The Silence (Dc Goodhew 4) (27 page)

‘They weren’t heavy users – someone gave them something bad.’

‘But you knew they were using?’

‘I guessed. All teenagers do it. They would’ve known what they were doing though. They just mucked around, nothing serious.’

Marks had heard the
It was just marijuana/steroids/Ecstasy
, delete-as-applicable, shock response from a bereaved
parent/friend/relative
, also delete-as-applicable, too many times in the past. It had ceased to surprise him years ago, but he felt increasingly angry every time it was trotted out.

‘They weren’t stupid,’ Stacy continued firmly.

‘I also wanted to inform you that we will be running further tests on the blood samples taken at the time.’

Stacy ground out the butt of his cigarette between his discoloured thumb and index finger and dropped the rest. ‘Should have guessed you lot didn’t look into it very hard. Couple of no-hope kids, what do you care?’

‘Actually I do, and if anything has been missed in the earlier investigation I’ll do my utmost to find it. That means I will stay in contact with you.’

Stacy shook his head in disgust and turned back towards the half-built house. After three or four paces he hacked up a mouthful of phlegm and spat it over his left shoulder. He cocked his head towards Marks and then shouted to a colleague, ‘Old Bill reckon they’ve cocked up.’

Marks walked towards his car.

When Stacy reached the other men he turned again, and as Marks closed his car door, delivered his final volley.

‘I lost everything, when I lost them. My kids were my fucking world.’

Marks retaliated silently,
No, they weren’t. But they should have been.

At primary school they called him Nobby, as in ‘copper nob’. And by fifteen it had been shortened to Nob. Or variations.
Oi, Nob
or
You fucking nob
were the two most common.

He’d dyed his hair now and his teeth were no longer overcrowded, nor tipping back like king penguins the moment before they topple.

He’d still looked like that in the last school photo. It had been one of those whole-school roll-out efforts, the ones that seemed like a good idea, that parents bought then didn’t know what to do with. Mostly they seemed destined to stay in some drawer, probably held tight by their original elastic band until either the rubber perished or the photograph was dug out in response to one of those ‘Do you remember so-and-so . . . ?’

For Nobby it had been neither scenario. He’d never even thought about the school photo since the day it was taken. His mum hadn’t bought a copy and he hadn’t cared. What interest was there in a photograph full of the victims and the bullies and worse still, those who stood silently on the sideline. Those with their sympathetic expressions and too little courage to harness the power of majority.

It had been an airless July afternoon when he’d first clapped his eyes on the wretched thing. An hour earlier and it would have only been a school photo. By the time he saw it, it had become the answer, the map and the future.

He’d helped himself to that same copy without asking, and now it stood on its end on the shelf next to the TV.

He liked watching television, but sometimes found it impossible to concentrate on any programme until he’d opened out the photo and studied it one more time.

He didn’t think it counted as either a trophy or the start of one of those obsessional collections of the newspaper clippings or hacked-up photographs that other killers seemed to collect.

In reality he didn’t know much about any of it. He certainly didn’t consider himself a criminal. That word belonged to the kind of opportunistic conscience-free scum who undermined society. He was on the other side of the fence – right over the other side.

One day he’d be arrested, charged and put on trial. There would be condemnation until they’d heard his side. The jurors would be the adult equivalents of one section of the kids in the photograph.

Two rows staring out at him, blank faced because of the unfamiliarity of it – but fully alert nonetheless.

Their expressions wouldn’t change but finally their eyes would light up as they recognized the truth.

He doubted that he would be faced with jail, although he’d understand it if the judge handed down a custodial term. The law needed to maintain the illusion that this wasn’t an acceptable way for good people to behave. He’d see the look of apology in the judge’s eye and accept his fate like a man.

He was well versed at imagining every scenario he expected to face. The courtroom scene was a favourite. He’d even been to visit the court; he sat in the public gallery watching a wretched defendant named Bryant deny that he’d ever seen a succession of stolen vehicles – even the ones smothered with his fingerprints, DNA and trademark touched-up paintwork.

