The Shadows in the Street (18 page)

‘Good morning. Thanks for coming. Right. We have this morning released a fifty-three-year-old Lafferton man without charge, following questioning in connection with the murders of seventeen-year-old Chantelle Buckley and twenty-three-year-old Marie O’Dowd.’

An immediate buzz. Voices called out with questions, arms were waving. Serrailler waited.

‘We are looking for a twenty-seven-year-old man, Jonathan James Lewis, generally known as Jonty, who was the boyfriend of Marie O’Dowd. We want to interview him in connection with Marie’s murder.’

He pointed to the picture that had come up on the large screen behind him.

‘This is Lewis, though I’m afraid the photo isn’t very recent. You can get copies from the press officer and I’d be grateful if you could publish it as widely as possible – we want the public to report any sightings or other information. No relatives locally and we’ve drawn a blank so far among known acquaintances. Meanwhile, separate inquiries into the murders of both women are continuing.’

The questions came from all sides of the room.

‘Are you saying the two murders are or are not connected?’

‘Can you say why the Lafferton man was brought in and then released?’

‘What are you doing to reassure the public?’

‘What measures are police taking to protect other prostitutes still working on our streets?’

The two DIs sat beside him stone-faced but Serrailler never minded being challenged by the press – that was their job, they asked questions the public would have asked, and needed to know. They also knew how constrained he was in what he could and could not say. He replied with care, knowing that he had given them little.

‘I may be able to give you more information later today but I’m afraid that’s it for now. However, I will keep you fully up to speed with any developments.’

They broke up, knowing the score. They also knew Serrailler played fair. When he had any more to give them, he would.

Twenty-nine

Leslie Blade walked without stopping or looking back for almost ten minutes. It was drizzling and he had no mac but he barely noticed. A car swerved to miss him, blaring its horn as he stepped out across the road, and when he reached the opposite pavement he wondered what had happened, why the noise, why the horrified stare of a woman watching. He had no sense of time, little of where he was, except that he was somewhere between the police station and home, and he had no idea if he was going home, or going to the college, or of what he was expected to do, who knew, who to ask.

There had been some sort of breakfast but he had eaten nothing and only taken a few sips of the tea and then, suddenly, it was over, they were listing his possessions, handing them back, sign here, sign there, you’re now free to go, that way, sir, not this way. Free to go.

There was a café in the row of shops he was passing. Dino’s.

The noise from the espresso machine startled him. There were people at a couple of tables and they stared. But perhaps not at him. Perhaps they did not even notice him. Did anyone know? How would they? Hilary knew. He had had to ring Hilary, ask her to stay with his mother, tell her something but he could not now remember what he had told her.

Free to go.

He got coffee and toast and sat with his back to the window. People went by. Anyone might recognise him, anyone might know.

Suddenly, he felt tears prick his eyes. His hand shook as he lifted the cup. The coffee spilled over.

Free to go.

He bit into the toast and it seemed to swell inside his mouth, and turn into some alien substance, soft and choking.

Inside his head a muzz of echoes and sensations but no clear thoughts, nothing he could grasp and hold to. At first, it had been troubling but he had felt that he might be of help. The murder of two girls appalled him, especially of Marie, the one he had known. He could not keep pictures of her out of his mind, could not stop imagining what had happened, how, when, what she had felt and tried to do. He had thought that by telling them everything he possibly could about the girls, the time he spent with them and why, what it was like for them out there, that he would be useful, might lead them to whoever … whenever. It had taken some time for the cold realisation to seep into his consciousness, that he was being questioned as a suspect, that they had his name, his details, his private activity, down on paper, that they were challenging him to prove to them that he had not killed either girl.

That was why they had taken swabs from inside his mouth. That was the way they proved things now.

He managed to swallow the soft swollen mass of wet toast congealed with butter but it hurt his throat, as if it were made of hard metal passing down his gullet.

