Flesh And Blood (35 page)

‘The jury didn’t agree.’

‘And you?’

Elder didn’t answer right away. ‘At the very least he stood by and let it happen.’

‘And for that he has to spend almost half his life inside?’

‘It’s the law.’

‘Fuck the law.’

A Japanese couple glanced round on their way towards the church door. The organist seemed to have finished his impromptu recital or possibly he was just resting.

‘Has he ever been aggressive towards you?’ Elder asked.

‘No. Not really.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘He wouldn’t hurt me.’

How many times have I heard that, Elder thought?

‘You’re not afraid for yourself?’ he asked.

Angel shook her head. An ailing lorry went past along the narrow road behind them, flowering black smoke from its exhaust.

‘Does he know you’re here, talking to me?’

‘No.’

‘And you really think he’d give himself up? Because if he would, all he has to do is walk into the nearest police station.’

‘He wouldn’t do that.’

‘What then?’

‘He’d talk to you.’

‘Why me? Like you said, I’m the one who put him away.’

‘He trusts you. Least, I think he does. One or two things he’s said. That you were a decent bloke. For a copper. Straight. That’s what he said.’ Slowly, she turned again to face him. ‘Is it true?’

‘I try to be.’

Elder was already getting to his feet.

‘Let’s walk a bit more.’

They went down some worn steps at the far end of the churchyard and turned back on to Stoney Street. He was trying to reconcile Angel with the details, sparse as they were, that Maureen had received from social services. He had expected someone with even less confidence, someone who carried the scars of her early life more openly. But the places where Angel had cut herself with razor blades and fragments of shattered mirror glass were mostly healed over now, hidden from sight.

Who, Elder wondered, as he watched Angel cross the street a pace in front of him, was she trying to save most, Shane Donald or herself?

In a café off Stoney Street and High Pavement, Elder drank coffee and watched her while she ate soup and then a bacon-and-tomato roll.

‘I’m gonna meet him,’ Angel said. ‘A few days’ time. I could phone you, let you know when.’

‘You could tell me now.’

‘No, later.’

‘You don’t trust me.’

Angel blinked. ‘You’ll just talk to him, right? You’re not going to grab him or nothing? Because if you do, he’ll run. I know.’

‘I understand,’ Elder said.

‘If he doesn’t want to go with you, you won’t try and stop him?’

‘I’m no longer a constable,’ Elder said. ‘I’ve no powers of arrest.’

‘And there’ll be no police, you promise?’

‘As long as he wants to talk to me, I’ll talk to him alone.’

Elder wrote down his mobile number, went to the counter and paid the bill. On their way out towards the street, he pushed a twenty and two tens down into Angel’s hand.

‘You will be in touch?’ Elder said.

‘Yes. I said.’

‘And afterwards? I mean, if he does decide to give himself up. What will you do then?’

‘I dunno. Go back with the fair, maybe. Della’d always take me in, for sure.’

Elder nodded. ‘Try and talk to him again,’ he said. ‘Work him round.’

They went a short way towards the Broad Marsh together and then he stopped and watched her walk away, hands stuffed into the pockets of her corduroy jacket, a survivor against the odds.

He woke with a head like so much wadded cotton wool. At first he thought it had been Katherine, treading round the edges of his dreams, but then he realised it had been Angel. Quickly dressed and feeling the need for space and fresher air, he drove the short distance from Willie Bell’s to Wollaton Park and walked down past the house towards the lake. Deer grazed in the adjoining field or stood in twos and threes beneath the trees. If Angel did contact him with Shane Donald’s whereabouts, there was no way he could keep them to himself, he understood that. He would have to tell Maureen, at the very least, and once he’d done that everything would be out of his hands.

Elder lengthened his stride; if he could convince them to let him talk to Shane first, there was a chance he might convince him to give himself up. A slim chance, but a chance all the same.

He was rounding the first curve of the lake, where the path opened out to afford an uninterrupted view back towards Wollaton Hall, when his phone began to ring.

‘Frank Elder?’ The voice was male and what would once have been called well-spoken. Maybe in some places it still was.

‘Yes?’

