Flesh And Blood (17 page)

A mother was pushing a small child on one of the swings; a bunch of eight- or nine-year-olds were chasing a ball. A couple of men wearing long coats and woolly hats were sitting three benches along, passing a bottle of cider back and forth between them. Cars, Donald noticed, would pull up at the kerb alongside the toilets, stay parked for five or ten minutes, then drive away.

McKeirnan’s father had ended up like that, Donald remembered, worse still, sleeping rough on a bench in Kensal Green, sneaking into the cemetery at night and sheltering from the weather. Cheap cider, cans of lager, four for the price of three. The occasional bottle of port. Miniatures of whisky. Anything. He was dead by the time McKeirnan was barely twelve years old. His mother a memory and little more. For a year or so, he was passed around the family like old washing, borrowed clothes. Then foster homes, forever running away. Fairgrounds became his natural home.

‘Johnny Kidd now, I’ll tell you,’ McKeirnan had said, another occasion this, watching the tide go out at Camber Sands. ‘Johnny, he had the right idea. Got himself killed well short of thirty, car crash, bang! Like Eddie Cochran, James Dean. Before he got tired and old.’ McKeirnan had paused to light a cigarette. ‘Cochran, the crash that killed him almost did for Gene Vincent too. Bust up his already busted leg. Poor bastard was already trying to drink himself to death, should’ve ended it there. I saw him once, you know, some uncle of mine took me to this rock show, Lowestoft, somewhere like that. Great Yarmouth. I was eight or nine. This fat bloke came out on stage with a brace on his leg. Black leather. Face puffed up so you could scarcely see his eyes. Pathetic. Few months later he was dead from ulcers. Ulcers. What kind of a fuckin’ death is that?’ He grabbed Donald by the front of his shirt. ‘I’m alive past thirty and you’re still here, you find me, right. Fuckin’ find me and do me in, I don’t care how. Yeah? You promise? You fuckin’ promise?’

Of course, Donald had given his promise. What else could he do?

And now McKeirnan was way past thirty. Close to forty and locked up inside a prison where he had not spoken to anyone, by way of what might pass for conversation, in years.

If he were here, what would McKeirnan do?

Another in the ever-changing parade of cars passed slowly along one side of the park before reversing to a halt. On his feet, Donald watched as a man wearing a blue suit got out of the car, locked it and looked around quickly before disappearing into the Gents.

♦

Donald stepped inside and walked towards the urinals, the man in the suit the only other person there. Donald stood two places along and unzipped his fly. After a couple of moments he glanced sideways towards the man and the man winked. He was fiftyish, Donald guessed, with a round, reddish face, overweight. The man winked again and Donald nodded back.

Without zipping himself up, the man backed away and entered one of the cubicles, leaving the door ajar. Donald could see him in there, playing with himself, trousers below his knees.

Donald spun around, moving fast, swung his foot and kicked the door back hard. The man shouted and tried to rise, but by then the knife was inches from his face.

‘No! Don’t! Please.’

‘Pockets, empty ’em now. Now!’

A fumble of wallet, cash, keys.

‘Put ’em down, down on the floor. Now push ’em, with your foot, over here.’

Donald scooped up the wallet and the money, kicked the house keys back against the wall.

‘Car keys.’

‘No, I can’t.’

The knife jabbed fast towards his eyes and the man flinched, shielding his face with his forearm. Donald kicked him in the chest.

‘Car keys, now.’

He snatched them from the man’s hand and jumped backwards, slamming the cubicle door shut as he went. McKeirnan had let him drive a few times when he had been either too tired or too drunk and Donald wondered if he would remember how. It took him several minutes to get the car started and figure out the gears, and all that time the man in the blue suit sat in the cubicle weeping, trousers bunched around his shoes.

Give or take a few minutes the train to St Pancras was on time. Elder had spent the journey reading or gazing out through the window, endeavouring to blank out the pervading babel of mobile phones. After several days of fairly miserable weather, the fault apparently of something that did or didn’t happen over the Azores, the morning was bright and sunny, the grass shining like silver in the fields. The book he was reading was
A Kestrel for a Knave
by Barry Hines, about a boy from a pit village who trains a hawk. They’d made a film of it which Elder had never seen. Puny and put upon, the boy is bullied at school and half-ignored at home; without the hawk, the kestrel that learned to come to his glove and that he grew to love, he would have had nothing. Drifted. Become what?

