Flesh And Blood (31 page)

McKeirnan stared back at him with flat, dark eyes.

‘A girl’s been killed,’ Elder said.

‘We have television, you know. Some do. Sky News. CNN. BBC News 24. The screws at least. Things pass around.’

‘Then you’ll know who I’m talking about.’

‘Sixteen, wasn’t she? Such a shame. Pretty, too.’

‘You know where she was found?’

‘Freeze your balls off that coast, most weeks of the year.’

‘Would Shane go back there?’ Elder repeated

McKeirnan looked away.

‘Would Shane go back there?’

‘He might.’

‘Why? Why there?’

‘Where he come of age.’

‘And d’you think this could be him?’

‘Is he on his own?’

A movement across Elder’s face told him he was not.

‘He’d never do it on his own,’ McKeirnan said.

‘How can you be sure?’

‘Anything else you want to know,’ McKeirnan said, ‘it’s gonna cost.’

Elder took a second packet of cigarettes from his pocket and set it down on top of the first.

‘No. I mean really cost you. Big.’

‘I’ll not bargain,’ Elder said.

‘Then what makes you think,’ McKeirnan said, ‘I’d waste myself on the likes of you?’

‘Because it’s Shane out there. Your boy. Your protégé. Because he’s out there and you’re not.’

‘And good luck to him,’ McKeirnan said, raising an imaginary glass.

Elder scraped back the chair, starting to rise.

‘Wait,’ McKeirnan said, extending his hand. ‘Wait a minute, wait.’

Slowly, Elder sat back down.

‘Tell me,’ McKeirnan said, leaning forward, lowering his voice. ‘Tell me what he did to her, the girl. Then maybe I’ll tell you what you want to know.’

Elder stared hard into his face. ‘Go to hell, McKeirnan.’

McKeirnan laughed the same raw, ugly sound.

♦

The fair had finished in Newark after the weekend, laid low for a day, packed up and driven north to Gainsborough, an ungainly market town just across the border into Lincolnshire. Another patch of muddied wasteland, another day of offloading and laborious setting-up. Donald kept his head down, pitched in, did his bit and no more. In the evenings he was quiet, preoccupied. One day when Angel woke up, his side of the bed was empty and Shane nowhere to be seen: the second time he had gone off without warning. No note, no explanation. After the flare-up with Brock, the incident with the knife, he had been gone for two whole days.

While Shane was away, Della, serious-faced, called Angel over to her caravan and sat her down. One of the newspapers was open on the small table, Shane’s blurry image staring out.

‘Here,’ Della said, steadying Angel’s arm before she fell. ‘Here. Sit yourself down. Take a sip of this.’

Angel read each page, each column several times, speculation about what had happened to Emma Harrison, speculation and a little fact.

‘What’s all this got to do with Shane?’ Angel asked, her voice a whisper.

Della turned the page and read the summary of Shane’s trial, the account of the ordeal Lucy Padmore had undergone at his and McKeirnan’s hands. Inside her something twisted and caught. She was pale when she left Della’s caravan, her skin the colour of a winding-sheet, a shroud. For the first few steps, her legs threatened to undo her, cast her down.

Late that evening, when Shane reappeared, Angel read the expression on his face and held her tongue.

That night, instead of making love, he clung to her and as she lay there in the dark she imagined she heard the small, constant movement of his lips; had she not known him better, she might have thought he was saying his prayers.

Come morning, he was quiet and still, a touch withdrawn, but closer to his usual self.

Grateful, Angel dipped her head to kiss his neck as she passed behind him on her way out.

Still she waited until she and Donald were next alone and away from others’ eyes.

‘Look,’ pushing the newspaper before him. ‘That’s you, isn’t it? You cut her. You hurt her. You did all those… those things to her and then you killed her.’

Donald snatched the paper from her and buried his face in it, then let it fall.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Oh, Christ!’ Angel cried. ‘Oh, Christ!’

The next morning they were both gone.

The post-mortem was inconclusive as to the exact cause of death: the injuries the body had received, the time spent in warm weather in a shallow grave. At some point in her ordeal, Emma’s life had given out. The probability that she had been already dead when she made her last journey to the coast was high, but difficult to prove.

