The Drowning Ground (16 page)

They were wearing their school uniforms. Some were smoking, holding the cigarettes in their hands and making a big deal about offering each other a drag and playing with their lighters.

The man Bray was following was already nearly amongst them. He had taken off his jacket and it now lay draped across his shoulder. They seemed to be expecting him. He approached them and started talking. His swagger became more exaggerated, stagy. The boys laughed, pleased to see him. They had a football, and they began to kick it around. The man kicked the ball between one of the boy's legs, raised his arms in the air and ran in a circle.

‘Goal!'

I watched. The man stood in goal for a while, and then they switched positions. The ball slid along the grass and landed near the foot of the pavilion, where three of the girls were sitting on the remains of the stone steps. One of the girls stood up and kicked back the ball. The boys laughed again.

Sitting away from the others, on her own, was a thin girl, perched on the edge of a broken-down bench, staring at her knees. Bray zoomed the camera on to her and kept it there. She was pale, with thick brown hair and an elfin face. She looked a little bemused, as if she wasn't sure what she was doing there. Although it didn't seem all that cold, she seemed to be shivering.

She was, I realized, the only one not watching the boys play. In fact, she seemed to be very purposefully not looking in their direction at all.

The football game stopped abruptly. The man picked up his jacket and sauntered off towards the pavilion. He passed the girls sitting on the steps. The girl sitting on the broken bench seemed to shrink in on herself. She clutched the blazer in her lap more tightly. But the man sat next to her on the bench. He reached for her and put his arm around her. The girl flinched, but she seemed frozen, unable to move. Then he turned his face towards her, trying to kiss her. This seemed to snap her out of it, because she sidled away from him. He let her go with a laugh. I felt sick to my stomach. The camera tracked outwards, as Bray steadied his grip, and then finally zoomed in on the man's face as he stood up.

When I saw that face, my stomach gave another nauseated lurch and my thoughts went straight into Spanish, then English, and then Spanish and English at the same time, until I couldn't think at all. I breathed in and then out came a long, uninterrupted stream of profanity. Then, still not able to believe what I was seeing, I said all of it over again, only more loudly. I reached for the remote and pressed ‘pause'.

I carried on staring at the screen, trying to calm down. I sat at my kitchen table, resting my chin on my upraised fist. Well, it was pretty obvious what he was doing there. Just like old times. There was no doubt about it. The son of a bitch hadn't changed a bit.

19

I decided to call Bray straightaway and used the mobile telephone number at the top of the agency's invoice. Bray answered the phone in mid-sentence. In the background were sounds of brittle laughter, clinking glasses. A pub or a busy restaurant. The voice at the other end of the line was very direct and underpinned with a fading London accent. As soon as I mentioned Frank Hurst, Bray asked me politely to please wait and took the phone outside. I could hear a door swinging open and then footsteps in gravel. I wasn't quite sure where to begin. With Rebecca or with the man Bray had been following? I suppose that I was still a little shocked by the ordinariness of it all. By the slightly damp Wednesday-afternoon feel of the footage on the videotape. By how easily that man had got so close and with such apparent ease to those teenagers. And in the open too. The video was still paused. Seen in profile, the man's nose was aquiline. His arm was draped around the girl's thin shoulders. I had to turn away, so that I was staring at the cold night gathering outside my kitchen windows.

‘You were working for Frank Hurst then, Mr Bray,' I said, deciding finally to begin with Rebecca. ‘He first got in contact with your agency because he was trying to find his daughter?'

‘Yes, well, agency,' Bray said sheepishly. ‘We're a pretty small outfit. It's just me, really, most of the time. All of the time, actually. After Rebecca went walkabout, Hurst called me and asked me to try to find her.'

‘But why didn't he try the police?'

‘He had a pretty low opinion of the police, I'm afraid. Besides, she was seventeen or eighteen by then, so she was old enough to do whatever she liked. And there wasn't much he could do about it. He'd had a go himself, but realized it was no use, so he thought he'd let me have a try. More or less gave me a blank cheque to find her. But she'd gone – disappeared. I told him I thought she must have moved away from London. Probably shacked up with some fella somewhere. Told him she could be anywhere. He wouldn't have that, of course. But I'd have found her if she'd still been in London.' He paused. ‘So she hasn't come forward, then?'

