Flesh and Blood (2 page)

It was only when I stood beside my wide window,
overlooking the removals van and the front of the house, that I noticed the fourth building in Priory Mews. How I’d missed it outside, I’ll never know. Too busy gaping at our place, I suppose.

From the moment I saw it, it unsettled me.

It was set well back from the others, surrounded by tall, narrow shrubs like leafy security guards. A broad gravel pathway led up to an imposing entrance. The house was three storeys high, its two lower levels topped with a series of windows jutting out from very high, angular sections of roof. One of these sections rose up even taller than the others, punctuated by chimney breasts. At the corners, the walls had the kind of inlaid stone you see on old manor houses and castles, like zigzag reinforcements.

The house was more than double the size of the others in Priory Mews. A long, glassy ground-floor extension had been added at the side. Above loomed the tortured, twisted grey branches of ancient wych elms and silver birches in the back garden. A separate, modern two-door garage had been built closer to the road.

This, I later found out, was Bierce Priory, built in 1812. That extension was constructed in the 1920s,
at the same time as our house. Even at first sight, even with the excitement of the moment sending my mood soaring, the Priory looked cold and austere. As if it was watching me back.

Despite my impressions of the place, I paid no more attention to the Priory that day. Now, merely writing the name sends a rush of horror through my guts. We had Chinese takeaway for tea, and Mum and I spent hours dragging cardboard boxes from one room to another. Dad spotted our new neighbours at No. 2 getting into their car, an elderly couple, and called them over with a whistle and a wave. I didn’t catch their names but they seemed taken in by that studied chumminess of his. He talked at them for nearly twenty minutes, while they smiled blandly.

I hooked up the TV in the biggest living room. The sound bounced off the bare floorboards as I sat on our threadbare sofa. I patted its stained arm a couple of times.
You’ll be chucked out soon, old friend,
I thought to myself,
without a doubt
. I watched gangsters shoot each other while Mum scrubbed the bathroom and Dad clattered about. “Ellen! Where did you pack my… S’OK, babe, I found them!”

By eleven I was snuggled down on my mattress on the floor of my room. The pieces of my wooden bed frame were stacked in a corner, waiting for when I could be bothered to put them together. My anglepoise lamp threw a yellowy glow over the thick paperback anthology of ’70s
Doctor Strange
comics I’d got on eBay just before we moved.

I was starting at Maybrick High the following day, Thursday. I’d tried to squeeze a couple of days off, to start at the beginning of a week, but with the school only a two-minute walk away and me already being late for the start of the Maybrick term, I had no excuses. I yawned, clicked off the light and went to sleep.

When I got up, Mum had already left for work. Some things never change. She didn’t need to do that job any more, but she did it anyway. I had suggested to her that she could free up her job for someone who really needed the money, but she’d just looked at me as if I’d asked her to boil her head. The only difference now was that she’d chosen which bank branch to work in, rather than letting the bank send her anywhere it liked. I imagined that the Hadlington branch was a little more prestigious than the last one.

I was up, washed and dressed nearly an hour before I needed to leave. I got through two slices of toast and a mug of orange juice, with first-day nerves jangling at my stomach. I made my sandwiches with a care I never normally took. Displacement activity, to mask the jitters. Cake in my lunchbox? Did I want cake today?

I still had forty minutes before I needed to leave. I took a slow tour of the house. The silence was only broken by the clump of my shoes on the floorboards and the sound of Dad snoring.

I told myself not to be such a wuss. No need to be nervous. Best school in the district.

I checked myself in the unhung mirror in the hall. My new uniform was embarrassingly fresh and unworn. My stomach knotted all over again.

Outside, the air was sharp and damp, a fresh autumnal morning. I looked across to our two neighbouring houses, but nothing was stirring there. Opposite them, the Priory seemed a touch less sinister in the cold early light, glowering behind its spiky shrubs.

As soon as I walked out on to Maybrick Road, I could tell something was up. There was a steady
flow of uniformed kids along the pavements. From the end of Priory Mews, you could just see the main entrance to the school, but kids were going straight past it. They were hurriedly crossing the road and taking a wide path that led down the hill, ending at the green metal footbridge over the river, which led to the park and the corner of Elton Gardens.

As a handful of younger pupils passed me, I stopped one of them.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Dead body!” said the kid excitedly. “A Year Nine’s put a picture on Facebook.” He and his friends scurried on.

A what? Surely he meant an animal or something? A larger group of pupils, who looked my age, also crossed the road and headed for the path. I wondered if some of them were my new classmates. I allowed curiosity to drag me into the flow.

