Make Believe (10 page)

Butchers sh
ook his head, raised a warning hand –
I’m not here
.  He felt sick.  He’d blanked three calls from Kim already.  It was busy and he was up to his eyes.  If she was mithering him like this now, then just how much worse would it be once they were hitched? 

‘
Just missed him,’  Shap said smoothly.  ‘All systems go for tonight?’  He listened and laughed.  ‘Can’t wait.’

Shap
hung up and looked to Butchers waiting for an explanation.  He could whistle for it.  Butchers shrugged, easier than trying to justify his behaviour.  Wasn’t sure what was going on himself, anyway.  No time to be bothering about all that now, he needed to do a bit more digging with Luke Stafford.

Butchers head
ed for the door then stopped. ‘Maybe we should postpone the party – everyone’s flat out.’

‘
No way, mate,’ said Shap, ‘after the last few days we need a chance to get totally hammered.’

Which was n
ot what Butchers wanted to hear.

The Staffords’ place was still a tip.  Didn’t look like anyone had picked up anything since Butchers’ last visit.  Ken Stafford simmered with resentment, if Luke Stafford had a temper, lost control and got into bother, Butchers could tell where he’d got that from.  While the father sat in an armchair, sitting forward rather than relaxing back, the lad stood leaning against the door jamb.  Butchers had invited him to sit down but the kid had replied, ‘Rather stand.’

Butchers started with the Saturday
of the abduction.  They had already answered questions about that day, he’d lull them into thinking he was just going over the same old ground then chuck something new into the mix.  See what it threw up.

‘A week last Saturday you were working?’ Butchers said to Ken Stafford.

‘
I told you that,’ he said.

‘
You work nights, so Luke’s here on his own?’

‘That’s right,’
Ken Stafford said.

‘Then what?’

‘
We’ve been over this,’ he said.

‘
I’d like to go over it again,’ Butchers said stolidly. 

Ken Stafford
shifted in his seat, ‘Shift finishes at four am,’ he said tightly, ‘I get in at half past.  Slept till five-ish that evening.’

‘
Long sleep.’

‘
I needed it,’ Ken Stafford retorted.  ‘I’d only just got off when the bloody builders roll up.’

‘
You remember this, Luke?’ said Butchers

‘
I was asleep but he told me, later.  You never shut up about it,’ he complained to his father.

‘
What time did you get up?’ Butchers asked the lad.

‘
Dunno,’ he gave a quick shrug.

‘
Rest of that day.  Where were you?’

‘
Here, probably,’ Luke said.

‘
You can’t remember?’

‘
Here.’

‘And
you didn’t see Luke for the best part of  twenty odd hours?’ Butchers said to Ken Stafford.

‘That’s right,’ he said.

‘You’ve been in a bit of bother,’ Butchers said to Luke, ‘assault, anti-social behaviour.  Make you feel big, does it, knocking people about?’

Luke
set his jaw, sullen, didn’t answer.

Ken Stafford glanced sharply at Butchers.

‘You get a buzz out of hurting people?’ Butchers said.

‘
Pack it in,’ Ken Stafford threatened Butchers, ‘don’t talk to him like that.’

‘
You know Phoebe Wray well?’ Butchers asked Luke.

S
urprise flashed across the boy’s face and he blushed.  ‘We’re mates,’ he stammered, ‘that’s all.’

‘
Mates,’ Butchers echoed.  ‘She said anything to you about her half-brother’s abduction?’

‘
No,’ Luke said.

‘
Nothing?  Odd that.’

‘
Said you lot went round there.’

‘
That all?’ Butchers said.

‘
Yeah,’ he said.  But Butchers had the sense there was more, that Luke was hiding something.  He turned to Ken Stafford, ‘Have you any objection to me taking a look round?’

‘
Yes, I have,’ Ken Stafford said baldly. 

‘
I could get a warrant,’ Butchers said.

‘
You best do that, then.’

‘
We normally expect a degree of co-operation in a case involving a child.’

‘
You get a warrant and we’ll co-operate,’ the man said.  ‘And don’t come back without one.’

Charm
personified.

Donny McEvoy was having a tea break when Shap caught up with him, mug balanced on a pile of breeze block, rolling tobacco on his knee.  ‘Mr McEvoy?’

He looked up eagerly,
‘You from the papers?’  McEvoy’s eyes gleamed, the bloke was practically slavering.

Shap flashe
d his warrant card.  McEvoy didn’t look quite so keen then.

‘
My boss,’ Shap said, ‘she’s not very happy.  You shooting your mouth off.  That could compromise our investigation.’

‘
I’m only giving my side of the story,’ McEvoy protested.

‘
Not any more, you’re not.’ Shap lit a fag of his own.

‘
What about free speech?’ McEvoy bleated.

‘
It isn’t free if it costs us the case,’ Shap told him.  ‘Get it?  Now – dates, places, times.  I need to go over it all with you again.’

‘
Fine,’ he said.  ‘It’s all in here,’ he tapped at his head.  ‘I can see it, that little bundle.  It was horrific …’

‘
Back up a-ways,’ Shap interrupted.  He got out his phone to record McEvoy’s answers.  ‘Let’s start at the beginning, how long had you been working at Kendal Avenue?’

  Butchers called Lisa who was at Felicity Wray’s to check that the search was still ongoing.  It was Phoebe’s bedroom he was most interested in and when he walked into it, he could see it looked promising. The posters on the wall were the stuff of nightmares: people in clown masks looking far from funny, blood and gore, vampires and images of war, a band all dressed in skeleton suits.  One slogan read,
Death is Freedom
.

