Lost River bcadf-10

by Stephen Booth

  Then she thought about the one child the Bowskills had adopted. Perhaps tired of saying goodbye to those they’d cared for over the years, they had fought to keep one particular boy, a few years younger than Fry. He was called Vincent, a quiet boy born to an Irish mother and a Jamaican father. He had been with Jim and Alice after Fry had left to set up home on her own and pursue her career in the police. The Bowskills’ last commitment, the one final object of their love.

  The children’s charity Barnardos had said recently that there was too much focus on trying to ‘fix’ families, when it would often be in the best interests of the children to put them up for adoption straight away when there was a problem. And by ‘straight away’ they meant at birth. Parents who’d failed to care properly for older children would not be allowed to bring up younger ones. It seemed to Fry that there was a definite logic in the argument.

  And yet, Vincent Bowskill had made the wrong friends, been attracted to a way of life the Bowskills deplored. Something had still gone wrong, despite their best efforts. Despite what the experts said, could there be some genetic influence that would always flow in the blood? Blood, they said, was thicker than water.

  Or maybe it was because there was no easy way for a boy like Vince to fit into a society that liked to put everyone in a category.

  Fry knew that mixed-race people were an elephant in the room — the fastest-growing ethnic minority in Britain, more numerous than black Caribbean or black African. Yet it was only in the 2001 census that they were given an ethnic category of their own. They were obvious to anybody living in a large British city, yet invisible at a political level. In multiculturalism Britain, the fact that more and more people were having children across racial divides was an inconvenient truth. It didn’t fit with the concept of neat communities of black, white or Asian.

  And that could be a problem for boys like Vincent Bowskill. These days, black and white kids tended not to call each other racial names. But the mixed-race kids got it from both sides. Many of them were fated to spend their entire lives searching for an identity.

  ‘So how is Vince?’ she said, as Jim sat down with her.

  ‘Oh, you know — fine.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, to be honest, he’s always been a bit of a worry to us. But he does his best. He’s a good lad, at heart.’

  ‘He isn’t involved with a gang, is he?’

  ‘No, no. Well, we don’t think so.’

  Fry realized Jim Bowskill might find it difficult to tell what sort of circles his adopted son moved in. When Vincent came here to visit, he wouldn’t be displaying his gang tattoos and waving a gun around. He’d be well behaved, polite.

  And maybe…just maybe, he’d actually turned his life around and moved on. It was possible to do that.

  ‘Should I look him up while I’m here?’

  ‘Vince?’ Jim looked doubtful. ‘Oh, you don’t have to, Diane. But — ’

  ‘I’ll see if I have time.’

  ‘All right.’

  She knew she had to broach the one subject they hadn’t touched on, the one the Bowskills were shying away from.

  ‘You know why I’m here in Birmingham, don’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, you told us. The case.’

  ‘You’ll let us know how it goes, won’t you?’ said Alice.

  ‘Don’t stay out of touch, Diane.’

  She sounded even frailer than she looked. Fry hoped Alice wasn’t worrying herself too much about something she couldn’t do anything about.

  Fry looked out of the bay window into the street. All the people passing were Bengalis. She hadn’t seen a white face all the time she’d been here.

  ‘Dad,’ she said, ‘what’s Surti Ravaiya?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a type of Indian eggplant. You serve it stuffed.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Why? Are you developing an interest in cooking?’

  ‘No.’

  Jim Bowskill looked at her oddly. ‘You know, you haven’t changed, Diane.’

  She turned back to the room. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I remember you when you were a teenager. You were always a very distant girl — so self-contained. It was hard for anyone to get you to open up. No matter how hard we tried, Alice and me, we never really understood what you were thinking, or feeling. You’re the same now. You’re still that teenage girl.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Dad. I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Do you remember that friend you had at school? Janet Dyson. Your best friend, she was.’

  Fry shook her head. ‘Janet…?’

  ‘Dyson. Pretty girl, with long dark hair. Her father ran the taxi firm.’

  ‘I don’t remember her.’

