The Unquiet Dead (17 page)

‘Jess, you didn’t tell me you
knew
Amanda.’

‘I don’t. And she’s leaving.’

‘What a coincidence,’ said Bill, ‘so am I. Fancy a coffee of something?’

Jessie watched in horror as Bill offered Amanda Hornby his arm and she took it with a gloat visible only to other women. There was nothing Jessie could do without appearing like a crazed incestuous freak. Instead she turned back to the pool. ‘Don, help – I need rescuing again.’

Niaz, Burrows and Jessie drove to the Romanos’ flat on the Lisson Grove Estate in silence. Even Niaz’s diplomatic skills couldn’t break the standoff between his two senior officers. Jessie was furious with Burrows for reporting her missing to her brother and wading in with two left feet at the Marshall Street Baths, and he in turn was furious with her for putting herself in danger and ignoring police procedure. She hadn’t been in danger, she insisted over and over again. But she could have been, he retaliated. Jessie felt like Burrows had pried into her personal life, had overstepped the boundary. What she did at night was her own business. She certainly didn’t want him knowing whether she’d slept in her own bed or not. Too much information. Too close. Too personal. Jessie stared out of the window. Was she really angry with Burrows for prying, or angry with herself for straying? Bill was right, she hadn’t made it home, but she wasn’t going to tell him or anyone else
that. To be truthful, she was glad to have something else to think about.

Jessie had not left the baths until she had made sure Don was calm. It had taken three cups of tea and a look through his scrapbook. Don – or Michael ‘Donnie’ Firth, as he was known back then – had had an exemplary record as a lifeguard. For twenty years he had perched on that seat, twenty feet above the water, in his red shorts. In all that time, no one had drowned, no one had even come close to drowning. The man was married to the job. He was Marshall Street Baths. All the children knew him as Donnie and treated him as one of their own. All the parents and teachers trusted him and treated him as one of their own.

On that fateful Tuesday, the class of teenage boys had been getting steadily out of control. They were boisterous, rowdy and aggressive. Don was told by the teachers to ignore their increasingly farfetched cries for help. It was a decision that would steal his sanity. Jonny Romano cried wolf three times; on the fourth he was dead. It wasn’t until the boy sank below the surface and lay like a stone on a riverbed, that Don realised this drowning had not been an act. He performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for forty-five minutes, but the boy never regained consciousness. Michael ‘Donnie’ Firth had to be physically removed by the paramedics. He went with the boy to the hospital. From there he was taken directly to the police station.
The questioning had been intense and relentless, they needed someone to blame. The press clawed over his professional and personal life, the mob shouted insults outside his cell for three days and three nights until the drug story broke. By then it was too late. The lifeguard had a massive nervous breakdown from which he never recovered. Two years later, management agreed to give him a job as caretaker. He had been working the boiler room ever since. According to his doctors he heard voices, saw people when there was no one there and told tall tales to anyone who would listen. When this happened too frequently, they upped his medication and the voices died down.

The lifeguard had had nothing to do with the death of Ian Doyle. Police records confirmed that he left the baths in the same ambulance as Jonny Romano and did not return for two years. He was nervous about people knowing his secret, certainly; he was tormented by guilt over the boy’s death, but he wasn’t a murderer. Don’s trouble was that he hadn’t accepted Jonny’s role in his own death, nor that of the man who sold him the amphetamines. As far as Don was concerned, all the accusations stuck, and the boy’s death lay entirely at his feet. Fourteen years on, he could still see the blurred shape of a boy’s body lying twenty feet below him at the bottom of a pool.
He drowned. It was an accident
. These were hollow words. An ineffectual mantra which meant as little as
exonerate
. Don would always believe it was his fault,
whatever the doctors, psychiatrists and lawyers told him.

A car door slammed.

‘I said we’re here.’ Burrows held open her door, but they didn’t look each other in the eye as she passed him.

