Assassin have a lot of power?” Her voice lingered mockingly on the sibilants.
“Yes.”
“Would an Assassin be a match for a big man like, say, DI Clemo here?”
“Assassins have their methods. They’re afraid of nobody and everybody fears them.”
“That’s very clever. Good for you. By the way, are you not curious to know why we’re here?”
“Is it because of the boy who went missing?”
“You’ve shown a remarkable lack of interest. Why is that?”
“It’s nothing to do with me. I didn’t see anything.”
“What happened to Benedict Finch wouldn’t be one of your secrets then?”
“I never tell my secrets.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because they’re secret.” He laughed, a quick, high-pitched sound, a fish gulping air.
“Or is it perhaps because you’re ashamed of them? You have a previous conviction for exposing yourself, don’t you? I can understand why you’d like to keep something like that under your hat, or should I say under your Assassin’s cape? Probably wise.”
“I never did it.”
“That’s not what two little girls who were trying to play a nice game of tennis said. How old do you think they were? I’ll tell you. They were eleven years old, and their nice game was interrupted by you sticking your wee tadger through the netting around the court, was it not?”
“It’s not how it was. I promise.”
Fraser leaned forward, fixing her gaze on Fount. “Did you see Benedict Finch in the woods on Sunday afternoon?”
Fount shuffled his backside across the bed until he was sitting with his back against the wall. He had a sharp Adam’s apple and angry ingrown hairs along his jawline. He said nothing, but there was defiance in his expression.
“So did you?” asked Fraser. “See Benedict Finch in the woods on Sunday afternoon?” She hadn’t looked away from him.
Fount crossed his arms. “I only answer to the authorities of my kingdom,” he said.
Fraser snorted. “You’ve got three authorities in the room with you now; how much more authority do you want?”
“I only answer to the authorities of my kingdom.”
“How about: how did you get home from the woods on Sunday? Nobody saw you after three o’clock.”
“You don’t understand. I inhabit the Kingdom of Isthcar. I recognize the Isthcarian authorities only. Assassins answer only to the Knights of Isthcar, the Holders of the Hammer of Hisuth.”
“What? What nonsense is that? You’ll answer to us. Let me tell you something, you’d better grow up, young man, and you’d better do it quickly. We’re investigating the disappearance of a child here. There are two facts we can’t ignore: you were there, and you’ve got previous.”
She stared at him until his eyes dropped. He picked at a frayed hole on the knee of his jeans.
“Can you tell us anything about what you saw?” I asked, inserting my words carefully into the stalemate that was brewing, although I felt like wringing his scrawny neck. “It would be very helpful.”
Fount closed down his face. He wasn’t going to talk.
“If I find out later that you know something that could help in the investigation, and you’re not telling us, then you’ll pay for that,” said Fraser. She got to her feet. “Have no doubt about that. Right, we’re finished here for now, but we’re certainly not finished with you.”
“You can see yourselves out,” said Fount to Fraser’s back. There was a hint of a smirk on his face. We paused at the bottom of the stairs when we realized Woodley wasn’t behind us. He’d waited in the doorway of the room.
“Isthcar,” he said to Fount. “Isn’t that an ancient tribe? From Nordic mythology?”
“The finest tribe,” said Fount. “The most noble.”
“It sounds fascinating. Is the game very complex?” Woodley sounded impressed.
“To play properly, there’s a lot you have to understand.”
“Awesome,” said Woodley. He said it simply, his voice light. “See you again maybe.” He nodded at Fount, a man-to-man gesture.
“Bye,” Fount said to him.
“What a prick,” said Fraser. “It’s meeting pricks like that that makes me actually look forward to getting back to my desk.”
I knew that wasn’t true. However high she’d climbed, at heart she was a street cop through and through.
We were in the car. Woodley and I had pulled on our seat belts, we were ready to leave; Fraser was taking a few moments to rage. “I bet he wishes he was still sucking at his mammy’s breast. What do you reckon?”
“I think we need to be careful. He’s almost too much of a cliché, he looks so good for it on paper. Young, single male, all of that. But I think we need to be careful not to make assumptions about him.”
She ignored me. “You know as well as I do that if there’s a cliché there’s usually a good reason for it. Christ! That little prick’s given me a headache with his skanky flat and his self-obsessed, smug little bucket-and-spade ideology. He needs to get out of the sandpit and get into the real world. Knights of Isthcar, what’s that about when it’s at home?”
She sighed. She looked tired. She was putting in the hours this week, just like everyone else.
“I suppose it makes a change from asking for a lawyer. I feel like I’ve got something in my eye, have I got something in my eye?” Fraser pulled down the mirror and pulled down an eyelid.
“I don’t think he did it,” I said.
She flicked the mirror back up brusquely.
“What makes you say that?”
“I agree that he looks good for it on paper, but he couldn’t take his eyes off your legs in there, and your . . .” I felt shy suddenly.
“My what, DI Clemo?”
