Dust and Desire (20 page)

I was in a fury for allowing Annie to infect me with the past, after I’d left the north-west to get away from all that hurt. That I’d acquired a great pile of new hurt – deeper, nastier, insidious hurt – down in London had no bearing on the matter. It was a different hurt, a hurt I thought I could cope with more successfully because I was older and wiser and more cynical. And I must have been doing something right, because I wasn’t running away any more. Maybe that was what separates adults from children: the direction you take and the speed at which you take it when the monsters come looking for you. But Annie wasn’t to blame, especially not after what Jimmy told me.

More fool me for thinking I could dodge my demons.

I followed the Speke Road out of Liverpool, stopping off at a drive-thru McDonald’s for a large McCoke and a few McNurofen cadged from the McGirl at the service hatch. I was about to leave, when Mike gave me a call. He’d spent a few hours in the archives and had found a reference to the murder I’d asked him about.

‘August 2005,’ he revealed. ‘Woman by the name of Georgina Millen. She was twenty-nine years old when she was killed.’

She’d been opened up with the kind of frenzy a thirteen-year-old boy affords a copy of
Playboy
. The MO didn’t resemble anything that Merseyside’s CID had seen before. The prints they took at the scene came up with zero matches when they were fed through the computer. Despite the public’s near-rabid demand for an arrest to be made, and one of the largest man-hunts in the north-west’s history, nobody was nailed for it. Now I could remember the panic that had flowered in the subsequent weeks. Everyone seemed tensed for a follow-up death, as if someone with such anger in them, such a propensity for murder as violent as this, could not surely have spent himself on a single victim. All over the area, schoolgirls vanished from the streets, confined to their bedrooms, and ferried to and from school by fathers who regarded each other with suspicion in the car parks. But then someone else was killed in a different way, in a different place. The tabloids foamed about other things, attention shifted, interest dropped off. As it always does.

Mike gave me the name of the murder site, and a couple more bits and pieces including the name of the school that the girl had attended. I thanked him, promising him a pint and a Chinese next time I was round his way. Before I rang off, I asked him to hang fire on any follow-up stories about the possible connection between this death and the one in London. He gnashed at that for a while, but eventually caved in. ‘Just till I’ve had a bit of breathing space on it,’ I confirmed. ‘A week, perhaps. Certainly no more than two.’

‘I’ll be all over it then, Joel,’ he said. ‘So don’t go asking me for any more time.’

Which meant I had a week, ten days tops, to finger the bastard. Otherwise, what with the heat the papers would bring to the situation, he’d go to ground. And Mawker would throw me in a cell and have my balls rubbed nonstop with a cheese grater.

Another twenty minutes and the A562 became Fiddlers Ferry Road. I followed it through its regeneration into Widnes Road and turned off at the Penketh roundabout, on to Stocks Lane. I turned right on to Meeting Lane and drove down to the end, bearing down on the waves of
déja vu
that were threatening to make me lose control and pile the car into one of the neatly clipped front lawns. I must have weeded and mowed a fair few of the gardens along here in my time, back when I was casting about for something to do. I did all kinds of odd-jobs: gardening, furniture removal, digging up potatoes, picking raspberries. About a year before I joined the police, I got the taxi-driving job, and also a few stints as a security guard through a friend whose father was the regional inspector for a nationwide security firm. Of all the jobs in all the world, that one stunk like a skunk with halitosis living on a sewage farm. I used to spend sixteen-hour shifts, 8 a.m. till midnight, sitting in a Portakabin on building sites, chasing off kids who wanted to play in the sand. I couldn’t bunk off the patrols and read or get a suntan because there were checkpoints at various areas around the site that I needed to punch in at certain times throughout the day, just to prove I’d been doing the job properly. Now, instead of chasing off those kids who wanted to play in the sand, I was trying to find them.

I parked the car on the road outside the primary school and walked through the playground to the main entrance. There were kids all over the place, pretty much what might be expected, I suppose, although this was a new strain of kid – an überkid. I was accosted by a couple of them who asked, in basso voices, if they could look after my car. I told them no, and that it didn’t matter if they did anything to it because it was a rented car and was thus insured against damage.

