Flesh And Blood (9 page)

‘And Trevor felt shut out.’

‘Yes.’

Elder was thinking about Katherine, about Katherine and Joanne. The pair of them walking ahead of him, heads together, arm in arm; disappearing for hours into a succession of shops, finally emerging with flushed faces and bags crammed with spoils; hushed conversations on the settee at home which would either explode into giggles or shut off the instant he entered the room.

‘How did he react to this?’ Elder asked. ‘Trevor.’

Helen drew on her cigarette. ‘Part of the time he made out he didn’t care. Other times, he cared too much. Fussed around her, asking questions – school, friends – forcing himself upon her almost. When he did that, of course, she closed herself off all the more. He’d live with that for a while, you know, pretend he hadn’t noticed. And then – it could be any little thing, sometimes it didn’t seem to be anything – he’d explode. Real, real anger. Once a month, once a week, less, more. It was like living with a time bomb in the house, never knowing what was going to set it off.’

‘He hit her.’

‘No. No – well, once or twice. A few times, maybe. When she was twelve, thirteen. She’d wind him up, knowing full well what she was doing. You know how kids can. When he couldn’t take it any more he’d lash out. Didn’t know what else to do. Once, I remember, we were at my parents’, Sunday lunch. He reached right across the table and slapped her face. You can picture the to-do there was about that. Susan ran off screaming, my mother hurrying after her, trying to calm her down; my dad up in arms, trying to lay down the law. Trevor, finally he slammed down his knife and fork and stormed out. Whenever they came to visit after that, he’d find some excuse to be out of the house; either that or he’d feign a headache, lay down upstairs with the blinds drawn till they’d gone.’

‘And this was all when she was younger? Hitting her, I mean.’

‘I told him if it didn’t stop… if it didn’t stop, I’d leave him. We’d leave him. Susan was coming on fourteen. He knew I meant it, you could tell. I suggested he got help. Talked to someone, a therapist, whatever, if he couldn’t control it himself. And, give him credit, that’s what he did. He never raised a hand to her after that.’

‘But he did still get angry?’

Helen wasn’t looking at him now, but was gazing, unfocused, at the floor. ‘Every so often, yes. Over things he thought important.’

‘Boys?’

‘Boys, yes. Or if he thought she’d been lying to him, being deceitful.’

‘And was she?’

Helen looked at him now. ‘I expect so. Girls are. Usually they have to be.’ She stubbed out her cigarette.

‘Trevor,’ Elder said. ‘Are you still in touch?’

‘No. Not really.’

‘You haven’t got an address?’

‘Tamworth, somewhere.’ She got to her feet. ‘I’ll get it for you.’

‘Those girls you mentioned, I don’t suppose you’ve got addresses for them, too?’

Helen shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. Not any more. They were really good about keeping in touch at first, Siobhan especially. One of the lads, too. Rob, I think it was. Used to send cards on Susan’s birthday, little things like that. But after a while, well, you know how it is – but just let me go and see.’

While she was out of the room, Elder looked more closely at the family photograph and thought about Trevor, off on his own searching for starfish or whatever, while mother and daughter gossiped and giggled like the best of friends.

Helen came back holding a small address book, slightly the worse for wear. ‘Here we are, Siobhan Hansen. And that’s Trevor’s, there. Siobhan’s though, it’s a good few years out of date, mind. I doubt she’s there any more. You could always try the school, though. The big comprehensive. Chesterfield. Used to be the grammar school a long time back. The drama teacher, Mr Latham, he might still be there. I suppose one or two of them might have kept in touch with him.’

‘All right, thanks.’ Elder noted the addresses down in his book.

Helen walked with him the short distance to the door.

‘How much longer will you be around?’

‘Oh, another day possibly, I’m not sure.’

She looked as if she was about to say something more, but changed her mind. Whether her wrist brushed his arm or the other way around, it was almost certainly accidental. She watched him for some moments, but turned away before he reached the corner of the street.

Pam Wilson had promised her dad she would never follow him into probation, no matter what. It had not been a difficult promise to make. Watching him leave for the office each morning of her childhood at around seven, sometimes as late as seven thirty, urging his arthritic Vauxhall over the hills and out of the county from Todmorden into Huddersfield and then returning back each evening at a similar hour, paperwork with him, had convinced Pam that no one in his or her right mind would opt for a career as a probation officer, overworked, under-appreciated and seriously underpaid.

