Crime (46 page)

I deeply regret the things I said to Ray of Light. It’s no excuse, but I was drunk at the time. Anybody who knows me will tell you that I’m not in the habit of behaving that way.

Lennox types a reply into the thread.

No worries. These things happen. My head wasn’t in the best of places, so I apologise for my overreaction. I also know what drink can do. If we ever meet I’ll buy you a beer – or maybe we’ll both stick to tomato juice!

Yours in Hearts

Ray

As they move from their terminals to settle down in the dedicated café section of the premises, Tianna says to Lennox, — So where is it you’re taking us? Not here?

— No, it’s close by. But there’s something I’ve got to explain first, he says. — Those dreams we were talking about, mind I promised to tell you about them?

— Yes.

— Ray, Trudi intervenes, — Tianna doesn’t want to hear –

— Please, give me a moment, Lennox is insistent, — and I want you to hear about this too. I’ve never told anybody before.
Not
my mum, dad, anybody. It’s something I dream about a lot, something that happened. He looks over his shoulder. The place is almost deserted as they sit in a cramped corner, sipping at the coffee or milk and eating chocolate-chip cookies.

Lennox speaks softly, but authoritatively. There is no cop in his voice, at least to his own ears. — I had a very good friend. His name was Les, he tells Tianna. — When we were round about your age, we were out on our bikes, going through a long, dark tunnel, like a disused train tunnel. Some really bad, disturbed people were waiting in there and they caught us. At first we thought they wanted to steal our bikes, he says, looking at her for understanding.

Tianna dunks the cookie into her milk. She looks up warily. Trudi’s bottom jaw tightens and slides out towards him. — This is Les Brodie and you?

— Aye, he says, then turns back to Tianna. — I managed to get away, but not before they did something bad. I’ve never told anybody this before, but one of the men made me suck his penis.

— Ray, Trudi gasps, — that’s terrible, could you not tell the pol— She stops and looks at Tianna.

The young American girl has hung her head shamefully. But a small, defiant voice rises from her. — I know … Vince … he used to …

Lennox lifts her head up. — It’s not your fault. You’re a kid. I was just a kid. It wasn’t my fault. I never told anybody because I was ashamed and embarrassed. But it’s not me who should’ve felt that way. I did nothing wrong. It wasn’t my fault. He takes his hand away.

Her head stays up. Her eyes locked on his. — No. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t our fault, Ray.

— They got a hold of Les. He didn’t manage to get away. I tried to find help, but it took so long. They did bad things, terrible things, to him.

— Did they do … she whispers, casting a privacy-checking gaze over the café, — like, sex things with a man’s penis inside him?

— Yes, Lennox says. — Yes, they did. After this, Les was very
angry
for a while. He was angry because it wasn’t fair what they did to him. But he was so raging that he caused himself and other people a lot of hurt. Then he realised that by doing this, they were winning. They were controlling him still. All that anger, not going to the people that caused it, but back at himself and everybody he loved, right?

— Yes, she nods. — Yes, that’s right.

— I’ve tried to find those people who did that to Les. And me. I haven’t done so yet. But I will. I’ll never stop.

— You won’t stop because you’re good, Ray. You’re a good person, she tells him.

— No, I won’t stop because I don’t like what they do. My friend Les is the good person, because he was big enough to get over it. Do you understand?

Yes, it was true. Trudi shares a simultaneous notion with him: Ray Lennox is stunted in his emotional growth. Part of him will always be that fearful little boy in the tunnel. The rest, the kick-boxing, the policework, the hunting of nonces, it’s all a futile attempt to negate that. As long as he has to do the job, he’s stuck in that mode.
He has to let it all go
.

I have to let it all go
.

She can feel the frightening honesty bursting from him, compelling her to mirror his behaviour, to confess, to start their married life with a clean slate.
The real-estate guy; I need to say
…

They leave the café in silence. Lennox wants to stop off at a Walgreens for some unspecified reason, and Trudi is disconcerted when he emerges with a small can of gasoline. They go back down Lincoln but he swings left at Meridian Avenue and they walk up a few featureless blocks. — Where are we going, Ray? Trudi asks in mounting concern.

