Flesh And Blood (3 page)

‘Good-night, Dad.’

Holding her close, he kissed her hair, her cheek. ‘It’s been good.’

‘Yes. Yes, it has.’

In the small kitchen, moths jousting with the lamp, he stood, glass of Jameson’s in hand, listening to her moving around above. Then silence. When he and Joanne had separated, he had been anxious to reassure his daughter, not wanting her to imagine the break-up was in any way her fault. ‘I love you, Kate,’ he had said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

She had looked back at him with a sad little smile. Fourteen. ‘I know, but that doesn’t matter, does it?’

‘What do you mean? Of course it does.’

‘No. It’s Mum. You should have loved her more.’

Elder swallowed down the rest of his drink and rinsed out the glass; that night he spent downstairs in the chair, blanket across his legs. A quick breakfast before seven and then the drive across the granite spine of the peninsula to the station at Penzance. The train stood waiting, doors open. A quick hug and then a turn away.

‘You’ll come and see me run?’

‘Of course.’

A wave, the guard’s last shout, Katherine’s face at the window a blur of white. And Elder, at the platform end, hand raised, the twist and tug at his insides sharp and real as the train disappeared from sight.

The landlord of Elder’s nearest pub was not best known, perhaps, for his good grace, but Elder had shown his face often enough to earn more than a sneer.

‘Was a call for you,’ the landlord said. ‘Some woman. After you for unpaid maintenance, I’d not be surprised.’ His roosterish laugh rose high above the bar. ‘Got to be some reason, you hidin’ out in that place the way you are. Said she’d ring back round nine.’

Katherine, Elder wondered? Joanne?

It was neither. Though he’d last heard it two years before, Elder had no trouble identifying the low lift and turn of Maureen Prior’s voice. Previously Elder’s sergeant, she was now a detective inspector in the Nottinghamshire Major Crime Unit, the same rank Elder had once held himself.

‘Maureen. What’s up?’

‘Shane Donald.’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s about to be released. On licence. I thought you’d like to know.’

‘Thanks, Maureen.’

Seventeen and convicted of murder, Donald had been sentenced to be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. His co-defendant, Alan McKeirnan, older, the acknowledged leader, had been given life. That had been in 1989. By now Donald would be passing thirty.

‘There’s been a bit of a hoo-ha in the local press.’

‘How did they latch on to it?’

‘The victim’s parents, they’d have been informed.’

‘Of course.’

The victim, Elder thought: Lucy Padmore, at sixteen a year younger than Donald himself.

‘If you’re interested, I’ll cut the pieces out, stick them in the post.’

‘Yes, okay, Maureen, thanks. Do that.’

‘All right, Frank. Take care.’ And the connection was broken.

Despite working closely with Maureen Prior for almost three years, Elder knew little about her; where her private life was concerned, she hoarded details like a miser. Single as far as the evidence allowed, straight if he’d had to hazard a guess, she never shirked a task, no matter how tedious or repugnant, always stood her fair share in the pub after hours. He had never seen her drunk, rarely heard her swear. Compared to Maureen, Elder wore his heart on his sleeve, his backside, as the singer put it, out to the world.

He stood a moment longer before returning the receiver to its cradle and turning back towards the bar. Shane Donald. He remembered a scrawny youth with watery eyes, impressionable, easily held in thrall. He wondered who Donald had latched on to in prison, which way he had been led. Now he would be relocated to another part of the country, away from the scene of his crime; he would spend, in all probability, the first six months in a probation hostel; be supervised closely to ensure that his readiness to re-enter the community had been well judged.

Elder bought a large Jameson’s and carried it to the far corner of the low-ceilinged room. In his experience you felt many things about those you arrested, especially for murder, and pity was rarely amongst them.

♦

Donald was the last child of older parents, a mistake as he was often called, an afterthought, a wee sickly thing at birth who had only just survived and, as his mother was wont to point out, more the sodding pity for that. The family lived in the north-east, a run-down sump estate on the edges of Sunderland, three generations stumbling over one another in a house where half the windows were like as not boarded up and the back door swung off its hinges in the wind. His father did odd jobs, scrounged scrap metal and sold it where he could, lost money on the horses, drew the dole; his mother worked as a cleaner in the local school. Before they were in their teens, his three brothers had been in trouble with the police. One of his sisters fell pregnant at thirteen, the same year Shane was born.

It was a life sure to get worse and so it did. His father would beat him as a matter of course, the back of his hand around the boy’s face, a thick belt laid hard across his arse. His grandfather abused him when he was drunk; when they were sober two of his brothers took it in turns to bugger him till he bled. Each time he ran away, the police or some well-meaning social worker would bring him back. Only his middle sister, Irene, showed him affection, would wipe away his tears and cuddle him on her lap. But when she left home, married to a gas fitter from Huddersfield some hundred or so miles away, one child already and another on the way, there was no one he could talk to, no one he could trust. More and more, he lived in that small dark space inside his head.

Around the time of his fifteenth birthday, not long after Irene left, something snapped. He lashed out at the woodwork teacher with a piece of two-by-four, smashed half a dozen windows along one side of the school, broke into his own house and took fresh wages from his mother’s purse, bundled some clothes and anything worth stealing into an old holdall and began hitching south-west.

It wasn’t easy. Most drivers, even if they slowed down, shot a glance in Donald’s direction, then sped past. He spent one night huddled up against his belongings in a bus station in Darlington, another sleeping under a hedge near a lay-by just off the A61. By the time he arrived on his sister’s doorstep he was hollow-eyed and filthy and his clothes reeked of damp and worse.

Irene hugged him and bundled him inside. Upstairs in the bathroom, she undressed him as if he were still a child and ran a warm flannel across his skin.

