‘Great. That’s good. Then send that over. Have a good day. Over.’
I turn back to Emre as he brings up the prevalence of heavy falls by old people during wintery conditions.
‘Yeah. Paperwork. On its way,’ I say.
She smiles, turns and taps away at the screen. Then looks up again.
‘I can wait,’ she says.
We do for all of five seconds before I agitatedly tap my fist on the counter a couple of times to suggest some unsaid time constraint.
‘I wondered whether you could do me a favour actually,’ I mutter, leaning in.
Then she leans in, too, and talks in whispers.
‘Yes? What would that be?’ she says.
I look just past her, to the glass behind her. The layout of the reception is similar to the one in the school.
‘We’re going to get called away now. Just got a message about… an old lady… who’s fallen down,’ I whisper back.
I look past her. I look to the glass.
‘Okay? Have they called an ambulance?’ she says, keeping her voice down still.
‘No, no. She’ll be fine. But she’s… a fragile character. We’d like to… check in on her. She relies on us… you know?’
I turn to Emre, bringing him into this. He leans in. He smiles a Good Samaritan smile.
‘I wondered whether we could get the printout now? And bring over the letter after? Can we do that… maybe… Tracey?’ I say. Looking at her name badge.
She hesitates. I look past her still, unable to lock eyes while I do this.
‘No, I’m sorry, we’ll have to see the paperwork first. And my name’s Stacey,’ she whispers.
‘Okay, that’s fine. We’ll be in touch,’ I say, striding swiftly out of the building.
Emre catches me up as we get around the corner.
‘Well, that went well,’ he says.
‘Give me a pen,’ I say.
‘You’re always stealing my pens,’ he says.
‘Then give me a pencil,’ I say.
‘You nick mine, then put it down somewhere, forget where, and then you take another one of mine. This is my last pencil.’
I grab it off him, noticing it’s the green pencil he clearly pocketed at the school, accidentally or otherwise. I give him a smile. Stealing school supplies, real smooth, Bartu. Then I close my eyes, open my pocket notebook and put pencil to paper.
‘Line, line, line, up. And across and down,’ I murmur to myself.
He folds his arms and stares at me. Waiting patiently.
‘Just a second. And… here.’
Bartu looks at it. He squints.
‘Yeah, that’s too clever for me, mate,’ he says.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I have absolutely no idea what those squiggles you’ve just drawn are supposed to signify.’
‘Ah. Sorry,’ I say. ‘Follow me.’
We head into a new, fashionable, industrially-styled coffee shop, the kind that never could’ve existed around here when I was younger. I order two Americanos and lead a confused Emre to the disabled toilet.
I lock us both inside and beckon him over, as I push my notes towards the mirror.
‘Holy shit. How did you do that?’ he says.
‘I caught the reflection in the glass behind her.’
‘And you just remembered it perfectly?’
‘My mind is full of surprises. What we got?’
16
‘I want to make everybody smile
Sit in the long grass and sing to you a while
There is nothing that gets me through
More than being lazy with you.’
Paul Johnson 84 Ruskin Road
Roy Bruce 28 Renton Gardens
Jonathan Savage 144 Northumberland Park
Veronica Hedges 8 Parkhurst Road
Charles Seymour 11b Poynton Road
At the station I tap up Mona in the office. Blank faces turn. They try to pretend they’re not looking but they are. I just walk on. Stealth-like, I am not, but people are pretty pliable in their pseudo-admiration.
‘Hey, just need to check a few addresses and date of births if I could?’ I say.
‘Oh, what for?’ she says, not looking up.
‘Nothing big. Can I read them out to you?’
She pauses. People peer out from behind their desks in the open plan room.
‘Well, is it parking stuff or…’ she says.
‘No, no. It’d just…’
She’s proving tougher than I thought. The room seems to lean in.
‘What? Unpaid fines or…’ she says.
