Flesh And Blood (34 page)

‘I know.’

After a while he rolled onto his back and she brought him off with her hand.

♦

In the morning, Eve Branscombe asked them how they’d slept, ushered them into the snug kitchen where two places were laid for breakfast, gave them cornflakes and then boiled eggs, two each, and plenty of toast, a slice of which, for Angel, she cut into narrow strips.

‘Soldiers, remember?’

‘Course.’

‘Well, eat up. There’s more toast if you want it. Tea’s in the pot.’

‘Aren’t you having anything, Mum?’

‘Oh, I’ve had mine.’

Just a few minutes later, Shane realised he needed the toilet. He found Eve on the upstairs landing, standing beside the telephone, receiver in her hand. A copy of that morning’s
Mail
was on the small circular table, folded open to a photograph of himself on page two.

‘Bitch!’

Fear flooded her eyes.

‘Fuckin’ bitch!’

He slapped the back of his hand across her face fast and as she cried out and staggered back, he seized the phone from her grasp and struck her with it hard above the ear.

Eve screamed and sank towards the floor.

‘Shane! What the hell you doin’?’

Angel pulled at his arm and he shoved her away.

‘She was only shopping us, wasn’t she? Lyin’ fuckin’ bitch!’

Eve whimpered and as he bent down to hit her again she covered her face as best she could with her fleshy arms.

‘Shane, don’t! Oh, Mum, Mum, Mum.’

Angel dropped into a crouch, putting herself between the older woman and Shane, but he caught hold of her wrist and pulled her away.

‘Shane, don’t. Please. Not any more.’

He drew back his leg and kicked Eve Branscombe in the side.

‘Shane…’

‘Okay, let’s go. We’re out of here now.’

‘We can’t leave her.’

‘Cunt. I hope she dies.’

Less than five minutes later they were out of the house and running down the street, Angel having to be half-dragged but going anyway, a rucksack on her back and a bag in each hand, sniffing back tears.

‘What’s got into you?’ Shane asked. They were in a lay-by off the Nantwich to Wrexham road, south of Crewe.

‘Nothing,’ Angel said.

‘Yeah? Then what you like that for?’

‘Like what?’

‘Face like a horse’s arse. Not sayin’ a thing.’

Angel turned away and he moved to confront her.

‘Well?’

‘I’m thinking about mum.’

‘She’s not your fuckin’ mum. She never was your fuckin’ mum.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘She was shoppin’ us, right?’

‘Shane, you could have killed her.’

‘Serve her fuckin’ right.’

Angel tipped the remainder of her tea over the ground and walked away, and this time he didn’t follow. Traffic, not heavy, trailed past on the other side of a ragged length of hawthorn hedge. The weather was on the turn maybe, clouds darkening high to the west and the temperature falling.

Shane looked at Angel standing head down near the grass verge, her hair just long enough now to lift in the breeze. Something pulled at his gut and he wanted to go to where she stood, put an arm around her and say it was going to be okay, but instead he stayed where he was.

A car transporter pulled in slowly with six new Skoda Fabias, blue, red and green, shining behind. When the driver jumped down he stared at Angel for a moment and she stared back. Half an hour with him in his cab, Shane thought, and she could earn them fifty quid easy, maybe more. Cash, that’s what they needed; what little they had, his mad money aside, was running out.

Angel’s idea was go to London, lose themselves there easy, that’s what she said. But McKeirnan had always said London was full of losers, blacks and queers, and Shane reckoned he was probably right. Asylum seekers now, Afghans or whatever they were, Africans, Iraqis, something like that, he didn’t know. Wales, that’s what they should do, hitch into Wales. No one would find them there. It was where he’d always wanted to go.

As if she’d made up her mind about something, Angel turned and came towards him, conjuring up a smile.

‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘D’you want anything?’

‘No, ’sall right.’

‘I’m going to have a burger.’

‘I’ll have a bite of yours.’

‘Says who?’ She kissed him on the side of his mouth.

