Kid Alone

by Simon Mason

  “That your friend Alex Robinson?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The boy who lived in a squat in Limekilns?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “The boy who’s always in trouble with the police?”

  “Well, once or—”

  “He’s not in prison at the moment?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “He’s at large again, supplying drugs to the community?”

  “Yes to the first question, no to the second.”

  “So you weren’t talking to him about a deal?”

  “No. Really not. Alex has changed. He doesn’t deal anymore, at all. In fact, and it’s a bit weird for everyone, he’s gone all anti-drugs. He’s cleaned himself up completely.”

  “You surprise me.”

  “I’m surprised myself.”

  “And why would he do that?”

  Garvie thought about this. “Her name’s Zuzana,” he said at last. “With a Z.”

  “Okay. It’s a nice name. Where’s she from?”

  Garvie hesitated. “Poland. As it happens.”

  “And it was her you were talking to him about?”

  “Yeah, it was, actually.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged, gave her one of his infuriating blank looks. “No reason.”

  They looked at each other, Garvie wary, his mother suspicious. He sensed a lecture, something about her not knowing who he was anymore. She wondered where to begin. This was how it generally happened, him settling back to concentrate on the ceiling, her fixing her gaze to concentrate on him.

  At last she opened her mouth. “You know, Garvie,” she began, “there are times I think I don’t know you anymore … ”

  The music room at Marsh was kept locked at all times. Apparently all those instruments that ought to be in a museum were valuable.

  Felix, crouching at the door, straightened up at last. “There you go,” he said with a modest professional pride.

  Glancing down the empty corridor, they went in together. It was a big room smelling of wax: a piano in one corner, stacks of orange plastic chairs down one wall, and shelves of music and books around the others. A messy desk stood under the single window.

  Felix opened another door at the far end marked STOCKROOM and went in with Smudge.

  “Here they are, Garv,” Smudge called. “Plus every other instrument that’s ever been made in the history of the world, looks like.”

  Garvie was leafing through a sheaf of papers headed STOCK LIST. “All right,” he said. “How many?”

  After a longish silence, Smudge called back, “Seven.”

  Garvie frowned. “Are you sure? Count them again.”

  Smudge reappeared, holding a violin. “Actually, I’m all right up to ten,” he said.

  Garvie kept frowning. “Odd,” he said.

  “What’s odd?”

  “Or clever,” Garvie murmured. Smudge passed the violin to Garvie, who glanced at it, turned it over rapidly in his hands, and gave it back.

  “Thought you wanted to examine it.”

  Garvie nodded. “I did. Chipped round the edges. Diagonal scratch across the front, top right. Small brand on lower rib, capital letters M and A. Label pasted inside: ‘Gustav Klee VL100 4/4 Maple and ebony, reference number 245833X.’ ”

  Smudge held the violin up to his eye and squinted inside it, slowly reading to himself, his mouth moving. “That’s right, actually,” he said at last. “What now? Any other instruments you want us to count? We can see how many French horns they’ve got. That’d be fun.”

  Before Garvie could reply, the door of the music room opened and a man came in looking bewildered.

  “This door was locked,” he said.

  He had sandy hair and wire-rimmed glasses and a pale beard. He put his hand in the pocket of his gray jacket and pulled out a set of keys, and looked at them, amazed.

  “It certainly should have been locked,” Smudge said. “Don’t you realize how valuable these old things are, sir?”

  Mr. Merryweather, the famously easygoing and sarcastic head of music, crossed the room and put his briefcase on his desk. Catching sight of Felix emerging from the stockroom, he frowned again.

  “Fricker,” he said. “I might have guessed. And you, Smith. What are you doing with that violin?”

  Garvie said, “I was thinking of having lessons, sir.”

  “You? You’re the idlest boy at the Academy. I imagine you’d rather step on a tack.”

  “And I was wondering,” Garvie went on, “if I’d need my own violin, or if the school provides them.”

