The Sleeping Season

by Kelly Creighton

  ‘We need perimeter control,’ I shouted over to them.

  ‘How much?’ asked Simon, a tall, long-boned man with thinning hair under his hat.

  There were two entrances to the park and to the right of the play area was an open space for picnics.

  ‘Cordon off access to the car park,’ I told them. ‘Don’t let anyone in.’

  I tried to picture my twin sister Charlotte in Zara’s position; she’d be taking it out on everyone in sight if one of her kids were missing, especially Timothy, her youngest. Timothy was four years old, the same age as River, only Timothy had cerebral palsy and complex medical needs while River was the picture of health. I looked again at River’s smiling little face in my copy of the photo Zara had given me. Then I thought of him not coming home, and I had to shake the thought from my mind.

  Linskey was thanking the man for phoning the information through when I reached them.

  ‘DI Linskey, can I show you something?’ I called out. At the climbing frame, I told her to look at the small rectangle in the hem that showed itself briefly in the breeze.

  ‘Looks like it’s our boy’s,’ Linskey said. She kept her voice low.

  The man lingered.

  Linskey turned back toward him. ‘Thanks again for the description of the woman, Mr Hammitt,’ she shouted and watched as he waited, smiled and felt her meaning tighten. I know that cold side of her.

  ‘Any time,’ he replied. He fixed a chunky brown scarf around his neck and headed back toward his car with a lead wrapped around his hand and his dog trotting off.

  ‘It’s our boy’s then. What’s it doing all this distance from home?’ Linskey asked. ‘They never mentioned being over here yesterday.’

  I remembered Zara being certain that River was wearing his coat. Not that it mattered that much, but it was a good coat to get lost in: bright and attention-grabbing. It wasn’t such a good coat if you went on to lose it too.

  ‘So, Mr Hammitt saw someone?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, I have her description here – a woman in her fifties, blonde bob, about five two. Black or dark grey coat. She was walking two dogs.’

  While Simon was at the car getting the tape, Linskey spoke to Constable Higgins: ‘I want you both to get back to River’s street. Keep asking questions … especially the street out back that runs parallel – Ribble Street. Start with the house directly behind.’

  Higgins goggled at her, his deep brown eyes narrowing until they were nearly all lash. Those eyes really would have been quite beautiful on a girl. At twenty-six, Constable Carl Higgins was a law unto himself; he was waiting for the results of his sergeant exams. He had thick hair he was clearly enjoying, and kept it in a long Liam Gallagher style with mutton-chop sideburns. He played drums in an Oasis tribute band – I’d seen him play at a couple of our Christmas parties. Outside of his greens he wore only two outfits – a cashmere jumper and creased black trousers, or a white shirt buttoned up to the neck and creased navy-blue ones. He had no doubt spent a clean fortune on both ensembles. Even his socks were Louis Vuitton. It was integral to the style that you should be able to notice this.

  ‘D’you not think we’d be better here?’ he asked.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Linskey said.

  ‘Alright,’ he said and walked off to help Simon.

  As the rain arrived so did forensics. They erected their portable tent over the frame, bagged the coat and dusted the wood for prints.

  So close to my own childhood home, I couldn’t stop thinking about my family in a way that had become unusual for me. I remembered one evening, when everyone else had gone into the drawing room after supper, Father and I sat on around the elongated oak table and he began, in a way that was unusual for him, to tell me about a case he was working: a teenage boy who had vanished into thin air. I recalled it feeling abnormal that Father should talk about this in such depth and with such frankness when one of his own son’s was unravelling, flitting in and out of the family, and his original mind, because of drugs. Brooks used to go missing for days at a time, and Mother would cover it up, saying he was staying at a friend’s. I had asked Father why he thought the boy had gone missing, perhaps wanting to understand Brooks on some level too and why he had become the reason for my parents’ late-night arguments. I’d forgotten Father’s reply to my question until that Monday we found River’s coat.

  ‘Someone going missing is not an event in their life but the indicator of a problem.’

