Pretty Little Dead Things (14 page)

  The boy glared at me, but his eyes were wet. "Fuck off."

  "He's over there now. He's waving at you, and calling your name." I studied the smoking boy, trying to make out what he was saying, but the distance was too great for me to fully understand what message he was trying to convey – if there were any message at all. Often there isn't. Sometimes they just appear and hang around for a while before moving on.

  "How do you know about our Jordan? He's been dead for years." The boy's cheeks were white; his too-large eyes had consumed most of his face.

  "Jordan loves you, and he's watching over you. He wants you to try your best, I think, and not to make the same mistakes that he did." I was making it up as I went along, but I sensed that there was something of the truth in what I said.

  The boy on the patch of waste ground stopped waving, nodded his head. He held up a hand, the fingers splayed apart, and then he stepped back into the smoke that was still churning from the old sofa and became part of it, drifting into pieces and finally slipping from view.

  The boy at my side was backing away. He was halfway across the road before I turned my attention back to him, and had already made his decision. "Paedo! Fuckin' weirdo!" he screamed, weeping openly now and hating me all the more for it. He ran, and I felt my heart sink. There went another one I was unable to help. Yet one more nameless victim in the long line that stood behind me, lost in time and darkness.

  I walked around to the back of the community centre, where the staff car park was already filled with police vehicles and a few local journalists stood outside the fire door smoking and chatting about the missing girl. A few of them recognised me; one of them, a young woman whose name I could not recall, nodded at me, a tentative smile playing across her thin lips. I nodded back, but didn't break my stride.

  I could see Ellen through one of the ground floor windows. She was sitting in a small room, with one arm around the shoulders of a short, overweight woman with badly bleached shoulder-length hair. Ellen looked up just as I approached the window. Her face was drawn; she looked tired. She gave me a worn-out smile and beckoned me over with a small nod of the head.

  Just as I approached the back door of the building, the journalists and other people hovering in the car park answered some unheard signal to head inside. I was caught up in the crowd as they all tried to squeeze through the same access point at the same time. Beyond the bodies who'd somehow barged their way in front of me, I saw Ellen waiting alone in the doorway of the same side room from which she'd summoned me.

  "Glad you could make it," she said, looking pale and tired and as if she did not want to be there, not really.

  "Sorry I was a bit late. I had a rough morning. Where's your cousin?" I glanced into the room and saw that it was now empty.

  "She's in there." Ellen motioned towards the main hall, inside which everyone else seemed to be congregating. "The fun and games are about to begin." The look on her face was one of cynicism mixed with dread. Her eyes were flat, like old pennies, and I wanted to reach out and hold her but the old guilt resurfaced to stay my hand.

  "Shall we?" She moved forward, stepping in front of me, so I had only a partial view of the room we were heading towards. I caught sight of a bunch of red plastic chairs set up in rows before a raised platform or stage, and on that stage were a series of Formica tables pushed together to form a long, low desk. Behind this makeshift desk were four people: Ellen's cousin, Shawna, looking drawn and ghost-like, a man who could only be her husband judging by the way he was tightly holding her hand and staring straight ahead at the gathered onlookers, and two uniformed police officers.

  One of the officers was my old sparring partner Detective Inspector Donald Tebbit. The other was a man whose face I vaguely recognised, and I took him to be Tebbit's superior officer. He was large – easily the most imposing figure at the desk – and grey-haired with watery eyes and a nose that looked like it had been broken countless times in the past. He stared dead ahead, his gaze unflinching, and I understood immediately that this was not a man to be messed with.

  Chair legs scraped across the wooden floor and muted coughs and snorts sounded as the stragglers – me included – made themselves comfortable. Ellen had snagged a couple of seats near the front, next to some other friends and family members I'd never seen before but recognised by the nature of their sadness – slumped shoulders, empty faces, features blurred by loss. It was a look I knew intimately. I had worn it myself now for years, with no regard for fashion.

  "Ladies and gentlemen." It was the large man seated next to Tebbit. His voice sounded exactly as I'd expected: a low, sombre tone, the words chosen carefully. This was a man who left nothing to chance.

  The crowd settled, went silent; they were captivated by his voice.

  "Ladies and gentlemen, I'd first like to thank you all for attending this official statement – both members of the press, a lot of whom I recognise, and other interested parties. My name, for those of you who don't yet know me, is Detective Chief Superintendent Norman Scanlon. I am heading up this case, with the day-to-day running of things being taken care of by my colleague Detective Inspector Donald Tebbit, seated at my side."

  Tebbit seemed to beam; the compliment of being called a colleague rather than an assistant was not wasted on him, and I silently congratulated Scanlon on his use of basic psychology.

  "I'll say nothing more today, and hand you over instead to DI Tebbit, who is more than capable of fielding all questions and filling you in on what we know – and, more crucially, what we don't yet know."

  What we don't
yet
know.

  Again, the subtle use of psychology, making everyone aware that during the course of the investigation they would get to know whatever they needed to help find the missing girl and nothing more.
Bravo
, I thought. Yo
u know exactly what you're doing.

  Tebbit coughed into his closed fist, swallowed, and seemed to grow a little in his chair. "Thank you, sir. Okay, then. As DCS Scanlon has already said, thank you all for coming today. Let me begin by telling you what we already know."

  Feet shuffled; the crowd leaned forward as one; someone coughed loudly.

  "Penny Royale went missing on her way home from school two days ago, October twenty-first, at approximately threefifty in the afternoon. We at the West Yorkshire Constabulary have committed every available resource to finding her, but we are also appealing to the general public to help us in any way they can. At the end of this press conference, I shall read out our emergency hotline numbers, which will be manned twenty-four hours a day. This has been a very tough time for the family, and rather than sit and detail every nuance of the case, Penny's mother and father would like to say something directly to you all."

