Someone You Know (19 page)

Lucy felt her phone vibrate in her pocket and, pulling it out, saw Robbie's name on the caller ID. She realized that he had left her a message earlier which she hadn't listened to yet. She hesitated answering, feeling absurdly guilty, then excused herself and, moving out of the office, answered the call.

‘Hey, Lucy,' Robbie said when he answered. ‘I've been trying you and Tom all morning.'

‘We've been busy,' Lucy said quickly, despite the fact there had been nothing accusatory in his comment.

‘Sorry,' he said. ‘It's about Gavin. He skipped out in the middle of the night. He didn't arrive back here until just after seven this morning. I got him out to school. He signed out of school at eleven to attend a Mass for his father with his grandparents. He's not come back to the school yet and I can't get in contact with the grandparents.'

Lucy exhaled deeply.

‘I'm sorry to land this on you,' Robbie said. ‘You know the protocol, though.' If a child in care didn't return to the residential unit when expected, Social Services were required to inform the PPU.

‘It's no problem,' Lucy said. ‘Why didn't you contact us last night when he went out?'

‘I didn't know,' Robbie replied sheepishly. ‘I fell asleep on the sofa in the common room. He'd already gone to bed and I'd the place locked up for the evening. I got up to wake him this morning and saw he was gone. I was about to call when he arrived at the front door.'

If Gavin had been missing during the night there was every chance that he, and his new gang of friends, had been part of the recreational rioting that Lucy had witnessed in Gobnascale earlier. ‘I'll get onto it as soon as I can,' Lucy said. Despite her caseload, she would have to follow up on it, especially without Fleming to handle it.

‘There's something else,' Robbie said. ‘I stuck on a washing load after he went to school. When I gathered up his clothes, they were stinking of petrol. Especially the sleeves of his hoodie.'

‘He was probably part of the crew rioting at the top of the hill this morning,' Lucy said. ‘I spotted him with them the other day.'

‘Great!' Robbie said, sarcastically. ‘He's only here a matter of weeks and he's already found himself a gang.'

It was as she was hanging up that Lucy realized that if Gavin had been back at the unit just after seven the riot had not even started by that stage. In fact, the only petrol they knew of as having been used at that stage was the stuff that had been poured through Gene Kay's letterbox before being set alight.

G
avin Duffy's grandparents' house was in Holymount Park, in Gobnascale. Lucy rang at the door and waited, but no one answered. She peered in the windows, smearing away the misting of rainwater that had gathered there, a result of the fine miasma which had swept up over the city from along the Foyle Valley. She angled her head to see through the cracks in the blinds, but the place seemed empty, the darkened outline of a small Christmas tree visible in the corner. Lucy considered that the couple would hardly feel like celebrating Christmas, having lost their son only a month earlier.

She was turning to leave when a couple came shuffling up the street under a black umbrella towards the house. The woman looked to be in her sixties, brown hair streaked with grey, her eyes rheumy. The man seemed older, balding with a grey moustache. He blinked at Lucy from behind rain-streaked glasses.

‘Yes?'

‘I'm looking for the Duffys,' she explained.

‘That's us,' the woman answered, smiling uncertainly.

‘I'm Detective Sergeant Black of the Public Protection Unit. I'm looking for your grandson, Gavin. He's not turned up at school. They've been trying to contact you.'

‘We were at Mass, over in the chapel.'

They pointed towards the outline of the Immaculate Conception Church, across the road from the estate where they lived. ‘We went to the cemetery afterwards.'

‘It's our son's Month's Mind,' the man said. He shuffled past, pulling out his keys, and opened the door. ‘You may come in, so,' he added.

The house was compact, three rooms downstairs – a living room, kitchen and cloakroom. The living room was cosy, the small fire smouldering in the grate surprisingly warming. The old man grunted as he bent and flicked on a switch at the wall, bringing the thin Christmas tree in the corner alight, throwing kaleidoscopic shadows on the wall.

‘You'll have tea,' Mr Duffy said, a statement not a question.