‘No. Not yet,' I said a little uneasily, but I didn't know why. I leant against the edge of the worktop in the kitchen and forced myself to stare hard at the television in front of me. ‘But there's something else I need to talk to you about,' I said. ‘He got you to do some other work for him as well, didn't he? Another job, after you'd finished looking for Rebecca.'

‘How do you know?' Bray said sharply, and then, realizing, said, ‘The files. Hurst kept them.'

‘Yes, and some videotapes.'

‘Well, like I said, I couldn't find her. But he was happy with the work I'd done for him. He said he was pleased with the way I'd kept him up to date and informed. He said he trusted me.' Bray sounded quite proud about it. ‘So he phoned me later on and asked me to do something else for him, if I could do with the extra work. I didn't really understand any of it to begin with. I asked him to explain but he wouldn't. He just wanted to know what they were up to.'

‘They?' I said.

‘Yes. Some men.'

‘So it wasn't just Gardner?'

‘So you know him?' Bray said, taken aback.

‘Yes. But there were others, you say. He asked you to follow more than just one man?'

‘Yes, but that was only part of it. What he really wanted to know was what they were up to.'

‘Up to?'

‘Yes. He wanted to know where they were and what they were doing. And he wanted me to keep an eye on them. Check up on 'em. That was all. And, of course, if they moved he wanted to know about that too.'

‘So these men – they were all local?'

‘Yes.'

‘How many?'

‘Three.'

‘Three,' I said quietly.

‘Yes.'

‘And who were they?'

‘God, I can't remember the name of the first one. Not off the top of my head. It'll be in the file. Anyway he'd moved. Gone to Canada. Ontario. No. Hold on. Actually Vancouver, I think it was. Had family over there, and the neighbours said he'd got a job out there and wasn't coming back. Gone for good. And they were all glad to see the back of him, which I thought was a bit funny to begin with. So I told Hurst and he said all right and then he gave me another name.'

‘Edward Secoy,' I said softly. ‘That was the name of the first man, wasn't it?'

‘Yes, that's it. Well, of course, as a DCI, you'd know what was happening on your patch. And I bet you can name the next one too.'

‘Another local?'

‘Yep. From over in Broadway.'

‘Ben Tanner,' I said straightaway. ‘But he was dead, right?'

‘Yeah, that one was even easier. Croaked in his sleep.'

‘Heart attack.'

‘Yep. Full marks again. So I phone Hurst and tell him. All right, he says, and then he gives me the last name.'

‘Christopher,' I said. ‘Christopher Gardner.'

‘Yeah. A decorator. I had to follow him all over the place.'

‘Anything else?' I said. ‘Anything more specific he may have wanted you to look out for?'

There was a pause. ‘Yes,' Bray said finally. ‘He wanted to know if there was a place they often went to – a storeroom or an old warehouse. A place out of the way and that no one else knew about. A secret place. That's what Frank called it. Sounded a bit silly. It was like something out of a book for little kiddies. I asked him if he could be a bit more specific. Of course, I didn't really know what I was getting myself into then. He said he didn't know. Could even be really out of the way, like. A field. A wood. Anything. And if there was, I was to tell him straightaway. But I could pretty much do as I saw fit. As long as I kept him posted, kept an eye on 'em and billed him for the hours I put in, that was fine by him.'

‘But you must have made the connection between the three men eventually.'

‘Yeah. Didn't take long. You know – the looks I got when I started asking about 'em.'

‘But you didn't tell him?'

‘No – wasn't my job to. I just did what he asked me to do and kept an eye on this Gardner fella. I followed him on and off a few times a month for about a year, I think. Then, after a while, he seemed to lose interest, so I stopped.'

‘Even when you followed him to a school?'

‘God. You saw that?' Bray said thinly.

‘Yes.'

