Shatter (36 page)

‘I did. She says she met you once.’

‘She’s lying.’

The words are sucked through his teeth as though he’s nibbling on a tiny seed.

‘Help me understand something, Gideon. Do you hate women?’

‘Are we talking intel ectual y, physical y or as a sub-species?’

‘You’re a misogynist.’

‘I knew there’d be a word for it.’

He’s teasing me now. He thinks he’s cleverer than I am. So far he’s right. I can hear a school bel in the background. Children are jostling and shouting.

‘Maybe we could meet,’ I say.

‘Sure. We could do lunch some time.’

‘How about now?’

‘Sorry, I’m busy.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m waiting for a bus.’

Air brakes sound in the silence. A diesel engine knocks and trembles.

‘I have to go, Professor. It’s been nice talking to you. Give my best to Patrick.’

He hangs up. I hit redial. The mobile is turned off.

I look at DI Cray and shake my head. She swings her right boot at a wastepaper bin, which thuds into the opposite wal and bounces off again. The large dent in the side of the bin makes it rock unevenly on the carpeted floor.

46

The bus door hisses open. Students pile forward, pushing between shoulders. Some of them are carrying papier mâché masks and hollowed-out pumpkins. Halloween is two weeks
away.

There she is; dressed in a tartan skirt, black tights and bottle green jumper. She finds a seat halfway down the bus and drops her school bag beside her. Strands of hair have
escaped from her ponytail.

I swing past her on my crutches. She doesn’t look up. All the seats are taken. I stare at one of the schoolboys, rocking back on forth on my metal sticks. He moves. I sit down.

The older boys have commandeered the back seats, yelling out the windows at their mates. The ringleader has a mouthful of braces and bum fluff on his chin. He’s watching the girl.

She’s picking at her fingernails.

The bus has started moving— stopping, dropping and picking up. The kid with the braces makes his way forward, moving past me. He leans over her seat and snatches her
schoolbag. She tries to grab it back but he kicks it along the floor. She asks nicely. He laughs. She tells him to grow up.

I move behind him. My hand seems to clap him gently on the neck. It’s a friendly looking gesture— fatherly— but my fingers have closed on either side of his spine. His eyeballs
are bulging and his thick-soled shoes are balancing on their toes.

His mates have come down the bus. One of them tells me to let him go.

I give him a stare. They go quiet. The bus driver, a mud-coloured Sikh in a turban, is looking in the rear mirror.

‘Is there a problem?’ he shouts.

‘I think this kid is sick,’ I say. ‘He needs some fresh air.’

‘You want me to stop?’

‘He’ll get a later bus.’ I look at the boy. ‘Won’t you?’ I move my hand. His head nods up and down.

The bus pulls up. I guide the boy to the back door.

‘Where’s his bag?’

Somebody passes it forward.

I let him go. He drops onto a seat at the bus shelter. The door closes with a hiss. We pull away.

The girl is looking at me uncertainly. Her schoolbag is on her lap now, beneath her folded arms.

I take a seat in front of her, resting my crutches on the metal rail.

‘Do you know if this bus goes past Bradford Road?’ I ask.

She shakes her head.

I open a bottle of water. ‘I can never read those maps they put up in the shelters.’

Still she doesn’t answer.

‘Isn’t it amazing how we buy water in plastic bottles. When I was a kid you would have died of thirst looking for bottled water. My old man says it’s a disgrace. Soon they’ll be charging
us for clean air.’

No response.

‘I guess you’re not supposed to talk to strangers.’

‘No.’

‘That’s OK. It’s good advice. It’s cold today, don’t you think? Especially for a Friday.’

She takes the bait. ‘It’s not Friday. It’s Wednesday.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

I take another sip of water.

‘What difference does the day make?’ she asks.

‘Well you see the days of the week each have a different character. Saturdays are busy. Sundays are slow. Fridays are supposed to be full of promise. Mondays… well we all hate
Mondays.’

She smiles and looks away. For a brief moment we are complicit. I enter her mind. She enters mine.

‘The guy with the braces— he a friend of yours?’

‘No.’

‘He gives you problems?’

‘I guess.’

