Dead Time (6 page)

‘You are the girl who was involved when that boy got killed?'

She nodded. Did absolutely everyone in the world know about it?

‘I remember you,' he said. ‘That boy was nasty to you. I had to speak to him about it.'

‘Yes,' she said, tapping her fingers on her laptop.

‘Anyway. Terrible thing. I'll let you get back to your work.'

The man turned away and went out of the cafe. The door hung open for a second, letting the cold air in. Rose relaxed. Then she felt immediately guilty. Why was she so ill at ease with people? The man had done her a favour – why couldn't she be more pleasant to him?

She thought back to the day in school a couple of weeks before when she'd been in the IT suite working on some graphics for an art project. She'd been deep in thought and felt someone flick the back of her head. She looked round to see Ricky Harris standing behind her with a couple of his mates. She'd turned back to her work, ignoring him and blushed quietly as she heard him talk loudly about her.

‘You know what private school girls are like. They give it away to anyone. They'll do anything you ask them to. Right slags.'

Rose felt her temper rise but made herself sit very still.

‘You!' a strong male voice called. ‘Leave that girl alone. What's your business in here? Have you got a pass? What's your name?'

Rose looked round to see one of the technicians striding across the room, his identity tag flying out. He was a tall bald man. The top button of his shirt was undone and his tie knotted loosely. He had black jeans on and his legs looked thin and long.

‘All right, gay boy. Calm down,' Ricky Harris said.

‘Get out of here,' the technician said.

‘I will. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. I don't want to get touched up. Wait, you sure you've had one of them CRB checks? Sure you're not on the sex offenders' register?'

‘I'll be speaking to your form tutor.'

‘Speaking to him. I bet you'd like to do more than that!'

They left, laughing. The technician looked flustered. Rose saw his name tag then:
Frank Palmer, IT Technician
. Kids were looking up from their computers and a couple of the other technicians were looking over at him, talking to each other.

‘Thanks, you didn't need to say anything …' she said.

‘You should speak to your form tutor. No one should treat you like that.'

The cafe was empty and Rose began to pack her laptop away. Why hadn't she been nicer to the man when he spoke to her? He had only wanted to pass the time of day. In any case why was she still there, sitting in the cafe? Her muffin was finished, the paper case baggy, its pleats misshapen. Joshua was expecting her.

But she couldn't get Ricky Harris out of her mind. His bullying had got to her. Then, on the walkway above the railway lines, someone had bullied him. Should she feel a tiny bit
pleased
about that? He had turned on to the walkway and taken the last steps he would ever take. He had come face to face with the person who would kill him seconds later. Someone who was past throwing stuff
down toilets and tormenting shy classmates. This was a person who meant business, who carried a length of steel that slid in and out of flesh as though it was butter.

The thought made her feel weak for a second.

Ricky Harris had no doubt been grinning to himself because he had ruffled the feathers of the posh girl from school. Perhaps he had had a smile on his face. Was it likely that that smile had offended another young man who had a name to make for himself? A young man like Lewis Proctor?
What you smiling for, Harris
? he might have said before putting his hand into his pocket and pulling out a knife.

She walked to the door of the cafe.

Violence and boys. Why did these two words fit so well together? Joshua said that it had been round every corner in his boys' only school. She pictured packs of snappy dogs eyeing each other, their tails stiff with apprehension. How different from her boarding school. There had been no violence at Mary Linton School for Girls. Nothing physical; no blood, no bruises, no hair pulling. Nothing so common for so many well brought-up girls. There had been other stuff, though; hurt and embarrassment, shame and envy. She thought of Rachel Bliss for the first time in months. Her oldest friend. Her closest friend. Rachel who had a soft smile and a hard heart.

It gave her a momentary jolt.

She'd spent too long thinking about the past.

Joshua was upstairs and she needed to go and see him.

She opened the cafe door and went out into the street. Moments later she was standing by Joshua's front door and ringing his bell.