£120,000 worth of BMWs.

Bryant’s defence relied on: ‘Must be a mistake . . .’

Nobby’s own defence would centre on the more challenging assertion: ‘I knew exactly what I was doing and I never got it wrong.’ He would take them back to the beginning . . .

He barely noticed himself reach for the photograph, but once it was in his hands, his fingers traced over the curve of the roll and the sheen of the glossy coated paper.

This photograph would definitely be Exhibit Number 1. The police would probably label it differently, by using a numeric reference that, for them at least, held a wider significance. But he would explain to them that it had to be Exhibit 1 and refuse to refer to it by any other name.

The moment had come to look at it again so he placed the end approximately three inches to the left of his left elbow and unrolled it from there. He knew this was the perfect position so that the group he wanted to view would appear directly in front of him.

And there they were.

He could almost hear Mr McCracken calling out their names with his Glaswegian growl swamping every syllable. The boys by their surnames, Brett, McCarthy, Stacy, Stone, Viney and Wren. And full names for the girls: Mandy French and Sarah Sumner.

McCracken never spat out all those names in the same breath – that was his own, minor embellishment. In fact, they weren’t all in the same class or even the same school year.

But by luck they
were
all in the same quarter of this big roll-out picture, and Nobby loved the way they all stared out at him, unaware of the invisible rings that circled some, the lines that joined the circles, and the way they were close enough for him to cover their faces with the tips of his fingers and make them disappear.

Just staring at the picture brought back that summer: the sawdust and the disinfectant mix that was swept along the corridors to remove the smell of sweat and the trodden-in food scraps and dirt on the stair carpet. The stewed smell that hung in the air outside the cafeteria even when the school was silent at the weekends. And the holes the kids had cut in the six-foot fence to get them out, or in, at will.

The deserted playground and the sound of the football being kicked rhythmically against the science-block wall until Mr Groves, the caretaker, bustled over to tell everyone to get lost.

All of those memories had been nothing until the first and subsequent unrolling of that photograph. Clichéd as it sounded, the day it was taken now seemed like only yesterday, and he wished he could fall into that scene, knowing what had really happened, knowing what he knew now.

He liked to think he would have killed them all.

He might have regretted that, for who would have suffered then? Their parents, their loved ones, but not them. Or he might have done nothing, and regretted that more.

His thoughts switched, heading off on a tangent, but always arcing back to the familiar . . . when he’d owned a dog once. And about the same time discovered Stourbridge Common.

On reflection it had been a stupid and inconvenient idea. He wasn’t a ‘dog person’, and he had neither the time nor the interest in the animal to sustain more than a few weeks of long walks and bagging up its mess.

His brief stint of dog-ownership had been about a woman. Her name was Connie, a skinny blonde with drainpipe jeans that failed to reach as high as her bony hips. She ‘fostered’ animals, and had turned her home into a small sanctuary for three dogs and four cats.

They had sex the night they met – not the cat and the dog but him and Connie. And it had been far more satisfying than the get-it-over-with shag he’d been after. He hadn’t even had the expectation of enjoying sex again – he wasn’t even sure he wanted to, at first – but Connie did.

Connie had a practical approach, thought of sex like a bag of chips or a burger on the last bus home. It was something you grabbed when you felt the urge; it didn’t need to be your whole diet and not worth beating yourself up over either.

He merely offered her a lift home but stayed for the whole weekend. Her bedroom looked out on to Stourbridge Common, and when he woke in the morning he decided it had to be the most sinister place in the whole city. The other commons like Midsummer and Newnham seemed tranquil; elsewhere in Cambridge the river-edges were moored with prettily painted narrowboats and the open areas criss-crossed by pathways that promised picnics and festivals. All these were views to stroll through or photograph. Welcome destinations. Postcards home.

Stourbridge Common, by contrast, was none of those things. Yes, there were narrowboats, but only the kind with the flaking paint and mossed-up windows hid down here. Even those that were halfway smart looked as though they’d fallen into bad company, tethered there between the abandoned and floating scrap-heaps.

