Flesh And Blood (16 page)

Elder was thinking about Helen Blacklock, reading possibly about the horrendous things that had been visited upon Lucy and imagining her own daughter suffering in the same way.

‘How goes your own little inquiry?’ Maureen asked.

When he’d finished giving her an abbreviated account of his meeting with Paul Latham, her face creased into a smile.

‘What?’

‘Didn’t exactly get your vote for personality of the month.’

‘Not exactly.’

‘You think there’s any more to it? Other than the two of you not hitting it off?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you’d like to think there might be.’

Elder shrugged and tasted his whiskey. ‘Anything definite would be good.’

‘You’ll go and talk to that woman in London? The actress.’

‘I’ll give it a shot.’

He asked Maureen about her current case load and they chatted about the job through another round of drinks, one or two other off-duty officers wandering over to exchange a word, bid Maureen good-night, cast an eye over her companion.

‘Grist to the rumour mill come morning, I dare say,’ Elder remarked.

‘Good luck to them,’ Maureen said.

‘Another?’ Elder asked, pointing towards her empty glass.

‘Best not.’

‘Maddy Birch,’ Elder said. ‘Name mean anything?’

‘DI, isn’t she? Lincolnshire somewhere. Your old patch. I’ve run across her a few times in the past. Nothing recent, why?’

‘Oh, no special reason. Just thought you might know where she was stationed.’

Maureen angled back her head and laughed. ‘Feeling horny, Frank?’

Elder had the grace to blush as he was reaching for his coat.

Outside a light drizzle of rain was falling. ‘You don’t fancy something to eat, I suppose?’ Elder said.

Maureen shook her head. ‘No, thanks.’ And then, smiling, ‘Should’ve asked me before you started on about Maddy Birch. Mind you, answer’d still have been the same. Good-night, Frank.’

♦

He picked up a doner kebab with chilli sauce at the take-away not so far from Willie Bell’s home. Wherever Willie was it wasn’t there. Elder found a beer in the fridge, tipped the food out on to a plate and sat down in front of the TV. On a street illuminated by neon and watered down with artificial rain, a couple of New York cops were rousting druggies in shop doorways, talking fast out of the sides of their mouths. He had Katherine’s mobile number in his wallet, but it was probably too late to call. And it wasn’t Katherine he was thinking of but Joanne. At the athletics stadium, the blue of her T-shirt, fit of her jeans.
I would say come round, Frank, only
 . . . Joanne, Maddy Birch – what was it, Elder wondered, about green eyes?

He finished his kebab, switched off the set and went upstairs to bed.

♦

First thing next morning, Pam Wilson was doorstepped outside her house and although she pushed her way past the reporters, refusing to speak, she knew they would find ways of putting words into her mouth. By eleven, Irene had invited one compassionate young newsman in for a cup of tea and before the quarter-hour thought better of it. By then it was some twelve or thirteen minutes too late. Come afternoon, her husband, Neville, had been offered an exclusive contract for his story, a murderer in my family, or something similar, and signed on the dotted line.

Of Shane Donald there was not a sign.

Four hours, near enough, that’s how long it had taken him to get a lift, hanging around the lorry park, asking drivers who, more often than not, brushed past him without so much as a word. Manchester, mate. Manchester. Come on. If he’d been some tart with fishnet stockings and a skirt up her arse, like the one he saw scrambling up into the cab of an eight-wheeler carrying auto parts, there’d have been no problem. But instead there he was, hands in pockets and shoulders hunched, rain needling into his face. Give us a lift, eh? Bastard. Bastard. Bastard. Cunt.

Earlier, he’d warmed himself up in the cafeteria, meat pie and chips, a packet of fags, tea with plenty of sugar. The cash he’d found in the probation officer’s bag would last him a while if he was careful, eked it out; fat chance he had of using her credit cards, forge the signature well as he might. No way some boss-eyed shop assistant was mistaking him for Pamela Wilson, her name scrawled large across the strip on the reverse. First chance he got, he’d sell them, let somebody else take the risk of getting caught.

In the end it was some foreigner who picked him up, Dutch, three times a week he made the journey, Rotterdam to Immingham and then the M180, M62, Leeds, Bradford, Manchester and back. Glad of the company. Inside the cab the usual photographs, torn from the pages of soft-porn magazines. They hadn’t been on the road five minutes before the driver pushed a cassette tape into the deck. ‘Blues. You like blues?’

