‘He’s a shifty one. He thinks he’s the boy’s dad, according to Shane. He hurt the boy before, this Raymond.’
‘Shane said this, and he said it today?’
‘No, no, another time, love.’
‘Just to clarify, he wasn’t talking about Raymond today when you spoke?’
‘No, not today, another time. That clampet, he was supposed to be minding the child when he got scalded.’
‘That was a long time ago now.’
‘You know about that?’
‘I do. Do you think Mr Marsh did it on purpose?’
‘Sounded like it,’ Ronnie said.
‘Would you be prepared to make a statement to that effect?’
‘Nah,’ he muttered. ‘What do I really know anyway? Sure, if you’ve already heard, then you know and it’s up to you now. At least I feel better for having said. You know, a clear conscience. If it turns out that Raymond has hurt the child I’ll be able to sleep at night.’
Ronnie looked chuffed with himself. It was best I said nothing, so I didn’t.
‘Shane’s very private,’ he continued. ‘He tells me very little, love.’
‘Enough of the “love”, alright?’
Ronnie looked taken aback.
‘It’s Detective Sloane. Now, when you gave him the job here, did you get any references?’
‘I did, but we have this helper – he fucken shreds everything. Thinks he’s being helpful. Sorry about that.’
‘Sorry about what?’
‘For swearing. My da always told me to never curse in front of ladies, especially ones who talk posh.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Who is this helper?’
‘Wee Syrian kid – Kage. I took him in and gave him a job. You have to help people like that. I went to Uganda for a fortnight a few years ago. You have to help people who need your help or you’d feel like a rotten bastard, isn’t that true? People like me and you are the same, and when I say that, what I mean is that we’re blessed, like, aren’t we?’
‘Kage, you say? What age is he?’
‘Definitely over eighteen.’
‘And you have kids yourself, Mr Dorrian?’
‘The potential’s there, love, plenty of it‘ – he winked – ‘but none that I know of.’
‘There’s the blessing right there,’ I said, taking the smile off his face.
Chapter 14
When we went to Witham Street later that evening, Raymond was sitting with Ness, the next door neighbour, a cheerful fire plumping in the grate. They were watching the news, Raymond with an inane grin on his face and Ness’s delight palpable that their houses were on the TV. She was bubbling with laughter and picking at her eyelashes. She was wearing a white coat, even though she was indoors, and kept her small square handbag on her knee.
I asked if she would give us a moment to talk to Raymond and she said it was no problem, but she sat on until Raymond told her he’d be straight round to debrief her when we left. At this she scoffed, got up and walked to the front door; the snib clicked shut.
‘Where’s Zara?’ Linskey asked Raymond.
‘Upstairs.’ He rubbed his nose and sniffed. ‘You looking her?’
‘Please.’
He plodded out to the hall, held the balustrade and called her.
Zara shouted, ‘Be down in a mo.’
We avoided each other’s eyes, the three of us. Raymond sighed. He asked if we had found Shane.
‘He’s on his way home,’ Linskey said.
Raymond nodded. ‘Has he been in Monaghan?’
‘Do you know the address in Monaghan, Raymond?’
‘Yeah, it’s in the address book … I think. I could be wrong.’ Raymond tried to dismiss the thought with a wave of his hand. ‘Zara never spoke to him when he lived over the border,’ he said.
‘We couldn’t find a place in his name,’ I said.
We all sat down in the living room.
‘No, you wouldn’t. It was his grandmother’s old farm he lived in. Wouldn’t be in his name, see?’
‘Could you get me the address please, Raymond?’
He got up and walked towards the kitchen, paused, then turned back. To make sure he didn’t renege on the offer of the address, I followed him in. Linskey edged up on her side of the sofa and watched around the door frame.
I put my hand out for the address book. It was covered in circles, the rings of coffee cups over the years denoting its age, like a tree. I flicked through it. Most of the pages were blank; the few names there were there had been scored out altogether, or one person removed – possible divorces. I didn’t see a single entry that hadn’t been altered in some way.
