Kid Alone

by Simon Mason

  “I knew it would work,” Zuzana said.

  “You were right.”

  “He needed to see it again. It would not have worked just to have talked to him.”

  “It was a good idea.”

  “You were good as Magee,” she said with a glance at him. “You are stronger than you look. Quite like a man.”

  “You were all right as the kid. The dramatic limp. The pathetic little voice.”

  She gave his arm a playful slap.

  “No, really. And the hand at your neck, masterly.”

  “You told me to do that.”

  “Of course. Good at details.”

  He allowed himself to glance at her as they walked. In a T-shirt and shorts she seemed shockingly underdressed, more than halfway to being naked. He hadn’t realized how petite she was, but how solid, how small-scale but strong. Her skin shone pale, almost translucent. The T-shirt they had found for her was on the small side; it strained across her breasts and rode up at her waist. The shorts were short, high on her slender legs quivering slightly as she walked, so soft and firm and fluid he thought he could watch them forever and never understand how they worked or even how they existed in the world. He remembered how she had felt to his touch as they came down the access road together, when his arm was around her waist, his hand under her armpit, the whole length of her tight, solid body pressing against his.

  “Don’t you?” she said.

  “What?”

  “I said, you know it all, don’t you?”

  “Not all. Most.”

  “Modest.”

  “Part of my charm.”

  “I was joking. You are not modest. Or very charming.”

  They reached their bags and stood there, talking quietly in the shadows.

  She said, “Tell me. How did you know it was not Pyotor up on the roof with Magee?”

  “I was pretty sure once Vinnie said he heard the shots before he saw Magee and the kid coming down the road. Sounded like the truth to me. He blurted it out to the police, and then again to us, before he could stop himself. It was the one thing he was consistent about—even though he thought it was the wrong answer. And it was completely obvious once you found out it was Pyotor who robbed Stanislaw. Pyotor didn’t have to help Magee rob the warehouse; he had the money he needed already, the exact amount. Anyway,” Garvie went on, “he didn’t like Magee. And Magee didn’t like the look of him. Magee worked with kids he could dominate. No one could dominate Pyotor.”

  She considered this.

  “Remember World of Warcraft too,” he said.

  “The computer game?”

  “He was a paladin. A tank. Gives protection to his teammates. Goes into danger, takes the flak. Pyotor was good at it. Perhaps he thought he’d be good at it in real life. I don’t know.”

  “He was good at it.”

  “Except for giving change in the corner shop. I’m sure Felix would advise against. Eats into your profit margin.”

  “But he knew how much was needed for his baby brother’s operation, and it would have been wrong to take more. That’s the other thing. His confession. He was going to tell everyone exactly what he’d done afterward.”

  Garvie was silent for a moment. Then he said, “So much truth sploshing about in the world. Half the time you’re up to your knees in it before you realize. Like Vinnie. He told the truth, in his own way. Pyotor always told the truth. Except when he needed not to. I like that. Very practical.”

  She began to pull on her jeans over her shorts, and she put out a hand and Garvie steadied her. Her hand was warm and small pressing against his stomach. Her scent disoriented him, a shock of the unfamiliar, as if he suddenly found himself in a place he’d never been before. When she spoke again her voice was quieter.

  “Here,” she said. “Help me with this.” She was pale in the darkness, her dark eyes shining as she looked at him. He held her pullover as she smoothed down her T-shirt.

  “So,” she went on, “he did not come here with Magee.”

  He shook his head.

  She looked at him accusingly. “But you do not tell me why he did come. You keep that to yourself. Why would he come here, still with the money from Stanislaw’s, instead of going home? To meet someone else?”

  He said nothing.

  She lifted her arms above her head, almost as if she were about to put them around his neck, and he leaned in to her and pulled the sweater over them, so close to her body he could feel it, like a margin of tickling warmth down his front. “You won’t tell me who killed him, either. Why?” She raised her eyebrows. “Don’t you trust me still?”

  “It wasn’t Magee, I’ll tell you that much. Magee just happened to find him there. Exactly as he said, to be fair.”