  “An idle boy after idle information.” He resumed his habitual sneer. “I suppose that’s not surprising in itself. Well, some students have their own instruments, of course. The school has no instruments of its own—these are the property of the county music service, though they’re registered to us, and we have use of them, to loan to students and so on. They’re all identifiable, by the way, Fricker,” he said to Felix. “No resale value.”

  “They got labels in them,” Smudge said helpfully. “Somebody Key.”

  “The label is immaterial, Howell. Labels can be removed.”

  Garvie said, “They’re all branded ‘MA,’ for the academy. You can’t remove a brand.”

  Mr. Merryweather looked at Garvie. “That’s right, Smith. Though why you’re interested I can’t imagine. Anyway, I must press on. I’ve been held up for nearly two hours by the police about this ghastly business you’ve heard about. They seem to have locked down the whole school. You’ll have seen the new security at the gates. Now they’re camped out in the senior common room. I suppose it’s because it happened so soon after Chloe.”

  “Did Gimpel have a county-music-service violin?” Garvie asked.

  “No. Pyotor had his own.” He looked at Garvie. “Funny. One of the policemen asked me that.”

  “Guy in a turban, I expect.”

  Mr. Merryweather stared at him a moment. “You do seem to know a lot of useless stuff, don’t you, Smith? Pity you can’t take an exam in it, instead of in French and geography and all the other subjects you know nothing about. Guy in a turban is right. Polite enough. The other was just a bully, if you want to know. He did most of the interview.” He peered closely at Garvie. “Perhaps you know him too.”

  “Big, bald head. Face the color of putty.”

  Mr. Merryweather nodded. “You have been getting into trouble.”

  Garvie said, “Good at the violin, was he? Pyotor.”

  “I assume you’re being serious now, Smith.”

  “Yeah, I am, actually. Thing is, I never saw him without it.”

  Mr. Merryweather looked at him a moment, considering. Then he sat down and briefly put his head in his hands, and when he looked up his face had changed. His voice was different too, when he spoke, free of sarcasm. “He was the best young violinist I ever saw,” he said softly. “None better.”

  The three boys looked at him.

  Smudge said, “A natural, then?”

  “No, actually. He worked hard, he practiced. In a way he was the most technically proficient of all the violinists I’ve worked with. But to get above a certain level you have to have a feel for the music. As you suggest, Smith, he had an obsessive streak. At first he was too mechanical—he played as if he was ticking off notes in a list.”

  “Bad with people, good with lists,” Smudge said, attempting a wise expression.

  “Yes. Don’t do that with your face, Howell, you’ll find you’ll need surgery later in life. The point I want to make is: Something had happened; he’d tapped into I don’t know what, an instinct, a feeling. He had the solo part for our current piece and was doing it very well. Very well indeed. It was a breakthrough. And now … ” He shook his head. “A ghastly business, as I say.”

  Garvie said, “Get on with the other violinists, did he?”

  “No, he didn’t. Ignored them mainly. Bad with people, as you said, Howell. Although … ” Mr. Merr
yweather thought for a moment. “Listen. This’ll tell you something about Pyotor. Once a week we have orchestra practice after school. Two weeks ago, after practice, he stayed behind to see me. Had something important to tell me, he said, very solemn. ‘All right, Pyotor,’ I said. ‘What is it?’ ‘You have to give me detention,’ he said. You know how he spoke. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ I said. Turned out the second violinist had handled Pyotor’s violin, and Pyotor had taken exception to this and there’d been a scuffle of some sort. Not just a scuffle, in fact. Pyotor had pretty much gone berserk; I found that out later. Anyway, he wanted me to suspend the other boy, for ‘unpermitted usage’—he must have looked it up—and to give him, Pyotor, detention for fighting. He’d brought with him a piece of paper he called a ‘confession,’ stating exactly what he’d done. He also wanted the other boy to sign something saying he’d never touch Pyotor’s violin again. It was all very strange—but, as you know, he liked things to be pinned down, made clear. When I talked to the other boy, he just wanted to forget about the whole thing. Not Pyotor. He wanted the boy to be punished, but he admitted that he had to be punished too. Logical, I suppose, but definitely peculiar. Part of his condition. Of course, he was very attached to his violin. Sadly, he was rather disconnected from other people.” He sighed. “Poor kid. God knows what his grandparents are going through. On top of everything else, those policemen were on their way to interview them.”