Growing up, Elder thought, whatever kind of family we come from, we need something extra, important. For Katherine it was running, for Susan Blacklock it had been drama, and for Shane Donald… for him it had been Alan McKeirnan. Fairgrounds and early rock-and-roll and the doling out of pain. Sex and pain. Control. And now, after thirteen years in prison, half a life, almost, of institutions, he was on the run. Out there somewhere on his own. Wreaking what harm?

On the fields the sun still shone as brightly, feathering the trees; a small child, riding a tricycle at its mother’s side, stopped and waved at the passing train. Elder closed his book and closed his eyes. In less than twenty minutes they would arrive.

♦

The area of London Siobhan Banham lived in seemed a good way from the nearest tube; the streets around St Pancras and King’s Cross were jammed fast, the line waiting for taxis long and slow. Elder checked his
A–Z
and decided he would walk. The prostitute at the corner of Goods Way scarcely glanced up at him as he passed; seventeen, Elder thought, eighteen at most, bruises round her neck, long-sleeved top hiding the tracks on her arms.

A strange miscellany of car-repair shops lined one side of the street and in amongst them premises selling second-hand office furniture and dubious antiques. A small park gave way to the St Pancras Hospital, then some new office buildings and the entrance to a garden centre, the road rising above a canal. Flats now, low blocks in yellowing brick, leading to terraces of late-Victorian houses and then Camden Square. South Villas led off from the top end: solid properties long since divided into flats. Siobhan lived in the third house along, second floor, the name Banham printed in neat purple ink amongst others alongside the door.

‘You’re not the plumber?’

‘Afraid not.’

‘Then you must be the policeman.’

‘Guilty as charged.’

‘Come on up.’

Siobhan was shorter than Elder had anticipated, with pale skin and a shock of startling red hair. Scarlet, Elder would have ventured had he been pushed. She was wearing jeans and a long and loose white collarless shirt. Her feet were bare.

‘Every time I switch on the washing machine, I flood the kitchen floor,’ she explained on the way up the stairs. ‘You don’t know anything about washing machines, I suppose?’

‘Sorry. Bit of a launderette man myself.’

‘Oh, well. Come in, come in.’

A white cat sat curled on a low settee over which brown-and-orange striped material had been draped, brightly coloured cushions scattered along its length. Narrow Indian rugs lay on polished boards. A metal table, painted grey. Books and CDs on shelves, in boxes, at intervals across the floor. Theatre posters on the walls. On one of them, the Gate at Notting Hill, Elder spied Siobhan’s name near the top of the cast, the list alphabetical.

‘Nice place,’ Elder said.

‘Yes. It’s great. I can’t afford it, of course. Shared till a month ago. Tina got pregnant and decided to go home to Kirkwall. Can you imagine what it’s like living on Orkney?’

‘No.’

‘Neither can I. Tea or coffee?’

‘How about tea?’

‘I’m sorry to be such a cliché, but all I’ve got is herbal. Peppermint or camomile.’

Elder smiled. ‘The coffee isn’t dandelion?’

‘Lavazza, actually. One-hundred-per-cent Arabica beans. Speciality of the house. And I’ve got one of those little octagonal pots I can make it in.’

‘Then coffee it is.’

‘All right, just make yourself at home. Don’t mind Vanessa, she won’t bite.’

Vanessa looked as if anything more vigorous than stretching out a paw would be too much to contemplate. Having surveyed Elder with one baleful eye, she went back to feigning sleep.

Siobhan paused at the kitchen door. ‘I could turn that off if it’s bothering you.’

Elder, who had been only vaguely aware of music playing, shook his head. ‘No, it’s fine.’

By the time she returned, almost seven or eight minutes later, the music, some kind of stringed instrument, probably Middle-Eastern – was there such a thing as an
oud
? – had wound its way around Elder’s brain.

The coffee was good, strong and not bitter, and Elder drank his with a little milk, Siobhan lifting the cat on to the floor so that she could sit, cross-legged, at one end of the settee while Elder sat at the other. After inspecting the underside of her tail for several moments, Vanessa jumped back up, circled and lay between them, her claws flexing in and out of a small blue cushion.

