by Ben Jeapes
“Shoplifting!” said the policeman, as if Ted had just presented him with a bouquet and a box of chocolates.
“What’s in the bag, Edward?” the woman asked. She had a gentle Scottish lilt, laid down like a soft layer over solid steel.
“My laptop.”
“‘Your’ laptop?” The man couldn’t hide his glee. “May we take a look?”
But they hadn’t responded to his surname, Ted noted. So far, so good. He silently swung the bag off his shoulder and held it out. The man opened it up and his face fell. Ted could see why. Unless Ted had taken the time to disguise the computer with the bangs and scuffs consistent with his taking it everywhere he went, and got a little girl to write TED LOOKS AT NAKID LADEIS in indelible marker on the case, and covered it up with a pair of stickers saying ‘Save the Earth – It’s the Only Planet with Chocolate’ and ‘Salisbury Cyclists Reclaim the Streets’ before their mum could see, so you could only read ‘TE-’ and ‘-IS’, then it quite obviously wasn’t fresh off the shelves of a computer store. If they made him turn it on then they would also see that since acquiring it he had had time to reinstall the operating system, customise the software, and download several movies and TV series and a few thousand tracks of music. There was also enough evidence scattered around the hard drive to prove Sarah’s graffiti correct beyond all reasonable doubt. There was no way this laptop had been recently shoplifted.
The man passed the laptop to PC Scottish and briefly checked the rest of the bag. The woman glanced at the chocolate sticker and smiled with one corner of her mouth.
“You can give it back,” the man muttered. “Nothing here.” PC Scottish handed the laptop over.
“Not been in any trouble since June, then?” she asked. Ted’s answer as he slipped the laptop back into his bag was legally correct, if technically inaccurate.
“Nope. I got help.”
She smiled with genuine warmth. She seemed pleased.
“Well done. You’re too young to screw up your life.”
No, Ted thought bitterly, I seem to be exactly the right age.
“You’re, uh, not from around here?” he asked. The last thing he wanted to do was keep their attention focused on him – but, even after chewing it over with Malcolm and Diana the previous night, he still didn’t know exactly what it was that made some people the King’s royal subjects and others not. He was presented with data and it had to be examined.
“No, he’s from London but we don’t hold it against him and I’m from a little further afield.” She smiled again but it didn’t quite meet the eyes. Ted guessed she wasn’t being paid to give her life story to teenage boys and she wanted him, politely, to move on. “Sorry to keep you, Edward. Try not to look suspicious.”
“So–” It was like picking at a scab and Ted couldn’t quite make himself stop. “You haven’t heard of the King?”
“Who’s he?” PC London snorted. “Salisbury’s criminal ganglord?”
“No. No.” Ted made himself smile. “It’s nothing. Thanks–”
“The King?” said a complete stranger who had been passing by. “The King wants Ted Gorse. Have you seen him?”
Ted turned and fled and ran straight into a lamppost. He rebounded into the arms of PC Scottish. London moved to stand in front of him and block him off.
“Not so fast, Edward– Ted–”
“Please,” Ted begged, “you can’t–”
The stranger’s eyes lit up. “Is that him? You can bring Ted Gorse to the King?”
“I’ll repeat the question I just asked this young man, sir,” said London. “Who is this King?”
The man stared at him.
“Who is the King? He’s … He’s–” It was the same process Ted had seen in Malcolm – the sudden deflating of an idea so certain you hadn’t bothered to question it before. Unlike Malcolm, the man rallied again as conviction won over the facts. “He’s the King! And he wants Ted. You have to take him to him.”
“I don’t have to take him anywhere, sir. Hold on.” London turned to his radio again. “Tango Papa from 451. Please confirm. Other than a six-month-old shoplifting charge, do we have anything on Edward a.k.a. Ted Gorse? Anything at all? Is he wanted?”
“451, affirmative. The King wants Ted Gorse.”
“Tango Papa, please clarify. Who is this King? Is he there at the nick?”
