Crusher (5 page)

“All the best. And sorry again about your dad. He was a good man, I heard.”

She slipped out, shutting the door quietly behind her. Her footsteps clacked away rapidly. I went back to the kitchen, dug out two pieces of bread, checked them for mould, bunged them in the toaster and set it going.

That had been short and sweet. I’d had social workers before; I’d given up trying to remember their names because it was never the same person twice in a row, it seemed to me. All of them were overworked and
barely organized, constantly referring to case folders, getting my name mixed up with some other delinquent two streets away. Kendrick hadn’t taken any notes, but she’d known about what had happened—all about me, about my dad, about our circumstances—without even looking at a file. She turned up the day after my dad was murdered—the other social workers I had met were always about six months behind with their cases. Maybe she was that mythical beast, a social worker who actually managed to be good at their job and stay on top of their casework. I’d never believed they’d existed. But that ID was kosher—I was dyslexic, not blind.

Except … she hadn’t actually been that helpful. She’d asked more questions than she’d answered, and left in a rush. The leaflets she’d given me—would they tell me what to do about the household bills? Those were still in my dad’s name, but maybe that wouldn’t matter, as long as I made sure they got paid. But what about the benefits Dad had been getting? Weren’t they what paid the mortgage? The mortgage … who did the house belong to now? Me, or the bank? I wasn’t even sure which bank Dad had used.

The toast had popped up while I wasn’t looking, and was sitting there growing cold and stale. I decided to leave it for now. I had to clear my head somehow, figure out what I was going to do.

*  *  *

The late-morning air was damp and fresh in my mouth, and before long I could feel the familiar burn in the bottom of my lungs. I was heading up the Thames towpath at eighty per cent of my top speed. My favourite time to run was about four or five in the morning, when I could really let rip without any fear of colliding with dog walkers or joggers, but right now the towpath was quiet, apart from the odd cyclist. The ones coming towards me I dodged, the ones heading my way I liked to keep up with and overtake, partly for the challenge and partly because it really wound them up.

At first the running had just been part of my fitness training for the boxing club that Dad took me to, then it became an end in itself. I liked boxing and I was good at it. Some wag nicknamed me Crusher Maguire, and after a year or so a lot of fighters in my weight range were starting to avoid me. Then Delroy got sick and the club closed temporarily and never reopened and I had to train by myself. Running was my favourite routine. Just me and the wind in my face and the burn in my chest and my breath in my ears. My dad had tried running with me for a while—he never asked me to do anything he wasn’t willing to try himself, he said—but before long he packed it in. He couldn’t keep up, and I didn’t want him to. I needed to push myself to the limit.

It was the boxing club that straightened me out. The clarity of it, the focus. Being right in the moment. The tiniest lapse in concentration and you got clobbered. And you soon learned that no matter how big or hard you were there was always someone bigger and harder, and that taught you to think as well as fight. Taking me there was the brightest idea my dad had ever had.

I came to the next bridge, wheeled round and headed back the way I came. A glance at my watch told me I was fifteen seconds outside my best time. I pushed myself harder.

Dad had done all the courses he could afford and read every book in the library about firm parenting and tough love and all that fatuous horseshit. He knew I was angry, and knew I was off the rails, and he knew why, and he wanted to help. But he couldn’t help the way I felt any more than I could. I’d put him through purgatory—the fights in school, the truancy, the petty crime, the pathetic attempt at dealing. He’d always stuck by me, come to court, tried to persuade anyone who’d listen I was a good kid, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Somehow he’d always been on my side, even when I really was guilty as hell. He’d never blamed me. He’d never even blamed my mother for leaving either, though you didn’t have to be Freud to work out that’s when I started going wrong. The heart wants what
the heart wants, he’d say, then snort. He never said, her heart hadn’t wanted him any more. Or me.

Back to Kew Bridge, twenty seconds under. That was better. I stayed on the towpath till it petered out at the new riverside redevelopment, then headed back up across the High Road, heading for my street, trying to keep the pace up right until the last minute to override the pain from the build-up of lactic acid in my calf muscles.