‘This is Stephen Bryan. You left your number, asked me to call.’

So much had happened it took Elder a while to connect the name. ‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘That’s right. A good few days ago.’

‘I’ve been away.’

‘It was about Susan Blacklock,’ Elder said. ‘You were at school with her, I believe. Chesterfield.’

‘She hasn’t turned up, has she?’ With each sentence the regional accent lurking behind the received pronunciation reasserted itself more and more.

‘Should she?’

‘Depends whose story we’re in.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Downbeat or sentimental. David Lynch or Steven Spielberg. George Eliot, if you like, or Charlotte Brontë.’

‘This isn’t fiction,’ Elder said. ‘We don’t have a choice.’

There was a laugh at the other end. ‘Do you still want to talk? Only if you do I’m afraid the window’s fairly small. I’m off to Edinburgh the day after tomorrow.’

‘Then how about this afternoon?’

Bryan gave him directions and Elder scribbled them down on the back of his hand.

♦

Clarendon Park was close enough to the centre of the city, the part of Leicester you lived in if you were a teacher near the top of salary scale; better still, a psychotherapist or university lecturer. Victorian villas with stained glass still intact above the doors and Bosch ovens in brushed steel in their remodelled kitchens, Farrow & Ball paint on the interior walls.

Stephen Bryan’s house was a part of a terrace of twelve with taller semi-detached villas at either end. From the upper storeys it would be possible to look back through the trees towards the railway station.

‘
Stephen Makepiece Bryan
’ read the card in black italic script alongside the front door. For someone who must still be only thirty or so, Elder thought, Bryan was doing pretty well for himself.

When he pressed the bell, Elder was treated to a burst of orchestral music, jarring and shrill.

‘Apologies,’ Bryan said, opening the door almost immediately. ‘Bernard Herrmann, the music from
Psycho
. It’s meant to scare away gas company cowboys and proselytising Baptists.’

Bryan was wearing blue-black jeans and a thrift-shop fifties print shirt. His feet were bare.

‘I assume you’re neither of those.’

‘Frank Elder. We spoke on the phone.’

Bryan shook his hand and stepped back. ‘Come on in.’

Elder followed him into a long and narrow hallway, one side of which was partly blocked by a confusion of cardboard boxes and bulging plastic bags.

‘Lodgers,’ Bryan explained. ‘One lot moving out, another moving in. The bane of my life, in a way, but most months it’s the only way to pay the bills. An aunt left me this place and I’ve been clinging on to it ever since – even if sometimes it does seem I’ve got half of De Montfort University living in it with me.’

There were posters from the Berlin and Telluride film festivals and, midway along, a striking black-and-white photograph of someone handsome and young, lit by a spotlight on the opposite wall.

‘Beautiful, isn’t he?’ Bryan said.

‘James Dean?’

‘Montgomery Clift.
A Place in the Sun
.’

Bryan ushered Elder through the doorway across from the foot of the stairs. The two main ground-floor rooms had been knocked through to make one large space with a square archway at the centre. Rugs on scuffed but polished wooden boards. Shelves, floor to ceiling, were crammed with books, videos and DVDs; the front half was dominated by a large, wide-screen television and separate floor-standing speakers; in the rear an old-fashioned wooden writing desk had been adapted to hold a computer and monitor, a printer on a table alongside. There was a framed painting, vivid with colour, above the tiled mantelpiece, a tall smoked-glass vase of flowers in the fireplace beneath; more flowers on a low table, hedged in by small piles of books.

‘I can offer you Yorkshire tea, Nicaraguan coffee or plain water, take your pick.’

Elder shook his head. ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

‘You won’t mind if I make myself some tea?’

‘Go ahead.’

Elder sat on a sloping leather armchair and leaned back. Traffic noise was slight and there was very little sound from inside the house itself. Perhaps the last twenty-four hours had taken it out of him more than he’d thought, because he could feel his eyes beginning to close.

