The Red Road (25 page)

“I find them kind of fun,” Sam
said. “We don’t have a subway back home. They can’t build one
either, because we’re too close to the sea level.”

“The London Underground is the
oldest underground network in the world, did you know that?” Jim
asked us.

“Is it?” I said, politely
breaking the immediate silence that had greeted the rather mundane
fact.

“Yes, it is. It was opened in the
late nineteenth century.”

“Oh, wow,” I said, this time
with genuine interest. That
was
old. The other four appeared
as equally impressed.

“Eighteen ... sixty or ninety, I
think?” Dave’s father continued. “It was actually running
electric trains back then, too.”

“They had electricity then?” Baz
said.

David’s father chuckled. “Yes,
they actually had a lot of things back then that we take for granted
today. Anyway, I’m going to go and take a shower. Are you all
staying here tonight?”

“I’m not,” Baz said. “I’m
going back home.”

“So, just the four of you as
planned, then. Don’t mind sharing a room, do you? Then again, you’re
probably used to it at school, and you’d be doing the same if you
were there right now, anyway.”

“We were thinking of ordering
pizza for dinner, Dad,” Dave said as his father started out of the
living room. “Do you want some?”

“Um,” his father considered it
for a moment. “Yes, I could eat. Only a small one, though. Lunch
was quite filling, and it will only go to waste otherwise.”

“What would you like?” Dave
asked, offering him the menu.

“Just one of whatever you’re
having,” Jim said, waving it away. “I want to go and shower and
get all the grim from the Tube off me.”

I could have used one myself if I
was being honest. I had noticed that my snot and fingernails had
turned black since arriving in London. I wasn’t sure if that was in
some way linked to travelling on the Underground, but I was sure I
had heard someone once say so.

Dave placed the food order, the
pizza arriving about forty minutes later. We gathered around the
dining table to eat, talking about the film we had seen and what we
had spent the day in London doing. I was quite impressed with the
relationship that Dave and his father maintained, acting more like
they were good friends, rather than father and son. An only child,
and with his mother having divorced his father a few years before he
had started attending St Christopher’s, maybe their relationship
had just taken a different course to most.

While the others were tucking into
their pizza quite happily, Baz and I were picking bits off, Baz
creating a small pile of unwanted scraps on the side of his plate.
Whereas Baz had found the mushroom not to his liking, I had failed to
see that my pizza came with olives; I couldn’t stand olives. The
others were more than happy to gobble them up, however. Jim’s pet
dog was lying on the floor by his side, and every now and again Jim
would cut off a piece of pizza and feed it to him. Wonka was a
friendly dog, a chocolate Labrador who wagged his tail non-stop.

“Did any of you three know the
ones they found?” Jim then wanted to know, looking to Baz, Rob and
myself.

“You did, Joe,” Baz said,
pointing his slice of pizza at me. “One of them, I mean.”

“Which one did you know?” Jim
asked.

“The sixth former,” I said.
“Craig Priest was his name.”

“He attacked you in the shower,”
Baz added helpfully.

I wanted to let Baz know that he was
supplying a little too much information now, but my mouth was full of
pizza, and I wasn’t able to swallow it in time.

“Had a run in with him in the
past, did you?” Jim said. “How did you feel about seeing him
there?”

“Sort of ... ambivalent? Is that
the right word? Yes. I ... don’t really know what to think.”

“You didn’t know the other boy,
no?”

“No,” I shook my head. “He was
from the junior school. I don’t think that his identity has been
revealed yet, has it?”

Shakes of heads came from the others
around the table.

“A junior boy. That was the same
as the last time around, wasn’t it?” Jim said. “Sounds to me
like it might be the work of a local paedophile. The police will be
questioning and keeping a close eye on all the known sex offenders in
the area from now on.”

I had no idea of the word that
Dave’s father had just used.

“A what?” Baz then asked, saving
me the indignity of having to do so myself.

“A paedophile,” Sam answered. “A
man who fucks kids! Oh, sorry, Jim,” he then said, his ears
catching up with his tongue and causing him to redden immediately.