Pause.
“Negative, 451. The King wants–”
London rolled his eyes.
“In words of one syllable, is Ted Gorse to be held or charged?” He asked it slowly and deliberately.
This time there was a longer delay. Yet another person was struggling with the idea of the King.
“There’s … no bulletin out on Ted Gorse … but the King wants–”
A fresh voice spoke. A woman.
“451 from 575. This is Inspector Stewart. Do you have Ted Gorse?”
“One moment please, ma’am.” Ted’s heart leaped as the man put Inspector Stewart on hold. “What the hell is wrong with them?” the policeman demanded rhetorically. He glared at Ted. “Who is this King?”
“Salisbury’s criminal ganglord?” Ted gasped hopefully. London and Scottish just looked at him and tilted their heads at identical sceptical angles. “He’s, uh, this guy and he can order people around, and … uh–” Okay, so he could see the truth wasn’t working. Ted grasped for the first story to come to mind that was remotely plausible. “He… I … I’ve been seeing his girlfriend behind his back and he doesn’t like it but … but she … she’s over sixteen, like me, so … so it’s legal … we’re not breaking the law–”
Sometimes, he thought, there were advantages to having a well-developed fantasy life.
The officers exchanged glances.
“So, this is police business how?” London muttered.
“The King wants Ted Gorse! Take him to the King!” the stranger shouted. More strangers started to gather round.
“They’ve got Ted Gorse!”
“The King wants him!”
In a matter of seconds a quiet Salisbury street was suddenly brewing a riot – a baying mob trying to get at Ted, with nothing but two stab-vested officers of the law to protect him.
And protect him they did. Scottish and London stood shoulder to shoulder and faced down the mob, and the mob was still just a little too polite to charge them.
“Listen, all of you.” London was shouting slowly and clearly in approved read-the-Riot-Act tones. “There’s nothing for you here, no crime has been committed–”
Scottish glanced back at Ted.
“Just go, Ted,” she said. “Quickly.”
Ted turned and ran.
Chapter 13
Malcolm heard the jingle as the door to the shop opened.
“Hello? Anyone in?”
“Through here,” Malcolm called back, without taking his eyes off Sarah. She still sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor, presumably as Ted had left her. Her breathing was a little heavier than he thought would be normal; there was just a little tension around her set lips and her eyelids fluttered ever so slightly. Somewhere, deep inside or far away there seemed to be a struggle going on and only the faintest tremors of it reached the surface.
Footsteps, and Barry Worth peered around the corner of the back room door.
“So, you said you had news about–” And then he saw her. “Sarah? What the–”
He stepped forward: Malcolm held up a hand.
“Wait. Look more closely.”
Barry frowned and shot him the kind of look any man would give someone they barely knew who was handing out orders about members of their family, but he moved slowly around his stepdaughter. When it was obvious he wasn’t getting it, Malcolm added: “Look at the ground.”
The penny dropped and Barry went white. He did everything Malcolm had already done: dropped down to the floor, peered beneath her, even ran a hand flat under her to see what was holding her up …
Eventually Barry squatted back on h
is heels, face pale and stricken. Malcolm gave him a while to take it in. Barry didn’t have the advantage of having seen Sarah in full guardian mode.
“Do you …?” Even starting a simple question seemed to take all Barry’s strength. The words trailed away and he kept on staring at Sarah but not quite seeing her. “What have you done to her?” he whispered.
“I haven’t laid a finger on her.” Which wasn’t quite true – he had had to do just that to remove the note Ted had left taped to her front and which was now folded up in Malcolm’s pocket. Tried to wake up guardian. Think it got stuck. For the time being, Malcolm thought it best that Barry didn’t know about that. Instead he chose a safely and usefully edited version of events that Barry had a right to know about.