  ‘Is he coming back?’ I had asked Father, my voice full of hope. I was eleven and had recently started Victoria College, the local girls’ grammar school. I wanted to be taken seriously and Father granted that wish.

  ‘Probably not, Harry,’ he said.

  ‘How do you know?’ Had Father heard something? Had there been a new development he hadn’t updated me with, something that had escaped his mind as we ate supper?

  ‘It doesn’t matter how I know.’

  In the kitchen, Father dried the dishes faster than I could wash them. Mother popped her head around the door.

  ‘Do you want some coffee?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll bring you one in,’ said Father.

  ‘No, it’s alright.’

  My parents were not compliant but they did comply. Mother’s heels bit the tiled floor. She fetched herself a mug. Father stood silent. Coffee and silence and a sink of cold sediment-filled water. What sort of couple had they become? Charlotte came in and pulled herself up onto the counter. Mother smiled at her, tapping Charly’s knee so she would move her legs out of the way of the cutlery drawer. She took a spoon, made her coffee and gave the spoon straight to me to wash.

  Father went into the drawing room where he opened a broadsheet across his lap. Coral was sixteen and lived in her room; she was a real bedroom girl. She attributed it to her studies, but I knew she spent hours making mixtapes from the radio.

  Father ran his hand over his brow and shook out his paper.

  ‘How do you know the boy isn’t coming home?’ I asked.

  ‘Who?’ asked Charly, only to be ignored.

  ‘He’s eighteen,’ Father said.

  ‘Same age as Addam,’ I said.

  ‘He’s more man now than boy.’

  I wasn’t sure. To me Addam still seemed like a boy. There was something babyish about him. He still played computers and went to Scouts. Brooks mocked him for it, when he was about. They could barely be in each other’s company a minute.

  ‘Adults make their own decisions in what they do,’ Father said. ‘That’s the point of growing up.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Time to go out on your own.’

  Mother joined us and the silence came pinballing back.

  But that night Father came into my room and shook me awake. Charly, in her bed, turned toward the wall, her eyes budded shut, her lips smacking gently.

  ‘He’s home,’ Father whispered.

  ‘Brooks?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ Father’s enthusiastic gaze dropped, excited more by the prospect of sharing his work with me. ‘The boy who had gone missing.’

  ‘That’s good.’ I yawned.

  ‘Just wanted to tell you.’

  ‘I’m pleased.’

  ‘Right.’ Father stood up.

  ‘Why did he leave?’ I asked louder than I meant to.

  ‘Plenty of reasons. He might not stay, but at least we all know now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s he’s alright.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Right, back to sleep, you.’

  Chapter 4

  ‘The Chief has been in touch,’ Linskey said. She stood against the gate. Her face was whiter than usual, her grey eyes cooler.

  ‘What did he say?’ I asked.

  ‘He wants someone to check in on your friend Donald.’

  ‘He’s not my friend.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘And you volunteered us?’

  ‘Do we really have any c
hoice?’

  ‘Let’s pretend we do,’ I said. ‘Any particular reason we need to see Donald Guy?’

  ‘Just to touch base.’

  ‘Touch base,’ I repeated.

  ‘Chief says it’s precautionary. Probably nothing.’

  I nodded, hoping this was true. ‘Want to go check in now then?’

  ‘Yes, let’s head over that direction,’ said Linskey, looking at the playground again.

  It was procedure to call on Guy in cases like this; it would be terribly negligent not to. Not that that knowledge made it any more pleasant.

  I couldn’t help but yawn again as I acclimatised to the warmth in the car. Linskey swiftly turned the heating off. We went right round the Malone roundabout and back along the Outer Ring, down Cregagh, Orangefield and on. Guy’s address was on the pad on the dash though I knew it by heart. Two minutes later we were in Ballyhackamore, at a second-floor flat buried behind a row of busy shops and restaurants. He was hidden away where, it seemed to me, he would be hard to keep an eye on. Which was worse? Seeing his ilk or not? Visits to his place were never a joy; this was a necessity.