Dad tried to get me not to hate Mum, and he failed. I wanted him to hate her as much as I did, and I failed. He always loved her, even after she left us. I remembered hiding behind their bedroom door once, meaning to jump out and say “boo,” and I’d heard them together, heard him sing their favourite song, “Sweet Thames Flows Softly,” about two lovers whose affair flowers and fades on the river. I’d heard the joy and affection in his voice, and I’d snuck out without them seeing, and never let on I’d been listening. It must have reminded him of how he’d lost her, but Dad would still sing that song; he hummed it every time he switched on his laptop.

Into my street. Still some energy left. Top speed, right down the middle of the road.

A thickset man in a rumpled suit was leaning on a car opposite our house, staring at it as he pulled on a cigarette. Prendergast.

He looked up, surprised and slightly alarmed, as I approached. Recognizing me, he relaxed again, tossed his cigarette down on the road and screwed it into the tarmac with his shoe. I pulled up, gasping for breath, glanced at him, went straight into my stretches while my pulse slowed. My sweat dripped onto the kerb in grey spots.

“Business as usual, that it?” said Prendergast. I frowned at him. “Most relatives of murder victims wander round in a daze for days, weeks sometimes. Sit staring into space, forget to wash, forget to eat, can’t sleep if they tried. You don’t seem that bothered.”

“I’m not most people,” I said. Keeping my sentences short while I got my breath back. I didn’t want to waste my breath on Prendergast anyway.

“You’ll be pleased to know our investigations are making progress,” he said. “Tracing your dad’s last known movements. And yours. Your manager down at Max Snax, he’s wondering where you are, by the way. I apprised him of your circumstances.” This with a sour grin. Prendergast talking police-jargon to Andy … that must have been a meeting of tiny minds.

“Any suspects yet?” I hunkered down, stretching each leg in turn, bending to hit my knee with my forehead.

“Your dad spent his last night drinking in the
Weaver’s Arms, over on the Griffin Estate,” said Prendergast. “He left at closing time, alone. Witness saw him turn into this street, singing to himself. After that … the last person to see him alive was you.”

“Someone came in the next morning, after I left,” I said. “Using the keys he’d lost. Or had lifted.”

“No DNA, no fingerprints except your dad’s, and yours,” Prendergast said.

“I live there,” I said. “Of course you’re going to find my fingerprints and DNA.”

“Nobody was seen, coming or going. Except you, the next morning. Running from the house.”

“I always run,” I said.

Prendergast grinned. “Funny,” he said. “A lot of punks these days watch a few TV shows about forensics and think they know it all. But real life doesn’t work like that. It’s messier, less dramatic, more predictable. Eventually the kid who did this will get drunk or stoned and shoot his mouth off, from guilt or the need to big himself up. And whoever he tells will tell someone else, and in time we’ll get to hear about it, and then we’ll move in and nick him. Sometimes it doesn’t even take that long—they come in and confess. The ones who don’t have any real friends, or anyone they can trust. Eventually the truth always comes out.”

“Since when do you lot give a shit about the truth?”
I said. “You just decide what happened, then select the evidence to fit. Whatever takes the least amount of effort.”

“Oh yeah,” said Prendergast. “You’ve got a criminal record, haven’t you?”

I’d had enough of his smirk. “When do I get my dad back? I’d like to bury him.”

“The coroner will want a postmortem,” said Prendergast. “Then he’ll open the inquest. Tomorrow or the day after. He’ll decide when to release the body.”

“Do I go to the inquest?”

“An officer will contact you with the details. All part of the service.” Prendergast smirked again and pulled a few folded sheets of paper out of his inside pocket. “Sign this,” he said. He handed me the sheets, pulled out a cheap retractable ballpoint and clicked it.

I unfolded the papers, looked at them. Prendergast sighed, looked away in exasperation.

“Go ahead, read it through first. I’ve got all day.”

“What is it?” I said.

“A list of the items removed from your house as part of our investigation,” said Prendergast. “We need your signature acknowledging their safe return.” He opened the rear passenger door. There was a cardboard box on the back seat, crammed with stuff from my house wrapped in tough plastic bags. I could see my laptop
near the bottom. I checked the pages again. Yeah, it was definitely a list. I saw the logo for “Dell.” They’d copied the hard drive, I supposed, so they could take their time checking for hidden files without me getting nervous.

