Finding Davey (4 page)

“Family, Dr Newton?”

“Yes. There is no let-up for a child who joins a new family. New reinforcement is constant. His every mouthful, every stitch of clothing, is prescribed. His speech is controlled, his accent determined by those he speaks with.”

“Thank you. Can I tell you what I think I’ve learned, Dr Newton?”

Haltingly Bray summarised her interview. Twice he returned to the problem of time passing in the mind of a child abruptly living among strangers. Patiently she went over the same ground. Bray doggedly went back to selective memory.

“Patchwork?” he questioned her. “Like a quilt?”

“A child may not understand whether they represent some actual event in his past, or something he dreamt.”

“Like true or false?”

“That’s so, Mr Charleston. Remember that we’re speaking of a child moved into a totally new world. All his old points of reference will vanish. New lamps for old,
certainly, but he won’t detect which is which for absolute certain at first. It goes on normally in all of us, until old age where we can no longer detect the new. We then say we’re senile.”

“Patchwork,” he repeated. It meant hope.

“Here’s my number, Mr Charleston. Do call if I can help.”

“One thing, please. Could you tell Dr Feering nothing of this, please, say I didn’t show up? My son and
daughter-in
-law, you see.”

With some surprise she agreed, then asked, “What will you do, Mr Charleston?”

“Try,” Bray said. “I’ll try.”

Outside, he’d somehow expected gathering dusk, and here it was still broad day with London traffic chugging about.

He knew a small caff near Charing Cross. He walked there and bought tea and some tomato thing. He ought to have brought sandwiches, for London floated on a sea of cholesterol and saturated fats. He vowed to watch this in the future.

Future? Carefully he allowed in that dangerous notion. No sugar in tea from now on. No margarine, no soggy puddings. Health was vital. Correction:
will be
important, from now on. He listened to tourists arguing theatres, what was on, museums. He was exhausted by the morning’s ordeal, until the counter lady asked him with concern if he was all right.

He told her yes, thank you, fine. Rising, he got himself into the onrush of pedestrians and allowed himself the thought he’d been saving until now.

They were only two words, but he thought them with deliberate clarity, the outlines mentally burnished in bright
luxuriant brilliant gold. It was still only early days, so he restricted himself to initials.

He thought, KV. He’d got six months, in which a child’s memory might hang on, maybe a whole year at the very outside until there was nothing of Davey left.

Hurrying, he caught the train and was at the library by four o’clock looking up local technical colleges.

Bray wanted a plus, any hint of a plus.

Next door, Geoff and Shirley had gone to bed. Occasionally through the wall Bray would hear Shirley explode, shriek insanities at Geoff, as familiar as a church litany. “Why don’t you do something?” And cruelly the malicious, “Think yourself a man, lying there doing nothing when our son…?” It always ended in the shrillest denunciation of all: “You don’t care!” and a terminal wail, “Get on that phone! I want us to go back and search! They’re doing nothing!”

Bray had heard every combination of screamed incoherences. Shirley saw Geoff’s reasoning as subversion, the words of an enemy.

How much longer could Shirley go on? Bray guessed that she might crumple in less than another week. Would psychiatry in hospital be kinder for Geoff? Geoff, Bray saw, was dying within, actually shrinking physically, walking hunched, his features grey. And how was he faring at work?

Eventually the din next door lessened. Bray turned the television on, the sound down. Buster dozed in his circular padded pit.

The programme,
Documentary Dispatches
, was familiar, its technique interviews between video shots. Violence was its theme. No interviewers were shown, voice-overs lending portentous comment. It came on at one a.m.

Bray made notes.

Tonight’s programme concerned some place in the King’s Road, Chelsea. Suite 107, an address at PLAZA. Men’s names were spelled under their talking heads.
Executive Outcomes
was the name of one firm,
Sandline International
another. People looked respectable.

They were involved with mercenary armies, complete with tanks, mortars. The mercenaries themselves were shown, streaky night shots, tracer fire, corpses twisted in undergrowth.

If Bray understood the drift, they had fought in Angola, Sierra Leone, Papua New Guinea. They battled against rebel armies and did deals at international arms fairs in the Gulf. They even had an air force. Bray took down Capricorn Air’s number, N123W, not knowing its significance.