Shaking himself, he sat forward and looked at the books on the table: Charles Barr on
Vertigo
,
Wilder on Wilder
, a couple by Bryan himself: a small, squarish paperback called
Forgotten Stars of the Fifties
and, more weightily,
Shakespeare on Film, Contemporary Interpretations
. The picture on the cover showed a young man in a garish jacket, holding on to a wounded comrade and brandishing a pistol.

‘My thesis,’ Bryan said, coming back into the room. ‘With a few updates and excisions, but it still reads as if untouched by human hand.’

‘Film,’ Elder said, ‘clearly your thing.’

Bryan flopped down on to the settee opposite, almost but not quite spilling his tea. ‘Yes. I do a bit of teaching up the road, some criticism – radio mostly, there’s a show called
Back Row
– introduce the odd movie at Phoenix Arts. Otherwise, I suppose I’m a bit of a
rentier
, raking in the shekels at the same time as unblocking the toilets and trying to make sure my guests don’t annoy the neighbours with Coldplay at two in the morning or smoke anything more serious than cannabis in the common parts.’

‘Some would say it sounds a pretty nice life.’

‘Most days they’d be right.’

‘I’ve talked to Siobhan Banham and Rob Shriver – it was Rob who gave me your number. Siobham said you and Susan Blacklock were close, that you spent a lot of time talking together.’

Bryan set down his tea. ‘I suppose that’s true.’

‘Can I ask you what you talked about?’

Bryan smiled. ‘Aside from contemporary interpretations of Shakespeare, you mean?’

‘Aside from that.’

‘Mostly, she wanted to talk about her father.’

‘She was having problems with him?’

‘No, that was Trevor. I don’t mean Trevor, I mean her real father.’

Elder felt as if all the air had been suddenly sucked out of him.

‘You didn’t know?’

‘No. I had no idea.’

‘Ah.’ Bryan drank a mouthful of tea. ‘I suppose I knew she kept it pretty quiet, Trevor being her stepfather.’

‘You sound as though you knew him?’

‘Not really. But he used to pick her up sometimes, after drama club, things like that. Fussed over her, I suppose you’d say. Susan found it… well, claustrophobic.’

‘But she never treated him as if he weren’t her actual father?’

‘No, not at all. And I don’t think anybody else knew. In fact, I’m sure they didn’t.’

‘Can I ask how come you did?’

Bryan smiled, remembering. ‘It was one of those conversations, in fact. About Shakespeare. We’d been reading
Lear
, doing bits and pieces of improvisation. We were due to see it, in Newcastle…’

‘The production that was cancelled.’

‘Precisely. Anyway, we’d been working in pairs on this scene where one of the daughters turns on her father and tells him if he thinks she’s going to look after him in the style he’s been accustomed to, he’s got another think coming. I’m wildly paraphrasing, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘Susan and I were talking about it afterwards and she looked at me, all serious, and said, “I’d never treat my father like that, no matter what he’d done.” Well, I’d seen her with Trevor, heard her moan about him often enough, so I must have looked at her a bit gone out and that was when she told me.’

‘Go on.’

‘Her mother got pregnant with her when she was just sixteen. She’d been seeing this man, older than her by quite a bit he must have been. Met him in the record shop where he worked. Chatted her up, asked her out. Nobody knew, big secret, then wham – secret no longer. At least, not the pregnancy part. According to Susan, her father didn’t want to know. Did his best to persuade her mum to have an abortion and when she wouldn’t, he washed his hands of her. Refused to speak to her, have anything to do with the baby after it was born.’

‘And Susan knew all this?’

‘Apparently.’

‘And still she felt something for him? Even after he’d deserted her and her mother and everything.’

‘Yes. I think so. She’d have forgiven him, no matter what. If she could. But I don’t think she’d ever seen him, not knowingly. She certainly didn’t know where he was, I’m sure of that, where he lived. I got the impression she’d tried asking her mother about it once and her mother had thrown a fit. So I think she probably spent quite a lot of time thinking about him instead, day-dreaming, I suppose. You know, what she’d say to him if he suddenly materialised one day out of the blue.’

‘And, as far as you know, she never talked to any of the others, any of her other friends about this?’

‘No, I’m sure she didn’t. And she made me promise not to mention it to a soul.’

‘And you’ve been true to your word.’