‘Hurst didn't seem all that bothered. He asked me for Gardner's telephone number when I sent him the tape. And I gave it to him along with his address. He was going a bit loopy by then, I think. I went to see him. Like I said, I'd twigged what it all meant by then. I was angry. I didn't want to get involved in any of that. And seeing Gardner with those kids … well … it was just fucking awful. But Hurst wouldn't even let me through the front door.'

‘You didn't consider contacting the police when you saw Gardner with that girl?'

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. ‘If I'd gone to the police, they'd have asked me why I was following Gardner. So no. But I did have a long chat with that girl when Gardner was gone. He … well, he tried to kiss her. You saw that. She swore that it was the first time. I said I'd be watching, and that if I saw anything like it again I'd report it to her school. And for good measure I told all her mates that if I caught any of them hanging out with Gardner, they'd have me to deal with.'

‘All right. And after Hurst got you to keep an eye on these three men, he never asked about Rebecca. You were to abandon that altogether?'

‘Yes. He'd pretty much given up on her by then.'

‘And you were to concentrate on Gardner?'

‘Yes. But it wasn't a full-time gig or anything like that. It was … well, he said it was at my own convenience. So, to prove I wasn't wasting his money and I was on the job, I videoed some of it and sent the tapes to him along with reports on what I'd found.'

‘So did you write reports on Gardner?'

‘Yes.'

‘All right,' I said, thinking that we must have left those in Hurst's house. ‘And is there any way you might have been seen? Do you think Gardner realized that Hurst had set you on to him?'

‘I don't know,' Bray said thoughtfully. ‘I was pretty careful. He just might have known someone was following him, but I don't know how. And I never really got that impression. Anyway, even if he had known, how would he have been able to link me to Hurst?'

On the other end of the line I could hear Bray's feet crunching in the gravel as he moved back towards the pub. I asked him to get me Gardner's last-known address and phone me as soon as he had it; then I thanked him and hung up.

20

Early the next morning Graves was reading a well-known tabloid that Drayton had left in the warmth of the tent in Frank Hurst's garden. He turned the page and almost did a double-take. There, at the top of the page, was a picture of the tent he was now standing in and the charred remains of Hurst's house right next to it. Beyond the rubble, collapsed walls leading to stretches of broken, jagged brick could be seen. Some stone stairs in the middle of the house spiralled up, collapsed and led nowhere – the stairs that Graves had climbed only a few days ago. The photographer had captured the desolate air of the place very well.

Graves shook his head. They must have come last night, when no one else was around. Beneath the photo was a lurid account of the discovery of Hurst's body at the top of the hill. Then the story went on to recount the tale of the two missing girls and the police's failure to find them. He almost decided to phone Downes and tell him straightaway about the article, but Downes would find out soon enough. If he didn't know already.

Graves left the tent and resolved to forget about it. He began to search through the charred rubble while Drayton threw the heavier rocks and pieces of debris into a wheelbarrow, then carted them away. The ruins had a damp, muddy and spongy feel to them as he made his way over their surface. He marked each area that he had covered with police tape fixed to spikes. Then he started all over again somewhere else.

It was long, painstaking and dull work. To begin with, there had been a very real dread every time he dug his hands into the ground. Perhaps he would feel the soft curve of a skull. The hem of a dress. A bone. But, as the days had worn on, he thought about this less and less, to the point where now he no longer thought about it at all. So far, he had come up with nothing of interest. A piece of old foam. Something broken and unrecognizable. A smooth-shaped rock that he threw to one side.

He looked up and massaged his eye with the back of a cold hand. Despite what he was searching for, it was still difficult to believe that anything dreadful could really happen in these far-off and remote hills. They were almost like a picture postcard, with all the snow. But already they seemed darker now. They held the potential for violence.

After a while his hands seemed to dig and search almost of their own accord. He kept at it, and by 11.00 a good portion of the place where the raised platform had once stood was covered with lines of fluttering police tape. He worked in silence as the cold deepened. So isolated did he feel that time out here seemed to be slowing down. Occasionally, leaves from the trees at the far end of the garden drifted down in the wind. The trees glistened. The clouds pushed over the fields. He kept searching.