The Sleeping Season

by Kelly Creighton

  Chapter 26

  Donald Guy twirled a ring on his little finger; it was silver, broad and flat. Then he rested his hands on the table. He stared through them, almost looking like he was praying.

  ‘Donald,’ said Linskey, ‘where were you on Monday between the hours of midday and four p.m.?’

  He smiled out of the corner of his mouth. ‘At work,’ he said, sitting up and wiping his palms along his trousers.

  ‘We need your cooperation, Mr Guy,’ I said. ‘Why did you leave work in the middle of your shift?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ he said, ‘not at all.’

  ‘Not even to get lunch?’

  ‘Not even to get lunch.’

  His eyes flitted from Linskey to me and back again. Donald was different from the last time he had been in this room with DI Amy Campbell and me. He didn’t seem to give a damn any more. His mother was dead; she had died at the end of his court case. Way back then he was ashamed for her sake, but now she was gone he didn’t care what people thought of him. He wasn’t asking me for my opinion any more. There was no shame behind his eyes. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe it meant he hadn’t touched River.

  ‘Where did you get lunch then, Mr Guy?’

  ‘In the staff room.’

  Though there wasn’t a CCTV camera in the lunchroom, Markus had watched each tape Alice had given us and Donald was notably missing for half of the day. But this wasn’t working, so I let Donald know that we didn’t believe him.

  ‘You weren’t at work. So where were you?’ I asked.

  He flapped his hands at me. ‘I’m the target here?’ he said. ‘Why aren’t you out looking for the boy instead of wasting time here with me. I told you, I don’t have those urges any more.’

  He was so matter-of-fact. Urges, he said, like he was talking about hunger pangs.

  Something was irritating his skin. He kept scratching his hands until they were red with raised white bumps, licking his fingers to soothe the skin. I felt sick just looking at him. The truth was that I did judge him. I hated him almost more than I hated anyone. Almost. He was a monster. A vile everyday monster.

  I went quiet and looked at Linskey. She could deal with him.

  ‘Your boss Alice seems to like you,’ she said to him. ‘Are you two friends?’

  ‘She’s as much my friend as she’s yours.’

  ‘Donald, the facts are that we have spoken to your place of work and they have given us their CCTV footage,’ Linskey said. ‘And the fact is, you did start work at eight a.m., as you normally do. But then you disappear and are not seen again, even though your shift isn’t over until four p.m. Your boss said you work mainly in the warehouse but there’s no sign of you on the tapes. So where did you go?’

  ‘Those are not the facts,’ he said. ‘Those are not facts at all.’

  *

  There was a baby doll on a corner chair in Zara’s house; it was wrapped in swaddling. Its opened eyes were the most peculiar colour in the tangerine glow of the midday sun that spilled in through the window. It wasn’t a dressing-up doll, a clicky-eyed toy, but a doughy, chubby wee thing, blotchy, with milk spots and an irregular hairline. It was more lifelike than any doll a parent would buy for a child, especially a four-year-old. I’d heard about strange women like Zara who bought those type of things.

  ‘Please talk some sense into Shane, will you?’ Zara said. ‘I think he has pneumonia. He won’t go to the hospital. I don’t want another person dying on me.’

  I ignored her. I couldn’t care less about Shane’s health.

  ‘Does River sleep with this doll?’ I asked, running my hand over its head. I swore I could feel a soft spot. It was almost warm; it seemed to reverberate.

  ‘No.’ Zara folded her arms.

  ‘The house is very tidy, considering you have a four-year-old,’ I said as if it had just occurred to me.

  ‘Thank you,’ Zara said, the words scaling upwards in question. ‘Well, when River went with Shane I tidied. Believe me, it’s the only time it isn’t like a bomb site.’

  Zara sighed. She seemed to be struggling to adjust to the fact that she was now being asked things instead of being comforted and reassured. There was a tidal change in the atmosphere as if we were no longer a help to each other. When cases get to that stage there is little anyone can do about it.

