Blood Guilt (16 page)

“Are you okay, Harlan?
You sound strange.”

“I’m fine. I just need
to see you.”

The line was silent for
the space of a few breaths. Then, with a sharp little sigh in her voice, as if
she was irritated with Harlan or herself, or both, Eve said, “Okay, I’ll be
there as soon as I can.”

Harlan moved his chair
to the window and sat in the gathering dusk, watching for Eve. His forehead was
nodding against the glass when her car pulled into view. He dragged his feet to
the front door, reaching it as she knocked. The look that came over her face
when she saw him added one more thin layer to his guilt. She put her hand to
her mouth, shaking her head. “I’m sorry,” Harlan said. “I wouldn’t have called
you, only I need someone to help me stay awake. I’ve got a concussion. It’ll be
okay, but the doctor says I shouldn’t sleep for longer than two hours at–” He
broke off, swaying on his feet.

Eve darted forward to
support Harlan. She helped him into bed and sat on the edge of the mattress,
gazing at his pale, drawn face. “Aren’t you going to ask me what happened?” he
said.

“I’d say it’s fairly
obvious what happened. Susan Reed thinks that man they released, William Jones,
may know something. And she asked you to question him. And when you did, he
attacked you.”

Harlan smiled faintly
through the pain in his head and heart. “Not bad. That’s almost exactly right.
Have you ever considered a change of career? You’d make a pretty good copper.”

“No I wouldn’t. I don’t
enjoy sticking my nose into other peoples’ business. And I don’t like the
police much, anyway.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“Besides, you said
almost right. So what did I get wrong?”

“Jones didn’t do this
to me.”

“So who did?”

Harlan took a long
breath and told her everything. She deserved that much at least. Besides, it
felt good to get it all out. When he got to the part about how he hadn’t been
able to bring himself to hurt Jones, his eyes dropped away from Eve’s. “Susan
Reed thinks I’m a coward.”

“A coward is the last
thing you are, Harlan. You’ve just seen too much hurt.”

“Maybe not a physical
coward, but a moral coward. I mean, for Christ’s sake, I killed an innocent
man, but I couldn’t hurt a child-abuser who might hold the key to finding
Ethan.”

Eve shook her head.
“You’ve got it the wrong way around. You’d be a moral coward if you hurt
Jones.”

Harlan made no reply,
but his expression was unconvinced.

“Do you really think
Jones knows where Ethan is?” asked Eve.

Harlan was momentarily
silent in thought, then he said, “No. But he knows something about something.”

“What makes you think
that?”

“Just a hunch. I’ve
questioned enough people to know when someone’s hiding something.”

A ripple of unease passed
over Eve’s features. “You don’t think Jones is…” she paused and gave a little
shudder, before continuing, “doing something to some other child, do you?”

Harlan thought about
the paintings. “I don’t know. I think he’s fighting what he is, but maybe it’s
a battle he’s losing.”

Eve’s frown deepened.
“It horrifies me to think that there are people like that out there.”

“Then don’t think about
it. You’ve no need to.” The instant Harlan said the words he wished he hadn’t.

“Why haven’t I?” Eve
demanded to know, the hurt plain in her eyes. “You don’t need to be a mother to
feel that way. You just need to be alive and human.”

Alive and human
.
The words seemed to throb in Harlan’s mind. It’d been a long time since he’d truly
felt either of those things. “I’m sorry.”

Eve’s features
softened. “Forget it,” she sighed. “So what happened after you left Jones?”

Harlan told the rest of
the story. When he finished, Eve asked, “Do you have any idea who attacked
you?”

“Kane.”

Eve’s eyebrows lifted.
“Ethan’s brother. How can you be sure it was him? You said your attacker wore a
scarf over their face.”

“Yes, but not their
eyes. You should’ve seen his eyes, Eve. The hate in them…” Harlan’s voice
trailed off with a tremor, as a pain that was nothing to do with the lesions on
his scalp poured out from his brain.