It was a typical London housing estate, built in the thirties with rust-coloured bricks and covered walkways running the length of every floor. Door. Kitchen window. Door. Kitchen window. Door. Kitchen window. As far as the eye could see. Of all the estates in London, Jessie particularly loathed Lisson Grove. If hatred had a smell it would be of rotting rubbish, beer-bottle dregs and cat spray. Here children weren’t children, they were an enemy to be feared.

The three of them hurried into a stinking stairwell and up the concrete steps to the fourth floor. The usual paraphernalia lined their route: used condoms, scraps of foil, syringes, crack pipes, beer cans, Burger King boxes, dog shit. They continued along the walkway, past the flat doors, the sound of a TV or stereo blasting out from almost every flat. Few had been gentrified. Right-to-buy had not applied to Lisson Grove. Niaz knocked on Flat G and within seconds the door was opened by a thickset man with olive skin and oiled black hair, wearing a thin white shirt and black jeans pulled high around his middle. Mr Romano.

‘Welcome, welcome,’ he said. ‘Please come in.’ They dutifully obliged. ‘Three of you!’ he said,
expressing what sounded like delight. ‘Why the uniform?’

‘PC Ahmet is part of CID,’ explained Burrows.

‘CID, CID. Excellent, excellent. Are you in charge?’

‘I am,’ said Jessie. ‘DI Driver. I know it happened a long time ago, but may I express my deepest sympathies. No parent should bury a child.’

‘Seems like yesterday,’ said Mr Romano dropping his head. ‘Sometimes I think he’ll still walk through the door, kick off his shoes and demand his spaghetti al funghi. For an English woman, his mother was an excellent cook.’ His expression changed suddenly, his face contorted into a snarl. ‘He’d be blown away not to see his mama in the kitchen. But I make do.’ He offered them coffee and biscuits. Accepting, Jessie made a silent promise to herself to eat a plate of fresh vegetables when she got home that evening.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know you’d divorced.’

‘The bereavement counsellor said it is not unusual.’ He stared at Jessie with wide black eyes. ‘Grief eats away at you until there is nothing left.’

Jessie held his gaze uncomfortably. She could recognise grief; she just wasn’t sure it was grief she was looking at.

‘Mr Romano, we’d like to talk to you about Ian –’

‘Have you found the murdering bastard?’

‘Would you be surprised if we had?’

‘Well, I haven’t been able to find him.’

‘Where have you looked?’ asked Jessie.

Mr Romano stood up. ‘It would be easier to tell you where I haven’t looked, that’s how hard I’ve been looking.’ He walked over to a pine dresser and began opening drawers and cupboards. Where glasses and plates should have been displayed, there were notebooks and files. ‘It is all documented here. A life’s work, you might say. It certainly gave me reason to get out of bed in the morning. Ian Doyle was a nobody, a vagrant; he lived in a squat in Soho and, according to another of the squatters, he’d been there a good many years. But they wouldn’t talk to the police, only me. Selling the drugs was his idea of getting a job. It’s disgusting what people will do for money. His greed killed my son.’ He looked the dresser over. ‘Everything you want to know is in there,’ he said proudly before turning back to his three visitors. ‘He was a very bright boy, my son. God knows where he got it from, came from nowhere, but he was bright, says so in all his reports.’ He opened another drawer. ‘I’ve got them all here. His mother wanted them, but no way, she wasn’t leaving with those.’

‘When did your wife leave, Mr Romano?’

‘Two years after Jonny was killed. She wanted to move on. “Move on?” I said. “How can you move on from something like that?” She said I was caught in the past, I had to choose between Jonny and her – daft cow. He was dead, wasn’t he. I think she had some psychological problems.’ He twirled a thick finger around by his temple. ‘She wanted me to stop searching. How could I stop? I wouldn’t do that to
Jonny. One day I came home and she’d tidied out his room. Can you imagine? Not been dead two full years and she throws all his stuff out. Thank God I came home early that day from the search. I saw his stuff on the landing out there. I went ballistic, I can tell you.’ He shook his head. ‘I put it all back, don’t worry. I knew exactly where everything went.’ He beckoned to Jessie. ‘You can come and have a look if you like, get more of a feel of him.’ Mr Romano pushed open one of the doors off the central hallway to reveal a museum to the eighties. A shrine to his son. The bed was unmade, there were shoes and socks spread on the floor. A poster of Duran Duran curled off the wall. Mr Romano patiently pushed the corner back up. ‘The Blue Tack has lost a bit of its stick.’ He stood back. ‘It’s exactly like when he left for school. Lucky I’ve got a photographic memory,’ said Mr Romano. ‘So maybe he did get his brains from my side of the family.’