‘You try to avoid him but he finds you?’

‘We catch the same bus.’

She’s beginning to get the hang of this conversation.

‘You got brothers?’

‘No.’

‘You know how to knee someone? That’s what you do— knee him right in the you-know-where.’

She blushes. Sweet.

‘Want to hear a joke?’ I say.

She doesn’t answer.

‘A woman gets on a bus with her baby and the bus driver says, “That’s the ugliest baby I’ve ever seen.” The woman is furious but pays the fare and sits down. Another passenger
says, “You can’t let him get away with saying that. You go back and tell him off. Here, I’ll hold the monkey for you.”‘

I get a proper laugh this time. It’s the sweetest thing you ever heard. She’s a peach, a sweet, sweet peach.

‘What’s your name?’

She doesn’t answer.

‘Oh right, I forgot, you’re not supposed to talk to strangers. I guess I’ll have to call you Snowflake.’

She stares out the window.

‘Well, this is my stop,’ I say, pulling myself up. A crutch topples into the aisle. She bends and picks it up for me.

‘What happened to your leg?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Why do you need the crutches?’

‘Gets me a seat on the bus.’

Again she laughs.

‘It’s been nice talking to you, Snowflake.’

47

Maureen Bracken has tubes flowing into her and tubes flowing out. It has been two days since the shooting and a day since she woke, pale and relieved, with only a vague idea of what happened. Every few hours a nurse gives her morphine and she floats into sleep again.

She is under police guard at the Bristol Royal Infirmary— a landmark building in a city with precious few landmarks. Inside the front entrance at a welcome desk there are volunteers wearing blue and white sashes. They look like geriatric beauty queens who missed their pageant by forty years.

I mention Maureen Bracken’s name. The smiles disappear. A police officer is summoned from upstairs. Ruiz and I wait in the foyer, glancing through magazines at the hospital shop.

Bruno’s voice booms from an opening lift.

‘Thank God, a friendly face. Come to cheer the old girl up?’

‘How is she?’

‘Looking better. I had no idea a bul et could make such a mess. Horrible. Missed al the important bits, that’s the main thing.’

He looks genuinely relieved. We spend the next few minutes trading clichés about what the world’s coming to.

‘I’m just off to get some decent food,’ he says. ‘Can’t have her eating hospital swil . Ful of super-bugs.’

‘It’s not as bad as you think,’ I say.

‘No, it’s worse,’ says Ruiz.

‘Do you think they’l mind?’ asks Bruno

‘I’m sure they won’t.’

He waves goodbye and disappears through the automatic doors.

A detective emerges from the lift. Italian-looking with a crew cut and a pistol slung low in a holster beneath his jacket. I recognise him from briefings at Trinity Road.

He escorts us upstairs where a second officer is guarding the corridor outside Maureen Bracken’s room in a secure wing of the hospital. The detectives use metal detecting wands to screen visitors and medical personnel.

The door opens. Maureen looks up from a magazine and smiles nervously. Her shoulder is bandaged and her arm held in a sling across her chest. Tubes appear and disappear beneath the bandages and bedding.

She’s wearing make-up— for Bruno’s sake, I suspect. And the normal y featureless room has been transformed by dozens of cards, painting and drawings. A banner is draped above her bed, fringed in gold and silver. It announces: GET WELL SOON and is signed by her hundreds of students.

‘You’re a very popular teacher,’ I say.

‘They al want to come and see me,’ she laughs. ‘Only in school hours of course, so they can get out of classes.’

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Better.’ She sits up a little higher. I adjust a pil ow behind her back. Ruiz has stayed outside in the corridor, swapping off-colour jokes about nurses with the detectives.

‘You just missed Bruno,’ says Maureen.

‘I saw him downstairs.’

‘He’s gone to buy me lunch from Mario’s. I had this craving for pasta and a rocket and parmesan salad. It’s like being pregnant again and having Bruno spoil me, but don’t tel him I said that.’

‘I won’t.’

She looks at her hands. ‘I’m sorry I tried to shoot you.’

‘It’s OK.’

Her voice cracks momentarily. ‘It was horrible… the things he said about Jackson. I real y believed him, you know. I real y thought he was going to do it.’