Inside the bun the meat was grey and thin and Angel smothered it with ketchup, mustard too. When Shane bit into it, a splash of red and yellow ran down his chin and when he tried to wipe it away it smeared all over his hand; Angel laughed and said could she have her burger back please and Shane pretended to hurl it at her but then handed it to her, almost graciously, instead. It’s going to be all right, Angel thought, it’s going to be all right, the two of us: for one whole minute believing it, maybe two. That night, she’d tried once or twice bringing the conversation round to Shane going to the police, giving himself up, but all he had done was scowl and tell her not to be so fucking daft.

‘We’ve got to split up,’ Angel said. The burger was finished and they were drinking Coke to swill away the taste. ‘Just for a bit. A week or so.’

‘No way.’ Shane shook his head.

She came close and wound her fingers inside the cuff of his sleeve.

‘We’ve got to. After what’s happened. We’re too obvious like this. Someone will spot us if we’re together, you know they will.’

‘They haven’t before.’

‘That was different. If Mum hadn’t talked to the police earlier, she certainly will’ve by now.’ She pulled lightly at his arm. ‘Shane, it makes sense, you know it does.’

‘How long?’ he said after several moments. ‘How long’d this be for?’

‘Just a week or so, like I say. Then we’ll meet up again.’

‘You won’t, though, will you? You’ll bugger off. It’s just an excuse to get away.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘It’s fucking true.’

‘No. No, it’s not. I promise you. Promise. Look, we’ll name a place, right? Motorway services, south of Birmingham. The M5. First services you come to, yeah? A week today. Early evening. Six or seven. We’ll wait for one another. Then we can go anywhere. Wales, like you wanted. Like you said. Okay? Shane, okay?’

‘Okay.’ When he looked at her there was sadness in his eyes.

‘I’ll be there, I promise.’ She kissed him hard and stepped away, knowing she had to go now if at all.

The driver of the car transporter was on his way back from his break. ‘Want a lift?’ he said, seeing Angel now standing alone.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, thanks. Hang on, I’ll just get my bag.’

Shane watched, then turned away.

♦

Happy to deflect the media from the true focus of their inquiry, the police did nothing to dissuade them from the view that Shane Donald was still the principal suspect in their investigation into Emma Harrison’s murder. Public relations set up a press interview with Elder and agreed that he could be interviewed on local television on the clear grounds that nothing was asked which might be prejudicial to any future trial. So Elder graced
Midlands Today
, fielding his one minute and forty seconds of questioning about Donald brusquely if competently and then providing the young feature writer from the
Post
with sufficient material for a half-page, double-column side-bar in which the unsolved disappearance of Susan Blacklock loomed large.

Front-page photographs of Shane and Angel lined up along the newsagents’ shelves. A couple of dangerous young villains on the run.

‘
21st Century Bonnie and Clyde
’ some sub-editor dubbed them, though as far as anyone knew they had yet to rob a bank or brandish a gun. Even the arts pages of the
Independent
got in on the act, publishing stills from movies featuring pairs of runaway fugitives: John Dall and Peggy Cummings in
Gun Crazy
; Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell in
They Live By Night
; Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as fictional versions of Charles Starkweather and Caril Fulgate in Terrence Malick’s
Badlands
.

And all the while the search for Adam Keach was progressing; relatives, friends and associates were being traced and questioned as urgently as possible.

♦

Elder drove the relatively short distance to Crewe and talked to Eve Branscombe, whose injuries, fortunately, were less serious than they had at first appeared. She looked at him out of a round, doughy face and when she spoke of Angel her voice was filled with genuine sadness and concern: a good girl gone astray. When he asked her about Shane Donald, tears brimmed in her eyes but they were tears of anger and fear; describing how he turned on her, she flinched as if his hand were striking her cheek again, his foot driving into her side.

‘He killed her, didn’t he? That poor girl. Emma, isn’t that her name?’

‘We don’t know, Mrs Branscombe,’ Elder said.

‘If she hadn’t pulled him off me, Angel, he would have killed me too.’

♦

‘Where have you been?’ Maureen asked, when Elder walked back into the office. ‘I’ve been trying to get you on your mobile.’

‘Sorry. It was switched off.’

‘Useful.’