  Linskey felt the same, as evidenced by the groan she emitted as we approached the entry to his place, a marked car already beating us there.

  Donald Guy: fifty-two years old, lived alone, visited by probation officers weekly. He had served three of his six years in Maghaberry for ten counts of child abuse, for hundreds of indecent images of children, for making and distributing all scales, thirty of those images in the most abhorrent category. He’d been out of jail for eighteen months. Since his release had been working in Albertbridge Home Supplies, a local hardware shop on the edge of Connswater Retail Park.

  In my experience paedophiles are one of two types. One is the type that grooms a community – the church leaders, school teachers – the types who are trusted, so that when they’re eventually complained about – after roughly two hundred offences – they can stand there, maintain eye contact, use fluid hand movements, their clothes unimpeachable, their name revered, and make the complainant look like a liar.

  My colleague Detective Amy Campbell worked on these cases exclusively. It was she who told me about the other type, the type that didn’t enter the community, the outsider who looked like your stereotypical creep, the kind of person you would never see near a school. That type worked in a different, underground way, lived an unexamined life. Campbell explained that the second type could sometimes be a later version of the first – what happened to a type one paedo once they had been forced to become covert. As much as I respected her – someone had to do the job – I hated to hear Campbell talk about it.

  Donald Guy was now a type two. I didn’t know if he had ever been the first type, the charmer; it was hard to picture him charming anyone. He stood in his hallway saying he had been expecting us; Campbell had phoned his landline to say she was on her way – he was banned from owning a smartphone or computer. His skin was tinged yellow, like he was vitamin D deficient, the whites of his eyes were pink.

  The search team set about his rooms while Linskey and I stayed with him. I didn’t fancy going through those rooms again, seeing where he gratified himself to thoughts of those images. He’d once looked at me with some indication of shame.

  Linskey cut to the chase. ‘Donald, have you seen the boy?’

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ he said, walking into his living room. He looked into the gas fireplace, embers brightening the shins of his trousers.

  ‘You know who I’m talking about?’ Linskey asked.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ he said. He sighed and looked from Linskey to me. ‘I can’t help you.’

  We were bookending him, brushing his knuckles. He didn’t look bothered that people were plundering through his home. We could hear them, the emptying, the removals. Donald knew he hadn’t a leg to stand on, not with his past crimes. Whether he had hurt River or not, whether he knew where the boy was or not, he couldn’t complain about any bombardment of his home and his life because this was the way it would always be for him.

  It was six o’clock in the evening. The plastic tray of a microwave meal sat on the arm of his chair, a fork resting on it. The room was sparse: TV, a clock, a rug on the floor. This was how he lived now, the opposite of Zara and Raymond. It was closer to how I lived, though I didn’t like to acknowledge the thought.

  ‘I told Detective Campbell,’ Donald said. ‘I was just home when my parole officer called. I told him too – I was working in Albertbridge today. Working from eight this morning till four this afternoon.’

  ‘That wouldn’t cover last night,’ I said. We had no time frame for River leaving the house or being taken.

  ‘There’s nothing I can do about that,’ he said. ‘I was here. Sunday’s my day off.’

  Donald took care of himself with the minimum amount of effort and expense – just enough to get by. He was thinly occupied. I could tell he had given up on life. In the past, he would have had this questioning look; he would have asked, ‘What do you think of people who download those photos?’

  I would have told him – because I had to – that I made no judgements.

  ‘You must have some thoughts,’ he’d have said. ‘Do you think this makes me a bad person?’

  ‘I think you need help,’ I’d told him at the time. This was before he had served time, back before the PSNI knew about the boy he had been abusing.