“Your shoes, your red shoes.”
“Oh right. Well, for a moment there I thought you were going to say something else.”
Woodley snorted from the backseat and then tried to turn it into a cough.
“So what’s your point, Jim?”
“My point is that somebody interested in children is not usually interested in women, especially not in a fetishistic way. He couldn’t take his eyes off the red shoes. I was watching him.”
“I still want him brought into the station. We can’t possibly rule him out because he looked at my shoes. You know that as well as I do. Woodley, I saw what you did at the end there. Very smart. When we bring him in, I want you to interview him and get to the bottom of his dirty little mind whichever way it bends.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I could hear the sound of a grin in Woodley’s voice.
“I’m not your ‘ma’am,’ ” she said. “ ‘Boss’ will do. Right, come on, Jim, what are we waiting for?”
RACHEL
Halfway through the morning Nicky announced, “I’ve spoken to John. He wants us to go around to his house so we can agree together on a design for a ‘Missing’ flyer, and print some there. He’s got a laser printer.”
I’d never been to John and Katrina’s new house. Not past the front door anyway. I’d spent plenty of time standing on the gravel outside when I’d dropped Ben off for the weekend.
“Will Katrina be there?”
“I expect so, yes, but at this point I think you need to think of her as another pair of hands. She wants to help and we need all the help we can get.”
I thought of the blog and the comments I’d read this morning.
�
�Any port in a storm?” I said.
“Exactly!” she said, and she smiled just a little.
It pleased Nicky when I said that because it’s what our aunt Esther used to say. “You’d been through a storm,” she would say if we ever discussed the circumstances that had led us to live with her. “A terrible storm, and I was your port.”
“A safe haven,” Nicky would say and Esther would agree.
Esther had taken us in after our parents’ death. She was our mother’s much older sister. She brought us to her house immediately after the accident that killed our parents and we never left after that. She sheltered us from gossip, which sometimes hung around us like a cloud of biting midges. She gave us the chance to have a childhood, or her version of one.
It wasn’t a usual upbringing, because Esther was a spinster, who’d always lived alone. She taught English literature A level to the children of the local wealthy at a small private school and could quote a huge amount of poetry by heart. She also played bridge and had a passion for growing roses. She wore knee-length skirts and flat shoes, with simple cardigans, and had bobbed flyaway white hair that she clipped back with bobby pins. She kept gold-topped milk in the fridge, which the birds had invariably pecked at before she brought it in in the morning, so each lid had neat puncture marks in it when it arrived on the breakfast table.
I don’t think Esther was a naturally maternal figure. She was unaccustomed to young children apart from a regular annual visit she’d made to our family before our parents died, so when Nicky and I arrived suddenly in her life she treated us as miniature adults, and shared her passions with us. She surrounded us with art and music and books, she pointed out the possibility of beauty in life. Nicky drank this up as if it were nectar, and fell into Esther’s arms gratefully.
I was different. When I was growing up I always felt like the baby that I’d been when we arrived there, a bit of an addendum to their lives, too little to understand things, always in bed when the proper conversations took place. It was ironic, as I’d never known our mother or father, that I was the one who found it most difficult to accept Esther in her role in loco parentis, while Nicky, nine years old when we arrived, wouldn’t leave her side.
As a teenager I’d meanly thought that Esther was fusty, tweedy, and better suited to another era, more like other people’s grandparents than their parents. I’d rejected her gentle offerings of culture and knowledge because they hadn’t immediately bolstered me, or given me an obvious direction or purpose. That came later in life, when I took up photography, when I sat beside John in St. George’s concert hall and fell in love with him and with classical music, and then I regretted that I’d never thanked her for what she did for us before she died.
It was because things hadn’t always been easy when we were growing up that it pleased Nicky whenever I said a kind word about Esther. It pleased her immensely.
I agreed to go to John’s house. Laura came around to house-sit because I still couldn’t stand to leave it empty. Just in case. Nicky and I had to fight through the journalists to get to her car. They jostled us, shouted questions at us. We ignored them, but the questions hurt. They were aggressive, and accusatory. Some of the photographers ran alongside the car as we pulled away, lenses at the windows, snapping away at our white, scared faces.
John and Katrina’s house was only ten minutes’ drive away, on a quiet suburban street where everybody had driveways and two cars parked in them on the weekend. The house was semidetached, art deco in style, painted white, and had long, linear windows along the front of it, which would normally give a view into both their sitting room and office. When we arrived the curtains were drawn in both rooms, and there were journalists lounging on their low front wall like teenagers at a bus stop. They leaped to their feet at the sight of us.
John opened the door and ushered us in quickly. He looked disheveled, and he was unshaven.
“In the kitchen,” he said.
“John,” I said, before we stepped out of the hallway. “I’m so sorry about the press conference, so, so sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .”
“It’s OK,” he said. “At least you didn’t just cry like a baby.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that John might be berating himself for his own behavior. I’d thought mine so much worse.
