Flesh And Blood (19 page)

Donald nodded. ‘You’re not really called Angel,’ he said.

‘Yeah. Angel Elizabeth Ryan.’

‘I thought you were takin’ the piss.’

‘That was my dad.’

They sat and smoked, listening to the occasional flurry of laughter from elsewhere on the site, the sound of a car on the road at their backs, going past with its radio playing.

‘Shane…’

‘Yeah.’

‘You gonna stick around or what?’

‘He said I could carry on workin’ the slide if I wanted.’

‘You goin’ to?’

‘While, maybe. Few days, why not?’

‘What’s this from?’ she asked, not quite touching the plaster on his head.

Shane grinned. ‘Crashed a car, didn’t I?’

She moved her face in front of his and when she kissed him her lips felt dry and cracked; her tongue was quick and wet and then she pulled away. He could feel the goose-pimples all along her arms. They smoked the joint right down to its end and then Angel scrambled to her feet, brushing the dirt from her jeans.

‘I’d best be getting in.’

‘Okay.’

When she’d gone, he turned and unzipped and pissed where he stood, a long curving stream that seemed to go on and on. By the time he’d finished, she was walking back towards him, a blanket over one arm.

‘Here, Della says you can have this.’

When he tried to kiss her again, she turned her head away.

‘See you tomorrow.’

‘Yeah. Reckon so.’

He was still thinking of the kiss, the exactness of it, when he fell asleep.

♦

Donald worked the slide for two more days, helping out on the dodgems once or twice, giving Angel a hand to put up and take down her stall. The fair’s owner, Otto, was a traveller from several generations of travellers; the fair itself had belonged to his father and uncle before him. Most of the people who worked it now were family: sons, nephews, cousins. Della, who had more or less adopted Angel, was Otto’s sister.

One of the cousins gave Donald a sleeping-bag and told him he could bed down in the back of the truck that pulled the Whirlatilter. On the second night, Della invited him into the caravan for supper, thick stew with meat and potatoes and a bottle of raw red wine. Glasses of white spirit that made Donald choke. Otto joined them at one point, drank mightily, tore off a piece of bread and wiped it round the almost empty pot.

‘Good boy!’ he said, gripping Donald hard on the shoulder. ‘Good boy, huh?’

I’m thirty years old, Donald thought, not a boy. He said nothing.

The following day Della walked across to the slide when he was working, her skirts trailing in the dust and dirt. Early in the afternoon, it was still quiet, a few young kids, mothers with buggies or babies slung across their chests.

‘Angel,’ she said, ‘she’s had one hell of a life, you know that?’

Donald nodded, though in truth he knew nothing, only what he’d guessed.

‘Mother on drugs, no good; father never there; foster homes, in care. Run away all the time, police bring her back. When I found her, six months now, she was skin and bones. Hates herself. Cut herself with razor. Not now. Now that has stopped.’

She moved closer and caught hold of Donald’s arm.

‘You harm her, make her start again, I cut you here.’ Releasing his arm, her hand moved fast between his legs. ‘You understand?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Yes?’ Twisting harder.

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’ When she stepped away, Donald’s eyes were watering and his crotch was sore.

‘You’ve been in prison,’ she said. Not a question. ‘Inside. Maybe a long time.’

‘Yeah, I…’

She made a chopping movement with her hand. ‘No. Just so you know I know. Your business for now.’ She moved close again, breath warm on his face. ‘Angel, you be good to her or you answer to me.’

♦

That night Angel came to him in the truck while he slept.

At first he thought the pressure against his body was part of a dream. The sound of the zip slowly sliding down. As she slipped into the opening of the sleeping-bag he felt her feet and legs cold against his, the sharp bones of her knees. She was wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of skimpy cotton pants. When he tried to talk she kissed his cheeks, his lids of his eyes, the corners of his mouth. He felt himself go hard against her and when she felt it too she drew in a little gasp of air.

‘Take it easy,’ she said, as suddenly he moved, pushing a hand between her legs. ‘No. Stop, stop, stop.’

