Weirdo (23 page)

“And do you really think,” Rivett’s voice was a whisper, his eyes dark, glittering, fathomless. “That I’ll let them?
In my town
…”

Gina’s mouth fell open, but there were no words left to say.

“Right,” Rivett nodded, putting on his genial voice again. “You just concentrate on paying off your debt and let me worry about everything else.”

With a loud click, the passenger door opened. Gina’s head spun round and took in a tall, thin man with sandy hair and a pointed face, a moustache on his upper lip, a gold belcher around his neck above a pastel Argyle sweater.

“She’s all yours, Eric,” said Rivett, turning his key in the ignition.

“Much obliged, Len,” the other man said, hauling Gina out of her seat.

“Have fun.” Rivett chuckled as the door slammed. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.”

* * *

Wayne turned the car north onto Marine Parade, slouching towards Edna’s. He’d spent nearly four hours looking for Samantha, and having exhausted all the pubs in town, then the ones along the front, the ’musies and the skating rink, he was just about out of ideas.

He pulled in just before he reached the Hoyles’. This had
been his idea, and the main reason he’d insisted on coming out was to stop Amanda from bringing her parents into it. She had been in such a state when he got home that she’d actually been considering it, convinced that one of her dad’s policemen friends could find Sam and bring her home.

Wayne had managed to make her see how bad an idea this was. He’d been sure that his CB buddies could help him track the miscreant down. But, normally so full of opinions and advice, tonight they had all gone strangely quiet.

He decided to give it one more go. Anything to put off talking to Edna.

“Breaker break, this is the Deuce,” he said into his mic. “Do I have any takers?”

The unit crackled white noise. Wayne cursed under his breath.

“Deuce to Bald Eagle, do you copy?” he tried again.

Bald Eagle was a minicab driver. His real name was Reg Styles, but when he went on the air, he started to believe he really was an American trucker out there in the night. Wayne knew he was out working, Saturday being the cabbie’s busiest night of the week. Most of the others were only talking from their bedrooms.

The road ahead of Wayne looked empty. He tilted his rear-view mirror so he could see the length of it behind him too.
One more time
, he told himself.

“Bald Eagle, this is the Deuce. You got your ears on, good buddy?”

“Ten-four, Deuce, the Eagle has landed,” with a hiss of feedback, the taxi driver’s voice finally came through. “In’t you found her yet?”

“Negatory,” said Wayne. “What’s your twenty, Eagle?”

“Just dropped a fare at Garveston, got wiped out there for a while. Coming back over the bridge now. There’s a lot of kids about tonight, but I in’t seen one that look like yours.”

“Well,” said Wayne, “can you keep eyeballin’ for me?”

“I’m getting another bleed out here,” the Eagle’s voice was lost in a violent spurt of feedback. “Catch you on the flip-flop, good buddy.”

“Ten-ten,” said Wayne, thinking,
Yeah, right. Just like everyone else round here, you ain’t interested unless there’s something in it for you
.

He replaced his mic on its handset, crawled a little further down the road until he was two doors away from Edna’s. He could see a light on beyond the front-room curtains, but thankfully, no sign of Eric’s car in the drive.
The lesser of two evils
, he thought, steeling himself to face his future mother-in-law.

Despite all recent family rapprochements, there was something in Edna’s manner that put Wayne’s teeth on edge. That sense of hysteria bubbling under those chintzy dresses and that helmet of hair was much too close to the surface. Amanda had never fully revealed to him the root of the animosity between her parents, her daughter and herself, it was a secret locked so deep inside her he knew it might be a matter of decades before she ever confided in him, if at all. But it only took a few moments in their company for him to make a good guess.

Wayne undid his seatbelt, taking a last look in the rear-view mirror.

Saw a pair of legs walking along the road towards him.

Wayne slid down in his seat, tilting the mirror as he did so, double-checking that his eyes were not deceiving him. No, it was Samantha, with different hair again, but that strange,
blank expression on her face that Wayne had seen come over her many times before. When she wasn’t scheming, screaming or pretending to come on to him. Amanda was right. In the end, she would always go running back to Nana.

But not if he got her first.

He opened the car door. For a second, she stared straight past him, the noise not even registering. Until he caught her arm.