‘What was it anyway?’

‘Angel Ryan.’

‘What about her?’

‘She’s phoned in three times. She wants to meet you.’

‘Why me?’

Maureen smiled caustically. ‘Something to do with all this publicity you’ve been getting?’

Angel was sitting on a bench in the Broad Marsh bus station in Nottingham, head down, smoking a cigarette. Her blue jeans were stained on one leg with grease or oil and almost threadbare at the knees, grubby trainers on her feet; she wore a thin cotton T-shirt beneath a man’s unbuttoned denim shirt, and over that a short rust-coloured corduroy jacket, new enough to have been liberated from somewhere like River Island earlier that day.

As Elder approached her, crossing from the underpass, she looked up.

‘Angel Ryan?’

Taking one last drag at her cigarette, she dropped it to the ground. ‘Recognised me, then?’

Elder glanced left towards a pair of men sitting hunched over their cans of Strongbow, right to where a harassed woman was doing her best to marshal four small children and stop them running out in front of oncoming buses.

‘Not too difficult,’ he said, and held out a hand. ‘Frank Elder.’

‘And you’re not with the police?’

‘Not exactly. Not any more.’

Despite the fact that it was far from cold, Angel began fastening the buttons on her jacket. Fastening and then unfastening nervously.

‘Do you want to walk?’ Elder asked.

Angel shrugged.

‘Come on, no sense staying here.’

She followed him through the Broad Marsh centre and up the escalator on to Low Pavement, from there along narrow streets that ran between old Victorian factories which were gradually being renovated and remodelled into loft apartments, chichi little shops that seemed to Elder to sell things he neither wanted nor could easily afford.

As they walked Elder chatted about this and that, nothing substantial, seeking to put Angel at her ease. At the corner of Stoney Street and High Pavement, he pointed towards a bench inside St Mary’s churchyard.

‘Let’s sit for a bit.’

Inside the church, someone was practising the organ, scales and then a tune, something Elder thought might well have been Bach.

‘You wanted to talk to me?’ he said.

‘Yeah, I suppose.’

‘About Shane?’

Angel glanced up at him and then back down at the ground. ‘Yes.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Really?’

‘Not where he is right now, no.’

‘But you could get in touch with him. If you wanted to.’

‘Maybe. Yeah, maybe.’

Angel looked at him again quickly. Old, about her father’s age, she supposed. Nice hands. And not rushing her, she liked that. Pretending to be her friend. She’d had social workers who were like that, a few; psychologists too. She wondered if she could trust Elder more than she had them. If she could trust anyone, including herself.

‘What if he wanted to give himself up?’ Angel asked, her voice quiet, as if she herself didn’t want to hear what she’d said.

‘Is that what he wants to do?’

‘If he did, though,’ Angel said, ‘what would happen?’

‘That depends.’

‘This girl, the one in the papers, Emma something, he didn’t have nothin’ to do with that. I swear.’

Elder nodded, thinking now that it was almost certainly true.

‘He’d have to go back to prison, anyway, wouldn’t he?’ Angel said.

‘No way round that, I’m afraid. He’s what’s called unlawfully at large. His licence would be rescinded and he’d have to serve the remainder of his sentence, that at least. And there’d be new charges, I imagine. The woman in Crewe, Eve was it? Quite possibly his probation officer, too. He’d likely be facing some serious time.’

Angel looked away.

‘You’ve talked about this?’ Elder said after several moments. ‘You and Shane.’

Angel shook her head. ‘Yes. No. No, not really. I mean, I’ve tried. Tried talking to him, but he won’t. He… And I’m afraid…’ She looked at Elder again, still trying to read something in his eyes. ‘I’m afraid, if he just carries on… if we…’ She blinked. ‘I’m afraid he might get too far out of control, kill someone. Not meaning to, not really, only…’

‘I understand.’

‘Do you?’

‘Perhaps. I think so.’

‘You were the one, arrested him before.’

Elder nodded.

‘He was just a boy,’ Angel said.

‘A boy who’d helped kill somebody.’

‘That was the other one, McKeirnan. Not Shane.’