The Red Road (5 page)

“Over six years,” I told him.
“Did you come from the junior house?”

“No. I went to a local school in
Kent, before.”

“Okay.”

“Six years. That’s a long time.”

I know. Too long
, I thought.

“I never wanted to come here,”
he went on, as though finding comfort in the sound of his own voice,
“but my parents made me. Are you going to do your A-Levels here?”

“No,” I said. “I’m planning
on going after I finish my GCSEs.”

“Are you looking forward to
leaving?”

“Can’t wait.”

We reached the toilet without
encountering any rake traps on the way. I gratefully clicked on the
light, and the first year went over to the urinal. I decided it would
be best to go myself, to avoid having to walk that corridor again on
my own.

“Where are you going to go after
you leave?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed.
“I only just thought about it at the start of this term. To tell
the truth, I’ve not even told my parents yet.”

We repeated our cautious walk back
to 2E and got back into bed. I lay there for a while, thinking about
things and turning thoughts over in my head. That first year was the
first person I had ever told that I was planning on leaving St
Christopher’s after my exams.
I should probably tell my parents
soon
, I thought. I made up my mind, rolled over and fell asleep.

~ ~ ~

My parents arrived early the next
morning, just after nine. They didn’t ask too many questions
about what had happened as we drove down to Surrey, and only a little
about how my schooling was going; they were far more focused on their
own careers for that. I could tell already that informing them of my
desire to return home permanently would probably be met with a great
deal of resistance. Perhaps it could wait until Christmas.

Chapter Four

M
y
parents lived in the suburbs of Baconsdale, a small town in Surrey.
It was a fairly quiet, quaint sort of place; nice to retreat to when
you had had enough of work/school/life and needed to get away from it
all. Or so those that I knew who lived and worked in London said.

Despite being a small town, there
was a fair amount to do. The town centre was home to a high street
with all the usual suspects – a Woolworths, WHSmith, Argos, Dixons,
Virgin and a Waterstone’s. There was also a McDonald’s, a Pizza
Hut, an Indian restaurant, and a Chinese restaurant. A Thai
restaurant had also once existed, though it had closed earlier that
year. I wasn’t surprised, as it was hideously overpriced. A shame,
I did enjoy a good green chicken curry. There was a corner shop with
a post office, a pub and a Cullens close to my parents’ house. We
also had a cinema with two screens, that thankfully tended to get all
the major releases.

“Did they give you much work to
do?” my father asked as we pulled up to the house. He clicked a
button on a device clipped to the sun visor, causing the automatic
gates to open.

“No,” I said. “There wasn’t
time.”

“Oh, well that’s no good.” He
sounded somewhat appalled. He clearly didn’t want to think that the
money he had spent on my education was going to waste. Or maybe he
was bothered that, with nothing to be getting on with, I would be
getting under his or my mother’s feet all day long.

“They’re just going to extend
the term by a couple of weeks, or however long it is,” I said.

“Ah, like they did when we had the
hurricane.” That seemed to please him a little more.

“Exactly,” I said.

“Did Rob not offer to take you
home with him?” my mother then asked. “He only lives on the other
side of town. It’s not a long way.”

“He’d actually gone home when I
found out you were staying the night in Geneva,” I said. “His mum
and dad were some of the first to arrive, apparently. I’ll see him
tomorrow I suppose.”

“Hmph,” my mother said. “They
probably didn’t offer on purpose. Jane and Andrew were always a
little weird like that.”

“Jealousy, as I keep telling you,”
my father added, undoing his seatbelt and exiting the vehicle.

“Where’s Sam gone?” my mother
asked me as she, too, began getting out.

“He’s staying with Dave, in
London. I was going to ask if he could stay with us, but you were
still away.”

Neither my mother or father said
anything to that. I wasn’t surprised. They were probably grateful
they had missed the opportunity to host him.