He scanned the bookshelves, and then he saw the title:
Children Who Kill
by Carol Anne Davis.  He grabbed it and opened the cover.  A name written inside,
Luke Stafford
. 

‘
Look at this,’ he said to Lisa, ‘Luke Stafford has lent her a book on child murders.’

Lisa raised her eyebrows. 
‘And everyone says kids don’t read anymore,’ she joked. 

Butchers
placed the book in a sealed evidence bag.  He hadn’t pieced it all together yet but there was something here, he could feel it.  Two teenagers going off the rails, egging each other on.  Impressionable at that age, risk takers, no sense of consequences.  Butchers felt a kick of excitement; he was onto them, he was going to hunt them down and bring them in.  Not exactly sure who’d done what yet.  But both Luke Stafford and Phoebe Wray looked guilty as sin.

Claire’s mind was on a loop,
it’s not Sammy, it’s not Sammy, it’s not Sammy
.  She found the concept impossible to grasp.  The  previous forty-eight hours she had been doing her hardest to accept the awful truth; to accept the image of her little boy in a drainage tunnel, his small body lifeless, so terribly damaged they would not let her see him.

She had been carrying that in her heart and now they were telling her that poor child was not her child.  They didn’t know who he was but they were absolutely certain he was not Sammy.

It was a violent wrench, them snatching away the truth, the certainty, cruel finality, almost as violent as Sammy being stolen in the first place and Claire was reeling from it, unable to reconfigure the features of the dead child into those of a stranger. 
It’s not Sammy.

The words didn’t sink in.  Her body, every
fibre from the hair on her skin to the marrow in her bones had been devastated by the shock of Sammy’s death, fighting to absorb it.  And now to have it reversed, to have this macabre resurrection was incomprehensible.  It was so hard to unthink it, unfeel it.

Perhaps he was dead anyway.  Was this her mother’s instinct recognizing the fundamen
tal truth?  That even though this dead child was not her boy, her boy was still a dead child.

She was sick and dizzy with it all.  And angry.  Angry that suddenly she was expected to readjust.  For a third time.

First to be bereft, full of fear and shame, mad with desperation that her boy had gone, disappeared. 
Magic, Mummy, Izzy-whizzy.

Then to be crushed, sobered, broken by the notification of death.

And now, a third yank of the rope, fresh torture.

It hurt when she breathed, her lungs, her ribs were sore.

How dare they, the police, fate, whoever.

The logical part of her brain told her this might yet be a good thing.  Sammy might be alive if he’s not in that sewer.  But her instincts felt heavy, swollen, leaden.
  Then there were flashes of piercing guilt when she thought that her reprieve meant that somewhere else another mother had lost her son.

Why hope, she thought, so there can be yet another fall?  Another blow to the skull, another attack on her heart.

Where was he?  Was he frightened?  He had a way of freezing, shrinking when he was scared.  He wouldn’t scream and run, sometimes he didn’t even cry, just stilled, frozen like a wary animal.

There were people on the television, voices,
news headlines, the police detective – DCI Lewis.  Clive turned up the sound.

Claire
looked at it stupidly for a second then felt her gorge rise.  Sickening.  That’s what it was.  Sickening and brutal and pitiless and she wanted it to stop.  All of it.  Forever.

Janine was in her office trying to work.  Richard and Millie were just outside, Richard looking over the new press release to accompany the reconstruction of Sammy Wray’s abduction.

‘Great,’ Richard said.

‘
Needs sensitive handling,’ Millie said.

‘
You’re good at that,’ Richard said with a throaty chuckle.

Oh, please, Janine prayed, enough.  It was
hard to concentrate without this going on.  She got up to close her door and saw Butchers and Lisa arriving back.  ‘Boss,’ Butchers called.  Janine went to see what he was so excited about.

‘
Luke Stafford and Phoebe Wray are mates,’ he said.  ‘He’s a history of violent behaviour and he lives next door to the murder scene.  She’s got reason to want rid of Sammy Wray.’

‘
What are you saying?’ Richard asked before Janine had chance.

‘
It’s a pact,’ Butchers answered, ‘she does Sammy – he does another child.’

‘
Oh, come on,’ Janine said.

‘Or maybe he was going after Sammy, to prove himself to her, like, but he got the wrong child,’ said Butchers.

‘
They’re kids,’ Janine said incredulously.  Murders of children by children were relatively rare.  Janine had never worked one in all her years as a detective.  When it did happen it sent shock waves through the nation; was held up as evidence of the collapse of society.  The names of child murderers lived on for decades in popular imagination: Mary Bell, Jon Venables, Robert Thompson.  And as for a pact between a teenage girl and boy, to abduct her half-brother and also to kill another child, it was ridiculous.  Butchers was living in some fantasy land.

‘You should see her room.’ Butchers wasn’t giving up, ‘Chiller DVDs, stuff about death and pain.  Sick stuff.  Look,’ he waved a book at her, ‘
Children Who Kill
.’

‘
I can read,’ Janine told him.

‘In her room, but it belongs to Luke Stafford.  And the stuff all over the walls—’

‘
She’s fourteen,’ Janine slapped him down. ‘Leonard Cohen, purple ink, crap poetry.  I know you sprang fully formed Butchers but the rest of us have been there, got the T-shirts.’

He wasn
’t deflected.  ‘The Staffords wouldn’t let us look round.  They’re acting guilty.’

Janine looked
to the others for reactions.  Were they buying this?  Richard shook his head. 

But Shap played
devil’s advocate.  ‘They’re being obstructive.  And they are right on the doorstep, plenty of chance to nip out and dump the body.’