Raymond jammed a finger at the page. ‘There’s the boyo there,’ he said.
I examined it. By now Linskey was at my side, trusty notebook out to write it down. I gave the address book to her and she leaned on the island. Raymond said he wouldn’t have the first idea how to get to Shane’s grandmother’s old house.
‘We need to get Zara down for a chat,’ I said.
Raymond paid no attention, so I went upstairs to fetch her.
The top stair creaked; drawers in Zara’s bedroom clattered like dropped crockery.
‘Hello?’ she said nervously.
The door was open just a crack. She was sitting on the bed, something whirring nearby, and a mink throw fussed over her shoulders, falling to a fold in her lap, her mobile phone on top of it.
She opened her teeth like gates. ‘Get out! I’m not decent!’ she shouted.
‘It’s Harriet Sloane,’ I said. ‘I’ve news about Shane.’
Zara looked from left to right and back at the door; the action was scented with panic. I let myself in.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Just thought you might like to know about River’s father.’
There was a bottle on her bedside table, a plastic tube going into it; the bottle was being filled with milk from her mink covered nipple.
Zara tutted. ‘Is nothing sacred?’ she mumbled.
‘Unless … unless you have something you want to tell me about Shane,’ I said, pretending I didn’t care that Zara was expressing milk, that I wasn’t taken aback by it. What in the world? River was a preschooler.
Zara looked at the open door, now behind me, and then the bottle and the white pithy sides of her book stack, spines hidden, sitting there like a nameless still-life. I chanced sitting on the edge of her bed. I tried to be kind to her, now I could see how she wore her motherhood so closely it looked like she might unskin without her boy.
‘We’ll find River,’ I promised her, knowing that I shouldn’t.
‘If he’s not back by the morning it’ll have been forty-eight hours,’ Zara said, ‘depending on what time he left, which we don’t even know. I could’ve been sleeping soundly in my bed all night and him away. Where’s the invisible string that joins a mother to their child? Where was my motherly fucken instinct?’ She swept the books beside her bed onto the carpet, knocking the bottle over, her milk spilling and gulped up by the chocolate brown carpet. Her breast was exposed, the nipple dripping liquid into a crinkle of stomach skin.
‘There’s every chance he’ll walk in the door,’ I said. ‘No news is often good news.’
‘Often is not good enough,’ she replied, looking at her mobile phone.
I lifted the books – text books, mostly about mothering – and arranged them back into their pile. Raymond was calling up to see if everything was okay.
‘Fine, dear,’ said Zara, sounding as though she was rehearsing an answer, or it was an answer too well rehearsed.
‘Alrighty then,’ he called back.
‘I’m sorry, Detective,’ Zara said. ‘What were you going to say about Shane?’
‘He’s on his way back. He contacted his boss, Ronnie Dorrian.’
‘You haven’t heard from Shane himself?’
‘Not directly, no. Zara, after sleeping on it, do you think Shane might have a reason to take River?’
‘After sleeping on it?’ She curled her top lip. ‘Do you think I can sleep with my baby missing?’
I apologised, knowing I shouldn’t. ‘If Shane doesn’t come back and we have to go to Monaghan to get him, where would we find him?’ I asked. ‘Are you sure you don’t have an address?’
‘Yep,’ said Zara. ‘It was a different life he had down there. I’ve no idea where he was, who he was with or what he did. Sorry.’ The last word came out almost sarcastically, like a childish song. ‘He told me lie after lie, that man. I stopped asking him questions.’
Cars went down in the street, the headlights running along the walls, and for a moment a necklace of lights fell across Zara’s collarbone. She saw me glance at her. She pulled the throw up and tucked it under her arms. Linskey came upstairs to ask if I was ready to go, and when she smiled kindly at Zara and didn’t seem taken aback by what she saw, it alarmed me how differently two people could view the exact same scene.
Chapter 15
At nine thirty a.m. on Wednesday 19 October, it looked like business as usual at Albertbridge Home Supplies. The car park was full of traders’ vans as their owners stocked up on panels, paints and screws. From the doorway, I spotted a large window looming over the cashier desks. From behind it and down a few steps, came the area manager, Alice Groves, shaking her blonde bobbed head like there was water in her ears, ruffled to see Linskey and me.