I spent the rest of the day talking
to them about what had happened and what I’d seen, but they still
didn’t appear all that interested. Though they found it tragic that
a young boy had been murdered in his first term at St Christopher’s,
and his first time away from home, their focus was, as always, on
work. My father soon retired to a room he maintained as a home office
and went back to organising things for his return to work the next
day. My mother dropped the same kind of hints that she wished to
return to dealing with everything that had happened during their
business trip and so began to sort through leaflets, handouts, files,
brochures and all manner of other things, transforming the living
room into a sea of multicoloured paper.

I made myself scarce, retreating to
my room. It sadly only took twenty minutes or so for me to discover
just how little there was to do. I had no stereo to listen to – that
was at school. And I had no Walkman for the few tapes that still
lived on my shelves. I spotted the box for my Mega Drive, but I
wasn’t exactly in the mood to play anything. I couldn’t see where
the games were, either. The idea of being at home for two weeks with
little to do was suddenly quite daunting. Had I become
institutionalised? I wondered. The other major trouble was that,
having been at St Christopher’s for six years, I no longer had any
real friends back home to spend time with. Trying to fit in with
those I had known before attending boarding school was an incredibly
awkward experience.

I unpacked, thinking that after
lunch I would go for a walk into the town centre and have a look
around the shops. I then heard the phone ring, stopping after only
two rings as my father answered it in his study. Somehow, I knew it
was for me.

“Joe,” he then called.

“Yes?”

“It’s Rob for you.”

I was down the stairs and by the
phone in the hallway only seconds after my father had finished
speaking. I had known Rob for a number of years before going to
boarding school, connecting loosely via the local parish that we had
both attended. Apparently, after hearing about my acceptance to St
Christopher’s, Rob’s parents had been keen to send him there,
too; though he had skipped the junior school and only started there
in time for his GCSEs. However, whereas my parents were doing so to
get me out from under their feet so they could focus on work, Rob’s
parents only wanted the best education they could afford for him. I
was certain my parents weren’t too bothered about what I ultimately
did with my life, as long as I embarked on a reasonable career. If
they were expecting me to become a doctor, a surgeon, a lawyer, a
dentist, or a vet, then I was going to disappoint them on that front.
To be honest, I hadn’t a clue what I wanted to do with my life.
That was something else I would need to think about carefully this
week.

“Hi, Rob,” I said.

“Hi, Joe,” Rob said. “What are
you doing?”

“Not a lot. I only just got in.”

“You stayed last night?”

“Yeah. There were only about
thirty of us left.”

“Oh, you should have said. You
could have stayed here. Anyway, do you want to meet in town after
lunch and do something?”

Clearly, he was bored already. An
only child as well, he had likely found that there wasn’t too much
going on, either. His parents were probably at work today, too,
leaving him with only the TV for company.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll meet
you at about ... two?”

“Cool. See you later.”

~ ~ ~

To begin with, I was quite excited
at the prospect of not having to be at school during term time. It
meant I would be free to wander the town and go to the cinema without
hoards of people getting in my way. Rob had other ideas, his first
suggestion being that we head into the pub and try to get served. He
was desperate to try a drink of beer.

“We look old enough,” he said.

“No, we don’t,” I pointed out.

“Yes, we do. Neither of us is
short, either. Besides, what’s the worst they’ll say?” he
asked. “They’ll just ask for ID and then refuse to serve us.”

It was true enough, I suppose, but
there was always the embarrassment of trying to do so and failing
miserably. I absentmindedly brushed a finger along the bum-fluff
moustache that was currently gracing my top lip and wondered how long
it would be until I was buying my first razor and shaving every day.
I somewhat reluctantly agreed with Rob, and we made our way to the
Queen’s Head, a pub just off the high street.

“Out,” the barman said before we
had barely even crossed the threshold. He was pouring a pint for a
group of burly-looking men in work clothes, paint and
caked-on-plaster-splattered overalls, propping up the bar.

“We’re eighteen,” Rob began to
protest.

“No, you’re not,” the barman
said, shaking his head.

“If we weren’t, we’d be at
school.”

“Look, just get out,” the barman
repeated, no longer making eye contact and instead concentrating on
pouring the workmen their pints. The four men gave us some
incredulous stares, as if angered that we should invade their domain.
Defeated, Rob and I exchanged a glance and walked out.

