Random Acts of Unkindness (11 page)

‘They’d pecked out her eyes.’

Mike tuts.

‘What? What did you say?’

‘The birds. They’d pecked out her eyes. That woman yesterday.’

Bessy, I think. But I don’t say her name, it feels like a betrayal.

‘Bloody hell. No wonder you were acting a bit strange. What else?’

‘Nothing. She was just in the chair, dead. With a load of birds in her house. And the back door open.’

He tuts again.

‘That’ll be why they’re treating it as a suspicious death. They’re doing full forensics.’

My stomach lurches and I feel like I’m going to be sick. The money. It’s hidden under the sink and there have been three policewomen in the house all day.

‘I’d better go, Mike. Ta for the update, see you tomorrow.’

I rush inside and all three of them are sitting on the settee with hot beverages, watching
P.S. I Love You
. None of their eyes leave the screen, and I wonder what would really happen if one of Connelly’s henchmen tried to break in or fired a shot outside.

I pull the money out and go upstairs. What had I been thinking? I’d taken it to pay a ransom that hadn’t been demanded. For a son who could have just walked away. Although that was looking less likely now, and the undercurrent of my soul tells me that it isn’t the case.

I push Aiden’s passport and bank card behind the fitted cupboard in the corner of my room. I couldn’t put the money back even if I wanted to, as Ney Street is now a crime scene. Too risky. Shit. I hide it in the ceiling space, behind some laminated tiles.

I go back downstairs and make small talk with Sheila, Sharon and, it turns out, Caroline. I can tell that they resent me sitting there, a distraction from the movies, but I need to find out what they will be doing tonight. I need to know who will be here when.

‘So when do you clock off?’

Sheila appears to be the ringleader and chief tea maker and she answers.

‘These two reprobates are off at seven and I clock on then with Sue. We’ll be here until morning. If that’s OK? We bought quite a lot of provisions to see us through. It’s that or sit outside in the car.’

I nod. I’ve already looked in the cupboards. Looks like they could be here awhile.

‘Fine. I can’t thank you enough. You girls make me feel safe. Very safe.’

There’s smiling and synchronized dipping of chocolate biscuits in tepid tea.

I go up to my room and get ready. Black trousers, black top. Black hat. Black pumps. Tonight’s the night. I need to see what’s going on in Old Mill, find out once and for all exactly what Connelly’s doing there. If it is flogging kitchens, at least I’ll know it’s a dead end. Dead end.

I think about those three boys now. The coincidence is almost too much to bear, and I wonder if Aiden is OK. I wonder if someone is torturing him, making him do things he doesn’t want to do. I fall asleep sobbing and my phone alarm wakes me up at 2:00 a.m.

I jump out of bed and pad across the room. I’ve done this dozens of times when I’ve started a night shift, gone to bed dressed, padded across the floor so as not to wake Aiden or Sal. It became an art form during my marriage, because if I woke Sal up he’d turn nasty. Very nasty.

No one knows him like I do, but who knows anyone? Who knows what goes on behind closed doors, between two people? I’ve interviewed dozens of people who’ve almost collapsed with shock when we’ve told them that their friend or family member has killed someone.

‘But he’s so gentle, so kind.’ And ‘But she’s so softly spoken, so calm.’

We just never know.

I pad down the stairs and behind Sue and Sheila, who are asleep leaning against each other like a pair of bookends, with a set of cushions wedged between them. Sue stirs a little and I freeze and duck, but she’s fast asleep.

I pull the vestibule door open without a sound. I used to go around the house daily and oil all the doors so the minutest squeak wouldn’t wake Sal. I’ve never lost the habit. The front door opens likewise, and I’m outside. I go into the garage through the side door and pull the cover off my motorbike.

I only use it in the direst of circumstances when I want to get somewhere fast and undetected. It just about fits through the doorframe and I push it up the drive and out onto the road. I look back at the house. No one will even miss me.

I keep to the left-hand side of the road as I push the bike out of hearing range, because I know that on the right-hand side of the junction there is a CCTV camera. I’ve checked, and I know there’s a small area to the left that isn’t covered.

