The Red Road

The Red Road

A
Novel

12.12

Copyright
2012, Stephen J Sweeney

All
Rights Reserved

Original cover photograph by Nick Bramhall. Copyright 2007, Nick Bramhall. Some Rights Reserved.
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0
http://www.flickr.com/photos/black_friction/1855160096/
http://www.flickr.com/people/black_friction/

The right of
Stephen J Sweeney to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1998.

All
characters in this publication, other than those clearly in the
public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons,
living or dead, is purely coincidental.

www.stephenjsweeney.com

Books
by Stephen J Sweeney

THE BATTLE FOR
THE SOLAR SYSTEM TRILOGY

The
Honour of the Knights (First Edition)

The
Honour of the Knights (Second Edition)

The
Third Side

The
Attribute of the Strong

Author's
Note

While many of the dates of past events, such as the releases of music albums,
films and sports fixtures, are largely accurate, some timings
have been modified for the purposes of storytelling.

Michaelmas Term

September 1991 – December 1991

Chapter One

I
had always known that at some point in my life I would see a dead
body. Whether it be a grandmother, a grandfather, a life-long friend,
or my own mother or father, it was a certainty of life. What I didn’t
expect was for it to be the body of a ten-year-old boy, when I myself
was only fifteen. I also never expected the corpse to have been
dumped by a roadside as a result of a murder.

I was jogging along the so-called
Red Road at the time, a woodland road that wound its way through the
countryside close to St Christopher’s boys’ boarding school. I
had always hated having to do the run. Word would spread around
lunchtime that we wouldn’t be playing rugby or football that
afternoon, but instead the teachers would be making us go on a
three-mile jog. The Road was always such a torturous affair that I
wouldn’t believe it until I went to the main notice board and saw a
printed piece of A4 pinned up over the usual sports schedule,
informing us of what time the run started (one forty-five,
directly after lunch).

Some would say that the run was to
help us build up our stamina and maintain a certain level of fitness,
so we could sprint around for eighty minutes during rugby matches.
But in my humble opinion, it was because the teachers were feeling
lazy and/or sadistic that day.

I would have been a little more
tolerant of the run today if I had been doing it along with one of my
close friends — Sam, Baz, Rory, Marvin, Rob or Carson. I had set
off early, however, changing into my sports kit straight after lunch.
I just wanted to get it over and done with.

Two things were almost guaranteed to
happen during these runs. The first, that even before I was halfway
done, I would hear of how one of the incredibly athletic African boys
at the school was already finished. Desperately out of breath and
wishing I could be finished at that point, too, I would trudge on
through the wind and the rain, climbing the hills and dodging the
holes, imagining the guy reclining in his room with a magazine,
having barely even broken a sweat.

The second thing that would happen
is that one of the sixth formers would choose to vent whatever
pent-up rage that was afflicting them (hormones, stress, general
sexual frustration) on one of the unfortunate younger boys they met
along the way. A swift and not so discreet punch in the guts would be
the norm, the older boys knowing that there would be no repercussions
from the assault. Not that this happened to me any more, thankfully.
I was almost sixteen, tall and able to handle myself better than when
I had been thirteen and simply forced to shut up and lump it. Not
that even now I would still hit a sixth former back if they did choose
to attack me; I wasn’t that stupid.

There was no getting out of the runs,
either. One of the sports teachers (usually Mr Edmunds, well-known
for his bad breath and poor sense of humour) would be sitting at the
end of the road in his car, along with a clipboard and pen, to tick
off the names of the boys as they arrived. If it was raining,
which it often was in good old England,
he would be sitting with a smug look on his face and pouring
out some hot coffee from a Thermos flask, making a point of
displaying his comfort to us as we arrived. Not having your name
ticked off would usually result in detention, essay writing, or
possibly something worse depending on how much the teacher in
question disliked you.

Still, the runs had their upsides.
Sometimes the less-fit teachers would come tramping along the Road
with us. I was never sure whether that was for their own benefit, to
keep an eye on us, or just to provide us with some extra motivation,
but I always enjoyed watching them get a stitch and have to pull up
and stop, taking some time out to ease their aching sides.

But at this moment, the person
pulling over was me. I had caught sight of the dead boy’s hand as I
had turned a bend. It was fairly well hidden, easy to miss if you
gave it just a glance, as I suspect all the other boys running ahead
of me had done. At first, I thought it was someone hiding. Then,
after further investigation, I discovered otherwise. The boy’s
dead, unblinking eyes stared out from the bushes at me as I came
closer, his face, hands, arms, and body extremely pale. He was naked,
whomever had left him here having stripped him before dumping the
body.

My stomach lurched, and I felt as
though I was going to vomit. I did so as soon as I saw a fly land on
the boy’s face and casually walk around it, before disappearing up
one of his nostrils. I cast frantically about as my half-digested
lunch shot up my throat and splattered all over the ground, seeing Mr
Rod, housemaster of Martin, jogging along the road towards me.

His expression was initially one of
mild concern, laced with humour. I was sure he wouldn’t be laughing
in a moment.

“Are you okay, Joe?” he asked,
stopping alongside me and rubbing me on the back.

“Sir ...” I said, spitting
particles of food and bile from my mouth and pointing to the bushes.