He wondered why Connie bothered to foster her animals when every one of her charges seemed to have feral relatives scavenging from the narrowboats. Even the vegetation seemed stunted and twisted, the pastureland bursting with fat clumps of weed that sprouted from the cow-shit-heavy grass. Cows avoided eating it and no one had thought to introduce sheep.

Most of Cambridge didn’t unnerve him, day or night. But even in the daytime on Stourbridge Common he found it hard not to look over his shoulder.

Connie didn’t get it. She always walked the dogs last thing at night. Thought they would protect her.

They had lain in bed one afternoon and he tried to make some conversation regarding the subject.

‘What d’you know about the Common, then?’

‘What . . . like its history?’ She turned her head just enough for him to glimpse the look of distaste on her face. ‘Don’t know. We’re not here for the view, are we?’ She made coquettish eyes at him. If she’d been twenty years younger, maybe they would’ve worked, but some women’s faces were too world-weary to pull it off after the age of twenty-five, and she was undoubtedly one of them.

She read too many cheap magazines too, and her brain was filled with the idea that all any man wanted was a woman with an insatiable appetite for sex. She saw no reason to keep her past discreetly hidden from him and made love like she’d taken tips from a second-rate porn movie; she groaned, panted and said ‘yes, yes, yes’ at every orgasm.

Or every faked orgasm.

His fascination with Stourbridge Common and his interest in shagging Connie seemed inversely proportional. She had been there at the right moment to allow him to catch his emotional breath. She’d never been a keeper, more like the temporary muse whose sole purpose was to inspire his next steps.

His waning interest in her was also inversely proportional to her interest in him; she was the classic woman who argued the benefits of no-strings sex then wouldn’t let go. So they lay on the bed, her head on his chest and her hand on his thigh.

‘I started reading up on the Common,’ he told her.

‘Me too.’

‘Really?’ He felt pleased, but irritated too as though she’d stepped on to his territory somehow. ‘What did you find out?’

‘It was once where they held the largest fair in Europe.’

‘Yeah, everyone knows that.’

His response disappointed her and she fell silent for a moment or two. ‘Okay, smartarse, tell me more.’

He stretched it out, giving her the history from 1199 to the early twentieth century, when it finally ended. He deliberately missed out two things; the one she wanted to hear and the one he’d decided to keep to himself.

‘Did you read about those London Hackney Carriages?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ he lied.

She sat up, a manoeuvre which involved sliding her body up his and straddling him. She didn’t have attractive breasts. They were small, which was okay but they sagged too, and the combined effect reminded him of the ears on the pigs’ heads that she bought as a treat for her dogs. The largest dog, an Alsatian cross named Myrtle, always tore them off and snapped her teeth as she tossed them around the garden.

‘The Hackney Carriages would be hired by ladies and driven around the streets.’ She made the annoying quote gesture with her fingers at the word
ladies
. ‘One shilling and sixpence, it cost.’

‘For her to hire the carriage or for the men to have sex?’

‘I don’t know.’ Connie scowled. ‘They were making a profit or they wouldn’t have done it.’

‘I guess so. So why do
you
do it?’

‘Oi! I’m not a slag.’

‘Come on, you’d have loved wearing all that finery and a queue of men to pull the petticoats over your head.’

‘Have you ever done it with two women in the same night?’

‘No. Have you – with two blokes, I mean?’

‘No.’ She went quiet, probably thinking about the opportunities missed. She’d slept with more men than he met in the course of a year. If they were ten days apart or ten minutes, what was the fucking difference?

It wasn’t exactly the moment he decided to kill her, just the moment when he realized he wouldn’t mind.

He remembered reining in his thoughts. This was the first time the two halves of his brain had recognized the other’s process of thinking.

There had only been one death so far, one which his conscious mind had written off as an act of passion. It hadn’t been a mistake though, just unplanned, and on the one or two moments when he remembered what he’d done, Nobby knew it had been something very, very risky.