  ‘By the time he got back on Sunday night,’ said Zara, ‘it was straight into bed for River, and for Raymond. He hadn’t been feeling well either.’ She rubbed her forehead with her wrist.

  ‘And neither had you,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe it was a bug or something.’

  It felt like I had it too, but it was autumn, the season for sickness, for viruses. ‘He slept well on Sunday night?’ I asked.

  ‘Who?’ Zara uprooted herself from the sofa, walked to the mantelpiece and straightened River’s photo. ‘Who are you on about now?’ she muttered.

  I couldn’t tell if Linskey had caught Zara’s last remark. Her face was inscrutable.

  ‘River. Did River sleep okay?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘But he didn’t always?’

  ‘When he was a baby he didn’t sleep. That’s true,’ said Zara.

  ‘Was he ever locked in his room?’

  Zara pouted. ‘Detective Sloane, I take it you don’t have any children.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said.

  Zara looked relaxed. Perhaps it was medication of some sort. Maybe she had been dipping into Raymond’s cupboard of potions.

  ‘The dressing-gown belt is an alarm of sorts,’ Zara said. ‘It’s tied loosely around the door handle, and when River comes out of his room in the morning, he pushes it off himself. It makes a bang. Why am I even explaining this? It wasn’t used all the time. If I had’ve used it on Sunday night, I’d have heard River leave his room. We wouldn’t be here, doing this. He’d be here. So just stop.’

  Linskey stepped in, her eyes on the doll but the words aimed directly at Zara. ‘Mrs Reede, did you … or Raymond … ever give River anything to help him sleep?’

  ‘What like?’ Her voice was pitched high.

  ‘We’ve been talking to your doctor. We know that you asked for something to help River sleep, but with his epilepsy medication—’

  ‘Those were febrile convulsions. They can lead to epilepsy. I’m not convinced,’ she said.

  ‘But the doctor must have been or else she wouldn’t have prescribed them,’ I said as gently as I could.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Mrs Reede, did you ever give River part of one of Raymond’s sleeping pills?’ Linskey asked, her words threading a step back to Raymond and his anecdote about the neighbour putting her cats on birth control.

  ‘No, I did not indeed!’

  ‘And Raymond didn’t either?’

  ‘I don’t have to listen to this,’ said Zara, her face tightening.

  I looked at the doll and thought about how the kitchen and Zara’s bedroom were an expression of her parenting ethos – the star charts, the books. There was no expression of the child himself, only his photo. It was like a grandmother’s house, not his own home. There were no loose ends, no green coat on the rack, no Lego bricks under the sofa. Shane’s home, in truth, was homelier. Here, all evidence of River seemed to have been scrubbed, his climbing, his running, erased.

  Zara didn’t know that at the station was the man we suspected of abducting her son. We couldn’t say that at that point; we only tried to reassure her that a local man was helping them with investigations, and she was easily reassured, which was weird in itself, but maybe she was just naïve. She got angriest when we were taking her PC.

  ‘So I’m a suspect now?’ she asked.

  Half of her was in shadow, a pyramid of light settling on the empty patch of sofa leather to her right where Raymond would have sat.

  Chapter 27

  I’d known Amy Campbell for a long time. We went to grammar school together, and at one point, before Jason came along, I was dating her el
dest brother. She came from Short Strand originally. She had cinnamon-coloured hair that she wore in a huge bun structured around a hair doughnut, and she always wore fancy impractical shoes, no matter the workload. That day, she teetered about in heels that looked like something from Ali Baba: all golds, blues and glitter.

  Campbell shuffled her papers. ‘You can’t keep Donald Guy,’ she said.

  ‘What can we do, then?’ I asked her. ‘He left work for four hours.’

  ‘I know. You said on the phone. Look, Harry, I’m worried that there’ll be a vigilante attack on him if this gets out, if there’s an arrest. We have someone checking in on him regularly at home.’

  ‘How often is regular?’

  ‘The required amount, the convenient amount.’