There was the sound of heavy footsteps coming down the stairs. Rose expected Joshua to open the door. She worked herself up to a smile to greet him. She heard bolts being pulled back. The door opened abruptly and a young man with heavy black glasses and flat black hair stared at her.

‘What?' he said.

‘I'm here to see Josh,' she said, as pleasantly as she could.

The young man who she supposed was Darren Skeggs gave a sigh and turned away. He trudged up a narrow stairway shouting Joshua's name. She stepped inside, assuming she was meant to follow. At the top she could see Joshua and hear him saying something. Then he gave her a beaming smile.

‘Hi, Rosie. Put the bolts on, would you?' he called.

The door had a metal bolt at the top and a smaller one at the bottom. In the middle was a chain. Puzzled, she fastened them all and went up the stairs. Joshua gave her a hug.

‘You've met Skeggsie, my landlord?' Joshua said.

Rose looked again at the young man, her eyes fixed on the heavy black glasses. His clothes were close-fitting and the shirt he had on seemed to be buttoned up to his chin. He was a complete contrast to Joshua, who had fair hair flicking round his ears and was wearing a faded, wrinkled T-shirt with a row of beads around his neck.

Skeggsie nodded stiffly at her. She opened her mouth to say something but he turned away and walked off. She frowned.

‘Come on, let me show you the flat,' Joshua said, oblivious to her discomfort. ‘Put your bag down. Take your coat off!'

She placed her bag on the hall floor and shrugged off her coat, taking care with her arm which was still tender from the tattoo. She let it hang down by her side.

‘Come on!' Joshua called.

He showed her a huge living room, one corner of which was filled with one of the biggest televisions she had ever seen. Opposite was a long low sofa, the kind you might find in a hotel foyer. A coffee table sat in front of it, every centimetre of which was covered by piles of books and DVDs. There was nothing else in the room. The floorboards were polished and the walls were four different colours. It was odd, like a set for a play and yet Rose quite liked it.

‘My room's here,' Joshua said.

His bedroom was small but neat. Rose was reminded immediately of the box room he had had when they lived in Brewster Road. Then his bed was high up so that he had space underneath. Now a double bed took up most of the space in the room. A rail sat alongside the opposite wall, crammed with clothes, some of which were on hangers, some just draped over the top. On the ground were trainers and boots piled on top of each other. By the side of the bed was a full-length mirror fixed on to the wall. On the bedside table sat a screwdriver. It was squat, bright yellow, different from the one she had seen him with on Tuesday night. There was a narrow rug on the floor with just enough space to walk along it to the bed and back.

‘It's compact,' she said.

‘I've got another room, a study.'

The room next door was twice the size and held a desk and a table and a couple of chairs. The walls were covered in posters for bands and movies and there were some big beanbag-type cushions in one corner underneath an old standard lamp with no shade. She looked back to the desk and the table alongside it. There was a computer monitor and a laptop, and a printer and a black box with a light blinking. There was wire snaking in and out, hanging precariously off the table, cascading down to a multi-plug adaptor.

‘Wow,' she said, ‘you've got a lot of hardware.'

‘This is nothing. You should see Skeggsie's room.'

She screwed her face up thinking of the rude young man. Joshua seemed to read her expression.

‘Skeggsie's all right. His people skills aren't great but he's a brilliant guy. Put your coat down,' he said, pulling her jacket out of her hand and laying it over the beanbags, ‘Here, come and see my websites. Sit here.'

He pulled one of the chairs back and she reluctantly sat down. He'd mentioned these websites to her a couple of weeks before. She wasn't looking forward to seeing them.

‘Skeggsie helped me set these up. Without him I couldn't have done it. This is the first.'

He tapped on the keyboard and then, on the screen, a website appeared,
missingones.com
. The background was deep red and underneath the web name was a brief outline of the site. Rose let her eyes run across the words. She was distracted, though, by the photographs which materialised down each side of the page. Her mum and Brendan. She stared at each one until it faded and was instantly replaced by another. Her mother's face, smiling, her glasses slightly crooked, her hair pulled back; Brendan grinning at something off camera; Brendan with a peaked cap; her mum wearing dark glasses, looking sombre.