We walked the high street, Rob
stopping at the McDonald’s to grab a cheeseburger and some chips,
saying that the toast that had constituted his lunch hadn’t been
enough, and he was still hungry (he had apparently only gotten out of
bed at eleven-thirty). We then slipped into Virgin and browsed the
racks.

“Butters has got this,” Rob
said, pointing out a weird-looking CD with black, white and red art,
with four men’s faces on it. “He’s had it for ages.”

“
Red Blood
?” I asked,
inspecting it. I tilted the case as I saw more words around the side.
“
Red Blood Hot Sugar
?”

“
Red Hot Chili Peppers
,”
Rob explained. “The album’s called ‘
Blood Sugar Sex Magik’
.”

“I’ve never heard of them.” The case I held was empty, and
I looked at the release schedule next to the shelf, which stated that
the album would be available at the end of the month.

“How did Butters get it?” I
asked, nodding to the release schedule.

“Same way he gets all the new
stuff – off his uncle.”

“Ah,” I said, turning the CD
case over and looking at the track listing. “Is it any good?” I
asked sceptically.

“Brilliant,” Rob said.

“What kind of music is it?”

“Rock; so drums and guitars. This
is their fourth or fifth album, so you’ve probably heard some of
their music already, just never realised.”

“Okay. I might get it at some
point,” I said, nodding. “Jesus, I’m not paying fifteen quid
for it, though,” I added, looking at the price tag on the front.

“That’s because it’s on CD,”
Rob said, putting the case back and picking up a smaller, rectangular
case from the shelf below. “It’s a tenner on tape.”

“I’d get the tape version, I
think,” I said.

We browsed a little longer before
seeing all that we wanted and decided to move on. Rob stopped off at
WHSmith along the way, buying a couple of car magazines. He had been
a total petrol-head ever since I had known him, hanging up posters of
cars whenever he could and decorating his work folders with cut-outs
from magazines. He even had a Porsche key ring, despite not owning a
car himself. I was actually certain that he had a Dodge key ring,
too.

It was a fairly warm and bright day
for late September, and we took a walk around the park, talking about
the murder, schoolwork, and general gossip about some of the other
boys at St Christopher’s.

“Who do you think could have done
it?” Rob asked me, as we sat down on a bench.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I
doubt it could have been one of the staff.”

“It could have been anyone, Joe.
There are some real weirdoes at St Christopher’s, too. Take
Quasimodo for example. He’s meant to have a dodgy past.”

“He lives in the monastery,” I
said.

“Doesn’t mean he can’t walk
out any time he likes. Being a groundskeeper, he probably has access
to loads of different parts of the school. He always has that massive
bunch of keys with him that opens ... everything.”

It was possible, I admitted, but I
doubted it.

“You saw him, didn’t you? The
murdered boy, I mean,” Rob asked. “What was his name?”

“Scott Parker.” I recalled the
name the headmaster had used during the assembly the previous day.
“He was all the way down the Red Road. That’s a long way. Whoever
did it must have put them in a car, and I don’t think Quasimodo can
drive.”

“So, if not Quasimodo, then who
else?”

“Maybe he went for a walk in the
middle of the night because he couldn’t sleep, and someone snatched
him outside the school.”

“Eh?” Rob looked at me. “Who
goes walking around the school at night?”

“I do sometimes,” I told him.

“Really? Why?”

“Because it helps me to get to
sleep. Don’t ask why, but sometimes if I can’t sleep I just go
for a walk around the school for a bit and then go back to bed.” I
shrugged.

Rob looked a little bemused by my
revelation but passed no comment. We turned our attention towards a
group of five teenagers sitting on the grass ahead of us.

“She’s fit,” Rob said. “The
one on the right.”

I couldn’t see the face of the
girl he indicated. She mostly had her back to me, but she certainly
looked nice from what I was able to see. She had on a pair of white
jeans and a small T-shirt, showing off her slender figure. Long
blonde hair flowed down her back and over her shoulders.