The café door opened. He dared not look round. People went, people came, the coffee machine hissed, and every sound was magnified inside his head, like drumming and shouting and screaming.

He did not know what to do. Perhaps he would not be allowed back into the college. You are free to go. But mud sticks. He had been taken to the police station, after all. June Petrie had seen everything.

Mud sticks.

He was free to go but not free to go.

He went to the counter and bought another cup of coffee though when he got back to his table he saw that the first was only half drunk. The toast was cold and he pushed it to one side.

The smell of the police station was on him, on his sleeves and his collar, in his hair; an institutional, antiseptic yet grubby smell. He would throw away the clothes he was wearing and bathe until his skin was raw to get rid of the smell. When he got home.

How would that be? Hilary would be there. His mother would be there. He could see them both, looking, waiting, puzzled, as he walked in. What did they know? He had been allowed a telephone call but he had talked only to Hilary and he knew he had not been very coherent, just been anxious to ensure that she could stay with Norah, and Hilary had agreed and sounded worried but had asked no questions, done no prying. That was the way Hilary was.

He took small sips of his coffee, holding the cup with both hands because they were still unsteady. The café was steamy. He had been here before once or twice. Liked it well enough. They were always cheerful, always friendly. He heard the proprietor now, chatting to someone, making a teasing remark to another. The ordinary world, Leslie thought suddenly. This is the ordinary world and I am returned to it. None of them knows me. Nobody knows where I have been nor why, and they will surely never know. He had no idea if his name had been in the paper but had the vague thought that you were anonymous until charged. And he had not been charged. He had not been charged. He gripped the cup so hard he thought it might shatter in his hands.

They had warned him not to go near the girls again, not to take them food, not to drive into the area at night. They could not forbid him, they had said, they could only warn him not to do it for his own safety, to ensure he came to no harm, got into no more trouble.

There had been three of them interviewing him at different times. The young woman had been tough, supercilious, trying to trip him up, the younger man cocky. Only the older detective had been easy, relaxed with him, friendly almost, as if this were not a police station, as if he had not been brought in, as if they were having a confidential chat. But none of it had altered what he had told them. None of them could make him say what he could not say.

The one word that had been repeated like bangs of a hammer on a nail, over and over again, had been ‘why.’ Why did he go out to the girls on the streets at night? Why try to befriend them? Why take them parcels of food and flasks of drink? If he had no religious motive and he was not wanting to buy their services, why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

How could he answer?

He had no real sense of time but he seemed to sit there half frozen, his thoughts moving more and more slowly so that they seemed to be congealing, for much of the morning. Nobody spoke to him, nobody disturbed him. He did not look at anyone.

But in the end, he simply got up, left a pound coin on the table by the cups because it seemed to him that he should somehow pay for having stayed so long, and went out into the street. Nobody glanced at him. He waited, anticipated a stare, even tried to catch someone’s eye, but she walked on.

He felt tired now and it was a fifteen-minute walk home, so he went to the taxi rank in the square, hesitated as he approached the first cab, wondering if the man would know, would look at him, would refuse to take him.

But he just nodded, started the engine. Leslie leaned back in the seat and felt a great weakness overcome him and a tightness in his chest so that he had to concentrate to breathe. They stopped at a pedestrian crossing and a woman glanced into the cab. Perhaps she knew, perhaps he was recognised after all. He slid down in the seat. They drove on. He glanced out of the rear window but she had disappeared. There seemed to be a thousand stops, at traffic lights, at junctions, behind other cars, at more crossings, the journey went on miles into the future, carrying him a great distance. He fell into an odd, half-awake trance and the sound of the engine was like an animal purring.

‘Forty-eight?’

Forty-eight.

‘Forty-eight, yes. Thank you.’

He noticed the clock on the dashboard so he knew what time it was but what was the day? He could not remember the day.