The path sloped in long, graceful curves down to the river. To either side were broad stretches of grass, and beyond that sprouted bushy swathes of tall reeds and sedges.

As the flow of kids approached the river, I could
see a gathering arranged in a ragged semicircle. I’d almost caught up with the group who looked my age, but hung back. I wasn’t sure if the best way to meet classmates was rubbernecking at the scene of an … accident?

A girl suddenly detached herself from the semicircle, staggered a few metres and vomited noisily on to the grass. A couple of her friends rushed to her side.

By now I was at the spot where the gathering of pupils had trampled flat a haphazard patch of the reeds. I could see something stretched out on the ground. Someone was saying that a woman walking her dog had found it a few minutes ago, that she’d already called the police. For a second, the scene flashed through my head: the dog sniffing around, not coming when called, taking a few licks.

I drew closer. I saw it in detail now.

My first day nerves vanished, replaced by icy horror.

It was a man, flat on his back on the damp ground, legs pointing away from me. He was dressed in dirty trainers, fleece tracksuit bottoms and a jumper. His limbs were straight, as if he’d calmly lain down on the spot. His face was upturned; dull staring eyes
pointed at the grey sky.

His face was spotted with blood. Much more blood, long sprays of it, fanned out around his head like some hideous spiked wig. The top of his head was gone. He simply ended, just above the face, sliced open like a pepper.

“Someone’s taken his brain!” cried the kid I’d stopped up on Maybrick Road.

“Eurgh, I bet that woman’s dog had it!” squirmed one of his friends.

The others groaned in disgust.

There was an empty, blood-smeared bowl of skull where the man’s brain had once been. I stepped back, almost without thinking. It was difficult to take in what I was seeing.

Suddenly, there was a general rush of pupils away up the path. At the same moment, I heard a single whoop from a police siren. A patrol car had driven across the park’s lawns, leaving muddy indentations, and was parked beside the footbridge. Two officers, a man and a woman, were dashing across the river.

“Get away from there, you kids! Don’t touch anything! Has anyone touched anything?”

There was a chorus of “no”s and “no way”s.
Pupils scattered and scurried back towards the school, looking over their shoulders as they went.

A woman I hadn’t spotted until now, with a white West Highland terrier bouncing around her, intercepted the female police officer and they started talking in hushed tones. The male officer jogged over to the corpse, let out a short exclamation at the sight of it and immediately radioed for backup.

I was more than a dozen metres away by now. Everyone was running, as if a gruesome creature was snapping at our heels. The younger ones laughed and shouted, while the older ones merely threw wide-eyed looks at each other.

I don’t really remember what happened for a few minutes after that. My mind went a bit numb. I must have gone to the school reception, to tell them I’d arrived. I presumably waited, then the Deputy Head must have collected me and led me to his office.

It was a pokey little room on the top floor of the main building, with a narrow floor-to-ceiling window, looking out on to the sports field. His desk was a litter of papers and dog-eared paperbacks. I sat below a cluttered corkboard. The Deputy Head himself, Mr Stainsby, was one of those naturally
scruffy people who can’t look smart to save their lives.

Only now, for some reason, did the obvious thought flash into my mind: that was a murder, in the park. A killing.

“Well, it’s great to welcome you to our school, Steve,” he began, pulling out drawers and looking for something.

“Sam,” I said.

“Sorry, yes, Sam.” He searched among his papers. “OKaaay, I’m afraid I’m filling in for the Head; he normally likes to have a chat with new students, but he’s away at a leadership seminar. I hope you’re feeling up to today’s challenges. Forgive me, but I just heard a moment ago there was some sort of incident in the park? You didn’t happen to see anything, did you?”

The man had been horribly murdered. Cut open.

“Er, no, I didn’t see anything,” I said, not wanting to talk about it.

“Oh, right, OK,” he said, finally pulling out a slim file. “The Office was, umm… Anyway, here’s your timetable; we’re on the two-week system here – are you familiar with that?”

“Yes, we had the same thing at my last school,” I said, taking the sheet of paper from him.

He consulted the file. “I’ve got the reports here from your last school. You’re clearly an excellent student, which is great, but it does look as if you’ll have some catching up to do. In most of your subjects, we’re further along in the curriculum than you were at –” he flicked a sheet – “Oak Vale.”

“What will I need to do?”

“Best action plan is to talk with your form tutor, who is… Miss Marlo. I was going to say that I’ll give you a whistlestop tour of the school first, but I think…” He checked his watch. “I think if I take you down to your form room right now, I can hand you over to Miss Marlo straight away. How’s that sound?” He looked up at me and grinned.