  “Grandparents?” Smudge said.

  “Yes. Pyotor lived with them in Strawberry Hill somewhere. Don’t know what happened to his parents. Sad story, I expect.”

  The school bell sounded, an always-accidental noise, like an alarm clock going off at the wrong time, and Mr. Merryweather looked at his watch.

  “Joy unparalleled,” he said. “Elementary composition with 10F. By the way, if I find anything now or afterward out of place in these rooms I will report your presence here today first to Miss Perkins and second to the bald-headed policeman with the face the color of putty. And Smith?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I’m putting you down for violin lessons, am I?”

  “Not sure now, sir. Orchestra sounds like a bear pit to me. Can’t stop to chat, though. Got an exam.”

  “Well, you better hurry, then. The bell’s gone; it’ll have started.”

  Garvie squinted at the clock above the door. “Yeah. Quarter of an hour ago, I think.”

  “Good God, boy, why didn’t you say?”

  But Garvie had already gone. Smudge, as he passed the teacher, tapped the side of his nose and said, “Good with people, bad with exams.”

  “You need to watch yourself, Howell,” Mr. Merryweather said as he turned to the mess of his desk. “One day you are going to need serious amounts of therapy.”

  The squad room at the police center was noisy, phones buzzing, emails pinging, printers droning, competing conversations across twelve desks making a joint combined noise as vague and endless as traffic. Every few minutes the door slammed as a distracted patrol officer came thumping in, calling out to his colleagues for attention. Ignoring it all, Singh sat stiffly at a makeshift desk in the corner with a keyboard on his lap, around him a zone of antisocial exclusion as much his invention as everyone else’s. By force of will he did not let his concentration break, rapidly typing up his report, from time to time glancing at his watch. At last he stood, briskly checked his uniform, and made his way across the squad room and into the corridor, leaving behind the general commotion and a few specific titters. Moving in his usual tightly wound manner, he went past Armory and Evidence Storage as far as Meetings 1 and took the staircase to the second floor, negotiating his way across the open-plan admin section. Only your actions shall go with you, he said to himself, your actions cannot be erased, feeling the ambiguous comfort of Guru Granth’s saying. With a carefully neutral expression he reached his old office in the corner of the wing, glanced at the name on the door—DETECTIVE INSPECTOR R. DOWELL—knocked, and went inside.

  Standing in shirtsleeves in front of the operations board, Dowell stopped what he was saying and raised his eyebrows at Singh, who said quietly, “The chief said it was okay to join the briefing once I’d finished the report on the corner-shop break-ins.”

  Dowell nodded at a chair at the back.

  There were three other people in the room: Detective Sergeant Mal Nolan, timeworn steel-haired veteran of Serious Crime; Inspector Doug Williams, a juvenile homicide specialist from out of town; and Detective Sergeant Darren Collier, a small, squat man with a gray over-mobile face, Dowell’s closest friend. None smiled at Singh as he picked his way past them to sit at the back.

  “Media,” Dowell said. “As I was saying. You’ve seen the headlines; you know what they’re like. It’s the second kid killing in Five Mile in two months. The first investigation skewed it for us. It was too slow, too chaotic.” His eyes flicked briefly toward Singh. “We do this one fast, and we do it well. I want you on message twenty-four-seven. I don’t need to tell you, the scum will rip us apart if they get the chance. We play their game, but we play it better, we play it harder, and we win big. Speed is our priority here. All leave canceled for the duration. Any problems with that?”

  There was a murmur of denial.

  Is this what I was like when I was up there? Singh thought. He caught Dowell’s eye and held it.