‘Come through,’ she said, waving us up into her office.
She was a woman in her fifties, and wore a trouser suit and a black velvet choker that looked like it was garrotting her. She turned to ask a young man working at a cash desk to bring us another seat. He glanced at his approaching customer and disappeared while we tailed Alice into the office.
The cashier returned with a swivel chair. ‘That’s from the lunch room,’ he said, then hung back. Alice looked out at the shop floor at the queue of two workmen.
‘Alright, thanks, Gary,’ she said. She waited until Gary was back down the last step and behind the till before she resumed. ‘I hadn’t a clue that Donald Guy was a paedophile,’ she whispered. ‘Not until this all happened.’
‘As I explained on the phone, we had a tip-off that Donald wasn’t in work for all of his shift on Monday,’ Linskey said. ‘Obviously that concerns us.’
‘Without a doubt,’ Alice said. ‘It concerns me too. Like, I knew he did time – that’s not unusual, the way we work – but it’s being honest that stands by you. We aren’t the type of place to need criminal checks. If someone’s a thief, then we don’t really want to be employing that type. Goes without saying. But Donald has courses. His CV, here it is.’
She set the pages on the desk on top of a lattice of order forms and invoices. There was a passport photo paper-clipped to the corner of the printouts. Even Donald’s passport photo looked like a mugshot.
‘Since this wee boy disappeared you get people saying things …’ Alice twiddled the back of her earring with her thumb. ‘Some fella refused to work with Donald a few months ago in the warehouse, but I’m glad now that he was working out there. We don’t just get tradespeople. People come in here to do DIY. At the weekend, a lot of kids come through these doors.’
‘Alice, in the tip-off we received during the night, someone gave information that Mr Guy was in work for only half of his shift and that he took off at lunchtime,’ I said. ‘A colleague of ours, Detective Amy Campbell, showed me Mr Guy’s roster. Isn’t he supposed to be working from eight to four on Mondays?’
‘That’s what he was supposed to do,’ Alice said, looking unglued. ‘He clocked in.’
‘How does one clock in here?’ Linskey asked.
‘You come here, to the office, at the start of the shift and sign in. Look, there’s his signature.’ Alice pressed her finger against Monday’s form that was stuck to the window.
‘Do you have a similar system for clocking out at the end of a shift?’
‘No, but you have to walk through and past there.’ Alice pointed out at the shop floor from our raised vantage point. ‘You couldn’t just leave. You’d be seen. Detectives, can I ask what Donald actually did in the past? You know the way people talk. Did he abduct a kid? That’s what Gary’s saying. Gary’s our assistant manager.’
‘Mr Guy has a conviction for making and possessing indecent images and sexually assaulting a child over a period of months,’ I said.
Alice’s expression didn’t alter. She rubbed her forehead. ‘No abduction?’ she asked.
‘No abduction,’ I said.
‘I’d hate to think that he’d take that wee boy River and do anything to him.’
‘We have to investigate every avenue. With Mr Guy’s crimes being known to us, we have already visited him. He is under surveillance all the time.’
‘He’s okay, you know,’ Alice said. ‘Out of all of them, he’s the only one who doesn’t give me any earache. Just keeps his head down and gets on with it. Goes to show!’
I was glad she was so pleased. ‘But you believe he was here? At work?’ I said.
‘I do, Detective.’
‘Do you have any proof, Alice?’
‘I was off at the start of the week. The manager of the shop was here – Crispin. He claims Donald was too. He called me yesterday to tell me all of this. Wish he’d told me sooner.’
‘Do you have those CCTV tapes of the warehouse?’
‘Yes. Here, they are.’ Alice pushed two tapes towards me. ‘I’m waiting for a delivery,’ she said. ‘I don’t have time to go through these myself. That okay?’
‘Perfect,’ I said.
We took the tapes with us.