He paid attention to the rewards
Executive Outcomes
expected, a million USA dollars a month in Sierra Leone. The sums grew. Diamond mining rights, tens of millions for mercenary wars. Companies were floated on Canadian stock exchanges, mining concessions wrested from African governments.

Bray watched the credits roll after a mocked-up trial of a company administrator. They had failed in Papua New Guinea, yet somehow fortunes had changed hands.

He switched off and tidied his scribbles, using an indexed notebook. The cover of another bore a single black question mark.

The last task was to enter Mercenary Action in his
Query notebook, and painstakingly delete it. He had considered that option. He carried the notebooks back to the shed, placed them in their new plastic case – purple, the first colour Davey had learned to name. Then he slid the case into the slot he had constructed over the shed door. He had built it the third day of horror.

He went to bed, to the ritual of reading for an hour then pretending to sleep the night through.

As Monday afternoon drew to a close Bray made sure his work was well finished by five o’clock. He told Harry Diggins, the oldest labourer, he would stay and close up. Only when he was sure everyone had called goodnights and gone did he walk to the end of the workshop. He switched on the display lights over his prize possession.

Bray truly admired the Garvan Craftsman, sometimes called the Garvan Carver. Bray actually owned this piece personally, and was certain it was created by that wonderful ancient expert. It was his personal property, bought as a relic quarter of a century previously, and painstakingly restored in the lantern hours. Now, it was of stunning excellence. It stood encased in the workshop for all to admire.

Philadelphia, in the years before their Independence, had a handful of genius furniture makers. Hercules Courtenay was one, Nicholas Bernard another. Closest to Bray’s heart was the Garvan Man, called after one Mabel Brady Garvan at Yale who had a furniture collection. The unknown Craftsman from those long-ago times had made furniture of genius level. Nobody carved leaves or vines on card tables, on desks, like the Garvan Carver.

Bray had given almost a year’s salary for the derelict turret-topped card table. He had restored it with love. For
years it had stood in a security case on the workshop floor, as example and tribute. Mr Winsarls often showed visitors the special piece, laughingly refusing offers. “It’s not ours,” he told people. “It’s on loan.”

Mr Winsarls had pointed out to Bray that he could make a giddy sum by selling it at Sotheby’s, who specialised in 1759 Philadelphia furniture. Bray always smiled and shook his head.

Now, though, he stood appraising it. It glowed, positively glowed, the lovely turrets, the wonderful carvings of vines, the slender feet each clasping a ball. He shook himself for feeling fanciful emotions, and spoke aloud.

He said softly, “Time to earn your keep, Craftsman. All right with you?”

He locked up, set the usual alarms, and caught the train. On the way, he bought the
Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook
. The manuscript woman, looking tired tonight, glimpsed it and raised her eyebrows, almost as if to say something. He moved elsewhere, and read it in silence all the way home.

The boy could see strange trees, and people playing tennis in a park.

Doctor was nice. The nurses said so. One nurse told him the sea was over there. The sun never stopped shining. The nurse was nice.

This time he asked Doctor a question. Doctor was pleased that he asked a question, straight out without thinking for the words.

“Can I go and see the sea?”

“You sure can, Clint! We’ve got your old surfboard here! Sure!”

The nurse brightly put in, “And Clint likes football, Doctor!”

Doctor laughed. “Clint’s going to be a hotshot quarter back!”

“He changes TV channels on his own now.”

“Great!” Doctor exclaimed. “Now, Clint, no more accidents, right?”

“Right.”

“This clinic’s the best for accidents. Pop and Mom already knew that.”

Alone, Clint clicked the remote control. On came a show, much laughter and clapping. He liked these shows. He didn’t know any answers, because he’d had an accident.

He dozed, was woken later for medication by another nurse. For an instant he imagined he’d heard a child cry out, but he must have been wrong because here was nice. They wouldn’t let anybody cry.

This nurse wasn’t fat like the morning nurse. She showed him pictures of her children. The children’s daddy was a pilot on a plane. The children went to school. One was in second grade, just like he’d been before his accident.

Doctor interrogated the nurse near the secluded room.

“How did he respond to the photographs?”