Most areas are covered by some kind of surveillance equipment these days, with small pockets that escape detection. I’m so used to it that I can tell by the angle of the cameras what area they cover. I’ve tested myself.

When I’ve been on obs with Mike I’ve been so bored that I’ve mapped the cameras and then, back at the station, looked them up to see if I’m right. Nine times out of ten I am. I’ve been doing it for years, and as I enter this particular black spot, I’m careful to ride at an angle that looks like I’ve ridden out of someone’s drive. I’ve put black mesh on the number plate so it’s not easily read, but not obscured.

I hope I’ve thought of everything, because if anyone finds out what I’m about to do, I’ll lose my job and possibly a lot more.

I speed along the streets, avoiding the main roads as much as possible and weaving in and out of black spots. That way, there will never be any consecutive evidence of my route.

I’m used to looking upward, searching for the cameras that are fixed to the high lampposts and telegraph poles, to the tops of buildings. Looking up toward mobile phone masts—I know where every single one is in my area.

The thing is, when you’re looking up so often you see a whole new world. One where words aren’t necessary, a world of signals and barriers and boundaries that ordinary people cross without even thinking. Unless you know what to look for, they will mean nothing. And I know.

About three years ago a woman walked into the station and asked to see me. She was heavily pregnant and she told me that she wanted protection for her and her baby. Lisa.

She was the girlfriend of one of Connelly’s nephews, deeply involved in their world. I told her that we needed information in return, and she told me something that’s been invaluable. She told me that the boundaries of Connelly’s territory are marked skyward.

A pair of trainers slung over a telegraph wire marks the edges. Football scarves carry messages, as well as babies’ bonnets. I see all these messages, a language that’s specific to a small group of hardened criminals, one of the few methods of communication that is never going to be offered as evidence in court, or even understood by most people, including the police.

There are continuous rumours that it’s all a conspiracy theory, that Connelly’s gang does it just to wind us up, but I know different. I know because I saw the fear on the girl’s face when she told me there are things going on that she can’t live with. That she’d rather leave her family and take her baby somewhere she could never be found.

Something, she said, that was completely unacceptable. She held her stomach as she said it. Then she flung a pink baby bonnet on the desk.

‘There you are. There’s the proof. We know she’s going to be a girl, and they made me promise that she’d be named a Connelly. That she’d be promised to them. They’re all about family, they are. But there are bad things. Bad things. That’s just the way it is and they all seem to accept it. But how could they?’

‘Accept what? What is it they have to accept?’

She shook her head.

‘No. I’ve told you enough. No one knows, outside the family. But there’s no smoke without fire. No smoke. Without fire.’

She was shaking now. Her eyes were dark and she was nodding slightly as she spoke. But I had to press her further.

‘What do you mean? Does that mean something?’

‘Like I said, not many people know outside the family. So if I told you they’d have to kill me.’

A play on the old SAS words. I stared at her. By the next day she was gone, magicked away by reciprocal programs. Eventually, after being threatened, her parents went too. But me, I just kept looking upward. The day she disappeared, a black scarf and a black baby bonnet appeared on a telegraph wire over the main road.

I’m almost at Old Mill now, past the hanging trainers and the footy scarves, past the cameras and into the heart of Connelly’s patch. Ironically, there’s less surveillance here than anywhere else, as all the cameras have been painted over or vandalized.

I park up at a side wall and push through a loose piece of fencing that I’ve had my eye on for weeks now. I spot a rotten mill window and put pressure on it. The wood crumbles and the safety glass feels like it will fall inward for a moment, then stabilizes.

I peer through the gap into the brightly lit warehouse and wait to see if there’s any activity. Then I take the plunge. I pull on the glass with my gloved hands and it breaks halfway down into a single sheet, which I place on the ground. I climb through and look around. This appears to be the office area.

I duck behind desks and look for cameras. None that I can see, so I look around the rest of the floor, which is crammed with various parts of fitted kitchens, appliances, and a huge stock of marble worktops. Kitchens. Fucking kitchens.

I spend an hour looking around, looking inside cupboards, inside the appliance packaging, anywhere a large supply of drugs could be. It appears that there is no alarm system, no security guards, except on the main doors. Nothing.

