Soul Seeker (19 page)

Shaun, as usual, was less than garrulous. He barely grunted as he came in; Sammy had long ago given up asking him to take his shoes off when he came in the house, was constantly aware that his wife would not have taken defiance as a reason to stay silent; he was aware, too, at how big his son was, how there was an ever present sense of
roiling
about him. ‘Good day?'

Shaun shrugged and Sammy, used to having his questions become rhetorical by means of indifference, said, ‘Supper'll be ready in about ten minutes. There's tea in the pot.'

‘OK.' His son had picked up the newspaper and was reading the back page.

‘How was work?'

Shaun shrugged by way of an answer; it was a perfect example of non-verbal communication and it said,
Fuck off.

But Sammy was worried. ‘I was talking today to Barry Drew.' Barry Drew was a man about town, a man of many talents, a man you called when you wanted things found like beaters for the shoot, or things done like gypsies moved on, or things removed that were in the way. He dealt quite frequently with Silverstone's.

‘Yeah?' This was a thing of total disinterest; the
Sun
's football reporters had apparently produced copy of exceptional quality.

Sammy's four eggs seemed to require more than usual attention as he stared at them and gently slopped hot vegetable oil over them. He went on: ‘The recession's hitting hard.'

No reaction.

‘He said that a lot of the firms he did business with were having difficulties . . .'

Shaun turned the page without looking up.

Sammy might have been overcooking the eggs, but his mind had wandered. He said after something of a deep breath, ‘Silverstone's are having trouble, aren't they, Shaun?' His tone was almost pleading, an attempt to enter his son's world that, despite their close proximity for so many years, was an alien place.

Shaun at last looked up at his father, his face a mix of controlled anger and clearly fabricated disingenuousness. ‘A bit.'

‘Barry said that there was a lot of short-time working.'

His son's face clouded briefly then he shrugged. ‘For some. Not for me.'

Sammy stared at the eggs that were now distinctly brown and crispy around the edges for a moment, then he nodded. ‘Good.'

Thereafter, their meal went as it usually did; that is to say, wordlessly, except for the chatter of
Drivetime
on Radio Two. After it was finished and Shaun had cleared the table in line with their unwritten contract, Sammy was left alone as Shaun went to his room before going out to the pub. He washed up slowly and methodically as he had always done, his hands encased in yellow rubber gloves, but his face was even more thoughtful than usual.

Barry Drew had been quite certain that Shaun Carter was on short-time working.

He wondered where his son was spending his extra spare time.

THIRTY-ONE

C
onsciousness came to Len Barker slowly, like a warm blanket, a thing that stifled him as it gave him life. With it there was intense pain that he could not localize, together with nausea and giddiness. He was on his side, on the hard, cold floor and it was dark. What had happened? For some moments he found no recall, no light of any kind either around him or within him. Had he been attacked? He felt as if he had been kicked, certainly. Gradually, though, his eyes took in the darkness, made dim sense of it. He was in his small kitchen, close to the fridge-freezer, his head a thing of pain and, he now appreciated, blood; it covered half his face, had pooled around on the floor; he could not move to touch his scalp but he was fairly sure there was a deep gash in it.

He began to remember. He had been unable to sleep, so consumed with the idea that he had to make someone listen to him about the white van; he had finally decided that he would have to do something about it. His sudden recollection of the shopping list in the kitchen had seemed like a brilliant idea; it was a small whiteboard on the wall by the cooker, used by the carers when he was running low on stuff. Once a week on Friday, whoever was the carer on duty would travel into Ledbury and get whatever was on it. If he could get from his bedroom and down the short corridor, the whiteboard would be within easy reach. He would have to walk, though, because he could not control the wheelchair and anyway it was out of reach in another room.