‘Mr Romano, did you ever see Ian Doyle?’

‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘He disappeared fast.’

‘So how did you know who you were searching for?’

‘Description from Jonny’s friends. Friends – ha! I blame that black kid, Pete Boateng. Bad family, the Boatengs, you could tell. So called best friend, didn’t do anything to stop Jonny taking those drugs, did he?’

Jessie smelled the pungent air of racism.

‘The kids said Doyle hung around the pool a lot, and they weren’t the only ones who remembered
him. I asked everyone who left the pool that day. Everyone. And I kept notes.’

‘May I see?’ said Jessie.

‘Of course. It’s nice to have someone take an interest after all these years.’

Jessie flicked through a blue schoolbook. It had Jonny’s name and his class number on the front. Inside was a long list of names and descriptions of people, the time they left the baths and what answers they gave to Mr Romano’s questions.

‘What did you ask them?’

‘Had they seen the devil who killed my son? A lot of people had.’

Jessie glanced back at the book.
15.19: Swimming teacher in tears, no. 15.25: Woman in white coat, ponytail, no English. 15.40: Fat lady, too upset to talk. 15.42: Spotty girl, hook nose, yes – frightening man, black hair
 … Jessie placed the book down. The notes were nonsense but they told her one interesting thing.

‘’Course it’s much easier now with the internet. It has done a lot to help my cause. I’ve even been to Spain after a tip-off. Wasn’t him, though. But it will be one day. He can’t run from me forever. The police may have forgotten about it, but he knows he won’t escape me. I bet he thinks about where I am every night before he falls asleep. I’m waiting for him to show his face. This time I’ll be ready.’

Jessie could sense that Burrows wanted to tell him about the body, put him out of his misery, but
she wasn’t yet convinced that Mr Romano hadn’t concocted a great alibi in his unrelenting search for a man he knew would never be found.

‘This time?’ asked Jessie.

‘I saw him once,’ said Mr Romano. ‘He stood right outside the kitchen window. I don’t know what made me pull back the blind. Some sixth sense, I think. There he was, just the other side of the glass, staring back at me. He gave me the slip during the chase.’

‘Mr Romano, it says in your report that you were at the baths before Jonny’s body was removed. How did you get there so quickly?’

‘I worked for a company in Soho very close to the baths – Vision Inc. Italians make good security men. Jonny had come over with his friends before. The lad was still wet when he reached me.’

‘And how soon did you know to look for Ian Doyle?’

‘One of the girls squealed about the speed there and then. She said she’d even seen Jonny take it. If that man hadn’t forced his drugs on my boy …’ He mumbled the rest of the sentence.

‘But, according to the paper, it wasn’t known that he had taken anything until the autopsy three days later.’

‘No. I didn’t believe her, I didn’t believe my son would do something that stupid. He was leaving that dump of a school, he’d got a scholarship. He was getting out.’

‘But you
did
believe it. You started searching
for Doyle that day. It’s all here, neatly logged.’

Mr Romano’s eyes flitted to each of them in turn. ‘What do you think she is getting at?’ he asked Burrows.

‘Just trying to establish the facts. If you had told the authorities about the drugs and Ian Doyle that day, they might have been able to catch him.’

‘Please, the police do the “I-ties” a favour? Don’t be fucking ridiculous. Back then they didn’t bother answering calls in this area.’

‘So you didn’t trust them to find him?’

‘I know what you are doing – you’re trying to pin this on me. You’re saying it’s my fault he got away, just like it was my poor boy’s fault he drowned. Oh yeah, you’re all the same.’

‘So you went looking for Doyle?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you found him?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’