Flesh And Blood (6 page)

A short while later, inside McKeirnan’s caravan, Donald had stood shivering while McKeirnan pulled off his clothing – denim jacket, T-shirt, trousers – until he stood in nothing but a pair of briefs and then not even those, Donald trying not to stare at the tattoos that snaked here and there across his body, the blue vein that ran up into the hood of his cock.

‘Get your things off,’ McKeirnan said, ‘you’ll catch your death.’ And when Donald hesitated, adding with a wink, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not after your arse. At least, not yet.’

Laughing, he began to towel himself down, as Donald slowly pulled his sodden sweat-shirt over his head and then, embarrassed, back half-turned, peeled off the rest.

‘Jesus!’ McKeirnan exclaimed, Donald’s ribs all too visible through pallid skin. ‘When did you last eat a fuckin’ meal?’

At a burger bar off the market square, McKeirnan drank Coke and smoked several cigarettes, while Donald crammed first one, then two greasy quarter-pounders into his mouth, devouring several helpings of matchstick fries, coleslaw, ketchup, apple pie and a banana milk shake before rushing to the toilet where he brought most of it back up.

‘You,’ McKeirnan said later, ‘have got to start eating regular. Treat your body like a fuckin’ temple, know what I mean?’

They had hung out on the square with four or five others from the fairground, all of them older than Donald, around McKeirnan’s age, mid-twenties, smoking roll-ups, a little dope, a couple of spliffs making the rounds, strong cider in cans. Calling out and laughing at the girls who ventured near, less than confident on high heels, tops pulled close across their tight little tits, at school still all of them while pretending otherwise. One of the blokes, tall and lean with peroxide hair, finally persuading a fourteen-year-old in sprayed-on scarlet pants into a shop doorway where he kissed her open-mouthed, one hand feeling her up inside her blouse, while with the other he stroked himself through his jeans.

Smile on his face, McKeirnan watching, watching every move, and Donald watching McKeirnan watching them.

Back in the caravan, a bottle of vodka passed between them, Donald not wanting it, not really, but not wanting to say no, the walls and the ceiling patchworked with old vinyl record covers and pages torn from magazines, rock-and-rollers that Donald failed to recognise and women with full breasts, legs splayed.

More than a little drunk, fearful lest he might be about to throw up again, Donald rose gingerly to his feet.

‘Where the fuck d’you reckon you’re goin’?’

Reaching down, McKeirnan pulled out a mattress and a couple of army blankets from beneath the narrow bed. ‘You can kip down here. A couple of days. We’ll go round in the morning, see if we can’t get you some work with the fair.’

Donald lay awake a long time, listening to the rich fall of McKeirnan’s breathing, the sounds of traffic, sporadic on the nearby road. Not since his sister, Irene, had anyone looked out for him, spared him anything other than a contemptuous word.

He got taken on next day, collecting money on the dodgems, helping out on the coconut shy. McKeirnan lent him a black cord shirt, several sizes too large, a pair of Levi’s, cinched tight with a leather belt and rolled up twice at the ankles. Donald painstakingly wrote his name, Shane, down the backs of both hands in biro, breaking the skin.

On the third night, McKeirnan, cock slick with Vaseline, slid down on to the mattress and buggered him, no more than Donald had expected, no more, he thought, than he deserved.

♦

Spring became summer, Donald stayed. Newark became Retford, Grantham, Boston, Skegness. When Donald pushed his way back into the caravan one afternoon, blinds closed, McKeirnan had a girl bent back over one end of the extended folding bed, bare-chested, skirt high above her waist; McKeirnan still wearing his leather jacket, the one with studs, naked from the waist down as he thrust into her, anger for a moment darkening his face as Donald entered and then grinning, shouting, ‘Shut the fuckin’ door.’ The girl staring, frightened, at Donald and calling, ‘No! Get him out of here.’ And McKeirnan, with a ferocity that stopped Donald’s breath in his mouth, striking her with an upwards-rising back-handed slap that knocked her face sideways and back, the edge of his ring cutting the top of her lip, the corner of her eye.

‘Stay!’ McKeirnan yelled. ‘Now you’re here, fuckin’ stay and fuckin’ watch.’