  “But you know who did it. Don’t you?”

  He shrugged and looked away. “Well, I still don’t know for sure who was driving the van.”

  “Van?”

  He sighed. “Course, it all would have been so much easier if only I’d found the violin.”

  She frowned, began again. “All right, I think for myself. I think it is really about Sajid. Am I right?”

  “Yeah. But don’t forget Khalid.”

  He said no more and she frowned again and moved closer and looked up into his face. “You won’t tell me anything else?”

  Garvie avoided looking at her.

  “Tell me this, then. Why did you want me here tonight?”

  “You’ve got a lot of questions,” he said. He shrugged. “You’re good at languages.”

  “You could have learned what you needed. Easy, with your famous memory.”

  “I needed another person with me.”

  “You could have asked Felix. He is just as small.” She hesitated. “Why me?”

  Still Garvie said nothing. She could hear him breathing.

  “You say it is about Khalid too,” she said after a while.

  “Yeah.”

  “Pyotor stole his gun. He brought it here. And the money too. We know this.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But what about Khalid’s phone?”

  Garvie said nothing to that.

  “The phone is also important, isn’t it?” she said. “I have been thinking. I know I’m right. I can see by your face. The phone is more important than just a phone.” She was smiling conspiratorially.

  Still Garvie said nothing.

  “I have been wondering,” she said, “what Pyotor wanted it for. To find out who Khalid had been talking to? You can at least tell me this.”

  There was a longish silence while Garvie continued to look at her.

  “Who told you about Khalid’s phone?” he said at last.

  Surprised, she hesitated. “You did.”

  He shook his head.

  “You mentioned that he—”

  “I didn’t say anything to you about the phone.”

  There was another long silence in which they stared at each other, and when he spoke again, his voice was low.

  “Enough of this, Zuza,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “These lies.”

  She dropped her eyes and lifted them again, defiantly. “What lies?”

  “You told me you knew Pyotor from Juwenalia meetings.”

  She said nothing.

  “He didn’t go. You told me Pyotor had been obsessed with his baby brother’s illness ‘for months,’ but his grandfather said they’d only found out about the illness a few days before. I don’t think you knew Pyotor at all, did you?”

  She stared back silently, her eyes big and vague.

  “You told Alex you only came to the city in January,” Garvie went on, “but you’ve attended Juwenalia parades for the last ten years. I saw the lists. You’ve lived here all your life, haven’t you? Where? Limekilns? Out at Tick Hill?”

  Still she said nothing.

  He shook his head, frowned. “Who are you?” he said. And then: “What do you want from me?”

  For
a moment she seemed confused, frightened even. Then she smiled. When she spoke her voice was very quiet but somehow very clear. “You do not like it when there are no answers, do you? When the facts run out.”

  He said nothing to that.

  “Are you still thinking about Alex? Or about Blinkie? You haven’t understood anything, have you?”

  He just looked at her.

  She said, softly, “You see, you think I don’t know you. But I know.” She smiled. “Perhaps I cannot solve a mystery. But I can read your mind.”

  His reply seemed to stick in the back of his throat. “What do you mean?”

  For some reason they were both whispering now. For some other reason, or perhaps the same one, Garvie began to tremble.

  “You want people to think you are so cold, so tough, like you have no heart.”

  He felt her hand again on his stomach but couldn’t take his eyes from hers. His voice drained away into his chest and set solid.

  “It’s not true,” she whispered. “You do all this because you care. Don’t look at me as if you can’t trust me. You can trust me, I told you before. But now,” she whispered, “I do not know if I can trust myself. Jesteś dziwny,” she murmured, “ale piękny i myślę, że cię kocham.”

  The words were soft as silk, unintelligible and obvious. Her own voice had disappeared almost to nothing, which was strange because her mouth was so close, next to Garvie’s in fact, and he was lost in her scent, in the warmth of her face, in the glow of her eyes, in the touch of her fingers on his stomach—and there was a sudden noise in the access road behind them, a sob or cry or hawking scream, and they staggered apart, both spinning around, and found Alex standing there looking at them in fury and anguish. For a second they were all fixed in place, as if hammered into the moment; then Alex turned and ran in moonlight up the access road toward the gates.