“Fine,” I smiled. Already I didn’t like him.

He led me back through a labyrinth of corridors and stairwells, much of it laced with the mixed odours of air freshener and human beings. My nerves began to jangle again. I got looked at quizzically by everyone we passed. New face.

Miss Marlo taught English, and her classroom was at the end of a wide walkway covered in pictures
of writers and some poster-sized reproductions of famous book covers. Mr Stainsby knocked once and marched inside. I followed him meekly, conscious that everyone in the room would be examining me, marking me out of ten for coolness and acceptability. I wondered if I should try to act casual. Or would that look obvious?

My new form tutor was younger than my parents, very blonde and very thin. As Mr Stainsby came into the room, she swung round. Her expression was flustered.

“Mr Stainsby, I need a word at once,” she said in a low voice. Looking at her, and at the thirty other faces in the room, I guessed she’d just been told about the corpse.

The two teachers bustled out into the corridor, Miss Marlo pointedly shutting the door behind her. I was left standing there, up in front of the whiteboard. The whole class did exactly what I’d expected them to do: stare right at me. There was a pause.

“Awkward!” I said loudly.

They all laughed, a release of tension via a weak joke. As if on cue, the bell rang. Everyone rose, chair legs scraping loudly.

I recognized a couple of faces from the group that I’d shadowed down the path to the river. One of them was blinking back tears, and I assumed it was them who’d told Miss Marlo what had happened.

Everyone was shouldering bags, shuffling out and chattering to each other. Miss Marlo suddenly appeared at my side. “Hello, sorry about that. Do you have your timetable?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Come back here at break; we can talk then. For now, we’ll just have to throw you in at the deep end.” She fluttered a hand at a tall boy who was shuffling out with the others. “Liam, you’re a sensible lad – can you take Steve Hunter here under your wing this morning?”

“Sure,” said Liam. He had small eyes and a slightly chunky nose, topped with a dense mop of brown hair. He clearly wasn’t too keen on having the new kid tag along. “What’s your first lesson?”

I whipped a look at my timetable. “Er, history.”

“Most of us, too; follow me. H3.”

We were halfway down the corridor outside, squashed in the mass of students, me trying not to
lose sight of the back of Liam’s head, when he turned and spoke again. “Steve, is it?”

“Sam,” I said.

“Sam, OK,” he said.

History was fine, mostly. Maths likewise. I was gawped at, and issued textbooks, and singled out by teachers, and called Steve. It had to be wrong on a vital piece of paper somewhere.

The contrast between the pupils of Maybrick High and those of my last school was so huge as to be almost comical. Oak Vale was a school where there was a daily fight beside the bike shelters, where a twitchy weirdo in an anorak sold drugs to sixth formers outside the gate, and the Head banged on about league tables being unimportant in the broader picture. It was the sort of place where teachers kept saying how every kid was ‘brilliant’ and every piece of work ‘incredible’ in order to cover up how dismal and bad it all was, until whatever they said became meaningless. I didn’t really have any friends there, not proper friends, and I’d been glad to leave it all behind.

Maybrick High kids were far more affluent, that’s for sure. Many had the self-assured confidence you
see in people who come from a history of money: the unspoken assumptions, the certainty of approval and advantage, that comes with being completely secure, and knowing your future.

I couldn’t even imagine myself being like them. But here I was.

It was halfway through maths when the command came from on high. Mr Stainsby, in the Head’s absence, issued a statement to be read out in every class. “Any students who witnessed the tragic incident in the park this morning should attend specially arranged trauma counselling in the upper school hall during the lunch break. An officer from the local police will also be on hand, if any student has information they would like to bring forward. The police officer will not, repeat not, be answering questions relating to the incident. It has come to the staff’s attention that a small number of students took photographs at the scene using their phones, and that some of these photographs are now circulating around the school. These photographs are to be deleted immediately. The school has been advised that students may be committing an offence by storing them, uploading them to a social-networking website, or sending them to others.”

The murder was more or less the only topic of conversation outside lessons. By lunchtime, Chinese whispers had included everything in the story from a pack of wild dogs to a carful of drug dealers. The one consistent thing, the one thing everyone appeared to agree on, was that at the root of it all was the Elton Gardens estate. No doubt about it. That was where these things started, definitely, no question. Bet it was gangs.

Being the new kid, I didn’t like to butt in. I had plenty to say about the fact that the corpse had obviously been dissected with care, and certainly not gunned down in a drive-by shooting or anything like that. I also had plenty to say about sweeping generalizations and appalling prejudices. I said none of it.