I leaned the papers on the top of Prendergast’s car and scribbled my signature. From his grimace I guessed he was worried about his paintwork, and I wished I’d leaned harder on the pen. I gave him back the papers and the ballpoint and lifted the cardboard box out of the back seat of the car. My dad’s wallet was in there too, I noticed, along with the spare house-keys.

“We’ll be in touch, Mr. Maguire,” said Prendergast. He climbed back into his car. I headed for my front door while he bumped down from the kerb and drove off, too fast for such a narrow street.

I kicked the door shut behind me and dumped the box on the table, across from where Dad had been sitting when he was killed. It was absurd, I thought, tiptoeing around as if he was still there, sleeping on his folded arms. He was gone, and I had to get used to it.

I took out my laptop and laid it down where Dad used to work. The power brick was in a separate bag with the mains lead. The battery didn’t hold a charge any more—without being plugged into the mains the machine would barely boot up before it died again.

I plugged the mains lead into the wall socket and the
power lead into the laptop, then pressed the “on” button. It sighed and buzzed and wheezed into life like an old dog being dragged out for a walk.

I wondered what the cops had thought of the stuff they’d found on it. They would have looked at all my social sites first—that wouldn’t have taken them long. It wasn’t the dyslexia that put me off posting stuff about my life. It was just that I didn’t have much I wanted to say. And whenever I looked at other people’s pages they never seemed to have much to say either, though admittedly that didn’t stop them saying it. I did try to join in for a while, and after a lot of effort realized it was just more of the noises kids made at the back of the school bus, only written down.

Of course, it made a lot of difference if you had a lot of friends. And I didn’t. I knew what the cops would make of that … anti-social loner. Even assholes get to be right once in a while.

I put in my password and the laptop grunted and groaned some more. The cops hadn’t asked for my password, though they were legally entitled to. Obviously they’d managed to bypass it somehow. If I ever did have anything worth hiding on a PC, I needed to come up with better security.

The desktop appeared. I fired up the browser and navigated to the AnyDocs website. Up in the top
right-hand corner were the log-in and password fields.
NoelPMaguire
, I put for the username. My dad used that label for everything online. Then the password. It had come to me when I was running, what it might be, and then I’d seen Prendergast, and for a moment it had slipped from my mind.

As I carefully typed the password I could feel my tongue poking out the corner of my mouth, the way it had done since I was a kid, trying hard to get the letters in the right order. I pulled it back in and clamped my mouth shut.

I typed,
sweetthamesflowsoftly
. Hit “Enter.”

On the screen a little circle chased its tail while the system pondered. The screen flickered.

A long list of documents appeared. The topmost one was called,
The Boss—Episode One—Fifth Draft
. Last modified two days ago. The day before my dad was murdered.

I double-clicked on the title, and eventually a page appeared. It looked like most movie scripts I’d seen: a block of text, a space, a name in the centre of the page, another block of text with narrower margins. That would be the dialogue. I checked the foot of the page. 1 of 120. Christ Almighty.

I took a deep breath, concentrated, and started to read.

It was dark by the time I’d finished and my head was aching. I hated having to read in front of people; by myself I could work at my own speed, though so slowly it infuriated even me. I didn’t think it was only my dyslexia that made my dad’s script so hard to read. Everyone in it talked too much and never got to the point, or they got to the point really quick and then spent ages repeating it and talking round and round it. There were loads of twists and turns and double-crosses that made the story really hard to follow, and the characters did things that made no sense and just made life harder for themselves for no real reason that I could see.

But then I didn’t suppose whoever killed Dad was a drama critic.

My stomach had been rumbling for the last hour, so I dug out a bag of pasta and put the kettle on to boil.
I had what was left in the bag; better tell Dad to get some more, I thought without thinking. Then that hit me too—Dad had gone, and all the things he’d done that I used to take for granted wouldn’t get done any more, unless I did them. He wouldn’t come home from a Monday morning shop with a sack of dried pasta past its sell-by date. He wouldn’t leave half-full mugs of tea to go cold on the floor when he fell asleep in front of the TV. He wouldn’t leave unflushed turds in the bog. He wouldn’t sing while he cooked … I stood there for a while, thinking about what all that would mean, trying to get my head round it, wondering when it would start to hurt. The kettle clicked off, and I poured water into a pan, added salt, lit the gas and waited for it to boil up again.