I could tell her that was it, but her computer would soon tell her that wasn’t it. The white walls and strip lights of the office seem to close in, too. I need Emre, he levels me out, but he wandered off as we entered. The halogen lights buzz. I’m not sure if she’s mothering me or being suspicious. I fight for composure as I place my hands on her desk and whisper.
‘Listen, Mona. Emre asked me to look these up so I’m doing that. He calls the shots and that’s fine, certainly until I get used to everything. But that might take a while and I don’t want people to know I forget things. So what I’m really saying is… I don’t really know what they’re for. But can you help me with this? I’m doing so well, but it’s going to take time, you know. Do you understand?’
She looks to the side. She melts.
‘Of course. I’m so sorry, didn’t mean to put you on the spot,’ she whispers.
The room hears nothing as she turns from foe to friend in one easy move. I’m good casting for the helpless one, I play it well, but I’m not planning to practise it much. It’s not really me at all. She starts to read them out. Age. Occupation. Previous convictions. I attempt to write them down as I go, but struggle with the pace required.
‘Tell you what, it’d make it a lot quicker if you just wrote them down for me. Could you do that?’ I say.
‘Of course,’ she says.
It will be quicker, but also I don’t want the room hearing about my leads. Just in case. Maybe this is the paraneea talking, but I’m not sure who I can trust here yet.
Emre arrives at the door, Levine patting him on the back and saying a few things like ‘Good stuff’ and ‘Hang in there, that’s what we need.’ Then Jarwar arrives and they all whisper conspiratorially to each other. They stand with their backs to me, Levine giving me the odd glance that I’m clearly not supposed to see.
It’s then that I notice how comfortable they all look in their uniforms, like the clothes are an extension of their bodies. I glance down at myself and see I have a shoelace undone and my vest zip is jammed half way up. They assure each other of something in the eggshell hallway. It looks like they all know each other more intimately than I imagined.
I grab my list. Thank Mona. And we head outside.
‘What was that all about?’ I say.
‘What?’ Emre says.
‘You. Jarwar. Levine. The chummy buddies.’
‘They’re just checking in, mate. I told them all’s good. You’re good. We’re good.’
‘Good. Well, that all sounds… good,’ I say.
Something doesn’t feel right about it. This is exactly why I can’t tell Emre everything yet. The things I see that he can’t. If I tell him everything it might jeopardise the plan.
‘What she give us then?’ he says, as we stop by the traffic lights.
‘You tell me,’ I say, handing him her notes. He’s on reading duties indefinitely.
‘Right. So… Paul Johnson… is a foreman. Good chance he incurred the injury on site. Fifty-two-year-old male. Moved out of the borough about a year ago.’
‘Which is not ideal,’ I say.
‘Nope. Roy Bruce. Coming up to his eighty-ninth birthday.’
‘Happy early birthday, Roy. You are eliminated from our enquiries. Kidnapping’s a young man’s game.’
‘Veronica Hedges? Is a twenty-eight-year-old nurse,’ he says.
&nbs
p; ‘Move on. It’s never a young woman. I’m sorry, it just never is. And these girls wanted a boyfriend, not a sister. They were being groomed by a male, aged between seventeen and thirty-five.’
It’s a wide span. But we’re narrowing it down.
‘Charles Seymour… is deceased. Sorry about that, Charles.’
‘Sounds like a pretty firm hit in the head.’
‘And Jonathan Savage…’
He stops in the street and looks up at me. For once he’s a step ahead. He grins and withholds. He knows how much that pisses me off. I just about resist the urge to punch him in the throat as he lets the moment linger. Then says… ‘Is a forty-two-year-old school caretaker. He lives next door to a school. And I think you know which one.’
Before he finishes I change direction and head back up the hill. The words were barely out of his mouth.
‘School’s out, Tom. Let’s wait till tomorrow,’ he says.
‘School never lets out for the caretaker. Come on. You know what happens next,’ I say.
And he isn’t putting up a fight.