“Don’t worry, I hear worse than
that every day at work,” Jim said, looking at Sam. “But, yes,
it’s someone who sexually abuses children, and often kills them
afterwards. You’d probably find it’s someone from the local town
that the police already know about. Might not be a man, either. Could
even be one of the teachers, or even one of the monks,” he
shrugged.

“Oh, I doubt that,” I said
automatically.

“Why?” Rob asked.

“I ... don’t know. I just don’t
see anyone from the school doing something like that.”

“I’m willing to bet it was
Quasimodo,” Rob said.

“Quasimodo?” Jim asked.

“It’s the name we have for one
of the gardeners, due to the fact that he walks with a hunch.”

“His real name’s Andre Kethlan,”
Baz said.

“How do you know that?” I asked,
seeing the others around the table looking as equally taken aback.

Baz shrugged. “I don’t know.
I’ve just always known that. I think he might have introduced
himself as Andre to me a few times.”

“What makes you think it’s him?”
Jim asked Rob.

“He’s a very strange man. He
seems to be a few bricks short of a full load,” Rob said.

“That’s because he is,” Baz
pointed out.

“Is he?”

“Yeah. He stares at the boys all
the time and is always touching them. Whenever he talks to me, he
always wants to shake my hand and then doesn’t let go.”

“He does like to make physical
contact all the time,” I nodded, remembering how he would always
touch me whenever I spoke to him. It was usually just on the shoulder
or the arm. It was maybe something that he just did, but it still
felt wrong.

“Does he live at the school?”
Jim asked.

“He lives with the monks, but in a
separate part of the monastery,” Baz explained. “They look after
him and give him work and stuff.”

“And you say he’s a bit mentally
retarded?”

“He has a previous conviction from
when he tried to rob a bank, using a banana.”

I snorted my Coke at that, laughing
extremely hard. Rob, Sam and Dave were doing likewise. “What?” I
asked.

“It’s true,” Baz insisted.
“I’m not making this up.”

“He tried to hold up a
bank
using a
banana
?” Jim smirked.

“Did he think it was a gun?” Rob
asked.

“No, he just thought that no one
would notice,” Baz said. “He didn’t hold it out in the open,
but had it under a tea towel that he’d taken from his mother’s
house. That’s what I was told, at least.” He picked another piece
of mushroom off his pizza, putting it aside.

“I don’t think it’s him,”
Sam said. “He might be weird, but I doubt it’s anyone from the
school.”

“Most likely it
is
someone
from the school,” Jim countered. “They know the grounds the best,
everything that goes on, and can pick their targets without raising
suspicion.”

“So what about Craig Priest?”
Baz wanted to know.

“Why he was killed, you mean?”
Rob said, finishing off his Coke and starting to pour himself another
glass. “Maybe he interrupted the killer and they killed him as
well.”

“What would Craig Priest have been
doing outside at that time?” Dave asked, pushing his glass over to
Rob to request a refill. Baz, Sam and I followed suit.

“Does he smoke?” Sam asked.
“Because if so, perhaps he was just going for a late-night fag. It
must have happened then. Would make sense, too, given that the bodies
were found early in the morning.”

“That’s most likely,” Rob
said. “Otherwise, you’d need to have a pretty strong reason to go
and do something like that to someone.”

I saw all four of the other boys at
the table glance in my direction, Dave’s father cottoning on a
short moment later.

“We’ll probably never know,” I
said.

~ ~ ~

We finished the pizza and began to
load the dishwasher, Dave’s father telling us that he needed to
check some electronic mail that he was waiting on from the US. I had
heard about electronic mail and was quite interested to see how it
worked, but Dave suggested that we take the dog out for a walk. He
seemed rather keen on doing so. I knew what that meant.

We began walking the neighbourhood,
Rob’s eyes almost on stalks as we passed by the expensive-looking
mansions and houses, and seeing the equally expensive-looking cars
parked out the front. This, to Rob, must have been like attending a
motor show, except without the chance to take any for a test drive.
With that in mind, I decided to keep an eye on Rob, in case he did
decide to see if he could get inside one.

“Best avoid the Heath at this time
of night,” Dave said as Wonka trotted happily along beside us.
“Loads of gay men up there, and we want to avoid getting bummed.”