  When Garvie turned back to Zuzana she was already moving away. “I am sorry,” she said, and her voice was oddly formal, loud, as if she was talking to someone else entirely. Then she was running after Alex, and Garvie stood alone watching her go.

  In the conference room on the second floor of the police center Singh stood upright as the chief went out at the end of the final morning session, the two lawyers who had presented the police case to the tribunal leaving with him, murmuring together as they passed through the door and into the corridor. Singh’s own lawyer and the human-resources manager had gone ahead, and now Singh was alone in the room with Dowell, who sat in full uniform behind a small pile of folders—key evidence against the defendant—watching him curiously, as if still not knowing what to make of the brown suit and beige turban, or indeed of the ritual of standing to attention.

  The room, like all such rooms, was impersonal, a place of official processes, as functional as its chrome-and-leather furniture, in which a civilian like Singh was irrelevant.

  After a moment Dowell stood, resting his weight on the folders, and shook his head.

  “You know, I hate to see this. I really do.”

  Singh made no reply. Still standing upright, he glanced at Dowell, at the folders, before returning his gaze imperturbably to the door, as if determined to remain in his post for as long as possible.

  Dowell shifted irritably. “I’m sorry the tribunal’s not minded to reconsider. But you don’t do yourself any favors, do you?”

  Again, Singh made no reply.

  “Granted, you made mistakes, especially with the kid. Kids like that need to be taught a lesson, not encouraged. But there was no need to take the position you did. Full responsibility? What’s that about? And why didn’t you submit a formal statement? I can’t believe your lawyer thought that was a good idea.”

  Singh didn’t even look in his direction.

  Dowell looked disgusted. Shrugging, he opened his briefcase and began to put his folders in it, and at the same time, as if suddenly winded, Singh gasped out loud and sat down heavily.

  Dowell stared at him in surprise.

  As he watched, Singh put his face in his hands and let out a long, quiet groan.

  Dowell had seen men crack up before, collapsing without warning after long years of self-discipline, and he watched Singh warily.

  “Come on now. Don’t take it that way, man.”

  A noise like a sob escaped from between Singh’s hands, and he began to cough, his shoulders trembling.

  Dowell fidgeted. He said, unnecessarily, “Wait here,” and went out of the conference room toward the café area where the water coolers were—and at once Singh got up, impassive as ever, and went across to the folders Dowell had left behind. When Dowell returned a few minutes later with a paper beaker of water, he found Singh sitting as normal, busily writing in a small black notebook.

  “Okay,” he said. “Good. You’ll get through this, I know you will. As I was—”

  But Singh had tucked the notebook away in his jacket pocket and was walking out of the conference room, leaving Dowell holding the paper cup, his mouth innocently open in outrage.

  Sajid was finishing his lunch at the table in the back room. With Khalid upstairs resting and Jamal in the shop, he had another twenty minutes on his own before returning to school for afternoon lessons, so he pushed aside the rest of his dhal, quietly fetched the laptop from the cupboard, and loaded World of Warcraft. He wasn’t going to play; he just wanted to look at it. These days it made him feel confused and frightened, but he couldn’t stop himself—in fact he felt an urge to be miserable—so he sat there gazing at the screen, occasionally blinking big, slow blinks. Upstairs Khalid was turning restlessly on his bed. Since he’d been discharged from the hospital he was more anxious and irritable than ever. The day before, he’d disappeared for a couple of hours in the morning, and since then he’d hardly come out of his room. In the shop at the front Jamal was talking to a customer.

  When he heard footsteps in the passage Sajid hurriedly pulled the plate of dhal toward him again. The door opened and Garvie came in.

  Sajid opened his mouth, and Garvie said, “You know, you should really keep your back door locked. Anyone could waltz right in.”