‘I thought…’

‘Here.’ Her small fingers tightened about his wrist and then, when he was still, she moved his hand back beneath her, easing the edge of damp material aside.

‘There. Now slowly… slowly… slow!’

Shifting position slightly, she eased down against him and he felt her gradually opening against his fingers, warm and damp.

‘Slowly, Shane. Slowly, for fuck’s sake. Please, please, please.’

When she came, she sank her teeth into the flesh of his upper arm and broke the skin.

‘Jesus!’

‘What?’

‘That hurt.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Gently, she kissed the half moon on his arm. Their legs, inside the sleeping-bag, were fast in sweat. Angel unglued herself and, peeling her T-shirt over her head, rolled away until she lay naked on her back on the bed of the truck.

‘You’re beautiful,’ Shane said, knowing he should say something.

Her small breasts, when she lay like that, almost disappeared; he was surprised by the thickness of the hair that grew between her legs.

‘You haven’t got anything, have you?’

‘What? What d’you mean?’

‘A condom, what you think?’

Donald shook his head. He had thought she meant HIV, some disease.

‘Here then.’ Twisting towards him, supple, she took him in her mouth.

‘You don’t have to…’

But within moments he had come and she had swallowed him, most of him, and leaned forward against him then, her face against his chest. Without moving her, Donald turned slightly inward on his side and closed his eyes, her heart beating against him.

He woke, without knowing that he had slept, one arm numb where his weight had pressed it down on the metal ridge of the truck floor. Slowly turning, he shivered and fidgeted the zip of the sleeping-bag back up. There was a light on inside one of the other caravans and already the sky was beginning to lighten at its eastern edge. He wondered how long Angel had stayed with him before she had gone back. He was trying to remember, moment by moment, what had happened, when he fell asleep again without meaning to.

When he saw her again, a couple of hours later, crossing the site from Della’s caravan towards her stall, she raised a hand in his direction and smiled quickly without ever breaking stride.

When Shane Donald didn’t turn up again within forty-eight hours, handcuffed and crestfallen, when he didn’t commit some heinous crime, national interest waned. His brother-in-law’s exposé, even with the imagination of an otherwise bored sub-editor to add spice, was put on hold. Pam Wilson found that she could lift her head above the parapet without fear of cameras being thrust in her direction. One of the broadsheet nationals, which might have been thought to know better, ran an in-depth survey of sexual crimes involving pairs of malefactors and their youthful victims.

Elder rang the number Siobhan had given him for Rob Shriver several times and on each occasion was politely informed that neither Rob nor Linda Shriver could come to the phone right then, but inviting him, should he choose, to leave a message for either of them or, indeed, for any or all of Matthew, Dominic or Eliza. Twice Elder demurred and on the final occasion he left Willie Bell’s number.

When he tried his daughter’s mobile, thinking they could meet up for a coffee or a meal or maybe even a visit to the cinema, he was automatically transferred to her home number and before he could think to ring off, Joanne had come on the line. There was an awkward pause followed by one of those halting conversations in which each asks the other questions to which they scarcely care about the answers. They kept it up for several minutes before Elder thought he heard a door opening in the background followed by a male voice and then it was Joanne saying, ‘I’ll be sure to tell Katherine you called,’ and that was that.

Elder could remember when he and Joanne – mostly Joanne, but with him propping up his end willingly – had talked for hours about anything and everything. Politics to fashion by way of films and books and friends. And plans! To carry out even half the plans Joanne could conceive within a twelvemonth would have taken as many years. Some, as Elder was wont to point out, were impractical, pie in the sky – let’s open a shop, a boutique, a fashion salon of our own, a small hotel; go and live in America, Lisbon, the Balearic Islands, anywhere but where we are – and for the most part they depended upon him quitting the police force and becoming something other than what he was: the flatfoot detective she’d met in Lincolnshire when she was just nineteen, had married a little over six years later, and had finally persuaded to head for the big lights of London seven years after that.