‘When you rang,’ Siobhan said, ‘work aside – I always think whenever the phone rings, those seconds between picking up and whoever’s at the other end responding, I always think it’s my agent telling me I’ve got a call back from the RSC or someone’s broken a leg and would I please hurry along to the National. Instead of which, if it is about work, it’s either a British Council tour of Shakespeare to Croatia and Kazakhstan or forty seconds as a sex-starved sheep herder on
Emmerdale
. The last thing I did – this isn’t my natural hair colour, you know, I dyed it for the part – was a stage version of
Gone With the Wind
at Battersea Arts with a cast of four and a dozen assorted puppets. Don’t ask about the puppets.’

She pushed both hands up through the maze of her hair and shook her head from side to side. ‘Now, sorry, what was I saying?’

‘When I rang.’

‘Oh, yes. Well, I thought it was probably to do with Susan. Before you’d even said. She’d been in my mind, I suppose. Seeing it on the telly, the news, about that man escaping, absconding, whatever. Loose, anyway. On the run. Shane Donald, is that his name? When Susan disappeared, they thought he’d killed her, didn’t they? The police. You. Is that what you thought? What you thought had happened?’

‘It was a strong possibility, yes. Donald and McKeirnan. Everything suggested…’

‘But was it what you thought? What you felt inside?’

Elder only answered after a pause. ‘Yes.’

‘And now?’

‘Now I don’t know. I still think it’s possible but…’ He shrugged. ‘I just don’t know.’

‘Poor Susan,’ Siobhan said.

‘You were close. Good friends.’

‘Yes. Not as much as I was with Lynsey. Lyns and I had been mates since we were in nursery. But yes, that year, I’d say we were close, the three of us. About as close to Susan as you could get.’

Though far from loud, the sound Elder’s cup made when it touched down in the saucer was clear and distinct.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘I don’t know. It was just something about her. She’d let you get so close and then…’ Siobhan raised both hands, palms outwards, fingers spread.

‘Some people are like that,’ Elder said. ‘Private.’

‘Yes.’

‘So there were things she kept to herself?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Family stuff?’

Siobhan swung her legs round and the cat raised her head from where it had been nestling and looked aggrieved.

‘Partly, yes. I mean, Lynsey and I were in and out of one another’s places the whole time. We’d known each other longer, of course, but even so. If we went to Susan’s house more than a couple of times in the year, I’d be surprised.’

‘Why do you think that was?’

‘I think she was a bit, not ashamed exactly, but embarrassed. Not that she had any reason to be. It wasn’t as though she lived in some slum. And her mum, her mum was nice as can be. Ordinary, you know, but nothing wrong with that.’ She laughed. ‘Better than a mother who downs gin and tonics like they’re going out of style and is forever dragging you off to auditions.’

‘And Susan’s father?’ Elder asked. ‘What impression did you have of him?’

Siobhan drank some more coffee while she thought. ‘It’s difficult to say. I mean, he just wasn’t there a lot of the time, working I assume, and when he was, well, he was okay, I suppose. That’s all you could say. I think he ignored us as much as he could.’

‘How about with Susan? What was he like with her?’

Siobhan pushed out her bottom lip. ‘Pretty normal. She was quiet around him, though, I did notice that. Walking on eggshells, you know? As though she didn’t want to set him off.’

‘Set him off?’

‘I heard him shouting at her once. Lyns and I turned up early to go to this thing and he was really carrying on. A proper screaming match. You could hear him outside, down the street.’

‘Do you know what it was about?’

‘Oh, some boy. Someone Susan had a bit of a crush on. A right yob, too. No wonder her old man was wetting his knickers. Not that he needed to have bothered. It was all over more or less before it’d started. He dumped her and then there were the usual tears and wailing and soon after that she was over him. Had fun with us instead. Look…’

Startling the cat, she sprang to her feet and fetched a photo album from one of the shelves. ‘I thought you’d like to look at these.’

In the first photograph, the drama group was gathered in front of the school minibus before setting out: Susan Blacklock stood at the far right, half a pace from the rest. There were eight girls and four boys in all; Paul Latham, wearing a baggy off-white suit, front and centre, smiling. In most of the others – outside the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, on the pavement in front of the Roundhouse in London – Susan stood close together with Siobhan and a dark-haired girl Elder presumed to be Lynsey.