Random Acts of Unkindness (16 page)

I read the summary carefully, and it could be a précis of exactly what Jim Stewart just said to me. There had been some sightings and, despite the commitment Mrs Swain has shown to finding her son, we believe, in the absence of a body, that Thomas Swain is still alive. There are some added notes later on, mostly about Bessy’s continuing visits to the police station, but these trail off around 1970.

It’s frightening. Bessy believed that Thomas was dead, or at least she didn’t believe that he had simply left. She had her reasons. It had clearly ruined her life and I get a feeling in the pit of my stomach that, if I pursue this line with Aiden, the persistence and the constant harassment of the police, my life will go the same way.

But I believe. I do. I still believe that my little boy is out there somewhere. It’s times like this, when I call him my little boy, my baby, night night, sleep tight, mind the bed bugs don’t bite, that the pain seeps through the chinks in my armour and the searing pain hits me.

Funnily enough, it’s these times that make my resolve stronger. Aiden couldn’t do this, not to me. We’re so close. Were. Are. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in anything, not after the cruel things I’ve seen in my life, in my job. Indescribable acts, carried out by people who don’t have empathy. Or just don’t care about anyone else. But, as if to hedge my bets, I say a silent prayer, just in case there is some ultimate reason for all this pain.

I flick through the 1963 missing cases to see who the other boys in Bessy’s stories are, and how many of them turned up. I count five boys between fourteen and seventeen missing in 1963, none of them returned or found. No bodies. All labelled runaways.

Shortly after I joined the police, I read a book about the Moors Murders. It made me want to get right to the top in law enforcement, if only to catch people like those two bastards. At my interview for DC I gave a presentation on policing and prolific cases, and my theories about them. I was quite young and very enthusiastic.

Afterward, Ted Scholes, the Chief Inspector at the time, sat me down and told me that murders were few and far between and serial killers even fewer. He told me that murdering someone and hiding a body was practically impossible, that the body was always found at some point. Therefore, the number of people murdered roughly equalled the number of bodies found.

Our job was to find the body and create a case against the person who had committed the crime. If there wasn’t a body, there wasn’t a crime. I remember asking him then, what about the people who go missing and a body’s never found? What then? When you know that someone’s done it, but you can’t prove it. He just shrugged.

‘You have to prove it one way or another. Otherwise, let it go. Chances are the body will turn up later and someone else will go back over your work and build on it. Random acts of unkindness, Janet. Random acts. Few and far between. Outside human nature.’

Random acts of unkindness. It’s always stuck with me. Acts committed in the heat of the moment, in distant locations, unplanned. Few and far between.

It didn’t look like that from the microfiche. I’ve reached the present day and the missing person files, runaways aged fourteen to seventeen, have risen and risen. By last year an average of three boys a year went missing. A couple of girls every few years. Some of them never turned up, but some of them were recorded as suicides. That’s around a hundred boys and ten girls in total. How come we never hear about it? Where are the appeals, like the one me and Sal did last yesterday?

I read three sample cases, the interview notes with the parents, and the recommendation reports. Same questions, any trouble at home? Any arguments? Girlfriend trouble? Boyfriend trouble? Problems at school or college?

Of course, the answer was always the same. They were mostly teenage boys, young people finding their identity. Of course there were challenges, arguments. Some had problems at school, some had relationship problems. In each report, the particular problem that had arisen had been taken, made bigger and the focus of the investigation and eventually the reason the case is closed.

‘Jason had a bad school report and the day before he went missing he had skipped a geography lesson.’

‘Darren’s girlfriend had ended a short relationship two months before he disappeared and he was upset.’

‘Stuart’s parents had divorced six months previously and this had upset him.’

I stare at the file. None of these reasons constitute evidence for the boys running away, or committing suicide, as it turned out poor Darren was thought to have done, when they found his body on a railway line in Northlands. I go to the PC and log in. I bring up Aiden’s case, which would have been updated and archived by now. I find the case closure notes.

‘Aiden’s parents were engaged in a tug of love following their divorce and Aiden was upset about it, and this is the probably reason for him running away.’

Sal. Fucking Sal. I resolve to watch his interview, although I know by heart the reasons he would have given for Aiden’s disappearance.