  ‘You must do,’ said Jim. ‘She was your best friend. You used to walk out of school holding hands sometimes. It was very sweet.’

  ‘How old was I?’

  ‘Eight or nine.’

  ‘It’s too long ago, Dad.’

  ‘I can’t believe you’ve forgotten. We remember everything about you.’

  ‘Well, you must have kept a photograph album. She’ll be in there, this girl. I bet you’ve been getting it out to remind yourselves before I arrived.’

  ‘No, no.’ He tapped his temple. ‘It’s all up here. All we have are our memories. They’re what make us the people we are.’

  Fry was puzzled. ‘Why are you bringing this girl up now?’

  ‘Janet Dyson? Well, we wondered why you fell out with her. You suddenly stopped being best friends with her, and we never found out why. You wouldn’t tell us. We thought, well…now that so much time has passed, we thought you might tell us what happened.’

  ‘Dad, I have no idea.’

  He sighed. ‘Still the same Diane.’

  ‘Dad, honestly — I have no idea. I can’t remember what happened. It can’t have been anything very important, can it?’

  ‘If you say so, love.’

  After a while, Fry looked at her watch and decided it was time to prise herself away. Refusing all offers of more tea, she got up to leave, then hesitated in the doorway.

  ‘So…is there a photograph album?’

  ‘Well, I think so,’ said Jim. ‘Do you want to see it?’

  She thought for a moment, mentally recoiled as she imagined the album’s contents. Happy, laughing snaps of herself and Angie, skinny teenagers in jeans and puffa jackets. Sunburned on holidays in Weston-super-Mare, dressed up in their best frocks for some cousin’s wedding.

  ‘Another time, Dad,’ she said.

  On the corner of Trinity Road stood a masjid, a community mosque. This was the one that had originally been named the Saddam Hussein Mosque, after the Iraqi leader donated two million pounds to build it. During the first Gulf War, the masjid had been fire-bombed, and excrement wrapped in pages of the Koran had been pushed through the letter box during prayers. So elders had decided to change the name, and now it was simply J ame Masjid, the main mosque.

  Just behind it, Fry could see the little parade of shops where Burger Bar Boys in a Ford Mondeo had sprayed bullets from two MAC-10 machine pistols, killing Letisha Shakespeare and Charlene Ellis as they left a New Year party, and putting the city firmly in the headlines.

  She supposed it was natural for her to worry about Jim and Alice Bowskill living in this area. Everyone worried about their parents. For a moment, she wondered if she ought to check whether they were registered with the Birchfield Dental Practice or the Churchill Medical Centre, if they used the post office here, or the one in Perry Barr. But it didn’t really matter.

  Fry turned on to Trinity Road and headed towards Aston. In the few hundred yards drive between the J ame Masjid and Villa Park, she passed the Ozzy Osbourne birthplace. The mosque, football, and heavy metal. Well, that came as close to summing up Birmingham as anything she could think of.

  7

  On his way back from the Nields, Cooper called at the Ashbourne section station on Compton. He spotted the blue lam
p over its door right next to the Wheel Inn.

  Seeing the Wheel reminded Cooper that he’d once had a memorable duty in Ashbourne, many moons ago, when he was drafted in to help police the world’s oldest, largest, longest and maddest football game. Several thousand people turned up every year for Ashbourne’s Royal Shrovetide Football — and that was just the players.

  From an objective point of view, the event was basically a moving brawl, which seethed backwards and forwards through the streets of the town, across fields, and even along the bed of the river. The game lasted for two days, with goals three miles apart on opposite sides of the town. If you visited Ashbourne on those days, you had to be careful where you parked your car. Of course, the pubs remained open all day, all the shops and banks boarded up their windows, and some closed completely, making the town look as though major civil unrest was taking place. Which, from a policing point of view, it was. There had been intermittent attempts to ban the game because of its violent nature. But it had been going on for a thousand years now. So that was that.

  Cooper remembered the Wheel Inn particularly. The two ‘teams’ — if thousands of people could be referred to as a team — came from the north and south sides of the town and were known as the Up’ards and Down’ards. Compton was Down’ard territory, and the Wheel one of their favourite gathering places before the match.