“Don’t be ashamed,” I said, but he was already on his way into the kitchen.
Before I joined him I couldn’t help noticing the parquet floor in the hallway, and remembered what Ben had said about it: “There’s a shiny floor, but I’m not allowed to skid on it.”
Katrina stood in the kitchen beside a small round table. Like John, she appeared haggard and undone somehow. She was dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, a cardigan over it. She looked very young. She glanced at John as if expecting him to play host and when he didn’t she asked, “Can I get anything for you? Would you like a cup of coffee? Or water? Or tea?”
It was awkward being in their house, I can’t deny it, but together we made a flyer, and in some ways it was a relief to have something constructive to concentrate on.
Ben’s photo was prominent in our design, as was the phone number to contact. The word “MISSING” ran along the top of the page. The plan was to print out one hundred copies there and then and Katrina said she would get more done at a local print shop. She and Nicky discussed how and where we should distribute them.
When we were done, Nicky said, “John, Katrina, do you mind if I ask, can either of you think of anybody who might have done this? Anybody at all?”
John’s reply was curt. “I’ve told the police everything I can think of.”
“Are you sure you can’t think of anything odd at all, people behaving strangely around him, anything like that?”
Katrina said, “We’ve gone round and round in circles talking about this, haven’t we, John?”
He had his elbows on the table, his hands flat on its surface. It was almost a position of surrender. He nodded at her. “We have,” he said. “And I can’t think of anything.” His eyes were so bloodshot they looked painful.
“It’s the teaching assistant I wonder about,” said Katrina.
“He only started this term,” I said. “I don’t know anything about him.”
“Exactly,” said Katrina. “That’s what bugs me. We don’t know who he is. He’s an unknown quantity.”
“Have you spoken to him?” I asked John.
“No. You?”
“Not once, he’s never out in the playground.”
John shrugged. “The police will be talking to everybody,” he said. “They’ve assured me of that. I don’t see what we can do.”
“Anybody else you’ve thought of?” Nicky asked.
John had had enough. “Don’t you think I haven’t spent every second of every day going through this in my mind? I can’t think of anything else that would help. God knows I wish I could!”
He slammed the flat of his hand down on the table and it juddered.
“Of course,” Nicky said. “I’m sorry.”
In the silence that followed, Katrina stood up and began tidying up mugs. My eyes roved around, taking in John’s new home. Their kitchen was white and shiny, the granite surfaces immaculate. The only sign of disorder in the room was a large pin board, covered with stuff. I stood up and went to look at it, lured over there by one image in particular. It was a drawing, made by Ben.
The drawing was of three adults and a child. Each person was named underneath: Mummy, John, Katrina, and Ben. We all stood equidistant from each other. Ben stood between John and me. “My family,” he’d written above it, and on each of our faces was a smile.
And in that moment I realized that Ben had managed to do what I hadn’t done, couldn’t do: he’d moved on. I began to cry.
I felt an arm around my shoulders. It was Katrina, and what she said next made me think for the first time that she had a heart, and feelings of her own.
“Would you like to see his room?” she asked me.
> “Yes.”
She took me upstairs. On the landing, the first door we came to had three colorful wooden letters on it that spelled out “BEN.” She opened it and I stepped inside. “Take as long as you like,” she said. She went back downstairs.
The room had been beautifully decorated. It was light, and fresh, with pale walls and striped bed linen. The bed was made up with care. The duvet had been smoothed and tucked in and somebody had carefully arranged three or four soft toys against the pillows, which were plumped up and welcoming.
The walls were hung with two framed pictures of Tintin book covers, Ben’s favorite ones, and a Minecraft poster. There was a child’s desk in the corner, and on it a stack of scrap paper, a container full of coloring pens and pencils, and a lamp, bright red, in the shape of an elephant. A half-finished drawing lay waiting to be completed beside the iPad that John had given me the day before he left us, but which had ended up belonging to Ben. It had felt impossible for me to deny him that, in the absence of his father, and he often left it at John and Katrina’s house so that he didn’t have to negotiate with them over computer use, because there was only one in the house.
A large rug covered the floor and there was an electric railway set assembled on it, a train with carriages attached, ready to depart. A light shade, patterned like the moon, hung in the center of the room, and from it, carefully suspended on a thread, one above the other, hung three homemade paper airplanes.
I sat on the bed for a long time, until John appeared in the doorway.
“This room is lovely.” I wanted him to know that.
“Katrina planned everything with Ben and she painted it herself.”
There was no reproach in his voice, which he might have been entitled to, just a dreadful sadness.
I could see that an extraordinary amount of care and attention had gone into the creation of the room. It was painful to me to hear that Katrina had done the work, but not nearly as painful as the fact that Ben had never once described it to me.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, and I saw suddenly how I’d taken everything Ben told me about his life at his dad’s and twisted it into a sordid, unhappy shape.
What She Knew Page 14