“I showed him Number Forty-One M and Sixty-Two N,” she said quietly. “I gave him school grading information and my supposed husband’s career. Clint responded as you predicted, Doctor. Acceptance plus.”

“What TV does he select?”

“Comedy, cartoons.”

Doctor harrumphed. “That travel programme was careless. Delete it.”

“Right away, Doctor.”

“Take no chances with this one.”

The nurse hesitated. “Should we worry, Doctor?”

“This kid’s buyer is a real operator. Know what I’m saying?”

In the room the sleeping boy didn’t stir. Vapour trails crossed as blue sky darkened to indigo.

On the ceiling and the wall shadows cast by the fading sun became diverse shapes with blurred outlines. The boy’s eyes opened. For a moment he glimpsed the shadows, then he dozed, his mind slipping away. Doctor and nurses were nice.

Doctor sat at his desk across from his framed diplomas, reviewing the listed staff of his Special Care Rehabilitation Unit. He had a star system – four stars for maximum reliability, down to one star. Such was his scheme of profit sharing, and so expert was he in employment pre-selection, that only three ancillary staff had ever merited only one star.

One star meant deletion, death by accident.

The first had been a medical technician, now twenty years deceased. A road accident was always the most reliable, and least investigated, means of elimination. The second had been a nurse whose man, a loutish beachblower, persuaded her to attempt to blackmail Doctor, so amateurish as to be laughable. Both had oh-so-accidentally drowned, drugged up, under the breakwaters by Old Bayonne Beach. He didn’t regret the cost. Their insolence deserved an ugly death.

The third member of staff had been a secretary. Her jealousy had become intolerable and her imperious demands on him ridiculous. He regarded hysteria as forgivable. But to insist that he decline sex with willing nurses in her favour was effrontery. From a mere clerk, to the prime mover of the enterprise that put bread in her mouth? Yet, he thought with satisfaction, her shrieked ultimatum that he marry her had been a compliment. She was found dead, victim of an unsolved assault in her apartment on Congreve and Vane. Expensive again, but requisite.

None of these deaths was Doctor’s fault, for the Clinic had to remain sacrosanct. Every employee received a heavy bonus for each child abducted from its parents and satisfactorily processed before being sold on with its new identity. Staff either believed, or were removed. Simple as
that. And only three among so many was a superb track record.

Starkly, the truth was this: The original parents of the children he acquired didn’t
deserve
them. Society needed somebody to rescue the children, and simply transfer them to decent strangers. If biological parents couldn’t be bothered, then he, the Doctor, had a medical duty to pass their children to better parents.

That’s all it was: duty fulfilled. Richer people, sure, who could pay well. But so?

There were fees, naturally. Had to be. He set the fees at whatever he judged they could afford. They were glad to pay.

After all, look at the product! Every child guaranteed ready-made, with all of its first memories blanked out. He felt inexpressibly moved whenever he entered up the details of a new child in his copperplate handwriting. He had created the perfect system. The fuss over the new boy had already died down.

Nothing could go wrong.

Two in the morning, Bray roused and went downstairs. Buster woke, stared, came with him while he made some cocoa. He sat in his armchair. The dog lay on the rug to listen.

“See, Buster,” he explained, “people who steal a child don’t do it just once. They steal one child after another. It’s money.”

Buster’s ears moved, but he was already into a doze.

“They’re rich enough to bribe anybody.” He tried the cocoa but it scalded, too hot. “Like police.” He never got the hang of cocoa.

“Two questions, Buzzie. Can I trust that Officer Stazio?
Or is he really one of them, keeping an eye on this sad Limey grampa?”

Buster gave a trial snore. Bray didn’t mind. The past weeks had been hard. He wanted eyes and ears, anybody’s, to test his suggestions. Even pretence would do.

“I can trust nobody, Buzzie,” he said. “I shall tell Geoffrey and Shirley nothing. I’m not trying to do my son’s job, or take anybody’s place. God knows I’m nothing special. But Geoff’s up to his neck, everything falling apart, Shirley broken.”

Buster fell sound asleep.

“I’m only the grandfather, no more, no less. So it’s down to me. I must remember. Trust might be a trick.”

He tried the cocoa. Stone cold. He told Buster goodnight and went back to bed and stared at the blackness.