A moment of silence
passed between him and Eve. He could see she wanted to say something to comfort
him. But he knew as well as she did that there was nothing she could say. He cleared
the knot from his throat. “Susan wants me to question Jones again, properly
this time.”

“And are you going to?”

“I don’t think I can.”

“So what are you going
to do now?”

“I’m not sure. All I
know is I’ve got to do something. If nothing else, I must make Kane see how
sorry I am.”

“How? By spending your
life searching in the shadows for a boy you’ll probably never find?”

Harlan looked at Eve
with a desperation close to tears. “What else can I do to make him stop hating
me?”

“Oh Harlan,” murmured
Eve, sympathy shining in her eyes as she reached to touch his face.

“Don’t.” Harlan moved
his cheek away from her. “I don’t want sympathy. I just want to stay alive
until this thing’s done.” He stared out the window. All he could see was
blackness and stars. A strange sensation came over him, as if he was falling
into the night sky. His eyelids drooped. “Wake me in two hours,” he managed to
mumble before sleep overpowered him.

Seemingly only seconds
later, Harlan felt himself being shaken awake. “It’s been two hours,” said Eve.

As Harlan rolled over
to look at her, pain crackled through his skull. “Painkillers, please,” he
groaned.

Eve fetched him a
couple of tablets and a glass of water. “Are you hungry?”

“No.”

Eve watched with an air
of resigned sadness as Harlan shakily swilled back the painkillers. She said
nothing. There was nothing left for her to say. After a while, he closed his
eyes and fell back asleep.

Eve woke Harlan up
three more times during the night. The final time, it was getting light and she
held a tray with toast and tea on it. After a silent breakfast, Harlan went
through to the bathroom. He still felt headachy and dizzy, but when he looked
in the mirror he saw that his pupils were no longer dilated with concussion.
When he left the bathroom, Eve was waiting for him in the hallway. She had her
coat on.

Harlan managed a thin
smile, although a heavy, hollow ache wrung his chest at the thought of her
leaving. “Thanks.”

Eve nodded, turned and
left.

From the living-room
window, Harlan watched Eve get into her car and drive away. Swallowing a sigh,
he dropped onto the sofa and watched the morning news. Still no mention of
Jones. Garrett was doing a good job of keeping a lid on the whole affair. It
was only a matter of time, though. Not that there was much chance of Jones
going to the media – characters like him thrived in the shadows. But every
police department had its leaks.

What are you going to
do now?
Eve’s question came back to Harlan. The answer was
simple. He was at a dead end, and there was only one thing he could do – turn
around and go back over old ground, see if he’d missed anything. He retrieved
his phone from the table and called Jim. “Tell me about Neil Price.”

“I’ve already told you
everything you need to know. He’s clean as a baby. Never even had a
speeding-ticket.”

“Everybody’s got some
dirt somewhere.”

“The guy doesn’t do
drugs, he doesn’t gamble, his computer’s clean. The only thing we dug up on him
even vaguely interesting is that he got into some credit-card debt in his early
twenties.”

“How much?”

“I can’t remember
exactly. Nine or ten thousand, I think. But he finished paying it off a couple
of years ago.”

“No outstanding loans?”

“No. His
credit-record’s clean now.”

“What about to loan
sharks?” 

“Not that we know of.”

“Yeah, but we know he
has the potential to get himself into debt.”

“Don’t we all? I’ll bet
if I added up how much I owe on credit-cards, car loans and all the other crap,
it’d be a good few thousand quid.” Jim let out a sigh. “Look, I’m telling you,
Harlan, he’s just some poor kid who got caught in this mess through no fault of
his own. And besides, I don’t think he’s got it in him to pull something like
this.”

“How do you mean?”

“If you’d met Price
you’d know what I mean. He’s the kind of guy who lets people walk all over him.
He lives with his parents on the Manor. His mum’s this little mouse of a woman.
But his dad’s a real tyrant. An unemployable drunk. The impression I get is
that Neil and his mum spend most of their lives running around after him.”