“Really?” Rob asked.

“Yeah, they all go ‘cruising’
up that way,” Dave said.

“Cruising?”

“It’s when they walk around,
looking for other gay men to pick up,” Dave said, with a look of
disgust on his face.

“Gross!”

“Yeah,” Dave said. He then
looked around to see who else was about, before taking a packet of
cigarettes out of his pocket, extracting one of the sticks and a
lighter from within. He wasn’t a heavy smoker as far as I knew, but
he had had two already today.

“Oh, give me one,” Sam said.
“I’ve got some back at school I can repay you with.”

“And me,” Rob said, wrenching
his eyes away from the cars parked in the driveways of the houses we
passed.

“Sure,” Dave said, handing one to
each in turn. “Don’t touch any of the cars, Rob. Most of their
alarms are really over sensitive. There were a couple ringing for
over half an hour last night. It was really bloody annoying. Baz?”
Dave presented the pack to him.

“No, thanks,” Baz said.

“Do you not smoke at all?” Sam
asked.

“No.”

“Ever tried it?” Rob asked.

“Not interested, to be honest,”
Baz said, sounding defiant and quite proud of his choice.

“Fair enough. Crotty?” Dave
asked.

“No, thanks,” I said, waving
them away.

“Go on, try one. No one’ll see.”

“Oh, I just don’t smoke either,”
I lied.

“What’s wrong with you two?”
Dave asked, looking between Baz and I.

“When did you start smoking?” I
asked Sam, shifting the focus of attention.

“I only do it sometimes,” Sam
said, lighting his cigarette and taking a small drag. “I mostly
just sell the others to the first and second years. I sold one for a
pound the other week.”

Dave laughed. “Really? Who to?”

“Neil Booth,” Sam said.

“The fat lump in the second year?”

“Yeah,” Sam grinned. “He was
desperate, and no one would sell him any.”

The walk ended up being a little
longer than originally planned, with Dave and Rob each enjoying a
second cigarette, chaining them off the first. Wonka had no
complaints. The longer the better in his eyes. We stopped off at a
corner shop on the way back to buy chewing gum, in an attempt to mask
the smell of the tobacco. I never believed this actually worked; no
one’s parents were that ignorant.

Jim had the TV on when we returned
to the mansion, preparing to watch a football match. Like Dave, he
was a Liverpool supporter, one of the few boys at St Christopher’s
that took more than just a passing interest in the sport. I had never
really paid much attention to football, rugby and cricket being the
main sporting events at school. Football was played, but the
inter-school matches never really made any headlines, and they were
so infrequent that they largely passed by unnoticed.

Tonight,
Liverpool were playing a match against Genoa. Jim was sitting with a
glass of beer in his hand, poured from a rather tall can that was
resting on a little table next to his chair. ‘Carling’, the label on the can read.

“UEFA cup? Wasn’t this on on
Wednesday?” Dave asked. “We watched it,” Dave nodded to Sam.

“It was, but I taped it. I was too
busy with delivering that project at work and have only just had a
chance to catch up. Don’t tell me the result!” he added quickly,
sticking a finger out towards his son. “I’ve been avoiding the
sports pages for that very reason.”

“First Division game tomorrow
night,” Dave said.

“Yep!” Jim grinned happily. “Do
any of you boys follow football?” he asked of the rest of us.

Shakes of heads all round.

“No, it’s all rugby and cricket
at St Christopher’s, isn’t it? Do you boys fancy watching the
game with me?” he asked.

“Sure,” we said after looking to
one another and shrugging. We weren’t really up to anything else.

“How old are you boys?” Jim
asked after we had found places to settle, Dave bringing a bean bag
down from his room for Sam to sit on.

“Sixteen,” we said. It was
mostly true. Some of us were still fifteen, but we would be turning
sixteen in the coming weeks.

Jim pondered for a time
before asking, “Would you like a beer? I think you’re old enough
to be fair, and I know you’re not going to do anything bad.”

“Yeah!”

“Oh! Yes, please!”

“Really? Cool!”

Jim chuckled. “That’s about the
same thing I said when I was your age. It was my dad that took me to
the pub for my first half pint, though.”