*
The cleaners are there so the doors are open, but the receptionist is nowhere to be seen. He seems to nip in and out of his own accord. The school smells especially sickly sweet, turning the air a thick mauve that’s almost difficult for me to see through, as I watch them cover the floor liberally with that cleaning fluid I know and despise. We hustle in and ask the first guy we see.
‘Hey, do you know where Mr Savage is?’
I get the blankest of looks from the man. Vacant, barren, spotless. He is the cleaner, I guess. He lives the job.
He has eyes that dart around a little. He has pitch black hair. He has a touch of heterochromia: different coloured irises. One is brown. The other is dark green. The human eye doesn’t move smoothly it flits around in tiny ‘saccades’. His do this more erratically than most.
‘The caretaker? The err… site manager?’ Bartu says.
His eyes roll to take us in at chest level, barely lifting his head as he addresses us, standing as stagnant as the lilac fluid below him.
‘You can’t be here. School’s closed and he’s busy,’ he says, soft and low, his deep rasping tones barely reaching us, as if he hasn’t spoken for a week and is just getting used to his voice again.
‘I’m sure he’ll make an exception for us,’ I say, tapping the symbol on my hat. But as his eyes saccade upwards, I’m not sure he’s as overawed by this show of authority as I’d hoped.
‘I don’t even know where he is,’ he says.
It’s difficult to determine his age; he’s got the posture and personality of a curled piece of pocket paper, which makes him a limp conversation partner and a lacklustre bodyguard.
‘It’s all good, mate. Whatever the consequences are, we’ll be the ones wearing them,’ I say. Which Bartu affirms with an intake of breath and a rueful nod. ‘Just point us in the right direction and…’
But I trail off, because then I see it.
‘Never mind,’ I say, as the smoke rises in the quad past the grey-green doors, with the trademark wire-gauged glass, which makes him look like he’s behind bars already. He’s a few weeks late for bonfire night. But caretakers love a bonfire. And if I know my caretaker chic, the man in the utility jacket and matching neck beard is our man.
‘Mr Savage?’ Bartu says outside, the fire blazing away.
‘Yeah. What do you want?’ he says. A touch confrontational. I guess he isn’t paid for his bedside manner.
‘We just had a couple of quick questions about Tanya Fraser.’
He stops. Wipes some ash off his trousers. Scrapes his boots across the grass. Shadow moves.
‘Do you know her at all?’ Bartu says, picking the conversation up off the dirt and dusting it down.
‘Nope. No, no,’ he says.
He almost shoves us out of the way as he throws some pieces of wood onto the fire and stares into it as if there are answers there. Some might assume that Mr Savage may have learning difficulties. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just another view on things.
‘Ever seen this before?’ I say.
I pull the picture out from Emre’s document holder. He stops in his tracks. He looks right into it, entranced. He drinks it in, it’s more than a passing sip, it’s a long slow gulp.
‘Nope.’ He continues on with his work.
‘Sorry. We just had one more question. We wondered what colour you’d say this was?’ I say, thrusting the picture into view.
He looks up again. Unlike many others, he sees nothing odd in the question. He gives me a nod that says ‘Try me’. I point to the clouds.
‘Err… oxblood?’ he says.
‘Good call.’ I point to the sky.
‘Uh… indigo?’ he says.
My eyes meet his. Only the noise of that Atlantic weather and the manmade fire crackles between us.
‘Yeah. Yeah that’s what we thought,’ I say.
Another dead-end. I suppose I shouldn’t be willing anyone on to be a sadistic child kidnapper. I hand him a card.
‘Well, if you think of anything. Anything at all?’
He nods and we go. But before we get out of the heat he’s created there, he stops us with a shout.
‘Saw a man. Hipster-looking bloke. All in black. Leather jacket. Waiting, sometimes after hockey practice, in his car. Always flustered, like he’d hotfooted it to get there, from somewhere else. He was older.’
Emre and I share a glance. We didn’t expect anything from this guy, let alone such an eager response.
‘Older than who?’
‘The girls he was waiting for.’
‘How much older?’