I walk up the poorly lit stairs to the second floor and stop dead. The whole of the second floor is completely empty and painted stark white. Nothing except white walls and windows. I try each floor and they are exactly the same. It’s almost beautiful, an old mill completely whitewashed and pristine.

But I’m not here to look at nothing, so I go back down to the first floor and search for access to a basement. There were no signs of a cellar or basement from the outside, no supply chutes or air bricks. And no access anywhere on the first floor. Just a lot of kitchens.

I’ve been here two hours now, and as a last straw I check the computers in the office. It’s an open network, unpassworded, running standard off-the-shelf software. I click on the accounts software and look at sales invoices. For kitchens. At reasonable prices.

I also look at purchase invoices. Various purchase of transport. For kitchens imported from Denmark and Germany. Unbelievably, Connelly appears to be actually running a kitchen business from Old Mill. A horrible notion grows inside my brain. What if Connelly really is only selling imported kitchens? But we know he isn’t. We’ve got intelligence that he’s behind everything criminal around here, but he has everyone else doing his dirty work. We need to catch him at it. But he doesn’t appear to be at it here.

I climb back through the window and collect my motorbike. I ride away quickly to a small black spot at the side of an all-night kebab shop, just outside Connelly’s territory. It’s open, and a lone reveller is undecided on which kebab he will have.

I sit on the pavement behind my bike. I need to think. Maybe I have got it wrong. Maybe Aiden has gone off somewhere, living in a squat with a girl he met. Maybe he’ll come back soon. Maybe Connelly hasn’t got him. Maybe Connelly didn’t kill the three boys. Maybe they did kill themselves. Maybe I’m going mad. Or maybe I’m paranoid.

Then I remember why I’m sure that I’m not. Why Sharon’s news about the three boys came as little surprise. I’d been expecting it.

Only just before Aiden had gone, I’d been reading the sky and I saw it. A twisted back T-shirt tied around the top of a lamppost on the boundary just before the city. Black was never good, and this was placed prominently so that everyone could see. Everyone who was looking upward, anyway.

Because I knew about it, I was waiting. Some people wait for dog shit to fall through their letter box. Some people wait for a brick to rain glass through their lounge, terrorizing their family. For me, this felt like a sign. Even before Aiden went, I was expecting something to happen.

I felt like this was a sign, specifically for me, to tell me that they knew I knew. A day later, Declan Connelly was spotted holding his baby daughter and we got a call to tell us that the mother had disappeared from protection. So, I thought, the scarf was for her.

Until Aiden disappeared. Then I thought it was for me. It’s only now that I remember three other black scarves, strategically placed on the edges of the territory at intervals over the past month.

I ride back home, weaving in and out of the camera space, and sneak past the sleeping policewomen. I’m too wired to sleep, so I pull out Bessy’s exercise book and begin to read.

So here’s the next part. I expect this is the bit people will be interested in, because it’s been in the papers.

When I tell people about all this palaver, people glaze over when I talk about our Thomas, but perk up at this bit. I suppose it’s because it’s all documented. I can only say it how I see it, and I don’t know if you’re interested in the bits about my life, anyone who’s had me telling this bit before has cut that out.

The thing is, something funny happened that day when we were waiting for news. Me and Colin sat in that house, drinking tea and smoking, and we lost a day. How can you do that?

It was Monday night when we sat down to wait, and Wednesday afternoon when Little came to talk to us. So where had Tuesday gone? It wasn’t as if we had talked for hours.

We’d sat in the front room, curtains drawn, ignoring anyone who knocked on the door. I didn’t personally know anyone who had died then, both our parents and grandparents were still alive, old, but still kicking around.

I’d seen some of my friends lose their mum and dad, and their door had been shut for a week or so, until the funeral, and I’d wondered what they were doing in there. Were they all crying, sleeping, praying? Until now I hadn’t known.

Colin would get up every now and again and look out of the curtain. We’d seen two reporters pull up in their cars, and someone on a motorbike, all of the knocking on the door and shouting through the letter box.