“Maybe that’s the
angle, maybe Neil’s sick of being a doormat. We’ve come across dozens of people
like that – people who live passively with anger and resentment for years until
suddenly one day, pop!”

“He’s not got the anger
in him. I questioned him myself, pushed him real hard and he just took it. It
was pathetic really. I almost felt sorry for him.”

A hint of a surprised
smile tugged at Harlan’s mouth. He’d never known Jim feel sorry for himself or
anyone else before. “You must be getting soft, mate.”

“Maybe. Or maybe I’m
just getting too old for this kind of work. I tell you, Harlan, some days I’m
so tired – tired of dealing with scum like William Jones and putting in fifty
or sixty hours a week for sod-all – that all I can think of is getting out of this
job. But what else would I do, eh? This is all I know.”

“How is Jones?”

Jim gave a low whistle
of contempt. “Oh he’s fine. Garrett wanted to put him up in a safe-house, but
he refused. So now a couple of uniforms are sat on him day and night. If you ask
me, there’s something warped about us baby-sitting that–” He broke off at a
voice in the background. After a moment, he came back on the line and said,
“I’ve got to go. Something’s going on. I’ll talk to you later. And Harlan,
remember our deal, if you find anything out…”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll call
you.”

Chapter
12

Careful not to wet his
bandage, Harlan showered and shaved. Then, pausing occasionally to steady
himself, he dressed and made his way down to his car. According to the doctor,
he shouldn’t drive for another twenty-four hours or so. But the thought of
doing nothing was even more nauseating than his concussion. The effort of
concentrating on driving made his head reel. Several times he was forced to
pull over and wait for the world to stop spinning in front of his eyes.

Harlan didn’t need an
A-Z to find Manor Lane. He knew it all too well from his days on the force. It
dissected the Manor – an estate with a bad rep as a playground for
binge-drinking, mugging, joyriding, happy-slapping hoodies. Neil Price’s
parents’ house was at the lower end of Manor Lane, with a view overlooking the
traffic-clogged Parkway and the industrial sprawl of Attercliffe and Tinsley.
Harlan drove slowly past it and pulled over a few doors down on the opposite
side of street. The house was a dirty red-brick semi with a small front lawn
that managed to be both threadbare and overgrown. A beat-up Volvo was parked
outside its front door. The neighbouring house, like numerous other houses
dotted around the huge estate, was boarded up with metal sheets. Harlan
reflected that there was certainly no shortage of places thereabouts to stash
an abducted child. Both sets of upstairs curtains were drawn. Harlan guessed
that Neil and his dad were respectively sleeping off a night-shift and a
hangover. The downstairs curtains were open and the flicker of a television was
visible. As he’d passed the house, he’d seen a late-middle-aged, mousey-faced
little woman sat in an armchair.

Harlan tuned the radio
to the news, and settled back to watch the house. He wasn’t worried about
people wondering what he was doing there. Manor Lane was a busy road. Moreover,
its residents were accustomed to turning a blind eye to what went on outside
their front doors. Not that most of them weren’t decent, honest people. Only
they’d become hardened, worn down or simply desensitised by the relentlessness
of their lives. And they were sick of being tarred with the same brush as the
criminals. It all added up to a toxic cocktail of distrust, apathy and silence.

Harlan wondered how
Neil Price had fared growing up on the estate. For someone as obviously
sensitive as him, life must’ve been a bitter pill to swallow. Places like the
Manor had a way of finding and homing in on weakness like a predator to prey. A
gawky, skinny misfit like Neil would’ve been an easy target for the other kids
to tease and bully. Surely somewhere beneath that timid exterior there was a
store of pent-up anger and frustration simmering away. Or maybe Jim was right,
maybe Neil really didn’t have it in him. If the former was the case, Harlan was
determined to find a line of attack to draw it out of him.