  Sajid looked alarmed enough that it was Garvie. “You know I’ll get into trouble if I—”

  “Think about how much trouble you’re already in. What I want out of you is the truth for once. And it has to be snappy ’cause I’ve got an exam, and because it turns out I’m not actually a waster after all I want to get there in reasonable time, so you’ve got five minutes to tell me what happened that night, starting with … this.” He reached out a hand and pulled down the boy’s collar to show the yellow bruises around his neck, fading now but still visible. “And if you want help with questions, I can do that too. Let’s go.”

  Location: back room in Jamal’s convenience store; dim, smelling of dhal and cat.

  Interviewer: DI Garvie Smith: brisk, intolerant.

  Interviewee: Sajid: anxious, guilty.

  DI GARVIE SMITH: You slipped, right?

  SAJID BALOCH [after a hesitation]: It was the shots made me lose my balance. They sounded really near. Magee hadn’t done up the rope right; it got tangled round my neck. I was screaming, and he was screaming at me, and I was scrabbling on tiptoe on that girder thing. I couldn’t breathe. I thought he was going to leave me there.

  DI GARVIE SMITH: How many shots?

  SAJID BALOCH: Three, four, I don’t know. Suddenly they stopped. That was almost the worst thing. I didn’t know what had happened.

  DI GARVIE SMITH: What next?

  SAJID BALOCH: I got free of the rope. He pulled me up and out the window, and we went fast as we could down the ladder.

  DI GARVIE SMITH: Then what?

  SAJID BALOCH: He kept telling me to hurry. I couldn’t walk properly—I’d twisted my ankle—and he sort of dragged me along.

  DI GARVIE SMITH: Shouting. In Urdu.

  SAJID BALOCH: It hurt. I couldn’t help it.

  DI GARVIE SMITH: What happened when you got to the storage facility?


  SAJID BALOCH: We got a shock. When we’d opened it up before, we’d turned the lights off. Someone had turned them on again. He didn’t know what to do. He was swearing and stuff. He said he was going in, to check it out, and he told me to go on to the van.

  DI GARVIE SMITH: And?

  SAJID BALOCH [hesitates]: And … when I got there, the van had gone. I was scared, in those bushes, in the dark, on my own, and when I heard the police siren I just started running. I went down the track until I got out of the woods, and I walked home all the way, hiding every time a car went past.

  DI GARVIE SMITH: Okay. Sounds about right. Now, tell me, who was in the van?

  [Silence]

  DI GARVIE SMITH: Come on, Sajid. Who was the driver?

  SAJID BALOCH [whispers]: Khalid.

  DI GARVIE SMITH: Khalid, yeah. He fixed it up with Magee, didn’t he? And he got you involved too. His little boy band of robbers.

  SAJID BALOCH: I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t like Magee. I’d had enough of getting into trouble. Pete had got me off all that.

  DI GARVIE SMITH: But Khalid persuaded you. He needed you, someone small and nimble. He must have thought all that basketball training was going to be put to good use. Besides, he was desperate for his cut. How much did he need?

  SAJID BALOCH: I don’t know.

  DI GARVIE SMITH: Maybe you don’t. I can tell you it was exactly a grand. Perhaps he even thought it was easy money. In and out the warehouse, stick the furs in the storage facility, be long gone by the time Plod changes shifts and gets his act together. But then Khalid always was the stupid party. Funny, it makes people think he’s not really that evil. He didn’t fool Pyotor, though, did he? Pyotor saw what was going down.

  SAJID BALOCH: Pete kept telling me not to do it.

  DI GARVIE SMITH: He did more than that, didn’t he? He tried to warn off Magee when he came around to talk to Khalid. Got a slap for his trouble. And he had a go at Khalid too.

  SAJID BALOCH: He said he’d go to the police. But Khalid said if he did he’d never play WoW with me ever again. Made him cry. I’d never seen him cry. He didn’t look like someone who would ever cry, not all his life. [Sniffing] I didn’t like it, Garv. I didn’t …