“What?” she looked down at his hand, as if witnessing alien phenomena. Then her brain clicked back in and she sprang to life. “Get off me!” she shouted.

But Wayne’s arms were strong from long hours of manual work. “No,” he said, “you’re not running back to Nana this time. You’re coming home with me.”

Keeping one hand firmly clamped to her arm, he tipped his driver’s seat forward and pushed her into the back, paying no attention to her squeals and kicks of outrage.

“You’ve got your mother worried sick,” he said, starting the engine, pulling away from the kerb. “I hope you’re pleased with yourself.”

“She is sick,” Samantha spat, back to her usual insouciant self. “But that’s got nothing to do with me.”

Wayne couldn’t stop himself. He knew Amanda wanted to tell her daughter their news herself, but at this moment, all he could think of was getting back at the little bitch for the continual aggravation she delighted in putting him through, to say something that might shut her cruel mouth up once and for all.

“She’s not sick,” he shouted, doing a wild U-turn across the road. “She’s pregnant.”

“Well, Mr Ward, I appear to have found your man for you.”

Mrs Nora Linguard was a small, smart woman, with iron-grey hair scooped up into a bun, a pleated navy skirt and a cream jumper, with a string of pearls around her neck. The Welfare Assistant of Ernemouth High for the past thirty years regarded Sean through bottle thick, horn-rimmed spectacles, a smile dimpling her round cheeks.

They sat opposite each other, across a desk in her office. Two thick ledgers sat open in front of her. She handed the top one across.

“This is the Admissions Register,” Mrs Linguard said, pointing to a name, written in blue ink, halfway down a page. “John Brendan Kenyon, date of birth 4.2.68, was admitted as a pupil here on the 8th of September 1981, transferred to us from Greenacres Secondary Modern. This was the year that the school went comprehensive.”

Sean’s eyes lingered on the page, the proof of Noj’s existence in this time and this place.

“And,” she flicked the pages forward to where she had
marked another entry with a Post-it note. “He left us on July 27th 1984. That’s the good news.”

“And what’s the bad?” Sean drew his gaze up to level with hers.

“Well, if there had been a problem with this child, any special needs or social service intervention, I would have remembered his name, it would have brought a face to mind. Files are only retained for three years after a pupil has left the school, so his are long gone. Instead, I consulted this,” she tapped the thick volume in front of her. “The School’s Log Book, kept by the Head. This is where he records all the events of significance that occur over each term.”

She looked at him meaningfully, her blue eyes like glass beads behind her lenses.

“And of course, as you know,” she said, “June 1984 was a particularly eventful period in the history of the school. If your Mr Kenyon
was
mixed up in the Woodrow case, then I’m sure Mr Hill would have made a note of it. But I’ve searched the Log backwards from there up to the day he was admitted, and I can’t find a single mention of the boy.”

“Mr Hill was the headmaster in those days?” Sean asked.

“That’s right.” She nodded. “A war veteran, you know, fought at Dunkirk. He served the school for nearly as long as I have now, saw it all through from grammar to comprehensive and then,” she grimaced, her gaze drifting through Sean, “during those terrible days. I know I won’t see his like again.”

“It must have been hard for you,” said Sean, “having to deal with the fallout from that.”

“Oh, it was,” said Mrs Linguard. “We had them all around the gates for weeks, the papers, the television, the radio. Digging around for stories, trying to apportion blame. Stirring
up the mob.” She rolled her eyes. “You know how people talk. Especially when they’ve suddenly got an audience egging them on.”

“I’m starting to get an idea,” said Sean. “Some of the pupils were hounded out, I believe?”

“Yes,” she nodded, “but your Mr Kenyon wasn’t one of them.” Her brow creased. “Look, I know it may not be sensible to rely on memory, but those events are fairly etched on my mind and I don’t recall him having anything to do with it. To be perfectly honest with you, I simply don’t recall this child at all.”

“You’d never have even noticed me in those days,”
Noj’s voice in Sean’s mind.
“Which is just the way I wanted it.”

Sean motioned his head towards the Log Book. “Well,” he said, “it has been nearly twenty years. Do you mind if I ask, what are your strongest memories of the time?”

