Widows & Orphans (30 page)

‘That’s not very fair.’

‘Funny but I don’t feel fair. There were four of them: two boys and two girls; although one of the girls ran off. It was dark. I only saw the first guy’s face. He can’t have been more than twenty. I thought he was alone, but then his friends jumped out and…’

‘You couldn’t have known.’

‘I should have realised. What would a gorgeous young hunk like that want with a minger like me. Quite frankly, I deserved everything I got. Not for being gay; not for being out there; not for being so desperate I was willing to let my dick get frostbite. But for being so bloody fucking dense!’

Duncan was grateful that the two keening women appeared not to understand English. ‘The more you beat yourself up; the more you do their work for them. Save all your energy for getting well. Meanwhile you have my word that the
Mercury
will keep up the pressure on the police to hunt down the perpetrators.’

‘When I was at school I wanted to be a journalist.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, to be honest I wanted to be a showbiz reporter. I pictured myself sitting on a leopard-print sofa interviewing Ann Margret. But I didn’t get the A levels.’

‘Not everyone can be academic.’

‘Especially not when they have their homework ripped up on a daily basis.’

‘Is that what happened to you?’

‘Along with being punched and spat on and having my books nicked and my clothes torn and being force-fed laxatives. There’s no need to look so appalled. It was twenty years ago.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Duncan said, fearful that Neil was suffering a similar fate now.

‘Hark at me: Moaning Minnie! Don’t worry,’ he said wryly, lifting his splint. ‘It gets better.’

‘Didn’t you tell your parents? Oh, I forgot; I’m sorry. They were dead.’

‘My parents are alive and well and living in Hastings.’

‘But you said you were brought up by your grandmother.’

‘So? They threw me out when my mother found a couple of skin mags under my mattress. They were so innocent, scarcely a dick in sight and that easily passed the Mull of Kintyre test. But it was still too much for my Bible-stroke-child-bashing parents. I was fourteen and homeless. My gran took me in and my parents never spoke to her again. But, as she said, I needed her more than she needed them.’

‘She sounds like a very special lady.’

‘Don’t get me started. She’s the kindest, wisest, most loving, most caring person I’ve ever met. But even she would have rather I were straight. She worried I’d have a miserable old age – ironic when you think what her own’s been like! I was more worried about my miserable youth. I had so much love in me; I wanted to share it with someone. Not to be told I had beautiful buttocks by an antique dealer.’

‘I can see that wouldn’t be much fun.’

‘Then I met Jay. He was a trainee chef at the hospital where I worked. He was everything I ever wanted; he still is. He said he loved me, and not just when we were in bed. We were together for three years. Gran thought the world of him. But then he fell for Gina, one of the ward clerks, or at least for the sort of life he could have with her. And everyone was happy for him. Even Gran, the one person who was always on my side, thought it best that he was “settling down with the right girl”. That’s when I realised that in your heart of hearts all of you – even the nice, kind, sympathetic ones – despise us.’

Although stung by the charge, Duncan refused to argue. A lifelong victim of bigotry, Chris had every right to feel bitter. His physical injuries were nothing compared to his psychic
scars. So, promising him again that the
Mercury
wouldn’t let the story drop, Duncan left the ward. The following morning, after ringing a police contact who admitted that the investigation had so far drawn a blank, he put it out of his mind while spending the day with the regional director of Provident and his team. Then, at six o’clock, back at his desk writing an ‘On This Day’ column about the first electric tramlines in Francombe, he received a phone call from Ellen that stunned him. She had returned from work to find Neil locked in the bathroom where, according to Sue, he was scrubbing the word ‘Twat’ off his forehead. Scouring his bedroom for clues to this latest assault, she had come across his unlocked phone and, scrolling through the messages, opened one with the subject: ‘You next, gay boy!’ Attached was a fuzzy video clip, which at first looked like three men wrestling underwater but gradually revealed itself as two thugs beating up a man in the woods.