Donald transfixed, not needing McKeirnan’s urging to watch the way the girl flinched, eyes squeezed shut, the slow run of blood below her ear, around her neck, the thickness of McKeirnan’s cock as it drew back, then disappeared from sight. His own cock hard and straight against his leg.

McKeirnan every now and then glancing over his shoulder at his audience, spellbound.

The beginning but not the end.

♦

A few nights later they were drinking vodka, Donald developing a taste, downing a few pills, one of McKeirnan’s tapes near full volume from the dodgy old cassette player, that singer he was forever on about, the one who had polio, or was it a road accident buggered up his leg, Donald could never remember. Anyway, him, McKeirnan singing along and suddenly he stopped and pulled out his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans, opened it and lifted out a creased and tattered Polaroid which he glanced at with a grin before spinning it round.

‘Here. What d’you reckon to that?’

Face blurred, the image of a woman leaning back against a chair, naked, a piece of rope dangling from one wrist, what could be blood staining the insides of her thighs. On the floor, close by one foot, an old-fashioned poker, or was it some kind of tool?

‘Well? What d’you think?’

Unable, quite, to take his eyes from the photograph, Donald didn’t know what he was supposed to say.

‘Michelle,’ McKeirnan said. ‘Nice girl. You’d’ve liked her. Quiet.’ He was smiling. ‘Stayed with me for a bit last year.’

Fingering the lighter from his pocket he flicked it to life.

‘No call to hang on to this now. Not when we can do better, eh? You and me.’

Holding one corner of the Polaroid, he watched it curl and burn, finally dropping it and watching till there were ashes and nothing more.

‘You and me, Shane.’ Laughing, he lifted the bottle in a toast, then brought it to his mouth and drank. ‘You and fuckin’ me.’

Unlike Elder who, for a variety of reasons, some of which he had never perhaps quite understood, had turned his back on the job almost as soon as his thirty years were in, Don Guiseley had laboured on for ten years more, falling finally on his sword when not so short of sixty, and opting for the quiet of the countryside, a village just west of the Cleveland Hills and the North York Moors National Park, where he and his wife, Esme, ran a small sub-post office and general store.

It was a surprisingly humid day, April turning into May, and Elder’s shirt stuck damply to his back.

‘Sweatin’ a bit, lad,’ Guiseley observed, shaking Elder’s hand.

Wearing a loose check shirt and dark shapeless trousers, grey, almost white hair falling across his eyes, Guiseley had been sorting through what remained of a sack of onions, throwing out any that were too soft or otherwise showing signs of decay.

‘Come on through here. Any luck Esme’ll reward us with some tea.’ The last of this with his voice raised in the direction of his wife, who was behind the small post office counter at the far corner of the shop, talking hysterectomies with one of her regulars.

In the small conservatory that had been added out back, two cushioned wicker chairs faced the open door, beyond which a broad garden sloped unevenly down towards a narrow stream. The far end was given over to vegetables, cucumbers under a cold frame; the rest, where not set to lawn, burgeoned with roses, dahlias and sweet peas.

‘It’s grand,’ Elder said. ‘The view, the garden, everything.’

‘Fancy it then, do you? This sort of life.’

Elder grinned. ‘Maybe not.’

‘Aye. Up at five, sorting out papers. To say nothing of deliverin’ bloody things when the lass as is supposed to do it overlays. And as for this garden, I’ll tell you what, it gives my back bloody gyp.’

Guiseley took a pipe from one pocket of his coat, a pouch of tobacco from another. ‘Cornwall, isn’t it now? How come you fetched up down there?’

‘As good a place as any.’

‘Long way from kith and kin.’

‘I think at first that was the point.’

‘And now?’

Elder hesitated. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You’re still married?’

‘Not so’s you’d notice.’

‘But you never, like, divorced?’

‘There didn’t seem to be a lot of point.’

‘Clean break, some as’d see a virtue in that. Unless you think it’s not done with, that is.’

Elder shuffled his feet.

‘You’ve got kids?’ Guiseley asked.

‘Just the one. A daughter, Katherine. Sixteen.’

Guiseley tamped tobacco down into the bowl of his pipe with his thumb, then struck a match. ‘Ours have flown the coop long since. Eldest boy’s in Australia, settled. Married with a couple of kids. Other lad’s in the job, London, Fraud Squad at the Yard. We get to see him once in a while.’ Guiseley took the pipe from his mouth and laughed. ‘Hear him talk, you’d think I was an old dinosaur. I told him, what he does, white-collar crime, lief as not be with one of them financial outfits in the City, making real money.’