  Inside the station, he didn’t have too much difficulty persuading Sergeant Wragg to let him have copies of the statements from the witnesses to Emily Nield’s death in Dovedale. There was a small sheaf of them, collected by Wragg’s constables as they intercepted members of the public leaving the scene.

  ‘Emily was a pupil at Parkside Community Junior,’ said Wragg as he gave Cooper the file. ‘I thought a copy of her photograph might be useful.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  The photo was clipped to the first page. In it, Emily Nield was pictured in a green sweatshirt with her school logo, and was grinning cheekily at the camera, with one slightly crooked tooth prominent in her smile.

  Seeing the photograph was a shock for Cooper. He hadn’t seen the girl in life, and could not have described her if he’d been asked to. Nor could he have recognized her from the photograph. As far as Cooper was concerned, she bore absolutely no resemblance to the body he’d held in his arms in Dovedale.

  But that was what death did to you. In a few tragic moments, Emily Nield had become a different person. Unrecognizable.

  ‘The son attends Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School here in the town,’ said Wragg. ‘But I suppose you don’t want to know about him.’

  The file also included the Nields’ own statements. Cooper had already got their version of events first hand, but he accepted the copies from Wragg and tucked the file under his arm.

  ‘Thank you for this. It’s appreciated.’

  ‘No problem. Is there anything I need to know?’

  Cooper hesitated, decided he could trust Wragg as a colleague.

  ‘It’s just a suspicion. I thought I saw someone I recognized among the bystanders in Dovedale.’

  ‘Ah. Someone who shouldn’t have been there?’ asked Wragg astutely.

  ‘Yes. I’m going to do a check on the Sex Offenders’ Register, to see if I can make an ID.’

  Wragg nodded. ‘Let me know, won’t you? He might be one of ours.’

  ‘Of course.’

  A look of concern crossed the sergeant’s face. ‘You don’t think this person was involved in Emily Nield’s death in some way?’

  ‘Let’s hope not,’ said Cooper. ‘I really hope not.’

  Outside, he paused to adjust to the glare of the sun, and dug out his sunglasses from a pocket.

  To his right, where Compton became Dig Street, he saw two supermarkets standing side by side near the bridge over Henmore Brook — Somerfield’s standing right next door to the Co-op. Behind them was the Shaw Croft car park, where the Shrovetide football game was kicked off or ‘turned up’. A few years ago, Prince Charles had arrived to be ‘turner-up’. He was a great lover of tradition.

  Round the corner in St John Street, Cooper passed Ashbourne’s famous Gingerbread Shop with its original wattle and daub frontage. He supposed the town was very attractive in its own way. But it wasn’t Edendale.

  Gavin Murfin had been calling him from West Street, no doubt wondering where his new Acting DS had disappeared to for so long. He wasn’t used to that when he was working for Diane Fry.

  ‘I got those print-outs for you, Ben,’ he said. ‘There aren’t many entries on the register in the Ashbourne area. Are you sure you don’t want me to widen it out a bit? Derby is only twenty minutes down the road, after all.’

  Cooper knew he was right. Visitors to Dovedale came from many miles around. It was probably a futile exercise, the list too long for him to plough through in search of a half-seen profile. On the other hand, the fact that the face he’d seen was familiar meant that the individual concerned must be from this area, at least from Derbyshire. Well, didn’t it? Or could his memory be playing some trick on him, throwing up a recollection of a photograph he’d seen in a bulletin from another force, or even glimpsed in a newspaper or on the TV screen.

  ‘We have to start somewhere, Gavin. That will do for now.’

  ‘I still don’t know what this is about, Ben.’

  ‘Sorry. I’ll explain it to you later.’

  Murfin’s voice became muffled, as if he was shielding the phone with his hand.

  ‘And where the heck are you? I’ve been covering for you. But, mate — ’

  ‘I’ll be back soon.’

