Flesh And Blood (13 page)

In the event he fell asleep in row G, barely disturbed by the smell and persistent rattle of popcorn, the almost permanent undertow of whispered voices.

♦

His room in Willie Bell’s house had a three-quarter-size bed – a double if you’re on good enough terms, as Willie explained – a book shelf partly stacked with old Rothmans’ Soccer Annuals and back copies of
Penthouse
and
Police Review
. There were two upright chairs and a small square table, a narrow but deep armchair with dodgy springs, and a built-in wardrobe inside which a dozen or so metal hangers jangled whenever the door was pulled open. A small television set stood on a wooden chest in the corner, an alarm clock with luminous hands on the floor beside the bed. The window looked out on to an array of rear gardens, lights burning behind half-drawn curtains and coloured blinds at the back of the houses opposite.

As a welcoming gift, Bell had placed a bottle of Aberlour on the table, along with a single thick-bottomed glass.

Elder sat for a while, listening to the sounds of Bell’s own TV rising up from below; the muffled bass tones of music through the party wall of the house next door; dogs sporadically barking, one setting off another until they all fell quiet and then, high and unworldly, the cry of a fox, a pair of foxes in rut.

He picked up both bottle and glass and carried them downstairs.

A few hours later both men were comfortably settled in the front living-room, the remnants of a take-away curry piled to one side, the Aberlour two-thirds gone. Willie Bell had been holding forth on Partick Thistle and Kilmarnock; the duplicity of women, wives in particular; the beauty of the farming country into which he had been born. Elder nodding and from time to time contributing the odd word.

When the phone rang, Bell picked it up and growled his own name; after listening for a moment, he passed it across.

‘Shane Donald,’ Maureen said, ‘he’s done a bunk. We’ve just been officially informed. He’s unlawfully at large.’

Pam slipped the lock behind her and set off along the terrace to the path that would take her quickly up above the town. Trainers, grey sweat pants and matching hooded top. When she’d first moved into the house in Hebden Bridge, she had persevered with her morning run, hills or no. But after stumbling twice on the uneven ground, her left knee, already weak, was liable to go out at the least excuse, so now it was this, the briskest of thirty-minute walks, arms swinging wide across her chest, pumping to push her heart rate up. The first part of her route skirted a small wood, after which a narrow lane, edged on one side with bilberry bushes, lifted her on to an old track, largely overgrown and running east to west, which still climbed until it levelled out and she would pause and turn, the whole valley below her, breathing in long, slow draughts of air.

Mill chimneys, long disused, stood tall above the rows of houses, densely packed, the canal running through them like a thread. Across the valley, the fields rose sharply, cross-hatched with low stone walls, farm buildings sparsely set down and exposed on the north-facing slopes.

To the right, rising above a cluster of distant rooftops, rose the church tower at Heptonstall, burial place, so her house-mate Danny had informed her, of the poet Sylvia Plath. Said with some solemnity as though he was expecting her to set out on an instant pilgrimage, be impressed. But Pam had read some Plath at university, an adjunct to second-year psychology, ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Daddy’, hysterical and overheated in Pam’s estimation. The poor woman terrified. And then to end it all as she did, life too much to bear at thirty, her head in an oven, gas full on. Why several of Pam’s fellow students revered her as some kind of feminist icon and kept posters of her alongside those of Virginia Woolf and Janis Joplin in their rooms, she’d never properly understood. Martyrs all, maybe, in a way. But role models, not on your life.

She turned and set off briskly along the track; another few hundred metres and she would scale a wall, slip through a sheep field, climb a gate and begin her descent.

♦

Shane Donald, Gribbens had phoned her from the hostel the morning after he had gone missing. Something had set him off, panicked him perhaps. Gribbens had spoken with his room-mate and learned nothing; he would talk to the other residents and find out what he could. Scarcely any money, few clothes, Gribbens thought he might not get too far; with any luck he could even change his mind, see sense, come back.

By now the police would know that Donald had absconded and be on the lookout for him, though with what degree of purpose she wasn’t sure. People remembered, though, what Donald and McKeirnan had been convicted for, the details albeit hazy and magnified with time. It wasn’t lodged in the folk memory like Brady and Hindley or the Yorkshire Ripper, Mary Bell, those boys who had killed poor Jamie Bulger. But for some, in certain parts of the country in particular, they were still there in the shadows where parents’ imaginations strayed, nights when their teenage daughters were late home, last bus and last train gone.