  Acting on intel from the National Crime Agency, which had traced his access of illegal sites, Linskey and I had initially arrested Donald for possession of indecent images. Then he was out on bail. Linskey went off work on sick leave – she was going through her divorce at the time – and I had my own shit to deal with. But when I, along with Campbell, went to his house to follow up ten months later, it turned out he had managed to befriend Sorcha Seton in that time. A local alcoholic, Sorcha worked in Neptune Bingo on the Newtownards Road and rented an apartment in Edenvale that always smelled of Malibu and leather. She had a strong jutting chin that sprung coarse white hairs and eyebrows that stayed high up on her forehead as if to keep her permanently heavy eyes open. Sorcha had raised a family who had abandoned her – or she had abandoned them, I’m not sure which. Then she had had Rhys, her little ‘late one’, her little strawberry-blond surprise. Rhys was four and Sorcha fifty-four, and Donald, fatter then, lived in the flat next to Sorcha’s.

  Back then, Donald had led us to his bedroom where three PCs were running simultaneously.

  ‘What will we find on those?’ Campbell had asked him.

  ‘More,’ he’d said, looking into her eyes for some kind of response.

  He wasn’t like some, craving a reaction he could feed off. It wasn’t like that. And because I wasn’t the one to look through the images – to tally up the stages, to look at those little violated bodies, distressed faces – I was able to see him as human. Unlike Amy Campbell.

  Campbell was disgusted, but that was what she’d signed up for. There was no achievement like seeing a predator go down, she told me. But then she changed too; in later years, Detective Campbell became all ‘hate the sin, not the sinner’.

  Back then, I’d had some empathy for Donald. He was ill; that’s how I saw it. I didn’t judge him too harshly, and had to distance myself for my own sake. Undeniably, if it had been one of my nephews he’d hurt, it would have been different. But it wasn’t. At that stage, it was images and images only. I told myself, to get through it, that it was indirect abuse.

  Then Sorcha found out about Donald’s arrest, and gradually there was a drip feed of disclosures from Rhys, telling his mother that on the nights she was out – partying, working at the bingo hall – encouraged and cajoled by Donald, her new friend, to do so, reassured that she could leave the boy in his care – Donald had been inappropriately touching the four-year-old.

  With Donald’s impending court case coming up, the PSNI had a visit from Sorcha, and from then on, things were very different. I couldn’t think of Donald asking me if he wa
s a bad person without wanting to go back in time and scratch the eyeballs out of his head. Of course he was an abuser.

  During the time he was on bail he had committed a contact crime. I was revolted both by how slow the legal process was and by how he couldn’t help himself, obviously, didn’t even want to try. Yes, he was ill all right; yes, he was a bad person for not getting help, for not going to his doctor’s and saying, I am having these urges and I need them stopped. That’s what Donald should have done, to my mind.

  Now he was a different person; now he was disillusioned. I was disillusioned too, but paid not to show it.

  ‘Donald, what are you doing about your urges?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t have them any more,’ he said. ‘I’m on tablets. Leuprorelin. Chemical castration. I’m as dangerous as a prepubescent boy.’

  We stood looking at each other.

  The search team shambled into the room. ‘All clear,’ said the officer before they left.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Donald, ‘that’s all I need – the neighbours seeing this!’

  ‘You hardly have any.’

  ‘It only takes one.’

  I coughed away an unprofessional response while Linskey went to the door to speak to the team. Then it was just Donald and I in the room.

  ‘I don’t want to be that other person,’ he told me. ‘If I have to be that person, I’m not saying I’d kill myself, but it would make everything different.’ He looked as animated as I’d ever seen him. He was at once the predator and the prey.

  But this victim act I didn’t buy. You only value other people’s lives when you treasure your own. That’s what worried me about the likes of him. And Donald Guy looked like a man with nothing left to lose.

  Chapter 5

  I went home for a cup of soup that I ended up pouring down the sink, eating a dry slice of bread instead and drinking a coffee. Feeling the silence. Even rush hour was silent in the apartment. I took my coffee out to the balcony to watch the darkening sky. The Lagan was stirring; people were coming and going along East Bridge Street, heading in and out of the city, some rushing for a train that would take them out of this place.