You married the wrong man, he used to tell her jokingly, but both of them came to believe it was true. Perhaps if she’d met Martyn Miles years earlier it would never have happened. Except that Martyn Miles probably wouldn’t be seen dead in Lincolnshire – or, rather, that’s the only way he would consent to being there – and if Elder and Joanne had never married there would be no Katherine.

A thought Elder refused to countenance.

Take away the rest, everything, and Katherine made it all worthwhile.

Hungry, he opened a large tin of baked beans, added Worcester sauce, and ate from the saucepan with a spoon. He was rinsing out the pan beneath the tap when the phone rang and he picked it up.

‘Hello, this is Linda Shriver. You left a message asking one of us to call.’

Elder thanked her for getting back to him and explained what he wanted.

‘And this is to do with Susan Blacklock and why she disappeared?’

‘Yes.’

‘I see.’

There was a pause at the other end of the line.

‘You knew her, of course,’ Elder said.

‘Yes. Yes. Not as well as Rob and the others, but yes.’

‘And you didn’t like her.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I don’t know. Just a feeling.’

She laughed, brittle and just off-key. ‘You should be a detective, Mr Elder.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, and then, ‘Would you mind telling me why you felt that way about her?’

She thought before replying. ‘I never… it’s difficult, because I was never really a member of that little group, only through Rob and of course that was never the same… but I don’t think I ever… I want to say believed her, but that’s not really what I mean.’

‘You didn’t trust her?’ Elder suggested.

‘I don’t know if it’s quite that, either, though that might well be part of it. No, it’s more I never really believed in who she was, as though it was all a front. All this wonderful drama, blah, blah, blah. As if it was just something she was doing for show.’

Elder remembered the photographs. ‘Isn’t that what they were all doing, in a way?’

‘Yes. I know what you mean.’ She laughed, warmer this time. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t explained myself very well. All I’m doing is tying myself up in knots.’

‘That’s okay.’

‘I wouldn’t fare very well, would I, in an interrogation? Someone like you would let me waffle on, positively encourage me, and then, when I was totally confused, pluck the truth right out of the hat.’

‘Which is?’

Linda laughed, louder and more nervously this time. ‘I was jealous of her, of course.’

‘Because she was interested in Rob?’

‘God, no! Half the damned school, the female half anyway, were throwing themselves at him, but most of the time I don’t think Susan even noticed he was there. It was Rob who was infatuated with her. I’d catch him gazing after her sometimes, like some sorry dog that can’t get his bone. Or whatever. I even told her once. It was at some party or other, think I’d probably had a drink or two, Dutch courage, anyway I told her if she ever… well, ever anything as far as Rob was concerned, I’d have her eyes out. I’m sorry, that’s awful, isn’t it? After what… you know… what might have happened.’

Elder didn’t reply.

‘Anyway,’ Linda said, ‘all that happened was she looked like I was something the cat had dragged in then she walked away.’

‘And you waited for him to get over it?’

‘Something like that.’

Elder heard a small clink of glass against glass. More Dutch courage, he thought.

‘Do you know if Susan was involved with anyone?’ he said. ‘Anyone at the school?’

‘I don’t think so. She and Stephen, Stephen Bryan, they used to spend quite a bit of time together, but I don’t think there was anything to it.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘No. But I don’t think Stephen was interested in girls. Still isn’t, as far as I know.’

‘You mean he’s gay?’

‘I don’t think it’s that simple. Rob still sees him from time to time and he’s never said anything one way or the other.’ She paused. ‘Of course, if there had been something going on between Stephen and Susan, it would explain why she wasn’t interested in Rob.’

‘Yes,’ Elder said. ‘Of course.’

‘Look, I ought to be getting Rob’s dinner ready. And the boys will be back from Scouts. I’ll ask Rob to phone you after we’ve eaten, shall I?’

‘If you would.’

‘And Mr Elder, all of that stuff about him and Susan, there’s no need, is there…?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’

♦

Almost as soon as he’d put the phone down, it rang again.

‘Hello, Dad?’