‘What you did, Shane, you and Alan, how do you feel about it now?’

‘It were wrong, weren’t it? Course it were. Dead wrong.’

As Pam turned the key in the front door, she made up her mind that she would clear something from her crowded schedule, pay a visit to Donald’s sister, see what, if anything, she knew.

♦

Behind the unclipped hedge, the meagre patch of garden was home to several children’s bicycles – mostly missing some crucial element like a wheel or handlebars – an upturned pram, assorted toys. Plans for a flowered border had foundered in dog shit and neglect. The front door was partly open, the bell no longer worked.

Pam called out to announce herself and after several moments Irene appeared, apron over a man’s shirt and crumpled skirt, slippers on her feet, the kind Pam’s mother wore when she was alone, pink and comfortable with pom-poms over the toes.

‘I don’t know if you remember me?’ Pam said, showing her card.

‘It’s Shane, isn’t it? He’s got hisself in trouble again.’

‘He’s gone missing from the hostel, I’m afraid.’

‘Daft wee sod. You’d best come in.’

When the children, five of them, had left that morning it had been like a hurricane. Plates, socks, school books, coloured mugs and magazines, odd trainers and discarded clothes were strewn higgledy-piggledy on every chair back and surface and across the floor. A small child with wide dark eyes and tangled hair remained behind, beneath a ratty blanket on the settee.

‘That’s Tara, she’s off sick,’ Irene explained. ‘Tara, pet, d’you want anything to drink? Some juice? A glass of milk? Hang on while I put kettle on, make this lady and myself a drop of tea.’ And then, over her shoulder to Pam. ‘If I said I’d stopped for two minutes since seven this morning, I’d be a liar. And Neville, he’s no help. Sets ’em off, that’s what he does. Shouts till they’re screaming and moaning, the eldest yelling back at him, then out he goes and slams the door. Leaves me to it. Milk, I daresay, and sugar. One or two?’

‘No sugar, thanks.’

‘Suit yourself.’

Pam cleared space on a chair and sat down. When she smiled at the little girl – five, Pam thought, five or six – the girl pulled at the blanket and buried her head.

‘You’ve not come looking for him here,’ Irene said, passing Pam her tea. ‘Waste of a journey that. Not set foot in this place, not with Neville the way he is. Won’t let him near the kids, you see, that’s what it is. I know when we talked before, about Shane coming out of prison, well, I thought I could change his mind. Neville. Thought I could talk him round. But he won’t budge. After, you know… well, you can understand.’

Pam thought that she could. ‘I just thought you might have some idea,’ she said, ‘why Shane might have left the hostel, where he might have gone.’

‘Me?’

‘You talked to him, just the other day. I thought he might have given some clue.’

‘No, love. Didn’t say a great deal about anything, to be honest. Not his way. Asked about the kids an’ that. Oh, said as how you was fixin’ him up with some job. Supermarket. He did say that.’ Irene drank some of her tea. ‘There’s biscuits if you’d like, I should’ve said. Digestives and there might still be a few custard creams.’

Pam shook her head. ‘No, thanks, I’m fine. The hostel, did he say anything about how he was settling in?’

Irene gave it thought. ‘Bloke he was sharing with, okay he said, especially for a black. That was about all.’

‘He didn’t give any indication that he was thinking of running away?’

‘No. No. Not a one.’

‘And you haven’t any idea, Irene, have you, where he might have gone?’

‘No, love. I’m afraid I’ve not.’

‘How about home? Sunderland?’

‘Last place he’d go. Last place on earth, I should’ve thought.’

‘And are there friends…?’

Irene reached for and lit a cigarette. ‘Knew him as well as you should, that’s not a question you’d ask. Not the sort as makes friends easily, our Shane. Better for him maybe if he did. Unless they’re like that rotten bastard, of course. The one as led him on.’

Pam nodded and tried some more of her tea, weak and over-milked. ‘If he does get in touch with you…’ she

began.

‘He’ll not.’

‘But if he does, please tell him to contact me. I can help. It might not be too late to straighten things out. Otherwise I’m afraid he’s going to be in real trouble.’