The van was found illegally parked outside an antique shop in Louth, one of several that permeated the town. This time there were no souvenirs, no obvious clues; the vehicle had been wiped meticulously clean inside and out. A preliminary trawl suggested there would be no fingerprints, possibly not as much as a stray hair. Whoever had been careless enough – or content – to lead them to Emma Harrison’s body was leading them no further.

Detectives examining the spot where Emma had been found were having no more luck. The boy’s bicycle had inadvertently ploughed up some of the area around the grave and the coarse dry sand revealed little else; what signs there were suggested that whoever had spent time there with the body had been wearing some smooth covering, possibly common-or-garden plastic bags, over his shoes, much in the same way as the officers themselves.

As a site, the barn seemed likely to prove more fruitful, but such had been the state of the interior, that the process of sorting and identifying was more than usually painstaking and slow.

While Maureen Prior’s team continued to track down and eliminate the most likely offenders, officers under Gerry Clarke, now freed from the task of finding the missing girl, attempted to evaluate and respond to the calls that were coming in as a response to the flurry of media publicity and the promise of financial reward. Overweight and lonely women who rarely walked further than the corner shop and wanted their five minutes in front of the television cameras. Couples who stuck a pin in a map and claimed to have seen someone resembling Shane Donald struggling with a girl, playing the odds much as they bought tickets for the lottery or backed a rank outsider at a hundred to one.

Elder stayed pretty much in the background during much of this, assessing the information as it was processed as best he could, feeling frustrated despite everything, too far from the centre of the investigation.

He was kicking his heels in the corridor, contemplating yet another cup of nondescript coffee, when Helen Blacklock got through to him on his mobile. ‘You’re okay?’ she said and then, after an awkward pause, ‘I tried calling you before…’

‘Yes.’

‘Left messages.’

‘Yes, I know.’

Another pause and then, ‘You’d rather I hadn’t called.’

‘No. Not at all.’

‘Then you’re busy.’

‘Yes.’

‘This girl, the one they found, Emma…’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t know…’

‘No. We’re still pretty much in the dark, I’m afraid.’

‘And Donald?’

‘Helen, we’re still investigating, doing what we can.’

‘You don’t want to talk about it.’

‘It’s difficult.’

‘Yes, of course. I understand.’ He could hear her breath, close to the phone, as she drew on her cigarette. The one she’d lit before dialling. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have phoned.’

‘No, it’s okay.’

‘Goodbye, Frank. Some other time.’

When the phone went dead, he felt guilty, without being a hundred per cent certain why.

♦

It was late on Monday afternoon when one of Clarke’s young DCs flagged a call made by a man who gave his name as Craig and claimed to have been working with Shane Donald on a fairground in Gainsborough, and what did he have to do to claim the reward? By midday Tuesday no one had responded and it was only when the constable who’d taken the original call brought it directly to the DI’s attention, that action was taken.

‘Maureen, it’s Gerry. Is Frank around?’

Elder was less than a dozen feet away, staring at names on a computer screen.

‘There’s something you both might want to follow up on. I’ll give you the details. May be nothing, you never know.’

Less than ten minutes later, the sun bright and high at their backs, both Elder and Maureen were in an unmarked saloon, driving north.

♦

Craig was working the dodgems, swinging his way from car to car, not tall, five six or seven, thick dark hair with something of a curl, a sleeveless denim shirt that showed off the muscles in his upper arms, patched jeans. They watched him amidst the blare of music, joking with the kids, chatting up the girls. Wasn’t many a night he didn’t end up copping a feel at least, out there in the grass around the fairground’s edge.

Neither Elder nor Maureen looked like punters exactly, standing where they did, waiting for the ride to end. ‘Craig,’ Maureen said, approaching him quietly, not wanting to make a fuss. ‘It is Craig, isn’t it?’

His eyes pale blue and nervous, flitting from one to the other, uncertain.

‘I think you wanted to talk to us. About Shane Donald.’

‘Not here.’

The caravan he shared with three others smelled of stale air, stale beer and cigarettes. A sweet undertaste of dope. Sweat and spliffs and skinning up. Four men under thirty living close together.