He draws breath and I see the buttons strain on his lumberjack shirt. He’s shrouded in the wild green overgrowth of the school quad. It’s greener than I remember, pretty verdant for London.
I remember those fields. They remind me of endless summers. A time when playing fields stretched out like summer holidays and my youth seemed like it would drag on forever. As Mr Savage reaches for his forehead in thought and leaves a sooty mark there, I feel like I do remember him. I think he once chased me across the field just behind where we are now, in his car, for taking a short cut over it at the weekend. He swerved in front of me and asked for my name and I wanted to give him a false one but could only think of my own, so spent the rest of term in fear of being called into Headmaster’s office, but I never was. I feel an unexpected tinge of shame at my minor infraction, and hope he doesn’t remember it. I remember those fields.
That childhood kiss drifts into my mind, then blows away, escaping through my ear. And a taste comes into my mouth. Like metal.
‘I’d say he was… thirty-three, lads. That’s what I’d say.’
Emre and I silently nod to each other.
‘No!’ he says. I take a step in.
‘Thirty-two.’
I respect a man who values the specifics.
My radio kicks into gear. But I don’t want to answer it. I don’t want to snap him out of it.
‘Remember the car at all? Colour? Make?’ I say.
‘Nope. Sorry.’
‘Where do you reckon he’d hotfooted it from to get here?’
‘No idea. But, oh, there was another thing. One time… I thought I saw him taking pictures of the girls, as they came past. All discreet like, camera held low. But I saw him,’ he says.
Chh. ‘Tom. Where are you? It’s Mona. Over.’
‘Thanks Jon. If you remember anything else…’ says Bartu.
‘I’ll give you a call,’ says Savage, holding up my card. Then he goes back to fanning the flames, the embers drifting all around then into the greying sky.
We turn and go, the picture becoming clearer. The man outside the gates, a man with a car, a man that draws for them. But why does he draw that particular scene? This is what intoxicates me as the smoke rises behind us.
We pass the cleaner, trying to avoid the sections h
e’s already mopped, and I decide to interrupt him and give him a card, too, for good measure.
‘Wondered if you ever saw a guy in black, hanging outside school with a camera, probably about the time you leave?’
He’s startled to see the card at first, then his eyes struggle to focus on it. I start to wonder whether, without a mask to protect him, working with those chemicals might make him a little high.
‘No, I ain’t seen nothing,’ he says, offering it back to me.
‘Keep hold of it, I’ve got a job lot. And if anything comes up…’
He takes a careful look around him as if there’s some rule about accepting self-made vanity cards from strangers on school time. Then he pockets it and nods with a new sense of compliance, before crouching down to get back to his work, as we push through the school doors and my radio sounds.
Cch. ‘Tom. We need you back here. We need everyone who can get here. I… I think another girl has gone missing. Over.’ Cch.
Three’s a crowd.
For the first time, I feel overwhelmed by the scale of what appears to be happening at the place where I spent the majority of my childhood hours. To the innocent girls who wanted nothing more this term than to pass some exams, maybe have some alone time with a boy, and get a little older.
I pick up the radio and speak.
Documented Telephone Conversation #2
It rings. The number is withheld. It rings again and I’m going to have to answer it or lose it. So I pick up and hold the handset tight.
‘I’ve called before but you didn’t pick up,’ the voice says.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I was afraid to. You withheld your number.’
‘Are you afraid of me?’
‘No. Not exactly,’ I lie, because I’m afraid of how she makes me feel. Brittle when I want to be anything but. I need to snuff her out.
‘I’m worried about you. I don’t think you’re safe,’ she says.
‘Worry about yourself. Worry about your boyfriend’s blog,’ I say, which I immediately regret as it doesn’t mean anything except ‘I am in pain’. And I wasn’t intending to show her that much.
‘Tom. Please consider stopping whatever it is you’re doing.’
At first I’m too busy bathing in the fact that I have the power to concern her. I stroke Mark and tut down the line as I review her request, before the obvious thought drops.
Head Case Page 12