“Here’s everything I can tell you. I tried to get Ted away after we got your call last night. He then did a runner when my back was turned.” And when Malcolm had got back home from that abortive expedition, the infamous Inspector Stewart had been waiting. Yes, Ted had been here; no, he wasn’t any more; no, Malcolm now had no idea where he was. Exit Inspector Stewart, with very bad grace. “I presume he arranged to meet Sarah this morning. I don’t know exactly what happened next, but he did call me to let me know I should come to the shop.”
It might not have been the most tactful thing to say. Barry rose slowly to his feet and regarded Malcolm with his head on one side.
“He called you? Not me, his stepfather? Not even Heather, his – and Sarah’s – own mother, who might conceivably have an interest in this?” Then he answered his own question. “No, why would he do that? Why should he possibly think of anyone else? Why should he face the consequences of his own actions?”
“You’re being harsh.” Not that Malcolm was surprised. One thing he had realised quite early on about Barry in their limited acquaintance – Barry had handled the legal side of setting up the shop, and inevitably they had met a couple of times since then – was that the other man was not over-blessed with imagination. His idées were so fixe they were armour plated. Malcolm on the other hand had already been through the process of silently consigning Ted to every circle of perdition, then reluctantly admitting that under the circumstances he could not have done anything else. Now he was surprised how stung he felt on the boy’s behalf. Ted was Barry’s family business, not his own; but they were in Malcolm’s shop, talking about someone on Malcolm’s payroll, which evened things out and gave him a right to speak. And there were things that needed to be said. “I suspect Ted didn’t call you because he didn’t want to be handed over to the King.”
Knowing how close he had come to doing just that himself, he tried not to sound self-righteous about it. Still, Barry made a noise somewhere between a groan and a scream.
“Oh, this bloody King! Heather won’t let up about him! Who is this git anyway? She’s all King this, King that, the King wants to see Ted–” He barked a brief, bitter laugh. “Here’s the funny bit, Malcolm. I expect you know, Ted kneed me in the balls last night to get away? I mean, actual, physical assault, and to be honest, I can almost see where he was coming from. His mother wanted him to go and see this bloody King. I was just humouring her but it’s gone so far–”
Malcolm kept his court face on: the neutral expression that didn’t betray, even with a flicker of the eyelids, the inner triumph. The theory had only been a guess, based on Barry’s call to warn him the police were coming. Now it was confirmed.
“You’re not one of the King’s followers? Ted assumed you were.”
“I support Ted’s mother,” Barry said distinctly. “My parents were always arguing in front of me, criticising each other, sniping, bitching, and it tore me up. I vowed I would never do that if I had kids myself. The one thing they could always depend on would be that my wife and I would stand together, be reliable, even when–” He snorted. “Even when what we’re standing together over is His effing Majesty the effing King. Who is he, Malcolm? Do you know?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Some sort of pop star? TV celebrity? There was some sort of procession going down the road when I got here and everyone was shouting, ‘The King, the King …’ It’s like bloody Beatlemania.”
Malcolm hadn’t realised about the procession. When he had arrived there had been what sounded like a mini riot going on behind the building in Butcher Row, and the K-word might have been shouted once or twice in that, too.
“There seem to be some people who instinctively obey him and some people who don’t.” Malcolm shared the sum of his knowledge on the royal subject and Barry stared at him as if he was mad. “Ted and I were trying to work out what the difference between the two groups is. Maybe something to do with where they were born?”
Barry visibly ran through two or three responses, each slightly less rude than the last, until he hit on something one man ought to be able to say politely to another.
“Well, all of us were born in Salisbury, so bang goes that … idea.” His tone plainly added a ‘bloody stupid’ in front of ‘idea’. “All three kids, and Heather, and me. Well, me by the skin of my teeth anyway,” he added in a mutter. Malcolm cocked his head.
“How so?”
“Oh, my mother never let me forget it. Dad was in the army. In Germany. Mum was pregnant, Dad’s posting was coming to an end, Mum left it too late to fly home, had to come overland … and we’d been here about five minutes when I popped out a month premature. Look, fascinating as this all is …” He trailed off and nodded down at Sarah.