At first he had thought he wouldn't even be able to get out of bed, let alone stagger from room to room. There were handles suspended from the ceiling to allow him to pull himself up the bed, but actually sitting upright and then swinging his legs over was a wholly different proposition. He did not know how long it took, but he knew very well indeed how much strain and effort it required; he felt as if he had wrestled a python by the time he sat on the side of the mattress, the covering sheet rucked into a ball, his useless right arm hanging down, curled, beside him. Thankfully, it was a small room and he could reach out with his left hand to touch the wardrobe handle; by pulling on it he reckoned to be able to lever himself up onto his feet, then use it as a crutch. He could then pull himself towards it, and begin his nocturnal journey by leaning on first the wardrobe, then the chest of drawers, then the door frame and so out into the hall.

Everything almost went pear-shaped from the first. As he pulled on the wardrobe handle to lift himself off the bed, the whole thing began to pivot forward, threatening to pin him between its bulk and the bed, crushing the breath out of him; he had hoped that there would be more than enough in it, especially in the two deep drawers at its base, to take his weight, but it was a close run thing, a moment of uncertainty, when it could have gone either way. Eventually, though, he was up, the wardrobe was back at the horizontal, and suddenly he felt elated. Months of frustration at being impotent and patronized made this small victory a significant one for him; he still possessed some independence.

And the journey from there to the door and beyond, although slow and exhausting and jerky, proved similarly exhilarating. With every shuffle forward, he gained confidence and regained pride, stood a little straighter, became a little happier, despite the thin, cold stream of spittle that would not stop oozing down from the corner of his drooping mouth. He clung to the scuffed, cool emulsion of the hallway, feeling more and more a man again. He reached the open doorway of the small kitchen, stood there for a moment, aware of how cold the flat was, breathing heavily, feeling tired despite his triumph, then moved forward again, intending to stagger the short distance to the nearby work surface where the whiteboard had been fitted to the wall. It would require only a controlled fall.

He misjudged the distance, perhaps through overconfidence, perhaps through exhaustion, perhaps through increasing hypothermia. He had fallen forward, struck his head upon the sharp edge of the cooker and lost consciousness at once.

Once again, he came to almost imperceptibly, the deep darkness and cavernous silence leaving little evidence of what was unconsciousness, what was awareness. He felt so stiff, so numb, so groggy, yet not at all cold.

He had once attended a post-mortem on a man who had died of exposure and the pathologist had told him that in the later stages the victim loses all sense of cold, feels only tired. Was that happening to him? How could he die of exposure in his own home?

All the feelings of resentment and frustration and anger returned to him, his previous nascent impression of progress, of dawning belief that he was not written off, not forever a cripple, gone into a vapour as insubstantial as his dreams. He had to let them know what he saw. He had to. He would not let this fucking awful stroke beat him, not at this, not when it came to police work.

For a long time – he knew not how long – he lay there, trying to overcome the helplessness, to use his brain in a way that had become foreign to him since the stroke. He could not hope to reach the whiteboard now, nor any piece of paper, let alone writing tool. He would have to use whatever he could to leave a message. If he lived until morning, then all well and good; if he didn't, and he could let them know what he knew, then he could die with some dignity restored.

Beverley descended on Fisher as soon as she got into the police station; his knowledge of the works of Byron was such that he had never heard of the Assyrian and his descent upon the fold but, had it been otherwise, he might well have spotted similarities. ‘What have you got for me?' There was a glint in her eye that told even Fisher – his knowledge of body language as meagre as his knowledge of poetry – that she wanted results. She loomed over him as he sat at his desk in the office he shared with Lancefield, the window behind her so that she acquired a spectral, deathly appearance, a thing of wrathful shadow.

Fisher was slow and he was woefully short of imagination, but he was methodical. He had written down in untidy, sprawling, misspelled handwriting the products of his labours. He found this, put it flat on the desk, cleared his throat and began to read while Beverley settled herself in a chair facing him. ‘I've interviewed his mother—' he began.

‘For fuck's sake, I hope you trod carefully, Fisher. You didn't go in there telling her she had lost her only child without first checking we've got the right body, did you?'

Fisher was hurt. ‘I got her to show me a recent photograph first. It is him.'

If he thought to receive some praise, he was to be disappointed, and not for the first time. ‘Go on,' she commanded.