— It’s not too far, Lennox says, as the art deco district starts to thin out, building slowly into north Miami Beach’s high-rise condo land. Passing the Convention Centre, the girls struggle in the heat to match Lennox’s driven stride.

But Tianna Marie Hinton suddenly remembers how she likes to walk, loved to walk in Mobile, and she’s in keen pursuit of him, feeling her feet hit the ground and arms swing, her essence
rising
up through her body. Not buried so deep inside her that the conquerors of her flesh would never be able to dig it out, but rippling and crackling around her in the heat and light. She thinks of what Ray said about Hank Aaron and the plate smashers in the restaurant.
Fuck those assholes!
Trudi Lowe, inspired by the girl’s reanimation, quickens to keep pace.

Then, when they cross 19th Street, a startling sight greets them; to their right, a huge green hand rises into the air. At first it seems as if it belongs to a drowning body, but its reach into the azure sky is as defiant as it is pained. What initially appears to be a tangle of weeds wrapped round its wrist, is, on closer examination, a confused knot of life-sized human bodies, all undernourished and writhing in agony. Drawing closer, an impending sense of something tumultuous crackles in their bones and the air around them. The hand sprouts out of an island in the centre of a pond cut into a flagstoned plaza. As they walk on to the paved area, a statue of a weeping mother and two children ambushes them, with the slogan on the wall behind the petrified family reading: ‘Then in spite of everything I still believe that people are good at heart.’ The quote is attributed to Anne Frank.

A guard in uniform, with the uncompromised skin tone and features of the African rather than African American, sits outside a booth in the sun. Traffic seems to rumble up Meridian Avenue in a hushed reverence. Palm trees, still and solemn, tower over the pond, which is semicircled by foreground pillars interspersed with white-blossom plants, forming a canopy over a marble wall, stark and candid as bone. On this edifice, vandal-proof words and images are engraved, conveying the story of the Holocaust. A blackboard nothing can whiten, deface or erase; a library of last resort. Then there are the names: hundreds, thousands, millions of them: the adults and the children who perished in the death camps.

An enclosed bridge splits the crescent, and leads to the island and the green hand. Inside the tunnel, the names of the camps, household ones like Auschwitz and Buchenwald, sit mounted in blocks in the wall alongside ones Lennox hasn’t heard of before: Belzec, Ponary, Westerbork.

Unlike the other tunnel branded in his memory, slats of sunlight
cut
through this one like lasers, pouring in from the spaces above. At the other end they are greeted on the island by more withered green figures and yet more names, etched into another, inner marble circle. Lennox looks at the family names, so many young lives wiped out. He wonders if it ever occurred to the Nazis and those who served them that they were working for a giant child-abuse ring.

— I need to talk to Tianna, Lennox says to Trudi. — You understand? he asks both of them.

— Okay … Tianna says, — … but Trudi can come too.

— We all make mistakes, Ray. Trudi looks warily at him. — We all … She falters and thinks of that stupid night, looks down on the grassy knoll by the path, hands bunching into fists, ready to say
something
, but when she lifts her head she sees he’s moved away and is walking sombrely out of the memorial, through a gate, with Tianna alongside him. Trudi’s first impulse is to follow but something overrides, freezing in her synapses, rooting her to the spot. Dangerous thoughts stampede within her. Ray and Tianna had spent all that time alone. People did strange things alone. He’d been abused and never, ever told her this dark secret. What other secrets did he have?

Trudi Lowe is suddenly frightened. She sets off in pursuit of her fiancé. Wonders if she knows him any more than the facade, any more than she knew that smiling, toothsome real-estate man in that night of tortured fantasy. How well can we truly know others when we only see them through the lens of the self? She turns into the gate. The sun stinging her face like a peeling cosmetic mask left on too long. In the gardens she squints but can’t see Lennox or Tianna. The air is still and dense with heat.

Then she stumbles into a clearing, and to her relief, they come into view and have stalled by a bench. She hears Lennox say to Tianna, — Remember when those scumbags gave you stuff to make you sleepy, and then mucked about with you, on the boat. You remember, don’t you?