‘Can we open a window or something?’ Maureen asked.

‘They’re stuck,’ Craig said, the merest hint of apology.

They settled for an open inch or two of door. Craig cracked a can of Special Brew, reached for his tobacco and his papers.

‘This reward,’ he began.

‘Just tell us,’ Maureen said, ‘what you know.’

Without too much embellishment, he did exactly that: Shane appearing outside Manchester, not so long back, and getting hired on. Then taking up with Angel…

‘That’s her real name?’ Elder asked.

‘Far’s I know.’

‘Go on,’ Maureen said.

Craig told them about the time Shane had attacked his friend, Brock, unprovoked, with a knife. ‘Crazy, fuckin’ crazy. Just sliced him up for no reason. Walked right over to him and cut him. There. Had to take him to the hospital, wait half the night while they sewed him up.’

There’ll be a record, Maureen was thinking, easy enough to check.

‘And this was out of the blue?’ Elder asked. ‘No provocation?’

Craig backed down a little under his stare. ‘He might’ve said something, I don’t know.’

‘What about?’

‘About the girl.’

‘He was defending her?’ Maureen said.

‘If you like, yeah. ’Cept it was nothin’, nothin’. Brock, what he said. Nothing.’

‘Donald evidently didn’t think so,’ Elder said.

‘Yeah, but he’s fuckin’ crazy, i’n’t he, like I said. I always knew it, right? Right from the first time I saw him. Somethin’ about his eyes, the way he don’t look at you, you know, head on. Dunno what she sees in him, Angel, ’cept she’s a bit of a scag herself.’

‘When did you last see them?’ Maureen asked.

‘Sunday. Sunday night. Last thing. In the morning they was gone.’

‘You don’t know where?’

Craig pulled a stray flake of tobacco from his lip and shook his head.

They asked him how long the fair had been in Gainsborough and where it had been before. At the mention of Newark, Elder and Maureen exchanged a glance. They asked how much time Donald had spent away from the fair – say, in the past week. Craig had some idea he’d gone off the previous weekend, after attacking Brock, maybe once since then, he wasn’t sure. There didn’t seem to be a great deal more he could tell them that would be of use.

‘Thank you for getting in touch with us,’ Maureen said, preparing to leave.

‘That’s it?’ Craig said. ‘That’s all?’

‘For now. We’ll want to talk to some of the others, of course. Before we go.’

‘What for?’

‘Oh, corroboration, that’s all.’

‘But I was the one as told you, right? Told you where he was.’

‘Where he’d been.’

‘Yeah, but, leading to the arrest, that’s what it says. The reward. Information leading to the arrest…’

‘And conviction.’

‘Yeah, and conviction. Okay.’

‘All a long way off,’ Maureen said, pushing open the door.

‘But he done it, right. The girl.’

‘We don’t know,’ Elder said. ‘We just don’t know.’

‘Hey! It said so, in the paper, black and fuckin’ white.’

♦

Della had no reason to trust the police. When she had read about Shane Donald, her only thought had been to tell Angel, warn her; after that, let the pieces fall where they may. Life dealt the cards and all you could do was play them, close to your chest as you could. It had dealt her a man she had loved, a woman also; a child who had died. Now she lived in her caravan and travelled with the fair; sometimes she told fortunes, dealt the tarot, gazed into any future but her own.

For Elder and Maureen Prior she made tea, black and strong.

‘She saw something good in him,’ Della said. ‘She’d not have gone with him otherwise. Not like she did. I’ve known her a while now and she’s not been like that before, not with anyone. Not like she was with him. She loves him. And I thought she might never trust anyone enough to do that again.’

‘How old is she?’ Maureen asked.

‘Seventeen.’

‘And you don’t know where they’ve gone?’ Elder said.

‘No, and I don’t know if I would tell you if I did.’

‘It might be for the best,’ Maureen said.

‘What? Prison? Can you imagine what would happen to someone like Angel if she was shut away in prison? Him, too, for that matter.’ Della shook her head. ‘My God, no. Let them have happiness while they can.’