‘Malcolm Willoughby was twenty-six years old. Cheltenham born and bred, until two years ago, he was living at home with his mother; his father died seven years ago. He left school at sixteen with two GCSEs, then drifted through a series of dead-end jobs, mainly bar-keeping; his mother says that the death of his father affected him very badly. She says that he had no enemies and everyone liked him.'

As far as Beverley was concerned, any character reference from a mother about a son might just as well be written on toilet paper and used immediately. ‘When did she last see him?'

‘Six days ago. He was working as a barman at The Grey Goose.'

‘That shithole on the Tewkesbury Road?'

‘That's the one.'

‘Have you spoken to them?'

‘Willoughby disappeared four days ago. It wasn't that he was dismissed, or anything. He just didn't turn up for the morning shift.'

‘Nothing untoward happened? No fight, or anything?'

Fisher shook his head.

‘Have you checked the databases?'

Thankfully, Fisher had and was able to say that he had. ‘Nothing.'

‘Nothing?' she didn't believe it. People like Malcolm Willoughby – people who failed at all the hurdles that you had leap to function in modern western society – inevitably drifted into crime, no matter how petty, no matter how pathetic.

Fisher was confident. ‘No.'

She was impressed by his certainty. ‘OK,' she said, deciding to give him the benefit of the doubt, happy that she would be able to flay him and then incinerate the remains if he had missed something. She ran through what she had been told, sifted it for gold and found nothing. She was understandably disappointed, though; surely there was something in this little man's past to indicate why someone had taken the trouble to broil him?

She turned abruptly and left Fisher with his thoughts, such as they were; she went straight up to her office where Lancefield was just putting the phone down. ‘Who was that?' she demanded.

‘Press. They've heard something about the body on the allotments.'

‘You didn't tell them anything?' Beverley's tone was threatening.

‘I said that I didn't know a thing about it. They asked where you were and I said I didn't know.'

Mollified, Beverley nodded. ‘Good.' She sat down, beckoned Lancefield to do likewise; then she explained what Fisher had learned.

‘What do you want me to do?'

‘Go through those clips on the web posting. Go through them again and again and again. See if you can spot anything that might identify the location.'

‘It's got to be isolated.'

‘And I'd wager large.'

Lancefield frowned. ‘A rich psychopath?'

Beverley snorted. ‘Maybe. Or a poor one who's squatting in a large house. Or one who's a servant of a rich man. Or maybe it's a hangar, or an abandoned farm, or any one of a million possibilities.'

Lancefield took the hint. She left to follow orders.

THIRTY-TWO

T
here is nothing touching in the fact that Melanie and Evangeline Whittaker died together in a parody of the companionship that they had failed to find in life. They had come to – Evangeline first, her mother some twenty minutes later after her daughter's loud, incessant and hoarse shouting – finding themselves facing each other at two ends of a long, dark corridor. They were both strapped into wooden chairs that were bolted to the floor. Melanie was groggy, confused and her daughter had to shout again. ‘Mum!'

‘Angel?' She had not used this term of endearment for five years. There was fear in her voice and it made her sound pathetic; it was her curse that Melanie Whittaker somehow always sounded
wrong
; when she became too excited, she sounded raucous; when she was angry, she became shrill; now she was scared witless, she sounded merely witless.

‘What's happening, Mum?' Evangeline's voice was cloyed with tears; she was so terrified that even years of disdain for her mother counted for nothing.

Her mother, of course, did not know, could not even find the words to admit this. Confused, she merely pulled ineffectually at the metal bonds, only dimly aware that they were naked, not at all aware that they were covered in sensors and electrodes, that they had been shaved. She did not even appreciate that her left forearm hurt terribly, at least not until Evangeline asked again, and in a voice that was barely less than a screech, ‘Mum? Mum? What the fuck's going on?' Melanie had never been a particularly sharp knife and the present circumstances proved far too tough for her to cut through; she could barely articulate, barely even concentrate. Evangeline asked (and perhaps it was more out of hope than expectation of a useful, coherent answer), ‘What's with the tubes?'