‘I was sorry to hear about your son,' Lucy said, a little insincerely, to the woman, who sat next to the fire now. She twisted slightly to address the husband who stood in the adjacent room, filling the kettle. ‘It must be very hard. Especially at this time of the year.'

‘We wouldn't have been celebrating it at all were it not for Gavin being here.'

Lucy heard a grunt of derision from the kitchen. ‘When he's here. He was to be at the Mass this morning. His own father's Month's Mind.'

‘It's a Mass for when—' the woman began.

‘I know,' said Lucy. Catholic families celebrated Mass one month after the death of a loved one in their memory. Lucy had attended a number herself over the years.

‘Oh,' Mrs Duffy replied, understanding the implication. ‘He'd wanted Gavin to come. The wee boy didn't know his father at all.'

‘Only his bitch of a mother,' her husband said, passing Lucy a cup of black tea and handing a second cup to his wife.

‘Don't say that,' his wife commented, though without conviction.

The man reappeared a moment later with a small tray, a cloth doily on it, on top of which sat a milk jug, a sugar bowl and a plate of biscuits. Lucy took milk and sugar, declined the Bourbon creams, then regretted having done so having managed only a single finger of a Twix bar since breakfast.

‘She ran off the first time Gary went inside. Then she remarried. Do you know what the new one did to the wee boy?'

Lucy had heard when he'd first been transferred in. His stepfather, in order to teach him a lesson for accidentally breaking the wing mirror of his car with his bike, had beaten him with the flex of a games console. His PE teacher had noticed the shape of the bruises the following day when Gavin was changing for football, his T-shirt riding too high up his trunk as he pulled his shirt over his head. The doctor who examined him said there were injuries consistent with punches around the boy's ribcage, in addition to repeated bruising from an electric flex.

The officers who had questioned his mother and stepfather, separately, said that the mother had accused the boy of injuring himself because he didn't like her husband. It was only after she read the extent of the injuries that she admitted what had happened. She claimed that the boy was uncontrollable, and that she could no longer look after him. At the age of twelve, Gavin had entered residential care and there remained, until his grandparents had asked to have him brought nearer their home after his father's death.

‘What's he done then?' Mr Duffy asked.

‘Nothing that I know of,' Lucy said. ‘He's just not in school.'

‘We hardly see him,' the man commented.

‘We need to give him space,' his wife countered. ‘It's been difficult for him.'

‘He should have been there this morning,' the man repeated, earning a roll of her eyes from his wife.

‘He wasn't at the Mass?' Lucy asked.

The woman shook her head. ‘He's like his father. Wayward. Gary was the same. Even after he got out. He was so angry all the time when he was younger. Then they lifted him for that wee girl's killing – all the people who'd been his friends would have nothing to do with him. They wouldn't let him onto their wing in the prison. For his own safety. Then he became withdrawn, wouldn't talk about anything. We couldn't get through to him. We asked him to say where the wee girl's body was, to admit if he'd done it.'

‘Did he?' Lucy asked, having debated whether to mention the body that had been found on Carlin's farm. There was no point. She'd still not heard whether she was right in believing it to be Louisa Gant.

The woman shook her head. ‘He said he was innocent of it.'

‘But you didn't believe him?'

The woman's eyes filled. ‘That's a terrible thing for a mother to say. That she didn't believe her own son. But he was a bad boy. From he was a teenager, it was like something was broken inside him.'

‘He'd his mother's heart broken before he ever went inside. Then, when he did, they all abandoned him. All the ones he ran with. He'd no one left in the end. Nowhere to go.'

‘He even moved back here; we made him, to be near us,' Mrs Duffy added.

‘For all the difference it made in the end,' her husband muttered.

‘He went down to the river,' Mrs Duffy said. ‘To spare us finding him. His father always brought him up his breakfast in the morning. He didn't want him to see him ... you know.'

They sat in silence, watching the flames curl round the briquette the woman had thrown on the fire when they'd arrived in.

‘I'm sorry,' Lucy repeated again.