Listening intently, but keeping her distance, she hears Tianna’s faltering words: — Yes. I thought it was a dream, but it wasn’t no dream, she says. — Starry gone and drove me there. They gave
me
roofies, or something. I keep dreaming about him, that Lance Dearing, touching me … I thought they was dreams and that I was dirty for having them … Dearing said he was a cop and that he’d know if I’d been a bad girl, and that he could put away bad people … he’d know if I was dirty …

— No, not you.
You’re
not dirty. It’s
them
. These people are paedophiles. They’re nonces. What do you do when somebody tries to touch you, or says dirty things to you?

— You walk away, or you run away, she says, chewing on her bottom lip.

— Aye. And you tell them to fuck off, he says, and now Lennox trembles as he can see that sweaty prick in his face, feel the taste of it in his mouth. Touches the bristle under his nose. Grown to cover his lip. To put turf on the pitch. Scare away the beasts. The moustache that said, a little too desperately: I’m a man. — You say: fuck off, ya dirty fuckin stoat!

— Fuck off, Tianna shouts. — Fuck off, you dirty fucking stoat!

Trudi approaches them, touches his arm. It’s as stiff and unyielding as a bus stop. — Ray … Lennox turns and looks at her in pain and what she thinks is accusation.
He knows. That guy I went with. He knows. He can tell
.

Then he sharply turns back to Tianna. Trudi’s aware that he’s formed a terrible bond with this young girl, one that she can never share. — That’s right. Fuck off, you tell them, her policeman fiancé says. — Fuck off, ya dirty fuckin beast. And you shout and scream, he urges, — from the bottom of your lungs. You make people listen, you make them hear, right around the world, and Ray Lennox closes his eyes and he can see the men in the tunnel, the men that pulled him into this strange and terrifying world, who made him a cop, and Gareth Horsburgh and Lance Dearing, Johnnie and Starry, as he bellows a primal roar from the pit of his stomach and the depth of his soul in denouncement of all the tricksters and bullies and pervert beasts he or anyone else would ever encounter: — FUCK OFF, YA DIRTY NONCE!

His roar echoes and shakes around the still and peaceful garden. An elderly man and woman walking along a path jump back in alarm, and quickly retrace their steps.

— Ray, we need to go, Trudi says, but now Tianna is screaming manically along with him: — FUCK OFF, YOU DIRTY FUCKING NONCE, AND LEAVE ME ALONE!

Lennox seizes at the air, his gulps like punches. It’s time to get rid of it; to start expunging the black leaves and dead water that fill his heart. To stick with that process, no matter how long it takes. They shout together until they are breathless. Then Trudi puts her arm round the sobbing girl’s shoulders. — Ray, we have to go now!

— Wait. A panting Lennox raises his palm, looks at Tianna, then takes her smaller hands in his. — They had a list, these nonces. It’s a list of the kids they were planning to hurt. To get at through their mothers, like they tricked Robyn. The police have a copy of it, he says, as he tugs a sheaf of white papers from the backpack. The sun blasts off them in dazzling reflection. He takes out the can of gasoline and pours its contents over them. He sets the soggy papers down in an empty steel-framed garbage basket. — Now this isn’t the right thing tae do, not in a park, but on this occasion it’s justified.

Tianna nods as Lennox clicks open a lighter. Trudi looks nervously around. He catches her objection. — We have to do this one thing.

Anger surges through her. — There’s always one thing, Ray! Trudi grabs his shoulders and shakes them in exasperation. What does he want? To tell him that he caught one of Britain’s most notorious child killers or broke up a paedophile ring spanning three American states would be offensive to his ears. He will only ever see the Britneys, Tiannas, Leses and his own younger self he’s been unable to protect. He is a man who will always define himself by his failures. — Then what? Then what do
we
do? What do
you
do?

— Then we … Lennox breaks into a slow smile, — then we go back to the hotel and I give my mother a phone, he says, — and I tell her I’m sorry. He rubs his face, his breath catching. — Then I get a shave.

Trudi swallows stiffly, filling herself with Ray’s brown eyes, misty with self-reproach, nodding her head slowly in acknowledgement.

— This is all that’s left of them, Lennox tells Tianna, looking
at
the papers in the trash basket. — Your mum’s put them all away where they’ll never get at you; Vince, Clemson, Dearing, Johnnie and loads of others like them. It’s rubbish, cause that’s what they are, and he hands her the lighter. — Burn it. Go on. Burn the bastards.

Trudi, jaw clenched, sucks some air in through her teeth.