  They weren’t the same thing.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘we need Donald to stay away from work. I don’t think they’d have him back now anyway. We need to find out where he really was on Monday afternoon.’

  Campbell shook her head; the bun didn’t move. ‘Alright, we’ll get some officers out to Donald’s place of work to ask when they last saw him.’

  ‘We have the footage. He wasn’t there.’

  ‘I get your point, but I have to make sure it’s safe for him.’

  ‘What about safe for kids like River Reede?’ I ripped the boy’s photo off the board and waved it in front of her.

  ‘My job is to look after people like Donald. I have a duty of care to him as an individual.’

  ‘Well then I pity you.’

  ‘Harry, I’m only doing my job. Like you are.’

  ‘No, not like me. You’re not his solicitor. You don’t need to stick up for him.’

  ‘I just know him now, and I don’t think Donald would do it again. He’s been proactive in changing.’

  ‘You think he wouldn’t do it again, but you don’t know for sure.’

  I pinned River back on the board. He smiled at me.

  I felt as if I’d let the child down.

  Chapter 28

  ‘Donald’s prints don’t match either of the adult fingermarks on River’s coat,’ Higgins said as he sat at his desk eating takeaway for a late lunch.

  ‘That doesn’t rule him out,’ I said. ‘You never told us what the woman living behind Zara and Raymond said. Did River climb into her garden?’

  ‘Ah, no. About that … we concentrated on Witham Street instead.’

  Linskey slammed her coke bottle down on the table. ‘I specifically told you, days ago, to go to the house that backs on to the Reedes’.’

  ‘You told me, did you?’ Higgins snarled.

  ‘It helps to give us the bigger picture,’ I said.

  Higgins sat back in his seat and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘We went round the nearby streets asking people if they’d seen anything,’ he said.

  ‘But we needed you to speak to that specific woman,’ Linskey said loudly, not caring who heard.

  ‘Raymond was nailing up the fence between them the morning the investigation started,’ I explained.

  Simon was nodding. He glanced at Higgins. Their partnership was so one-sided it was going to topple at any minute. I felt sorry for Fergus Simon, paired with this waster.

  ‘We needed her spoken to, Simon,’ I said. ‘The woman at the back of River’s house.’

  ‘I know that,’ he said. He looked exasperated.

  ‘Maybe you should have done it then,’ said Higgins.

  ‘Obviously I should have,’ said Simon.

  ‘Not you,’ said Higgins. ‘The Nolan Sisters here. Youse should have done it if you’re that concerned.’

  ‘The Nolan Sisters?’ I repeated.

  Higgins laughed.

  ‘He means us,’ said Linskey. ‘Cheeky sod.’

  ‘They were a girl band in the seventies,’ explained Simon.

  ‘Christ, Carl,’ I said to Higgins, ‘even your insults are retro.’ He clapped his hands in delight that he had got a begrudging laugh. ‘And anyway, we’ve been busy, flitting about the country. Can’t you be trusted to do anything?’

  ‘Obviously not, so just do it yourself,’ Higgins said. He got up and left just as Chief Dunne came in.

  Linskey stood up. ‘Chief, I want little drummer boy pulled off this case.’

  *

  In the end we did call ourselves to see the woman in Ribble Street.

  ‘We’re here to ask you a few questions about the young boy at the back of you who went missing on Monday,’ I said as I stood on her doorstep.

  ‘Oh, c’mon on in.’ She was staring at our feet, ushering us in quickly with a wave of her hand.

  The hall was long and ran the length of the house; it was an old house and deceptively big from the outside.

  ‘Watch there, loves,’ she said, closing the door behind us as two dogs rushed out of the living room.

  ‘Hello,’ said Linskey, crouching to pet them.

  So she had two small dogs. It wasn’t what I was expecting from Raymond’s mention that River had no fear of the dogs. These weren’t the type that would invoke fear in anyone, except spaniels.

  ‘You have a dog?’ the woman asked Linskey. She spoke from the side of her mouth; it was hard to make her out.

  ‘No,’ said Linskey, ‘I work too long hours. Someday, maybe. When I’m retired.’