Donald didn’t know.

‘Fabulous Thunderbirds. I saw them in Holland. Just last year.’

‘Oh, yeah.’

‘Listen to this. “Look Whatcha Done”.’ He cranked up the volume a little more. ‘Kid Ramos. Some guitar, huh? You like it?’

Donald thought it was like a circular saw working through his head.

‘Okay, so what kind of music you like? Come on, you have to talk, yes? Keep me awake. What kind of music?’

‘I dunno.’

‘Yes, you must.’

The Dutchman pulled out to overtake another lorry and the spray from the road washed across the windscreen like a wave. Donald remembering those evenings in the caravan, McKeirnan telling him, sit down, sit fucking down and listen to this.

‘Eddie Cochran,’ Donald said. ‘That’s who I like. Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, stuff like that.’

‘Yes.’ The Dutchman’s face broadened into a tired smile. ‘Eddie Cochran, “Fifteen Flight Rock”. I know this.’

Donald thought it was twenty, ‘Twenty Flight Rock’, but he couldn’t be bothered to argue. He closed his eyes and feigned sleep.

He must have slept in earnest. Next thing he knew he was being shaken awake, the driver leaning towards him, shouting in his face. ‘Come on, you have to wake up.’

The lorry’s indicator flashed off and on, reflected on the surface of the road.

‘We are here now. End of journey.’

They had pulled some little distance off the motorway and stopped by the entrance to a small industrial estate, the buildings, most of them, shadowed in darkness.

‘Come. You have to go now. I will get into trouble.’

Donald yawned and rubbed his eyes with both hands. It felt cold, a chill running up through him. In the half-light he could see a uniformed guard approaching the gate.

‘Where the fuck are we?’

‘Manchester.’

The Dutchman reached past him and pushed down the handle, opening the cab door.

‘Goodbye, Eddie.’

‘What?’

‘Eddie Cochran,’ the Dutchman said and laughed.

The bag his sister had given him in one hand, Donald jumped to the ground and moved aside as the lorry juddered forward. At least it’s not fucking raining, Donald thought. By the time he’d worked his way back on to the main road it was.

On either side, warehousing, blank and featureless, was interspersed with empty, chain-fenced lots.

‘Where the hell am I?’ Donald said to no one. ‘Manchester? This isn’t any soddin’ Manchester.’

At the first roundabout, there were signs to Oldham, Rochdale, Stalybridge, Ashton-under-fucking-Lyne. When, after what seemed like the best part of half an hour, the first car appeared and Donald stepped off the kerb, arm out and thumb angled forward, the driver veered sharply towards him and skidded through a standing puddle of water, soaking him from the waist down.

‘Fucking bastard!’ Donald shouted after him. ‘Fucking cunt!’

Manchester City Centre, the sign read, twelve miles.

♦

Both the chief and the ACO had urged Pam to take some time off, go away, a short break, a little holiday; stay home if you must, paint the bathroom, varnish the stairs. All of those appointments in her book were suddenly, it seemed, less important; they could be rescheduled, dealt with by other staff, indefinitely postponed. Had she thought all this was primarily out of concern for her wellbeing, rather than that of the service, she might have been better pleased. As it was, she needed to work, to sit there at her desk, have that distraction.

When the two uniformed officers came in, her first thought was that Donald had been found, that something – she didn’t know why she thought this, or what she feared, except that she was sure it was something bad – had happened to him. But when they opened what looked like a grey bin-liner and lifted out her bag, she knew it was something altogether less.

‘You recognise this?’

‘Of course.’

‘It’s yours?’

‘Yes.’

‘The one that was stolen?’

‘By Shane Donald, yes.’

‘There isn’t room for doubt?’

Pam looked again at the bag. ‘No. No, none at all. Where was it found?’

‘I don’t know if we can…’ one officer began.

‘Motorway services,’ the other said. ‘M62 west. The men’s toilets. Stuffed down the back of the cistern.’

‘I don’t suppose my purse was there?’

‘Afraid not.’

‘If we could ask you to identify the contents?’ the first officer said.