Bloody hell. All those boys missing. I do the obvious thing and cross check the stats with other areas. It’s the highest in the country. This appears to have been spotted and blamed on high deprivation in the area.

The thread running through this, the completing rationale, isn’t convincing. Someone in the report I’m reading argues that a quarter of a million people go missing each year. Someone else argues that most of those come back at some point, which brings what I’m looking at into focus. All of these missing boys have either never turned up, or are dead, presumed suicides.

It doesn’t add up, not over such a long period. Even though it’s been investigated, something is wrong. I can hear Ted Scholes’s voice echo through my mind. ‘Few and far between.’ Not here. Boys are going missing all the time. And as far back as 1963, maybe even further. I really haven’t got the heart to look.

I pull out the files of three of the boys who have eventually been recovered. I read the autopsy reports. All causes of death undetermined at first, then confirmed as a drug overdose. All found outside. All pallid complexions, as if they hadn’t been outside for a while. All with problem family backgrounds.

On the surface of it, it seemed exactly like Jim had said, a product of a desperate generation, disadvantaged and numbing the pain with drugs until it all got too much. After all, the teenage suicide rate is at an all-time high, with the main cause reported to be depression and disadvantage.

When I look a little bit closer, I see that all these boys have traces of white paint under their fingernails. Had this been linked? It links somewhere in the background of my consciousness with an image of the empty, stark rooms at Old Mill, and this strengthens my resolve. It had been investigated in each case—household paint, standard white emulsion. But they hadn’t been linked between the cases. Why would they be? As soon as they were found the assumption was made, some fucked-up junkie from a broken home. And the last two had fried chicken as their last meal, just like Darren. All of them reported no recent sexual activity, but had bruising between two weeks and a month old.

I write it all down and print out the reports I need. But as I sit with this new evidence in my lap and a firmer link forming in my mind, I wonder what I can really do about it now. And I wonder how Aiden fits into all this. Will he be found under a railway bridge, all full of drugs and pale?

Is this really a fucking social trend, a convenient line on some statistical chart that tells us poor equals desperately unhappy? Or is there much more to this, with scores of young men going missing over five decades and a few of them turning up dead in similar circumstances?

The question is, what can I do about it? If I bring it up now it will just look like I’m clutching at straws and I’ll be suspended. I send some of the microfiche reports to print and push the papers into my bag. My phone rings and it’s Mike.

‘Good news about Aiden, eh? Bet you’re chuffed?’

I pause and think.
It’s not him, Mike
, I think
. I love you Mike, you’re my best friend, but I can’t trust even you with this. I have to do this on my own.
An idea’s forming in my mind and I need to keep myself on side with everyone here.

‘Yeah. Case closed, then.’

‘So you’ll be back on Prophesy then, will you?’

I laugh.

‘Already back. Currently in the archives doing collations.’

He snorts.

‘Bloody hell. How did you get lumbered with that?’

‘Gives me a bit of head space. You know, think about something else.’

‘So come up with anything, have you?’

I stare at my bulging bag, and the pile of papers on the table.

‘Not really. Nothing much at all. It’ll probably take days. What about you?’

‘Not much. There was a break-in at the mill last night and were all questioned. One of Connelly’s boys looked at me and did the ‘haven’t we met before act,’ but the guy I’ve been working for covered for me.’

I sigh.

‘Oh. Break-in? Did they take anything?’

‘No. Not really. Anyway, there’s only fucking kitchens to take. Someone had accessed the computer, they reckon it’s a disgruntled employee. Don’t have no alarm system, either. They reckon everyone’s so scared of Connelly that no one would dare to break in.’

‘Mmm. Except someone with nothing to lose.’

I kind of wish I hadn’t said that, and Mike passes over it.

‘Yeah. OK, well, I’ll see you in a couple of days when you’ve finished your admin. Bye.’

‘Bye.’

I take the papers home, past the sky messages and past Connelly’s territory. When I arrive I see an unfamiliar orange glow from my lounge window. I go inside and Sheila is there, with a new woman called Annie. Sheila smiles. She’s wearing slippers. They’re pink, with a bunny rabbit face on the front and big fluffy ears

‘I hope you don’t mind, but I nipped to Housing Units to get some dimmer bulbs. Yours were a bit harsh, you know, hard on the eyes. Much more homely, isn’t it? Want a cuppa?’