  With a deep sigh, Murfin accepted his reassurance. ‘I hope I actually make it to my thirty, Ben. I’m afraid Superintendent Branagh might kill me before that.’

  Fry felt sure some of these Birmingham city-centre under-passes were exactly the way they’d been when she drove through them in her very first car, a white Mini. Particularly this one under the Paradise Circus island. It had grey walls, and a black roof so low that no natural light penetrated the tunnel. It was probably a metaphor for something, diving underground into this grim, lightless world, but knowing that you would emerge a minute later, out into the sunlight.

  As she came back above ground, Fry caught a glimpse of the old Paradise Forum shopping centre, which was supposed to have been scheduled for demolition. And next to it was the brutalist Central Library, described by Prince Charles as looking more like a place for burning books than for keeping them in. These buildings seemed old now, though they were built in the mid seventies. Well, thirty or forty years was a lifetime in the history of Birmingham architecture. Buildings she remembered being under construction while she was growing up were already being pulled down as obsolete.

  Turning into Broad Street, she passed billboards announcing the site of the new Library of Birmingham. She had been booked into a hotel in Brindleyplace, part of Birmingham’s 1990s revival — a canalside development containing offices, bars, restaurants, an art gallery, a radio station, and even the National Sea Life Centre.

  Arriving at the hotel, Fry entered a lobby like a piece of abstract art. Sofas and armchairs were blocks of red and blue on a yellow background. Cylindrical white pillars framed a zig-zag turquoise staircase. She felt as though she’d walked into a piece of abstract art.

  The receptionist at the desk wished her a good stay, but hardly looked at her. That was the way she liked it — not as it was in Edendale, where everyone wanted to know who she was and where she came from.

  She found herself in a room equipped with an iMac computer and satellite TV. In reception she’d seen a library of CDs and DVDs. She could always watch the latest romcom if she got really bored.

  The front of the hotel looked down Spine Road towards the Central Square of Brindleyplace, with the Italianate arcade and campanile of the 3 Brindleyplace office block filling most of the view at the bottom of the square. Fry strained her neck to look southwards, over Broad Street, but saw only more hotels and offices. Ev
en from several floors up, there was no hope of a distant enough view to see the Lickey Hills, which lay ten or twelve miles south of the city centre.

  The Lickeys had been her first experience of countryside as a child. Perhaps the only one, unless her memory was successfully blocking out the others. There had been a train ride with her foster parents through Edgbaston and out past the huge Longbridge car plant, where Rovers were still being produced then. Arrival at a small railway station in Barnt Green had been followed by an uphill walk to Lickey itself.

  She recalled bluebell woods — so what time of year would that have been? She wasn’t sure now. But she did remember being urged and harried to the top of Beacon Hill, where on a clear day they said you could see thirteen counties. Old counties, that would have been, though. Most of what you saw now was the metropolitan sprawl of the West Midlands.

  Beacon Hill was supposed to be the highest point in a direct line west from the Urals. You’d need a really clear day to see Russia. At less than a thousand feet, it was half the height of many of the Peak District hills. But it seemed high enough to her.

  To the north, she’d looked out over the M5 towards Dudley and the Black Country, those small industrial towns of her childhood crouching on the skyline. Then she’d turned to the northeast, and found herself gazing all the way to Birmingham city centre. Its towers stood clustered together, with the BT Tower and the cylindrical shape of the Rotunda easiest to pick out, but all of them faintly blurred, as if they were standing in a mist. There was something mysterious about the sight, a fascination that seemed to call to her. It was like the first glimpse of the Emerald City at the end of the yellow brick road. The distance and perspective had made that island of tall buildings look like some far-off promised land, a place she could reach only by hacking her way through the forest of suburbs that stretched for miles at her feet. Rubery, Bournville, Selly Oak, Edgbaston. Their very names made them sound like obstacles in her way. They were surely Munchkin Country.

  She vaguely remembered hearing her foster parents’ voices telling her it was possible to see beyond Birmingham, right out to the countryside at Barr Beacon and Cannock Chase. But she hadn’t bothered trying. That view of the city was enough for her.