‘How about if we do something to you instead? Are
you
insured against damage?’ This from a boy who couldn’t have been any older than ten with, I swear, a furring of pseudo-moustache on his top lip. He must have topped five foot six.

‘Which failed experiment produced you?’ I asked him, feeling cheap at having a pop at a child but, well, he started it.

‘Come again?’ Bumfluff said.

‘Are you one of the teachers here?’

Some of the other kids laughed. Bumfluff didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. He was turning red, his hands balled into fists the size of Puerto Rican mangoes. I was impressed, but I moved on before he did something to get himself expelled.

Inside the entrance hall was a small, presently unmanned, reception desk. The walls were filled with collages of winter scenes, lots of glitter and tinfoil and clear plastic glued on to black backing paper with Uhu. Another board contained words describing winter. To the usual ones someone had chalked – without any of the staff noticing, it would seem – the words
Miss Hicks’s tits
. From the assembly hall came the sound of someone playing the piano astonishingly badly.

A cough, one of those questioning hacks used by people who can’t be arsed to try out their manners, made me turn around. A woman who looked as if she was put on the earth to wear shawls scurried into the entrance hall. She was thinner than the plot of a TV movie and bore the ingrained expression of all teachers who wish to instil terror into their charges: a kind of hawkishness that comes with true dedication and practice. It wasn’t something you could wash off easily. She couldn’t be all bad, though: she had cat scratches on her hands.

‘Yes?’ she said, in precisely the voice I expected. Borderline shrill.

‘My name’s Joel Sorrell,’ I said, then added, in a voice filled with urbane ennui, ‘Can you help me?’

My dad had given me this little trick when I was young. He said, whenever you’re talking to a woman, before you say anything, ask her if she can help you. And say it in a little-boy-lost voice. I’ve always followed his advice. It never works.

‘What do you want?’ she asked, her tone brittle.

‘I need some information,’ I said, ditching the little-boy-lost and trying the wolfish admirer of older women ploy. I gave her a smile. ‘Got cats?’ I asked, nodding at her hands and revealing my own scars.

‘Gardening,’ she said. A disappointment, but it was an in of sorts. ‘Are you from the police?’

‘No, I’m representing a client who has a missing relative. Possibly abducted from this school.’

‘We have nobody missing from this school. We have excellent security measures here.’

‘Which is why I was allowed to get in without anybody checking who I was.’

This seemed to bring her up short. Any chance of her being my ally was now as likely as Osama Bin Laden appearing in a Wigan panto.

‘I can assure you,’ she said again, ‘that our security here is excellent.’

I didn’t really care. I said, ‘Two pupils from this school were murdered. Did you know that?’

‘That’s complete non–’

‘No, it’s true. Two girls. One called Kara Geenan and another, Georgina Millen. Both killed in the same year, 2009.’

‘Those names don’t ring a bell,’ she said, but nothing more, clearly expecting me to take that as my cue to leave.

‘Who are you, by the way?’ I asked. ‘Cleaner?’

‘I’m the Deputy Head,’ she said, firmly.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t be Miss Hicks, by any chance?’

‘How do you know?’

I smiled. ‘One of the boys outside told me your name.’

Get that ‘Miss’ – I could buy it. She was all Vosene and Pontefract cakes, spending long nights in, listening to Radio 2 and thinking of a man called Gerald who had once volubly admired her hibiscus.

‘I’d like to see the headmaster, if that’s okay. This is a pretty serious matter.’

She left me there with the ice thesaurus, and I decided against freaking her out any further by going for a wander along the school corridors, just to show her just how excellent the school’s security was, and instead waited by the staffroom, which was as full of furtive bitching as the bike sheds or the patch of spare wasteland behind the gym.

Presently, a rotund guy appeared through the swing-doors leading to the assembly hall. He and Miss Hicks scurried towards me like the Number 10 made flesh. His hair was receding and his dark suit was dusted with dandruff from the remnants. He had sad eyes, but who wouldn’t, being in charge of a shower like the ones I’d met outside?

‘Banbury,’ he said. ‘Don Banbury. Headmaster.’

I told Banbury what I’d told Hicks, and he was in the middle of saying the same thing she’d said when he cottoned on that I wasn’t talking about now.