Chapter 16
The staff at Strandtown Preschool had all been eliminated as the sources of the fingermarks on River’s coat. With this news, I sat in the meeting room where Higgins was throwing ideas around. He was convinced he had it.
‘A man and a woman,’ he said. ‘Maybe they’ve taken River to play the part of their son? You know, a couple who can’t have kids of their own.’
Linskey stared at the ceiling. ‘God give me strength,’ she said. ‘Let me guess – you’re a flat-earther too, Carl.’
‘Why not?’ Higgins said, but no one responded. ‘It’s not unlikely.’
‘It’s very unlikely,’ said Linskey.
‘We’re looking for a jeep, is that right?’ asked Simon.
‘That’s right,’ I said.
Ronnie Dorrian had confirmed it when we spoke, and Raymond had told Linskey the same thing the night before when I had been upstairs with Zara. Shane drove a different car every time he dropped River home. On one occasion, according to Raymond, someone on the street had done a double-take when they saw Shane coming to the house – had they just seen their own car drive past when it was supposed to be in RAD getting work done? Shane had wriggled his way out of it by claiming that he’d been taking the car for a test drive to check the repairs.
Raymond was no petrolhead, which I imagined was a pleasant change for Zara and far removed from bad associations with car-loving men, but it meant that Raymond couldn’t tell Linskey the make or model. Zara just palmed me off with ‘a jeepy thing’ when I asked her.
But what Raymond could tell us, which was even better, was that the spare wheel cover had a cartoon of a jeep on the back and the words ‘I like it dirty’ in white writing above it.
‘That spare wheel is bound to stand out,’ I said to the team. ‘Or the testicles Raymond told us about.’
‘The testicles?’ asked Simon.
‘Yes, Raymond said Shane had something akin to a pair of tights with two egg-shaped objects weighing each side down and this was tied around the tow bar.’
Higgins laughed. ‘A pair of bollocks? What a legend!’
‘Is he for real?’ Linskey said, hiking her thumb at Higgins.
‘So, Shane Reede can sexually harass motorists while simply overtaking them, is that his game?’ asked Simon.
‘Right charmer, isn’t he,’ Linske
y said.
I thought of the pin-up on Ronnie Dorrian’s office wall. Those accessories on the tow bar of the jeep said Ronnie to me through and through. He had eventually stopped playing the dumb chauvinist long enough to confirm that the vehicle was a black Suzuki Vitara. I think it was to take the heat off the Syrian family – a father, two sons and a daughter – who were washing and valeting cars in front of the garage.
‘A black Suzuki Vitara with a couple of swingers hanging from the tow bar,’ said Higgins. ‘That should be easy to find.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘It sounds like a job for the boys.’
*
We waited at Shane’s house in Brandon Terrace for this jeep to pull up. The road was landmined with cracks and weeds. It was here, looking at that sorry state of a house and feeling glad it was only a weekend home to River, that I admitted to Linskey I found Zara to be a hard-boned soul, despite her nice house and her nice face.
‘I can’t make out if she’s a saint or a bitch,’ is what I actually said.
‘You have to admire her though,’ said Linskey. ‘Four years old and she still has River on the boob. Even with a mouthful of teeth … or not. Expressing milk for when he returns. She’s formidable in some ways.’
The most recent photos of River showed his front teeth missing and the bottom two as well, though they fell out on their own. Just as I was thinking about the photo a white transit van rocked our Skoda as it passed. I had to wonder if it was Shane. We sat on and after five minutes the transit came back the way it went without stopping.
So we tried to follow it. We circled the area but kept coming back to Brandon Terrace. With no sign of the van, we got out of the Skoda and went around the back of the house where the blinds in the kitchen were still shut fast, the third slat up buckled on the right-hand side. Through the gap you could just about peer in. It was completely dark.
At the front of the house two boys were playing in the street, hitting a football off the kerb, every time getting nearer and nearer to our car and to us as we stood trying to agree what to do next. We couldn’t waste any more time waiting for Shane to return. We should have had him the day before.
The Sleeping Season Page 9