Telling her to do nothing without him, Duncan left the office and sped through Francombe as though the alarm bells ringing in his head had been transformed into a siren on his car. Arriving at Ellen’s, he no sooner stepped through the door than she handed him the phone. Trembling, he studied the grainy grey-green footage of two youths attacking an older man, first kneeing him in the groin and wrenching his shoulder, then stamping and spitting on him as he rolled on the ground. A girl fleetingly grappled with one of the youths, who pushed her aside. Confounding expectations, the victim, who made shockingly little attempt to defend himself, was the only one who was hooded, but when the camera picked out the line of spittle on his cheek, it was unmistakably Chris. The next moment a leering face approached the lens and, despite the darkness and distortion, it was equally unmistakably Craig. The focus then shifted abruptly and, to judge from the peal of laughter, inadvertently, to a swaying treetop where the clip ran out.

The attack had been as brief as it was brutal: one minute fifty-two seconds according to the timecode display; but they were the one minute and fifty-two most sickening seconds of Duncan’s life. He stared at the phone in his palm as if it were a deadly spider that had injected its venom into his bloodstream. Unbidden, Ellen handed him a glass of whisky, which he took, grateful not just for the drink but for the excuse not to speak.

‘That was Chris. I visited him in hospital yesterday,’ he said, finally breaking the silence.

‘I thought so. I was frightened to look too closely.’

‘And Craig.’

‘Yes.’

‘The girl who tried to pull him off…?’

‘I can’t be sure … yes, I can. That top. The way she screamed at him. It was Sue.’

‘So she did the right thing; she tried to stop it. And, as you told me on Tuesday, they’ve split up.’

‘They most certainly have! If I have to lock her in her room; if I have to send her to school in Scotland, she won’t see that boy again!’ Ellen said with a steeliness that Duncan had never heard in her before.

With Craig and Sue accounted for, Duncan pondered the identities of the rest of the gang and the harrowing possibility that one of them was Jamie. Size alone ruled out his having been the second assailant (never had he felt so grateful for the double-edged ‘Squirt’), but there was nothing to prevent his having been behind the camera, filming the attack to impress his friends – and intimidate Neil. The climactic laughter sounded girlish but might it have come from a boy with a breaking voice? Reluctant to replay the sequence, he asked Ellen if she would fetch Sue.

‘And then what? Do we pretend it never happened? Do we go to the police?’

‘I don’t know.’ He tried to picture his response were the clip to land on his desk without his knowing any of the
participants, but the leering face and the saliva-coated cheek, to say nothing of the unknown cameraman, made it impossible. ‘If we cover it up, we’d be complicit … accessories.’

‘Oh God! That’s all my kids need. Two criminal parents! And why was it sent to Neil?’

‘I’m as much at a loss as you.’

‘There’s only one way to find out.’ She walked into the hall and called, ‘Sue! Sue, will you come down here a minute?’ Receiving no answer, she went upstairs and returned moments later.

‘She’s on her way.’

When Sue walked in, she looked somehow smaller. It was not just that her hair, which had been bunched on top of her head, hung limply round her face, but her body, which had been thrust out at the world, seemed turned in on itself. She stood behind the armchair, gripping the back, as if the storm raging round her were real.

‘I thought you said he wasn’t coming here on school days,’ she said. And, in the substitution of ‘school’ for ‘week’, Duncan glimpsed the contract that Ellen had made with her daughter.

‘We need to talk to you about something very serious,’ Ellen said.

‘Don’t tell me; you’re getting hitched!’ Sue said with a sneer.

‘No, of course not,’ Ellen replied, at which Duncan caught his breath. ‘We’ve watched a piece of film on Neil’s phone.’

‘If it’s on Neil’s phone, then ask Neil. What’s it got to do with me?’

‘It shows a man being mugged in Salter Nature Reserve,’ Ellen continued resolutely. ‘We think you may know something about it.’

‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong, see! I’ve never been to any nature reserve. Can I go now?’

‘You’re not in any trouble … quite the opposite. But the man was badly injured.’

‘No!’ Sue’s face paled.

‘It’s clear that one of those involved was Craig.’

‘Then why are you asking me? Craig and me have broken up.’

‘Yes, but this occurred on Saturday night: the last night you went out with him; the night you came home so upset.’

‘Don’t do this, Mum. It wasn’t me, honest!’ Sue burst into tears.

‘I know, darling; we can see you tried to stop them. But you have to tell us the truth.’ She moved to Sue. ‘Let’s sit down.’ She led her to the sofa where Sue laid her head on her shoulder and wept. Duncan caught Ellen’s eye and made as if to leave the room, but she shook her head. ‘Now take your time and tell us exactly what happened.’