“What’s that ...?” Mr Rod began,
before giving a start. He didn’t investigate for very long and
immediately began instructing me to tell everyone coming our way to
turn around and head back to the school, no questions asked. Just
say there had been an incident, he told me.

“Make sure you get word to the
prefects to ensure everyone goes back,” he added, “but send a
couple of them this way.”

“Do you want me to tell the
headmaster?” I asked, spitting the remainder of the vomit from my
mouth and wishing I had some water to hand.

“No, just get back to the school
and don’t say anything. Understood?” Mr Rod said.

“Okay,” I replied and started
back the other way. It was the shortest run of the Road I had ever
done. Likely, I had even beaten one of the African boys this time.

~ ~ ~

The assembly hall was packed, all
five hundred boys crammed inside. I had rarely ever seen it this
full, and there was barely enough room for all of us. We sat in our
houses, a raft of black suits and multicoloured ties for the senior
school covering the vast majority of the seats, while bright blue
blazers filled what chairs were available to those in the junior
school. There weren’t nearly enough seats for everyone, many of the
juniors being made to stand. They lined the walls closer to the
front, skinny white legs exposed in shorts. I recalled shivering
during the winter months in those and was grateful that I was no
longer forced to wear them, trousers being part of the uniform in the
senior school.

“Crotty saw it.”

I heard my nickname mentioned and
leaned forward to look down the line of boys seated on the same row
as me. Anthony Simmons, Charlie Smith
and Daniel Rye were whispering together.

Although in the same house
as me, they weren’t three people that I usually had a great deal to
do with. They were part of the exclusive third-year “Clique” that
numbered around twenty, made up of boys from the five different
houses. In the main, those in the Clique would only ever speak to me
if they wanted something or had heard some disparaging rumour either
about me or one of my close friends. In those cases, it would either
be to rile me about it or seek further information. The whispering
continued for a time, before all three turned in my direction.

“Oi, Joe,” Simmons hissed.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Did you see the body?”

I nodded.

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know,” I shrugged.

“What year?” Smith interjected
as Simmons made to ask another question.

“I think he was from the junior
school,” I said, glancing in the direction of the skinny white
pins. “They looked like it.”

“How do you know?” Smith asked,
somewhat incredulously.

What’s with the bloody
interrogation?
I wondered. “Because he looked about ten.”

“How cou—” Rye started.

“What uniform was he wearing?”
Simmons interrupted.

“He wasn’t wearing one,” I
admitted, catching the eyes of other boys who had turned in their
seats to focus on me. “He wasn’t wearing anything.”

“He was naked? Gross!” Rye said,
scowling. “Was he—”

“Oi, shut the fuck up, Ben,”
Simmons glared at him. “Do you know what happened to him? Was he
covered in blood?” he asked, looking back to me.

Good question. To be honest, I
hadn’t actually noticed; I was too busy being sick. I couldn’t
recall having seen any blood or anything like that on him, so he
could well have been hit by a car for all I knew. The real question
was what he was doing all the way out there.

I told the three
inquisitive boys as much as I knew, and they mulled the information
over.

“You don’t know anything else?”
Simmons demanded, sounding a little annoyed that he wasn’t about to
become privy to exclusive information ahead of time.

“No,” I said.

“Well, you’re no fucking use,
are you?” The three turned back to discussing things between
themselves.

“Joe, you saw it?” Sam, sitting
next to me, asked.

I nodded. As per Mr Rod’s
instruction, I hadn’t told anyone of what I had seen and was only
now admitting it, having been outed by the Clique. I had denied all
knowledge of it to those who shared my dormitory.

“What happened?” Sam asked.

I didn’t have time to answer, as
the headmaster was coming in through the tall doors at the rear of
the hall. We all fell silent and rose from our seats, as was expected
of us whenever the headmaster entered a room. He said nothing as he
proceeded down the central aisle and up to the podium at the front.

St Christopher’s, as with so many
other boarding and prep schools of its ilk in the South East of
England, had been founded on the grounds of a monastery. In the past,
the school had been staffed almost exclusively by monks. These days,
the monastery’s influenced had waned somewhat, and the teaching
staff now came from a variety of different backgrounds.

There were
still a number of hangovers from the past, however, with many of the
more senior positions being held by monks or chaplains; the position of the
headmaster always held by a member of the clergy, in this case a monk
named Father Benedict. It had often surprised me that for all the
authority and power the man held, he was very placid and easy to talk
to. It was rumoured, however, that though he was a patient man, he
had been the type to happily throw a school-wide blanket punishment,
should he feel the need to. These usually only happened under extreme
circumstances and usually involved no talking at meal times, in our
houses or in the classroom block, an early lights out, and no
privileges (meaning that the tuck shop, arcade machines, TVs and all
else were off limits). Thankfully, this had not yet happened during my
six years of attendance.

“Please be seated,” Father
Benedict said. “I’ll keep this brief.”

And so he did. Following on from the
discovery of the body on the Red Road, the school was to be closed for
at least the next seven days, while the police conducted their
investigation. The body was that of a first-year junior school boy
named Scott Parker, who had actually disappeared the previous night.

I
could tell that Father Benedict was loath to suggest that the boy had
been snatched from his dorm and murdered, but it was obvious that
that was what everyone was thinking. Having seen the body for myself,
it was clear to me that that had been his fate. No blood,
though. Perhaps he had been strangled.