Reaching out, she set a card down on the arm of Irene’s chair.

For no apparent reason, the little girl began to snivel, then to cry.

‘I will help him,’ Pam said, on her feet. ‘It’s my job.’

‘For Christ’s sake, shut it, Tara,’ Irene said. ‘I’m not putting up with that row the rest of the day.’

She walked Pam the length of the short path and through the missing gate.

‘He had a bastard life, you know. Shane. Everyone on to him. Growing up. Runt of the litter, you know how it is. If he’d topped hisself before now I’d not’ve been surprised.’

Pam nodded and said goodbye. When she turned the car around at the end of the street and drove back past, Irene was still standing there. Pam waved and got no response.

‘I thought she’d never fucking go,’ Shane Donald said, the moment his sister got back inside the house. ‘Thought you were going to sit there gassing for hours. Interfering bitch.’

♦

Donald had waited, watching the house, until Neville and the kids, all except Tara, had gone. Irene opening the door to him, a gasp of surprise before hustling him inside, his clothes in a state from sleeping rough, face and hands grimed with dirt; running a bath and then breakfast, bacon, egg and beans.

Shaven-haired, jumpy, Donald twitched at each new sound. Thirty years old and still, save for what lived in his eyes, looking seventeen. Her baby brother. How many years had she pulled him, sobbing and broken, into her arms? Ssh, Shane. Ssh, pet, it’ll be all right. She reached out for him now, fingers barely touching his arm before he pulled away.

‘This bloke at the hostel,’ she said, ‘the one as threatened you. Couldn’t you tell somebody? You know, somebody in charge.’

‘Jokin’, right? Imagine what’d happen to me if I did that. Be lucky to get out of there in one piece. ’Sides, wasn’t him, only be someone else.’

‘Suppose, you know, you’d paid him, given him some money…’

‘What money?’

‘Come to me, like he said.’

‘And what?’

‘I’d’ve given you what I could.’

Donald laughed. ‘Bingo money? A tenner? Fifty quid? How long d’you reckon he’d keep his mouth shut for that? When someone’s offerin’ his brother five fuckin’ grand.’

‘You don’t know if that’s true. He could’ve just been saying that to wind you up.’

Angrily, Donald pushed his plate and mug away. ‘I saw the paper, didn’t I? Her father mouthing off.’

Irene looked at him then. ‘Here,’ she said, reaching across the table, ‘I’ll just clear these pots away.’ Anxious to be free from his gaze; not wanting him to see the tears in her eyes and know they were not for him but for someone she had never seen.

♦

He followed her upstairs while she was sorting through her husband’s old clothes for whatever was halfway suitable, whatever he might not miss.

‘Where will you go?’

‘I dunno. Wales, maybe.’

‘For God’s sake, what for?’

‘This bloke inside, he reckoned you could live dead cheap. Just pickin’ up the odd job, like.’

‘You’ll let us know?’

‘Hm?’

‘Where you are? Send a postcard or something?’

‘Yeah, course.’

So far Irene had found a pair of jeans that would be all right with a belt, rolled up; two shirts, three T-shirts, a jumper with paint down one sleeve, assorted dodgy underpants and socks. Neville’s feet were huge; the shoes Shane was wearing would have to do.

‘She was your age, wasn’t she? The girl. Lucy.’

Shane stared at her until she looked away. When he got up and left the room, she finished stuffing the clothes down into an old sports bag.

‘Another cup of tea before you go?’

‘No, thanks.’

The probation officer’s card was in Irene’s hand. ‘Here.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Take it.’

‘What for?’

‘Maybe you should go and see her.’

‘Yeah. And maybe I should just turn myself in.’

‘Shane, she might be able to help.’

‘Help put me back inside, you mean.’

‘No. She said she’d be able to straighten things out.’

‘Yeah? And how’s she hopin’ to do that?’

‘I liked her. For one of her kind. She’s straight, I reckon. You could trust her.’

‘You think?’

‘It’s got to be better than just goin’ off to Wales or wherever. Somewhere you don’t know.’ She put her hand on his and this time he didn’t pull away. ‘You should try. The probation officer. Give her a chance.’ She squeezed his hand tighter. ‘Promise me, Shane. Promise, yes?’