‘We thought having Gavin around would help,' Mr Duffy said. ‘But he's out with that crew more often than not.'

‘The street gang?'

‘Local lads is all,' Mrs Duffy said, quickly. ‘He'll be out running around somewhere.'

Lucy drained her tea then placed the cup back on the tray. ‘I'd best take a drive around and see if I can find him. Would they be anywhere in particular?

‘I'd try the back of the shops,' the man said. ‘That's where they normally be.'

The couple saw her to the door, where Lucy thanked them for the tea and offered her condolences once more.

‘Gavin's very lucky he has you,' she said. ‘He showed me the iPod you got him. You're very good to him.'

‘What's an iPod?' Mr Duffy said, his face creased in bewilderment.

L
ucy drove across to the parking bays outside the shops where she and Fleming had gone looking for Sarah Finn. She jumped out of the car, the air heavy with the smell of hot grease from the local chip shop reminding her she should eat. She had no time, for now, she decided.

Lucy had considered whether it might be best to call for backup, but if there was a gang of fellas standing, bored, in the rain, a Land Rover-load of PSNI officers pulling up would be the perfect entertainment to keep them occupied after the events at Kay's house. She thought she would try to get Gavin's attention and take him away quietly, rather than having to take a heavy-handed approach.

As she opened the boot to take out her coat, she caught a glimpse of a red car parked at the outer edge of the bays. A stocky man, wearing a brown overcoat and a black beanie hat sat in the driver's seat while, at the open door, two younger boys, in their late teens at most, leaned in. She recognized one of the boys as Tony, the leader of the gang with whom she had spoken about Sarah Finn. For a moment, Lucy thought they were robbing him, until the three of them started laughing. The man seemed to sense her watching, for he stared across at her. It took her a moment to place him as Jackie Logue, the community worker who'd helped calm the riot during Kay's burning.

After pulling her hood up enough to cover her face, she slammed the boot shut and headed across to the shops. Aware that she was still being watched, she instead went into the shop to buy a bar of chocolate, rather than heading directly around the back.

Two women served in the shop; one looked to be in her early twenties. She was loading the display in front of the tills with bags of crisps, while the older woman behind the counter chatted to a customer.

It was the younger girl that Lucy approached first.

‘Can I have a packet of those?' she asked, only realizing after she'd done so that they were Worcester sauce flavour. ‘I'm looking for my nephew. I'm told he hangs around with a crowd of boys around here.'

The girl looked up at her, blinking against the strip lights above Lucy's head. ‘What's he called? I'll know if he's been in.'

‘Gavin,' Lucy said, aware that the conversation at the counter had stopped.

‘He's round the back, I think,' the girl said.

‘They're not doing any harm,' a voice said.

Lucy turned. Both the woman behind the counter, and the older man to whom she had been talking, were now looking at her.

‘They're all right out there. The back's covered over, so they stand in there out of the rain. Besides, Jackie keeps tabs on them.'

‘Jackie?' Lucy asked. ‘Jackie Logue?'

‘Gavin's your nephew, is he?' the woman said.

‘Gavin who?' the old man asked in response.

‘Gary Duffy's boy,' she replied, as if Lucy wasn't there.

‘The Duffys only had the one,' the man commented.

‘That's right,' agreed his co-conspirator. ‘You're no aunt. Police, is it?'

‘His grandparents are wondering where he is,' Lucy lied. ‘I'll take a Bounty too.'

‘He's doing no harm out there. Leave him alone.'

Lucy said nothing further about the boys, thanking the woman and leaving, pulling her hood up again.

The area to the side of the shops was covered by sheets of corrugated metal, providing a smoking area along the entirety of the row, presumably for the staff of the various shop units who were being forced to smoke outside in the wake of the ban on smoking indoors. A group of around twenty youths were congregated there, a mixture of boys and girls, in half shadow, their faces faintly illuminated by the green emergency exit lights above the rear doors of each unit.

Four plastic dumpsters sat to one side, and it was against one of these that Gavin was standing, a cigarette in his hand, talking to a boy and girl of about the same age as him.