‘He needn’t think as he’s stayin’ here, cause he’s bloody not,’ were her husband Neville’s words.

Ignoring him, Irene spread margarine across sliced bread, then jam, made tea. She was seven months’ pregnant and it showed; the baby presenting itself the wrong way round though there was time enough for it to turn.

‘Shane, pet, what’ve you done?’ she asked, watching him devour the bread. ‘You’re not in trouble, are you?’

‘Left ’em, that’s what.’

‘Not before time.’

‘An’ I’m never goin’ back neither, no matter what.’

‘I’ve told you,’ Neville said from the doorway, ‘you’re not stopping here.’

‘You keep out of this,’ Irene said. ‘It’s my business, not yours.’

‘Is it, hell as like!’ He took a step towards her, fist clenched, but she stared him down.

‘Time, isn’t it, you were getting off to work?’

Neville turned and went without a further word.

‘Don’t you fret,’ she said to Shane. ‘It’ll be all right. He’ll come around.’ She could make up a bed for him downstairs, she was thinking, a mattress on the floor. At least until the baby came.

But before that happened, Shane had met Alan McKeirnan and the chain of events that led to murder had begun.

♦

Elder tipped the last of the Jameson’s into his mouth and savoured it for a moment on his tongue. He remembered one of his fellow officer’s words when they finally had Donald handcuffed in the station, brown hair cropped close to his head, wisps of a moustache vying with cold sores around his bloodless mouth. ‘Someone should have drowned him at birth, pathetic bastard. Either that or left him on the blanket where he belonged.’

♦

The envelope bearing Maureen Prior’s precise writing arrived three days later. The postwoman left her van at the top of the lane and walked down, the first time she’d had occasion to call since early spring.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said with a quick glance skywards as Elder stepped out to meet her. ‘Day like this, good news, got to be.’

‘Let’s hope, eh?’ He doubted that it was.

There were pages from the
Mansfield Chad
, the
Nottingham Evening Post
. Photographs of both Donald and McKeirnan at the time of their trial, the one of Donald unfocused and ill-framed, snatched by a press photographer through the window of a moving van.
GIRL’S KILLER TO GO FREE
proclaimed one headline. Free, Elder thought, after serving thirteen years.

There were two pictures of Lucy, one a regulation shot of her in school uniform, smiling blandly at the camera, the other a candid snap of a pretty, fair-haired girl in sweatshirt and jeans, laughing at something that had just been said.

Elder supposed she had looked much like that when she had met them, McKeirnan and Donald, on the sea front at Mablethorpe, where she was holidaying with her family. Alan McKeirnan, twenty-six, black hair greased into a retro fifties quiff, fairground tattoos on his arms, leather jacket studded and open, jeans buckled tight. He would have spoken to her first, a certain cocky charm. Donald she would scarcely have noticed, an ill-fitting shadow in the older man’s wake. An older man – Lucy might have liked that, part of the appeal; that and the offer of a ride on his motor bike. A Norton 750, polished chrome. ‘Hey, Shane. Give her your helmet. You can walk.’ Elder could see McKeirnan in his mind’s eye, leading Lucy off with a wink and a grin. Twenty minutes to the small caravan site where he and Donald were staying, inland from the coast.

They had kept her there for five days, a prisoner, subjecting her to a series of assaults which had escalated to the point of her eventual death. Her body had been found, torn and bruised, buried in a shallow grave amongst scrub and couch grass near the coast path across the dunes.

Similarities were found with a number of assaults that had taken place across the county border in Nottinghamshire, going back several years. In the most recent of these, one year before, a young woman named Michelle Guest had been kept prisoner for forty-eight hours and forced to take part in a variety of sexual acts, including penetration with a blunt implement, before being released, dumped out of a car on a nothing road between Retford and Gainsborough at dead of night. She was seventeen, not overly bright, and had worked as a prostitute in a casual sort of a way since leaving school. When a farmer found her, huddled against a hay bale early the next morning, and contacted the police, she was disorientated, terrified, scarcely able to speak.

An inter-force team was set up, with Elder and a detective inspector from Nottinghamshire, Terry Foster, leading inquiries in the field. Another DI ran the incident room where different elements of the investigation were logged and local records were checked, officers and civilians accessing the national HOLMES computer, sifting and categorising before a decision was made as to which names could be discarded, which should be considered potential suspects and a trace initiated.

Alan McKeirnan was one of the latter. In his late teens he had been convicted of indecent assault and served eighteen months inside; in the intervening years he had been suspected of involvement in several similar offences, including one of attempted rape, brought in for questioning but never charged.

Of no fixed address, he worked occasionally as a mechanic; more frequently he was on the road with one or other of the small travelling fairs which criss-crossed the country, coming together for major annual events such as Nottingham Goose Fair. When Elder finally caught up with him, McKeirnan was repairing an errant bumper car in an amusement park in Skegness, Gene Vincent blaring distortedly through the overhead speakers, ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ and ‘Bluejean Bop’.

‘Can’t beat it,’ McKeirnan said, wiping greasy palms down the front of his overalls. ‘Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Charlie Feathers.’

Elder remembered them vaguely as names from his childhood and wondered what someone roughly half his age was doing listening to them now.

‘Can you turn it down?’ Elder shouted above the sound.

McKeirnan signalled towards the control booth and, after a few moments, the volume diminished to normal levels.

‘Who’s that?’ Elder asked, indicating the youth who had waved back at McKeirnan before obeying his instruction.

‘That?’ McKeirnan said. ‘That’s nobody.’

Elder would discover later that it was Shane Donald.

‘You, though,’ Elder said, ‘you’re Alan McKeirnan?’

‘Nobody else.’ Already the smile in place, self-assured.

‘And you’ll not mind answering a few questions?’

‘Depends.’

‘On what?’