“So …” Malcolm sensed the question bubble up inside him, and let the words out unspoken in a breath. There were things he just wasn’t going to say to a man he didn’t know particularly well and “so you weren’t conceived in Salisbury?” was one of them. Was that it? All kinds of environmental factors could affect an unborn child, even while it was just different bits of biological material. Could the fact that sperm and egg happened to meet within the King’s realm be one of them?
But Barry was right: there was still the matter of Sarah, and it had to push aside any insight that might be forming in his mind.
“What do you suggest?” he asked.
“God knows.” Barry ran his hands through his hair and his eyes stared a little. “Hospital? Yeah, right. Home? Heather would freak out–”
“We could take her to my place.”
Barry snorted, a laugh without humour.
“You’re getting good at this, putting up with various members of our family, aren’t you? No, thanks.” He grimaced. “Yeah, Heather will freak out but she needs to know. We’ll take her back home.” Barry pulled a face as he suddenly realised something. “Heather’s got the car. I cycled in.”
“My car’s outside. Let me drive you both.”
It wasn’t easy to pick Sarah up. Even though she was floating an inch above the floor, she seemed to weigh just as much as a ten-year-old girl should and picking her up required just as much effort. It did cross Malcolm’s mind that they could just push her gently across the floor, but … no.
“Thanks. I’ve got her,” Barry said pointedly when they had lifted her up into his arms. He was a man whose emotions rarely got further than his eyes, but what emotion Malcolm could see was tender, paternal concern. He readily ceded the right of a man to carry his own stepdaughter and simply opened the door for them.
“Just one thing–” They stepped out into the front of the shop, but Barry paused before Malcolm opened the front door. “Thank you. Thank you for doing this, thank you for looking after Ted last night … But what is it between you two? I mean, if he was serving burgers or stacking shelves like other kids his age, he wouldn’t have stayed over with his manager, and his manager wouldn’t be protecting him from the police – and I do remember Ted’s only sixteen, he’s a minor, and I should be a lot more upset about that than I am at the moment. I’m reasonably certain Ted’s not gay and you’re not … never mind. What’s going on?”
“It’s a long story.” Malcolm was a little taken aback with h
ow nicely he had just been cleared of suspicion of being Ted’s sugar daddy. He made the decision. “But you deserve to know, when we have a moment, but maybe not now.”
“Maybe not. But I’m going to have this out with you, Malcolm, and I’m going to think very hard about whether I want Ted to keep on working for you.”
“That’s your privilege,” Malcolm agreed, and he opened the door for Barry and Sarah.
Chapter 14
The King was getting used to using a mobile phone. The one he was using had belonged to one of the hotel staff. He paced beside the edge of the water that covered the flooded meadows like a sheet. Even the sight of the Queen briefly surfacing a short distance away did little to cheer him.
“So you still have no idea where the boy is?”
“No, sir.” He could sense the frustration of his Hunter at the other end of the line. She did not want to be making this report. But where a lesser mortal might squirm and make excuses, this one just presented him with the facts. He approved. “We’ve searched every hotel, every bed and breakfast, and we’ve questioned every known contact. We’ve been to the homeless drop-in centre, we’ve woken up every man and woman we’ve found sleeping rough on the streets, we’ve been to the shop he works at, we’ve even been to the hospital. Unfortunately we don’t have the resources to put a roadblock on every exit, cut Salisbury off completely … sir, it is quite possible Gorse just fled town the moment he got a chance and we’re just wasting our time.”
“No, he’s here,” the King said absently. He knew the boy was still in his realm somewhere. It was like having a very small bit of grit in the eye, a tiny hair on the tongue: you knew it was there, you just couldn’t find it. There was a small bit of Salisbury somewhere that should have been his, but was not.
“Then we’ll keep … excuse me, sir–” A pause, a crackle and some indistinct exchanges of words. “Sounds like two officers have just encountered him, sir. They’re not royal subjects but I’m on my way.”
She hung up abruptly.