The street was quiet. Were people at their windows? He felt spying eyes following him as he went up the path to the front door, judging eyes, and heard the whispering tongues. He wondered if he would ever live down the shame. Word would get out. Word always got out. June Petrie knew. He could not imagine June Petrie staying silent.

He was fumbling about for the key with fingers that seemed to have lost all sensation when the door opened.

‘Oh, Leslie!’

Hearing Hilary’s voice, full of warmth and understanding, he thought he might burst into tears, but he only shook his head and went in as she held open the door for him.

‘Come into the kitchen, I’ll make you tea. You’ll perhaps want to get yourself together.’

Before you see her, she meant, before you have to come up with an explanation.

He followed her and reached for a chair before his legs gave way under him.

‘It’s quite all right,’ Hilary said. ‘I told her you’d been called away, you had to go with a work colleague somewhere, you hadn’t had time to explain, or else I’d misunderstood, I said, being stupid as I am. You needn’t worry.’

He looked at her but could not speak. Hilary. How old was she? In her forties, with, he knew, a husband and two children, boys. What else did he know? Nothing else, except that without her their lives would not have functioned so easily. He felt a wave of guilt, that he knew so little about her. Did he take her for granted? Easy to do so.

He watched her, pouring milk into the jug, water into the teapot, unfussed, not making anything of it. A large, fair-haired woman in grey trousers and a brightly coloured T-shirt. Hilary.

‘It was all a mistake,’ he said. ‘Something – some confusion – someone else … they made a mistake, you see … but they had every right to … I had to clear myself, I had to answer the questions, of course. I’ve no complaints, I can’t blame them, they’re doing their job, they have to do their job.’

Hilary set down the mug of tea and then, briefly, placed her hand over his. It was a soft hand but her touch quite firm. He felt the tears behind his eyes but they did not show.

‘She’s watching the lunchtime news,’ Hilary said, ‘you know she doesn’t like to miss that. You take your time.’

She did not watch him or fuss over him, she started to put clothes into the washing machine, and then to fold up a basket of dry clean ones, moving patiently from this to that, so that, after a while, he began to calm down, to drink his tea and feel his heart beat less erratically, to hear the tick of the kitchen clock and the soothing hum of the machine, and realise that he was home and quite free.

‘You’re free to go, sir.’

Sir.

He had never been further than the reception area of any police station and that perhaps only a couple of times in his life. But that must be true of most people. Most people did not know anything about the rooms and the talk and the procedures and the smells and the noises beyond the front desk. It had been like entering a foreign country, full of people he knew existed, people like actors he had seen on television, dressed in uniforms or none, people going down corridors carrying files and banging in and out through swing doors. He had felt dirty, and guilty, from the moment he’d realised that he was being questioned, ‘interrogated’, not simply spoken to, from the moment he’d entered the bare room with the table and chairs and linoleum floor. He had understood quickly how easy it would be to agree to anything, become confused, forget things you knew perfectly well, in the anonymous, impersonal, horrible space between four beige walls.

‘Why?’ The one word they had used again and again. ‘Why? Why?’

He heard them now, their voices trapped inside his head, and realised that if he forgot their faces, over time, forgot how many of them there had been and certainly forgot their names, he would not forget the room, and its smell, and their voices asking him why.

‘I think I’d like to have a bath.’ He had begun to itch with the need to get the smell and dirt from his skin.

‘The water should be hot. I had the heater on for doing all this. You go while she’s watching her programme and then, you know, she has a nap, so you’ll have time to yourself.’

She took his mug to the sink, rinsed it out, put it on the draining rack. The sun was shining through the window. The kitchen was neat and clean. The clock ticked.

He wanted to say something to Hilary, that he was grateful to her for saying nothing, carrying on with what she was doing, not asking questions, but he did not know how.

As he went up the stairs he heard the television, voices, the sound of an explosion, more voices.

The sun was shining into the bathroom, washing across the white enamel and the pale blue wall, highlighting the rim of the toothbrush holder.