I did make a few guarded comments to Liam. We got talking a bit more after maths, mostly about the homework we’d been given, which was on a topic I’d never even heard of, let alone studied. I surmised that he was the class expert on science and technical subjects.

When the bell for lunch break went, Liam and I joined the long queue in the canteen. I’d expected to
be able to find somewhere quiet to eat my sandwiches in peace, but absolutely nobody appeared to have brought a packed lunch with them, so I left my lunchbox at the bottom of my bag and stood in line for pie and chips.

“They given you a pre-pay card yet?” said Liam.

“No, I’ve got some cash,” I said, as casually as I could. Luckily, I’d taken a fiver from my wallet before leaving home. I just hoped pie and chips wouldn’t come to more than that!

The canteen was the standard model: the trailing queue, dinner ladies clanking their pots behind enormous metal serving units, rigidly arranged tables and chairs. A few minutes later – £4.20, phew – we weaved our way across the room with our plastic trays. Liam made a beeline for a small table in the corner where a girl was already sitting. She nodded a hello as Liam and I approached. The table was meant for two, but Liam found a spare chair and I squeezed in awkwardly at the side, pulling the chair as far forward as I could, so I didn’t stick out too much. Our three trays took up about a hundred and twenty per cent of the available table space.

“This is Jo,” said Liam. He pointed at me. “This is
Sam Hunter, new today, Marlo’s class.”

“Hello,” smiled Jo. She was moon-faced and freckly, with a mass of messy curls. She and Liam had the same date of birth, they later told me, which was how they’d originally got talking.

“Hi,” I smiled. I had no idea what to say next.

“How are you finding this place?” said Jo.

“Er, different,” I said, with raised eyebrows. “It looks like I’ve got some catching up to do.”

“Yeah, they said that to a girl in my class,” said Jo. “She’s new this year, too, and she seems fine. I wouldn’t worry.”

Liam was already halfway through his pie. “I wish someone would send me one of those murder pictures,” he said, through a mouthful. “Have you two seen any?”

“No,” said Jo. “Fat Matt in our class said he was there, but that’s crap.”

“I was there,” I said.

They both gazed at me. A morsel of pie was poised on Liam’s bottom lip. “Really?” he said.

“Really,” I said.

“You lucky sod,” grumbled Liam. “The most interesting thing that’s happened in ages and I
missed it.”

“It’s no joke,” I said. “I really don’t think you’d want to see any pictures. It was horrible.”

“Are you OK about it?” said Jo. “I saw a few people going into the upper school hall a minute ago.”

“I’m fine, weirdly enough. I think I’m still a bit shell-shocked. It keeps popping into my head, though. And nobody around here seems too surprised… I mean, no offence, but except for those who saw it, people seem to have your attitude to it.”

“None taken,” grinned Jo. “Sorry, we’re not being jokey, it’s just, y’know, Elton Gardens. There’s
always
stuff going on over there.”

I had to say something. “It clearly wasn’t gangs, or anything like that. The poor guy was deliberately cut up.”

Liam edged forward slightly. “Is it true his head was chopped off?”

I hesitated. “Not really… The top half was. That’s what I mean – he was cold-bloodedly opened up, he wasn’t beaten or shot or anything.”

“Even so,” said Jo, “Elton Gardens really has got a terrible reputation. Honestly, I don’t think there’s anything you wouldn’t put past them. Actual murders
are pretty rare, I admit, so this is serious shit. They found a garage full of ketamine the other week and they found an arm in the river about a year ago. It’s like Gotham City!”

“An arm?” I said. “On its own?”

“Yup, no body, nothing. Severed arm, sliced clean off. It was pumped full of drugs, too. Medical stuff, I mean, not Class As. They kept those sort of gory details out of the press, for some reason.”

“How do you know about it?” I said.

“My dad’s a journalist on the
Hadlington Courier
,” said Jo. “So I get to hear all kinds of good stuff.”

“Really?” I said. I unintentionally blurted my enthusiasm. “Would they be interested in an article? By me, I mean. About what I saw? I’m thinking about a career in journalism.” I don’t know what made me say it. I wouldn’t have, normally.

“Yeah?” said Jo. “Well, I can ask. They don’t usually take much stuff from freelancers, but you never know. If not, when we get to Work Experience week, I can definitely get you into Dad’s office.”

“That’d be brilliant!” I beamed.

“What do your parents do?” said Liam.

My stomach suddenly turned inside out but I
tried not to let anything show on my face. “Er, my mum works in a bank, and my dad … has his own business.” I knew for a fact they’d been assuming that Mum was a branch manager and Dad was some sort of suited entrepreneur. Embarrassment clawed at my guts.