‘And the girl? You had a daughter, too, I thought.’

‘Married this Asian bloke, wholesaler of some sort, big place the other side of Bradford.’ He looked at his pipe and struck another match. ‘Esme goes over to see them sometimes.’

Elder stayed silent and a moment later Guiseley’s wife came through from the house with a tray, a pot of tea and proper cups, cheese scones. Her hand when Elder shook it, though small, was calloused and strong and, whatever her husband might claim to the contrary, Elder would have bet good money at least half the garden work was hers.

A few polite exchanges and she went back inside to look after the shop.

Guiseley indicated Elder could do the honours with the pot.

‘Now,’ he said after his first taste, ‘you’ve not come out of politeness and I doubt you’ve took up social work, so you’d best tell me what it is you want.’

‘Susan Blacklock.’

‘Aye. Should’ve guessed. Sticks in the craw, don’t it? Ones you never put to bed.’

He supped more tea and stared out across the grass.

‘If I asked you now,’ Elder said, ‘thinking back, what would you say happened?’

‘Same as I would’ve forty-eight hours after she went missing and no sign. She’s dead. Some bastard’s killed her. Though I am surprised the body’s not turned up, I’ll grant you that. Some small room for hope there, if that’s what you’re after.’

‘I don’t know,’ Elder said.

‘That business down in Gloucester, Fred and Rosemary West, all them bodies they were digging up, carrying off to be identified, dental records and the like, I kept half-expecting she’d be one of those. Easy enough for her to have gone off on her own, hitched a ride, one end of the country to the other, near enough. It’s what kids do, given a half a mind.’

Elder poured hot water from a jug into the pot, swirled it round a little and refilled their cups. In his mind’s eye, he saw his daughter, Katherine, rucksack on her shoulder, walking towards him down the lane.

‘That pair as were put away,’ Guiseley said. ‘McKeirnan and Donald. You still think it was them?’

‘Until someone convinces me otherwise.’

Guiseley nodded and fiddled with his pipe.

‘The files on the case,’ Elder said, ‘I’d like the chance to look through them.’

‘You don’t want much then.’

‘I thought maybe there was a favour you could pull, somebody you could call.’

‘You know,’ Guiseley said, ‘when you came up here, the way you put yourself about, you put up a lot of backs.’

‘There was one girl already dead, another likely gone the same way. There wasn’t a lot of time to be polite. Observe protocol.’

‘Even so.’ With the air of someone who’s been backed into a corner, Guiseley sighed. ‘Give me the chance to make a couple of calls. I’ll see what I can do. No promises, mind.’

Elder nodded. He knew, grudging or not, Guiseley would do what he could.

‘Thanks, Don.’

‘It’ll cost you. A couple of pints at least.’

Shane Donald stepped out of the station and stood on the lower step, looking around. Uncertain. Great pillars behind him, like it was the entrance to Buckingham Palace or something, some stately home, not poxy Huddersfield station. His travel warrant still in his pocket, the one they’d given him when he’d left prison that morning. Duffel bag over one shoulder, two carrier bags: all the things he owned.

He’d put on weight inside, filled out; muscle on his arms and legs, quite hard. Strong, even though he might not have looked it at first glance. He liked that. Taller, too, five eight or nine. Hair cut short and fine stubble sandpapering his face.

No longer a kid.

They’d given him a map, hand-drawn, how to find the hostel, instructions written down. He could always ask someone, he supposed, but he’d rather not do that. Keep yourself to yourself, avoid looking anyone in the eye: one of the things he’d learned inside. Just one. And there were others, too. Keep yourself to yourself, but if you can’t…

He stepped out from the kerb and crossed the street.

♦

The probation hostel was in a large Victorian building, detached, set back off one of the broad tree-lined roads slowly rising out of the town centre. Several of the others, close by, looked to have been turned into guest-houses, small hotels.

Donald had checked his piece of paper several times on the way out there, fidgeting it in and out of his pocket, folding and unfolding and then folding it again; he was looking at it again now, wanting to be certain of the number.