Maureen recounts again what happened. Every parent knows what it’s like to lose sight of a child in a supermarket or a playground or in a busy street. Two minutes becomes a lifetime.

Two hours and you’re capable of almost anything. It was worse for Maureen. She listened to her son screaming and imagined his pain and death. The cal er told her that she would never see Jackson again, never find his body; never know the truth.

I tel her that I understand.

‘Do you?’ she asks.

‘I think so.’

She shakes her head and looks down at her wounded shoulder. ‘I don’t think anyone can understand. I would have put that gun in my own mouth. I would have pul ed the trigger. I would have done anything to save Jackson.’

I take a seat beside the bed.

‘Did you recognise his voice?’

She shakes her head. ‘But I know it was Gideon.’

‘How?’

‘He asked about Helen. He demanded to know if she’d written or cal ed or sent me an email. I told him no. I said Helen was dead and I was sorry, but he laughed.’

‘Did he say why he thinks she’s alive?’

‘No, but he made me believe it.’

‘How?’

She stumbles, searching for words. ‘He was so sure.’

Maureen looks away, seeking a distraction, no longer wanting to think about Gideon Tyler.

‘Helen’s mother sent me a get wel message,’ she says, pointing to the side table. She directs me to the right card. It features a hand-drawn orchid in pastel shades. Claudia Chambers has written:

God sometimes tests the best people because he knows they’re going to pass. Our thoughts and prayers are with you. Please get well soon.

I replace the card.

Maureen has closed her eyes. Slowly her face folds in pain. The morphine is wearing off. A memory uncurls itself from inside her head and she opens her mouth.

‘Mothers should always know where their children are.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘It’s something he said to me.’

‘Gideon?’

‘I thought he was goading me, but I don’t know any more. Maybe it was the only thing he said that wasn’t a lie.’

48

The law firm of Spencer, Rose and Davis is located in a modern office block opposite the Guildhal and alongside the Law Courts. The foyer is like a modern day citadel, towering five storeys to a convex glass roof crisscrossed with white pipes.

There is a waterfal and a pond and a waiting area with black leather sofas. Ruiz and I watch a man in a pinstriped suit come floating to the floor in one of twin glass lifts.

‘See that guy’s suit,’ Ruiz whispers. ‘It’s worth more than my entire wardrobe.’

‘My shoes are worth more than your entire wardrobe,’ I reply.

‘That’s cruel.’

The pinstriped man confers with the receptionist and moves towards us, unbuttoning his jacket. There are no introductions. We are to fol ow.

The lift carries us upwards. The potted plants grow smal er and the koi carp become like goldfish.

We are ushered into an office where a septuagenarian lawyer is seated at a large desk that makes him appear even more shrunken. He rises an inch from his leather chair and sits again. It’s either a sign of his age or how much respect he’s going to give us.

‘My name is Julian Spencer,’ he says. ‘I act for Chambers Construction and I’m an old friend of Bryan’s family. I believe that you’ve already met Mr Chambers.’

Bryan Chambers doesn’t bother shaking hands. He is dressed in a suit that no tailor could ever make look comfortable. Some men are built to wear overal s.

‘I think we got off on the wrong foot,’ I say.

‘You tricked your way onto my property and upset my wife.’

‘I apologise if that’s the case.’

Mr Spencer tries to take the edge off the moment, tut-tutting Mr Chambers like a schoolmaster.

Family friends, he said. It doesn’t strike me as a natural al iance— an old money establishment lawyer and working-class mil ionaire.

The pinstriped man has stayed in the room. He stands by the window, his arms folded.

‘The police are looking for Gideon Tyler,’ I say.

‘It’s about bloody time,’ says Bryan Chambers.

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘No.’

‘When did you last speak to him?’

‘I speak to him al the time. I yel at him down the phone when he cal s in the middle of the night and says nothing, just stays on the line, breathing.’

‘You’re sure it’s him.’

Chambers glares at me, as though I’m questioning his intel igence. I meet his eyes and hold them, studying his face. Big men tend to have big personalities, but a shadow has been cast over his life and he’s wilting under the weight of it.