I nod and throw my bag on the chair, placing the pile of papers on the table. Annie is eating a Crunchie and watching a nature programme.

‘Did you know that fairy-wren chicks are taught a ‘password’ by their mothers while they’re still in their eggs. It’s a specific note that they must cheep in order to be given food after they hatch. It’s thought that this is a defence against nest parasites like cuckoos.’

I focus on the TV and three fairy-wren chicks are calling to their mother. I’m tempted to take a maudlin dip into mother and child relationships, but I focus on something else. A password, is it? Like a code. Like a shared understanding, one that outsiders don’t get.

There’s more to this than meets the eye. I think about the black T-shirts and scarves, the yellows and the greens, and the blacks, blowing in the wind high above the traffic, a secret language. It’s obvious really. I’ve been looking in the wrong place. We should have known at the end of Operation Hurricane that Old Mill wasn’t a crime scene.

Like Mike said, there wasn’t even an alarm. It’s as if they want us to just walk in and see that they are doing absolutely nothing wrong in there. But where is it? Where is the fucking crime scene? Something must be pointing to it.

All I have is three missing boys with a pattern in their crime reports that could be coincidence or could be crucial, four with Aiden, silent sky messages, and an invisible crime scene in an unseen world that I know nothing about, hidden somewhere between the kitchens, a makeshift protection racket, and the dead boys.

The mother bird comes back and feed the babies and I feel a stab of pain in my soul. Where is my son?

After two nights of broken sleep, I sleep for ten hours. I when I wake up I can smell bacon. I shower and go downstairs and Sheila is just dishing out a full breakfast for four.

‘Mornin’. Do you want some?’

It does look good. And I need to pick their brains.

‘Oh, yeah. Sausages, and a few beans. And some toast, please.’

She’s dishing up and holding the hot pan with a new set of tea towels with robins on the edge.

‘There you go.’

I sit at the table and pour myself some tea from the big earthenware teapot that has magically appeared. It’s lovely and warm and I almost feel at home. In my own home. Almost. I look around and see that they’ve moved Percy’s dish and his tray. Thinking about it, I hadn’t even had the heating on since Aiden disappeared. Most of my life had been centred around caring for him and Sal, then just him. Now it had stopped and the elephant in the room was me. Even the WPCs looked more at home than me, with their fluffy slippers under their regulation trews.

‘Thanks. That’s lovely. I haven’t had breakfast with anyone since, well, you know.’

They collectively tilt their heads to one side. Sheila represents their expressions.

‘It must be so hard for you. Losing a child like that. Not that he’s . . .’

I wave my handful of toast.

‘It’s OK. It’s fine. I’m gradually getting used to it, that he’s not coming back. I just feel like I need some support.’

Annie smiles and touches my arm.

‘You’ve got us. Just think of us as sisters.’

I nod. And I was becoming fond of them, in a strange way. You don’t have many friends in this job, but at least they were backing me up.

‘That’s very kind, and I will. But I was thinking some kind of support group. There’s so many boys go missing from round here, there must be some kind of group that deals with it. You know, like victim support, only for mums of the missing boys.’

Sheila’s chewing her sausage, thinking deeply.

‘Yeah. I’ve heard there’s one at the community centre on Northlands. Mothers for the Missing. It’s been going awhile now, funded by that lovely Mr Connelly.’

I stare at her.

‘Lovely Mr Connelly? You do know that he’s a criminal, don’t you, Sheila? You were slagging him off the other day.’

She nods.

‘Oh yes, so everyone says, but you know, there’s something that makes me think that he’s not all bad. Us lot think he’s a bloody menace, but how many people have actually seen him do anything? I mean, he lets people rent those cheap houses he’s done up and he provides things like Mothers for the Missing. And he’s always speaking up against crime. If anything happens, you can guarantee he’s there in the front of the Herald. Here’s last week’s. You know, when that house was raided and all that heroin and coke was found, he was on the front of the paper, and inside it, waging a war against drugs. I know everyone thinks it’s him and he does run the estate, but I sometimes wonder if we’re on the wrong track and it’s not him at all. He seems so nice.’