‘Hang on,’ he said, and pinched his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger. ‘In 2009? I wasn’t here then.’

‘I didn’t say you killed them,’ I said.

He kind of half-laughed at that, as if I’d made a joke but he couldn’t quite enjoy it as much as he wanted to. ‘Come with me,’ he said, in that
don’t you dare deny me
kind of headmasterish way.

We went through a large door into what I supposed was his office. There were no canes or slippers lying around. They did it differently these days, the old violence. It was all psychological now – much more effective. Maybe they went on courses for it.

Hicks had vanished, glad to get shut of me. Banbury gestured at a chair and I sat down. He then got on the blower to someone called Ollie, and asked to see the registers for the year in question.

‘Tea?’ he asked me.

‘Coffee, if that’s okay,’ I said, and he nodded, relaying the order through to Ollie.

We played verbal tennis with the weather and the football, and then he served me something with a bit of topspin.

‘I’m not at liberty to tell you who I’m working for,’ I said.

‘But you’re looking for one of our ex-pupils. Someone you say is already dead?’

‘No,’ I corrected him, ‘I’m looking for the person who killed them.’

‘You think the person who killed them was a pupil here?’

‘It’s an eyebrow-raiser, I admit, but no less possible because of that.’

‘Mr Sorrell, this is a good school in an improving area. I’m not sure I’m happy with your theory that we nurtured a murderer here.’

‘I’m not saying you did. I’m saying it’s a possibility. And, anyway, it would have been before your time.’

He smarted at that, and might have come back at me were it not for Ollie coming through the door with our cups, a plate of biscuits and a couple of large folders.

I sipped my piss-weak Nescafé while he fingered the buff suspension files and pinched his bottom lip again. ‘Can I see some identification?’ he said.

‘I don’t have any,’ I said. ‘I work on my own. I used to be in the police force and I can give you some people to contact if you need references, but it will take time and there’s a man on a slab in London with his tripes hanging out of him, thanks to this bastard. Another murder occurring isn’t that far-fetched and this is my only lead. If it works out, you’ll be fêted. If somebody else dies because you were too busy playing red-tape fannies, then my mate Mike Brinksman at the
Echo
will be up your nose faster than a Vicks inhaler.’

‘There’s no need–’

‘There’s every need, Banbury. Now, come on, get shuffling.’

He went through the papers so slowly that I dragged my chair over to him and started giving him a hand. I asked him if there were any teachers still around from five years ago, someone who might shed some light on the girls who had gone missing, but he was shaking his head even before I got to the end of my sentence.

‘It’s not the most prestigious of schools, I have to admit,’ he said. ‘There’s rather a rapid turnover of staff here.’

He gradually got chatty again, giving me information about registers and photographs that I wasn’t asking for, but I was glad that he was cooperating – if only because he thought it might mean his becoming a local hero.

A knock at the door. A kid with hair like a twelve-inch record that had melted over his head entered the room. His glasses had little bits of Band-Aid on the hinges. He looked a feisty little twat.

‘What is it, Jeremy?’

‘Miss Sharples sent me, sir. I put a drawing pin on Tim Raines’ chair.’

‘Did he sit on it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Wait outside,’ said Banbury, ladling on the menace. I was starting to enjoy my day at school. But that didn’t last long.

I was still ploughing through the custard creams when he passed me a class photograph that I had seen before, many years ago. I knew it was the same picture, for a number of reasons. There was a kid on the end of the middle row, pulling a face, his lips drawn back from his teeth and his eyelids screwed up. Another had stuck his tongue out. At the front, in the centre, sat Miss Blythe – Gemma Blythe. I knew Gemma Blythe. I knew her very well.

‘Why are you showing me this picture?’

‘The girls,’ he said. He pointed at two faces, then showed me the corresponding names on the back of the photograph. ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding.’ My head was swimming. I hadn’t realised this was Gemma’s school. And I hadn’t realised that the two dead girls had been in her class. But on the back of this photo, the names were there: Kara Geenan, Georgina Millen. They were some years away from their deaths, and looked about as happy as two kids unaware of that fact could be.