  Dowell said, “The press think it’s an open-and-shut. I don’t need to inform you they’re wrong. We have major difficulties. Witness statement inadmissible. No link between perp and victim. No motive. Seriously. What we have is a mess: a kid who never went out of his house except to go to school, and a man without a gun or a motive, in the same improbable place at the same time in the middle of the night. We have to build this case from the ground up.”

  He paused and looked at them. “Let’s get to it then. Mal, what have you got for us on Magee?”

  Mal Nolan summarized her report. Martin Magee, twenty-eight years old, was a habitual criminal with a police record and a total of three years served in two different facilities for armed robbery and aggravated violence. “He runs a sham landscaping business,” she said, “but consistently seeks out criminal opportunities.” He had been in the city since January and had already come to their attention.

  Singh said, “He’s helping us with inquiries into the corner-shop break-ins.”

  “It’s in the report,” Nolan said without turning.

  Collier asked, “What’s his story?”

  Dowell said, “He has a crib in Limekilns. Says he couldn’t sleep, took a walk, found himself in the industrial estate, and heard shots. He went into the storage facility, found the kid breathing his last, heard us arrive, panicked, and hid upstairs. Obvious bull, and he doesn’t attempt to hide it, either. Totally uncooperative in interviews. If we need to mix it up I’ll be looking for help.”

  Singh opened his mouth and Dowell looked the other way at Collier.

  “Darren? You up for that?”

  “Sure,” Collier said.

  “Okay. Doug, tell us about the kid.”

  Doug Williams said, “Pyotor Gimpel. Not your normal underage. His medical and social-care records are in the file. As you can see, he was on the spectrum, certified Aspie. No record of any sort of trouble. No social circle at all. A loner. Strictly private. Had a highly disciplined, narrow daily routine. As Bob says, when he wasn’t at school—either for lessons or orchestra practice—he was at home. Not only is there absolutely no link with Magee, there doesn’t seem to have been any opportunity for the kid to ever encounter him. But he did, obviously, in a place he seems never to have known existed before, let alone visited.”

  “Abduction?” Mal Nolan said.

  Dowell said, “For which he got out of bed in the early hours of the morning and dressed himself neatly in his full school uniform?”

  There was silence.

  “It gets worse,” Dowell said. “Here’s the big news, just back from forensics: the gun retrieved f
rom the scene wasn’t the murder weapon. Turns out it wasn’t Magee’s, either. It was in the possession of this boy Gimpel, and was almost certainly carried by him to the storage facility in his violin case.”

  There was another, longer silence while they absorbed this.

  “So here’s the thing,” Dowell said. “The world assumes the kid’s an innocent victim, but for all we know he went to the storage facility to kill Magee.”

  Collier said, “He’s a sixteen-year-old Aspie. We have some of the toughest gun laws in the world. How could he have got hold of one?”

  “Not on the market,” Dowell said. “He found it, or he stole it. The question is where? But the bigger question,” he went on, “is what the hell? What made this kid tick? He didn’t think like other kids; he didn’t act like them. He did the unexpected.”

  There was again a short silence while people flicked through the file.

  Singh said quietly, “But, of course, he was also just a kid. And we shouldn’t rule out that what he did was just what someone else would have done.”

  Ignoring him, Dowell ran through key directives and appointed tasks. There was the ongoing search for the missing murder weapon out at East Field, there was further research on Magee and associates, and there were the interviews with Pyotor’s family and at Marsh Academy, all big areas needing detailed work done fast.

  “What we need to work toward now is the link between perp and victim. How did they end up together in that storage facility? Was there a prior connection between them? I want that boy’s schedule laid out in detail. I want the school turned over. Any questions? Let’s get to it.”

  Singh said, “There’s a possible hate-crime angle. He was Polish and—”

  “In the file,” Dowell said. “Along with the others. We’re not treating this as a hate crime, or any other sort of crime, yet. We don’t have enough to go on. It’s part of our thinking, going forward. Okay?”

  “I meant, shall I assist in that area? My training—”

  “Give support to Darren, then. Time permitting. You know what the deal is here. Your priority is the corner-shop breaks-ins. What’s the news from Strawberry Hill?”