From a separate bag, her belongings spread slowly across the centre of her desk. Appointments book, address book, files, her copy of
How to be Good
, several dog-eared letters she’d been meaning to reply to but had never found the time; tell-tale shiny blue paper from too many bars of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut; a lighter and matches but no cigarettes; two black Bics and a stub of pencil; tampons, business cards, postage stamps, keys.

‘That’s all yours?’ one of the officers said.

Pam nodded. ‘It’s all mine.’

‘Sorry about the purse,’ the second officer said. ‘Hope there wasn’t too much cash inside.’

‘Enough.’

He smiled sympathetically.

‘Never mind,’ Pam said brightly. ‘Perhaps it’s gone to a good cause.’

Neither of the officers seemed to appreciate the joke, if joke it was.

‘There’s no news, I suppose?’ she asked. ‘About Donald, I mean.’

‘Can’t really say, miss.’

Miss? What had he been doing, reading her hand for signs?

‘Not likely to tell us, even if there was.’

‘I can keep the bag now?’ Pam asked. ‘My stuff?’

She could. The two men nodded, mumbled and left. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. She doubted if either of them was as much as twenty-four or -five. Their visit not the only thing lately to make her aware of her age, conscious of her mortality. A knife being held, albeit shakily, against the skin, against the neck, will do that to a person, Pam had found.

She hated it; hated him. Donald. The way he’d made her feel then. Vulnerable. Afraid.

The way he was making her feel now.

♦

He had bought a bacon roll, two rashers nicely greased and ketchup running down the edges of the cob; tea in a lidded polystyrene cup and a Twix. There was a park across from the parade of shops, benches here and there along a narrow path, a broken roundabout and some kids’ swings, patches where the grass had been kicked to mud. At the far end, a brick-built toilet stood close against the road. The bench Donald chose was grafittied over like the rest, one of the wooden slats missing at the back. He sat minding his own business, washing down the last of his roll with a final swig of tea, thinking about McKeirnan. In his place, now, what would McKeirnan have done? What would he have been doing now?

A pair of magpies screeched down from the trees and hopped about on the ground nearby, disputing over a piece of shiny paper that had blown there from one of the overflowing bins.

The truth was, of course, McKeirnan would never have got himself there in the first place.

Alan McKeirnan who could talk his way out of most things, turning on the blarney, the crack, the charm. Not that he was Irish nor anything like it, not really. Oh, a couple of generations back maybe, his grandad or his great-grandaddy over from County Wicklow or so, slaving on the railway, digging out some bloody great canal, whatever job it was called for muscle and but little brain. McKeirnan’s father though, he’d been in the building trade, a brickie by day, playing guitar and singing by night. Pubs the length of Kilburn High Road, Harlesden, Royal Oak. Sometimes with two or three other fellers, sometimes by himself. 1959, three years before Alan was born, he’d auditioned for this rock-and-roll group, Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. Bass guitar. Kidd had pulled his amp lead out mid-number, laughed in his face and then, so the story went, felt sorry for him and hired him as his roadie. For a while. Johnny Kidd and the Pirates.

When McKeirnan got really drunk, really into it, late at night and smashed on pills, it was their records he’d put on, their songs he’d sing, thrash along to, playing air guitar. ‘Please Don’t Touch’, ‘Shakin’ All Over’, ‘Linda Lu’.

‘My godfather, you know,’ McKeirnan used to say. Drunk and a little exhausted, three in the morning and the booze all but gone, stretched out on the floor with a spliff in his hand. ‘My fucking godfather, Johnny fuckin’ Kidd.’

It wasn’t true.

McKeirnan had told him the truth one day, the two of them setting up on a fair site at Cleethorpes; a clear blue morning, Donald remembered, cold, not a cloud in the sky. ‘He asked him,’ McKeirnan said, ‘my old man asked him, come, you know, to the church, the christening, and Johnny said – that wasn’t his real name, that was Fred, Frederick, Frederick Heath – anyway Johnny said sure, sure I’ll be there and then, of course, he never came. Didn’t matter, my old man said, he told me he’d do it and that’s good enough. Anyone asks you who your godfather is, you tell ’em, Johnny Kidd; tell ’em that and watch their faces change. Course, Johnny was already dead by then, killed in a car crash when I was only four. Somehow my old man always managed to forget that.’ McKeirnan’s laugh was sour. ‘Probably never even asked him at all, lyin’ cunt.’