  Muted whispering. The shuffling of feet. This was why they were all here, to watch the monkeys perform. I could sense the press leaning forward in their plastic chairs, straining to get closer to the shattered parents. A few camera flashes went off, and the TV crews lined along both sides of the hall shifted their lenses towards the Royales, who sat in the glare of lights like frightened animals.

  "I'd like to ask you all to remain silent during the announcement, and keep your questions until later. There'll be plenty of time to answer everyone."

  Murmured voices. Again, the restless shuffling of feet.

  Mrs Royale leaned forward across the table, her hands clutching a sheet of foolscap paper that had been folded and unfolded countless times judging by its shabby appearance.

  "I…" Her voice was breaking before she'd even begun, and her husband reached out to take the paper. Mrs Royale snatched it away from him, as if his attempt to take over had been an insult. Then she closed her eyes for a couple of seconds, opened them and continued, reading directly from the sheet of paper now clutched so tightly in her hands that I was afraid it might tear.

  "I would like to speak directly to whoever has our Penny." Her accent was thick, making her sound dull and uneducated in the way that pure regional accents often do. "Whoever you are, wherever you've got her, I just want to tell you that our Penny is a good girl. She sticks in at school, has a lot of friends, and wants to work with animals when she grows up."

  A pause, during which it seemed like nobody dared breathe.

  "Our Penny won't give you any trouble. Just tell her what to do and she'll help you. Penny doesn't want to be hurt, and I'm sure that you don't want to hurt Penny."

  The constant repetition of the girl's name was surely the work of some police advisor: the woman had probably been told to make sure that any potential kidnapper identified with Penny, seeing her as a real human being rather than a thing to be coveted and kept.

  "Our Penny belongs at home, with us. We love her very, very much, and would like her to come home. We promise that we'll try and understand why you've taken Penny, and we'll make sure the police give you all the help you need to sort out your problems. Our Penny can help you, too. She's a good girl. A very good girl. Please just let her go – even if you open the door now and let her out. She'll know her way back to us… she's a good… a good… good girl…"

  Mrs Royale had done well right up until the end, when her voice seemed to fade away into a series of quiet sobs. Her husband held her hand, but it was limp in his grip. The woman looked deflated, as if all the air had been let out of her in one go, and she slumped so low into her seat that it seemed for a moment she might fall to the floor in a heap.

  Then something happened that took me completely by surprise. From the far side of the raised platform, where he must have been standing quietly and watching events unfurl, a man walked over and approached Mrs Royale. He was short, solidly built, and bald-headed, wearing a simple dark suit with a white T-shirt underneath. It was the man I'd brushed up against at Baz Singh's place, the Blue Viper. The man Singh had called Mr Shiloh.

  He crossed the stage and knelt down at Mrs Royale's side, one hand slipping into hers and the other arm going around her shoulder. She leaned into him, and he whispered something into her ear. She smiled, briefly, and then buried her head in his neck. Mr Royale looked on, helpless yet not objecting at all, as if this were all perfectly natural. Mr Shiloh kept whispering into the side of Mrs Royale's face, his skin shining like plastic under the bright lights. Again I was struck by his lack of energy, the strange neutrality that radiated from him, as if he were a blank sheet of matter waiting to absorb the energy of others and reflect it back at them. The image I had was of the neck of a bottle floating upon an endless sea, the remainder of the receptacle resting beneath the water, but with the bottom smashed off, so that the entire ocean had
be
come
the container. And it would never, ever be full enough to cease swallowing whatever it came into contact with.

  How, I asked myself, could a man of such unassuming stature seem to contain the whole world?

  The room erupted into chaos; members of the press all tried to ask different questions at the same time, creating a sound not unlike the mad chattering of a group of chimpanzees. Cameras flashed like indoor lightning and the television crews trained their lenses on the centre of everyone's attention: the poor, weeping parents and their stolid companion.

  Tebbit tried to field the ensuing questions as best he could, but I'd already heard the official version of events. My job here was to look from a different angle, to bring my own unique perspective to the tragedy. My job was to see that which no one else could.

And what I saw most was Mr Shiloh.

  "Who is that?" I leaned in close to Ellen, aware that I sounded slightly panicked.

  "Who do you mean?"

  I turned to face her, camera flashes haloing her features, and stared into her lovely blue eyes. "That man, the bald one. I've seen him before. Who is he?"

  Ellen looked at the stage, and then turned back to me. "That's Mr Shiloh. He's a friend of the family." She didn't look too convinced by her own description. "Apparently he's been around for years."

  I felt cold inside that warm, cramped room, and when I looked back towards him, the man they called Mr Shiloh caught my gaze. Held it. Held it. And did not let it go, even when I frowned at him to make my displeasure clear. It looked like he was trying not to smile – or struggling not to laugh – but I couldn't be certain. I could be certain of nothing, not any more.

  Something within this dark little man of infinite capacity recognised me; and something inside me knew him too. The horror of the moment was greater than I could even begin to comprehend, and I felt lost in its baleful shadow.

Loss is another country, a strange and welcoming dominion into which all of mankind must one day fall. Some of us walk there regularly, knowing its pathways by heart, and others merely visit briefly, keen to leave before the terrain becomes one with which they are too familiar.

  The landscape of my grief was a place I knew well. I had spent far too many years traversing its dense interior, mapping its ever-changing borders, and then I had finally reached a point where I was happy to call it home.

  After the meeting broke up, I found myself standing outside with Ellen looking up at the dark scudding clouds and wishing for rain. I'd made a hasty getaway to ensure that there were no awkward moments with DI Tebbit. I wasn't sure how official my involvement with his murder case might be, and the presence of his superior officer made me nervous.