She looked back to the words, trying to ignore the images.

Each year 275,000 people disappear.

Most of these people return to their families within a day or two.

The number of people missing from their families for more than a year is 16,000–20,000.

Kathy Smith and Brendan Johnson are two such people. We want them back. We need them. This site is about them and about the circumstances of their disappearance.

Rose felt her throat begin to tighten. She looked away from the screen at Joshua's profile. His eyes were fixed on the images, his jaw and neck tense. The beads, which had looked so casual moments before, seemed tight like a choker. He turned to her before she could look away. Their eyes met.

‘I know you don't approve of all this,' he said, holding his hands out, encompassing the technology that sat glowing in front of him, ‘You said that in your emails. But I have to go on looking for Kathy and Dad.'

‘I understand,' she said softly. ‘But the police explained …'

‘But nothing is
proven
. Nothing is certain. That's why I have to keep looking. And in any case if the police were right, if they were …'

He licked his lips before going on.

‘If Kathy and Dad were
killed
then I've set up this other website. Look.'

He pulled the laptop towards him and tapped on the keys. Its screen was smaller but in a second a website filled the space. This time the background was black.
oldmurders.com
. The font was sombre. Rose frowned. This was stark, funereal. There were no photographs, just some text that had been bulleted.

• Many murders go unsolved.

• They sit in police files for lack of resources.

• The murderers are free to get on with their lives.

• This site is about a possible murder.

• Kathy Smith and Brendan Johnson disappeared.

• The police think they were murdered.

• Help us to find out one way or another.

Underneath was a menu: Biographies; Last Known Whereabouts; Witnesses; Maps; Car; Contact us.

‘See, these websites can reach two potential communities. People researching crime or murders, other police forces, private investigators. Look, I've tagged all the important words. So, say if anyone was searching for the Tuscan Moon, for any reason, then this website and
missingones.com
would come up.'

Joshua seemed breathless. Rose gave a smile but it wasn't an encouraging one. He carried on, not giving her a chance to speak.

‘I know you don't think I should do all this …'

‘It's up to you what you do,' she said.

‘You have your way of dealing with what happened. This is mine.'

‘I don't exactly deal with it. I just accept it.'

‘I can't …'

‘You can't let it go,' she said slowly, almost to herself.

He shrugged.

The sound of footsteps going downstairs made Joshua look around. Then the bolts of the street door shot back. The door opened and closed with a slam.

‘Skeggsie's gone out,' Joshua said with a half-smile.

‘Without saying anything? Isn't he a bit odd?' she said, moving her chair back, relieved to be turning away from the content of the screens in front of her.

‘He is odd. But trust me,' Josh said, standing up, fiddling with the beads around his neck, ‘he is the best.'

‘What's with the bolts on the door?' she said.

‘Ah, the bolts,' he said. ‘Come on, I'll make you a coffee and explain. Oh no, wait! It's not coffee. It's
tea
. Tea bag left in for exactly sixty seconds, a touch of milk and no sugar,' he said.

She smiled. He'd remembered what she liked. He, on the other hand, had large mugs of lukewarm, milky coffee. When they had lived in Bethnal Green with her mum and Brendan she would sometimes find them in his room days after he'd made them, a third of the liquid left, the top covered in a chocolate-coloured scuddy skin. It
used to turn her stomach but still she carried them downstairs and washed them up before her mum or Brendan noticed.

As they left the room she turned back for a second to see the screens sitting side by side, the monitor big and brassy, the words
missingones.com
dominant. The laptop was smaller, at a slight angle, the word
murder
just visible.

While Joshua was fussing with the drinks Rose thought of the Tuscan Moon. It was her mum and Brendan's favourite restaurant and they went there regularly. Rose and Joshua had been there a few times with them for an early meal. The waiters spoke a lot of Italian and there were pictures of Italian footballers all over the walls. Rose used to have a Margherita pizza and some garlic bread but Joshua liked the lasagne and insisted on having it with chips much to everyone's embarrassment.