Mrs Linguard paused, cupping her hands together under her chin. “The fateful form 5P,” she said. “The first person who had to leave because of what that girl did wasn’t any of her classmates. It was her teacher.”

“Really?” said Sean. “I haven’t heard this before.”

“Philip Pearson,” said Mrs Linguard, “was Corrine Woodrow’s form teacher for a period, before she got moved into the special class. He was a chemistry don, a quite brilliant mind. And a strong disciplinarian, one of the best. But he also had a knack for bringing some of the worst pupils out of themselves, the ones that were more sinned against than sinning, so to speak. That’s what he tried to do with the Woodrow girl. And that’s what got him in trouble.”

As she spoke, shadows passed across her features, deepening the lines on her forehead, tugging down the corners of her
mouth. “He made the mistake of talking to someone from one of the papers. Someone he thought he could trust. He imagined he was going to be able to calm the situation down by explaining some of the background. But of course they just twisted his words out of context, you know how they do.”

“Only too well,” said Sean. “What was it, a local paper or a national, can you remember?” He hadn’t seen any of this in Francesca’s clippings.

“
The Times Educational Supplement
,” Mrs Linguard said. “He wouldn’t have spoken to a tabloid. But by the Monday, they’d all got hold of the story anyway and turned it upside down. Mr Pearson said something about the town that he probably shouldn’t, that it was a deprived area with a higher than national average of children on the social services register. Which was true enough …”

She raised her eyebrows. “But when it gets translated into something like:
Incest Town a Breeding Ground for Murder says Corrine Woodrow’s Teacher
, well – you can imagine how that went down. We had them baying for his blood at the school gates, had to call the police in to get him past them. Poor Mr Pearson was forced to hand in his resignation.”

“Was this story in the local paper,” Sean pressed, “the
Mercury
?”

“The
Mercury
,” Mrs Linguard repeated with disdain, “comes out on a Friday, so they tried to capitalise by getting Mr Pearson to make a public apology for slandering the town. He declined, of course. So they made a big front-page splash about him being unrepentant, cold-blooded, arrogant and so on. It was a terrible paper in those days, run by a quite grubby little man. Now, what was his name? Hayles,” she hit upon the correct moniker with some ferocity. “Sidney Hayles.”

Not many flaws in this old girl’s memory, then. “I don’t suppose you know what happened to Mr Pearson?” Sean asked. “I’d like to talk to him, if I could.”

“Well,” Mrs Linguard hesitated, “he got another job all right, at the university in Norwich. But they didn’t actually move, in the end – his wife had a business here and they managed to tough it out.”

She paused again, her gaze losing focus as another emotion hit her. “It’s terribly sad; she died quite recently, Mrs Pearson. She was only in her fifties. Cancer, you know. I haven’t seen him since the funeral, but I don’t think he would have moved since then. Let me just check …”

Sean nodded, looking back down at the Admission Register on the desk in front of him, the rows of names of the pupils who had left school at the same time as Noj. He saw it there in black and white:
Dale Smollet
.

“Here you are,” Mrs Linguard jotted onto her pad and detached the page, handing Philip Pearson’s number across.

“Thanks,” said Sean, pointing to the entry on the Admission Register. “And what effect did all of this have on him, do you think?”

“Oh,” Mrs Linguard’s expression instantly brightened, “the Detective Chief Inspector. Well, that’s what made him want to become a policeman in the first place. Because he was in with a bit of a bad crowd himself, at one point, he won’t mind me telling you. Now he’s one of our most successful old boys, comes back every year to give the prizes out on Sport’s Day.” She shook her head. “It just goes to show, doesn’t it? How some children can go one way and others the complete opposite.”

“It certainly does,” said Sean.

* * *

Outside the school, Sean dialled Rivett’s number, taking the calculated risk that Paul Gray wouldn’t have called the old sweat first. He didn’t want Rivett to know exactly what they’d just found in the pillbox.

“Two down,” he answered on the second ring, “one scumbag to go.” As ever, Rivett sounded delighted with himself. Traffic noises whooshed in the background; he was outside, somewhere. “How’s your morning been, so far?”

“Interesting,” said Sean. “Someone’s been back to the murder site.”