  ‘Do you have kids?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Two,’ Linskey said.

  ‘People don’t have dogs cos they’re too much work,’ she said looking into my eyes. ‘But yet they have kids and they’re more work.’ She laughed heartily to herself, so convinced she was funny that it would have been impolite not to at least smile; so I did. ‘But these two are like babies, I s’pose. One gets jealous of the other. What is it you want to see, the garden?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said.

  The woman’s name was Lila Smith. She was in her fifties, short – little more than five feet tall – and had her hair cropped in a blonde bob. She had lived in the same house for fourteen years, she told us.

  She led us into the garden. It was divided in two; the back half was grass and slightly elevated, a raised flowerbed, the other part nearest the house was dull, grey concrete. From where we were standing we could see Zara in her kitchen at the sink. If she looked around she would see us. But she didn’t. And there was the hole in the fence, the part that Raymond repaired.

  ‘The man who lives there was fixing the fence when we called on Monday,’ I commented.

  ‘Yes, drubbing away rightly,’ she said. I saw that one side of her face was paralysed.

  ‘Did the boy ever climb through into your garden?’ I asked her.

  ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Just woulda put his hand through to pet the dogs. His dad woulda told me to chase him and not let him, in case he got bit. But they’d never do anything to anybody. More chance he’d hurt them.’ I noticed Lila had no trees, nor a shed or a garage.

  ‘And he’d never have hidden in your garden or anywhere?’ I asked.

  Lila shook her head.

  Back at her front door I noticed the car outside her house was a Volvo. ‘Has anyone spoken to you about the case already?’ I asked.

  Lila put the dogs in the living room and stood in the doorway. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I went into the station to tell the officer, a good-looking young man, Higgins, to tell him I had been in the park at Shaw’s Bridge and hadn’t seen anything. I can’t remember seeing anybody there. It was freezing. No one was about.’

  ‘You’re the woman in the park!’ Linskey said as it dawned on her.

  ‘Yes, is that not what this is about?’

  ‘We called with you as a neighbour.’

  ‘Didn’t you tell Constable Higgins that you’re a neighbour?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I didn’t think to. I’ve never even walked down Witham Street since those new houses were built. Sorry, I’m not a good person to ask. I didn’t see a coat. I was only asked about that.’

  ‘The park is quite a dis
tance from your home. Why did you go there, instead of walking around here?’

  ‘The kids round here are too cheeky. When you’re trying to walk here they say stuff to you and video you on their phones. They ask me why I talk funny. They aren’t like that at Shaw’s Bridge. Up there it’s a good long walk, and people ring their bells on their bikes when they go past so you can step out of the way. No one annoys you, and sometimes there are people out on the water. Not now, of course – it’s too cold. Other times there are families. The kids don’t go to the playground unless they have a parent with them, and they’re playing like good children do. There’s nowhere for kids to play here, so they congregate outside of here cos I’m on the corner. Cos I’m a woman living alone, they mess me around.’

  ‘But there’s a park through there,’ I said, pointing towards the end of the street.

  ‘Aye, and the big kids race through there on scramblers and terrify the wee ones. Or they put the wee ones on their knees and race, no helmets on their heads and they go down the greenway. That lovely park they built, that community centre and that’s what they do! If you say anything they tell you to eff off.’

  ‘Do you know River?’ asked Linskey. ‘Would you know him if you saw him?’

  ‘I would,’ Lila said, turning when her dogs started scratching the living room door.

  Chapter 29

  Zara’s PC was bulky and aged and she had not deleted the internet searches that would incriminate her.

  How to love your child more.

  She would have loved to think of herself as a perfect woman, I thought, a mum who breastfed a preschool child and had a disabled older partner, a wonderful stay-at-home mother who denied her child’s ADHD and epilepsy. Yet here she was searching for natural cures for both on the internet, scouring the World Wide Web for salves to cure the mess of her life.

  Linskey winced at the screen. ‘Poor girl,’ she said, scrolling down.