Through her tears, Sue explained that she and Craig and another couple had gone to the woods to ‘drink and smoke and make out’. Duncan’s relief that Jamie had not been one of the party was checked by a glance at Ellen, struggling to conceal her dismay at her daughter’s weekend pursuits. Sue explained that Craig had gone behind a tree for ‘a piss’ and then shouted at them all to come quickly because he was being ‘felt up by a queer’. Everything had happened so fast, but she remembered that Craig and Alan began punching the man while yelling at Rosalie and her to film it on their phones.

‘I tried to pull Craig off, but he kept on punching him. It’s like he was possessed. They say the woods are haunted. It wasn’t really him, Mum, honest. I know what he’s like. I really, really love him.’

Her voice splintered into sobs as her mother stroked her hair and consoled her.

‘But you said you’d broken up,’ Duncan said, at which her sobbing grew louder.

‘Come on, darling. Let’s go upstairs and wash your face.’ She turned to Duncan. ‘Make yourself at home. I won’t be long.’

Duncan poured himself two fingers of whisky and mulled over what to do. Was this the only footage of the attack in
existence? In which case, if he were to delete it would the two boys be in the clear? For all his antipathy to Craig, he had never suspected him of violence. The shock of Chris’s advances on top of the drink and drugs must have unbalanced him. There was no reason to suppose that he would ever behave so brutally again. On the other hand, had he (or Alan or Rosalie) still been intoxicated when they posted the clip the next day? Far from expressing remorse, the threat to Neil suggested that they were ready to strike again. Yet something failed to add up. He thought back to the aftermath of Christmas lunch and Jamie’s explanation that ‘gay’ had become an all-purpose insult, irrespective of a person’s sexuality. So why had they muddled the two in the message to Neil?

Defeated, he moved to the sideboard but just as he was about to refill his glass Ellen walked in with Neil, his hair drenched and forehead raw but eyes blazing.

‘Mum says you’ve got my mobile.’

‘I have.’

‘Give it back! It’s thieving. Else I’ll report you to the police.’

Duncan smiled at the thought of how neatly that would solve his dilemma.

‘What’s so fucking funny?’

‘Neil!’ Ellen interjected, matching her tone with a pained glance at Duncan.

‘Nothing, I’m sorry. It’s just that we want to talk to you about a crime. Who sent you the film?’

‘What film?’

‘The one of the man being beaten up.’

‘Yeah, wouldn’t you like to know?’

‘It’s no good protecting them.’

‘I’m protecting me. Me! If I grass, they’ll kill me.’

‘You mustn’t say things like that!’ Ellen said. ‘We’ll put a stop to this bullying once and for all. I’ll talk to the headmistress, to the teachers, to the governors if necessary.’

‘You think they’re like the counsellors at your Centre
having cosy case conferences over tea and biscuits? You don’t know squat!’

‘Then tell us,’ Ellen said.

‘I want to go now. Just give me back my phone.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ Duncan said. ‘It’s evidence.’

‘What if I need to call an ambulance for an old lady who’s been mugged?’

‘You mean like the man in the clip?’ Duncan asked, wondering whether Neil had studied the face closely enough to recognise Chris.

‘I’m not gay!’

‘I didn’t say you were. But somebody obviously thinks you are. And he or they are using it to menace you. How do you get on with your sister’s ex-boyfriend, Craig?’

‘I hate you!’ Neil shrieked. ‘You want to know who sent me the film? It was Jamie.’

‘Jamie?’ Ellen asked.

‘My Jamie?’ Duncan asked.

‘Don’t you know your own son’s number? You freak! I hate you!’ Neil repeated as he fled the room.

Duncan and Ellen stood in silence listening to his heavy tread on the stairs.

‘Jamie,’ Duncan said.

‘He may just be saying that to hurt you,’ Ellen said.

Duncan took out his phone, comparing the number on Neil’s text with that in his contacts. ‘I wish he were.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ellen said, mechanically rubbing her ring finger as if grateful that it was still bare. ‘What do we do now?’

‘I don’t know,’ Duncan replied, feeling chopped in two. ‘Jamie’s only thirteen.’

‘He wasn’t with them in the reserve.’

‘No, but he sent the clip. And the message.’

‘I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it,’ Ellen said, and Duncan felt that he had never loved her so much. ‘It’s like the poison-pen letters girls send each other at school.’