She and her then best friend, Julie Walker, had sworn on their shared fifteenth birthday that they would dedicate their lives to buying designer clothes, dating only Italian boys, drinking Bacardi and finding jobs that would pay them sufficiently to afford a penthouse flat in the centre of Leeds before they were twenty-five. After taking a degree in business studies, Julie was now, at the grand old age of thirty-seven, marketing manager for the country’s second-biggest-selling brand of multi-flavoured potato-based snacks, with an annual income in excess of 70K, excluding bonuses, a leased company car and a water-level dockside apartment on the Thames. Pam thought it had looked somewhat over-the-top in the pages of
Hello!
magazine, Julie holding hands on the white leather settee with Darren What’s-His-Name, who’d made his name at Highbury and now was lucky to get off the bench at West Ham.

Pam, meantime, having switched courses during her first year at university, trading history for psychology and sociology, had toyed with the idea of a fast-track career in the police, hated that, rebounded somehow into selling advertising space on television, something for which she was temperamentally unsuited, then spent nine months as a trainee manager in a department store before signing on for a TEFL course with a view to teaching English somewhere warm; after catching a bad case of hives and something infinitely worse and more personal in Barcelona, flat broke and despondent, she had moved back into her old room at home and accepted a post as trainee probation officer.

It was something about which her father never missed an opportunity to tease and chide her. Most usually in the car park, mornings after she’d followed him in her rusting Toyota on the journey to Huddersfield.

Now, at thirty-seven, she drank bitter in preference to Bacardi, the only words of Italian her last date had known wouldn’t have stretched far beyond
espresso
and
Di Matteo
, and she was living just along the valley from her parents, in a narrow terraced house in Hebden Bridge. And, although she might not always have admitted it, she found working in probation satisfying. Challenging, frequently; frustrating, certainly; yet strangely satisfying.

Pam would not have been first choice as Shane Donald’s probation officer; not that she lacked the necessary experience, but given the nature of Donald’s offence, his history of violence towards women, a male officer would normally have been given the job. But several months earlier, at the time it had been necessary to become involved in the plans for Donald’s release, Dennis Robson was on leave of absence with a stress-related illness, Terry Smith had ricked his back on the badminton court, and that left Pam holding, as it were, the baby.

The first time she had met Donald she had been surprised at how much younger than his thirty years he appeared; had surreptitiously checked, in fact, his date of birth on the papers in his file. Since then, the several-days’ stubble he had affected, together with his close-cropped hair, made him seem, if not exactly older, certainly stronger, more self-contained. He had answered Pam’s questions with a minimum of fuss, brief and to the point, grudgingly polite. Conscious of the magnitude of what he had done. Contrite. Serious about making a new start. Pam thought experience had taught her who to believe, to recognise when the wool was being pulled over her eyes. With Shane Donald she had never been sure.

Risk. How much was attached to his release? None that an uneasy feeling, deep in her gut, could testify to, rationally explain. And others, other professionals, had assessed, weighed in the hand, decided what was appropriate, correct.

On the way to the hostel and her third appointment of the morning, she picked up a coffee and a doughnut and gave herself ten minutes, parked in a lay-by rereading Donald’s file. Low educational attainment, dysfunctional home, victim of abuse, easily led. At the trial, Donald’s barrister had alleged that her client was, in his own way, as much a victim as the girl he and McKeirnan had raped and murdered. Pam was less sure. There wasn’t a lot she hadn’t come across, but, given a little imagination to fill in the gaps, what Donald and his companion had perpetrated on the young women they’d held captive still brought out goose-pimples along her arms; made her look round with a slow chill of apprehension, sitting there alone in her car, a single woman who’d failed to take the elementary precaution of locking the doors.

By the time she pulled the Toyota in to the kerb outside the hostel and parked, she was back in control. Checking the mirror to make sure there was no stray icing round her mouth, she set off towards the front door: five ten and close to a hundred and fifty pounds, strong shoulders and upper arms from playing volleyball, a loose-fitting pale grey suit over a black polo-neck, hair which had once been blonde but had darkened with age cut spiky and short, a leather bag, A4 size, over one arm.

‘Pam.’ As was his habit, Peter Gribbens greeted her at the entrance, hand outstretched. ‘Good to see you.’

‘You too, Peter.’

‘Let’s go into my office, you can talk to Shane in there.’

‘If you’re sure you don’t mind.’

The first time they’d met, Gribbens had asked to which denomination she belonged; on the second, he’d invited her to join him and his lady wife for a day’s ramble along the Pennine Way. Drawing a blank on both fronts, he’d since retreated behind the slightly blustering cheeriness that was his norm.

‘How’s he been getting on?’ Pam asked.

‘Oh, quite well, I think. Quite well. He’s quiet, keeps himself to himself. So far, at least. No signs of any aggression. But then, it’s early days, early days.’

‘Well, the sooner you wheel him in…’

‘Ah. Yes. Yes, of course.’

When Donald stepped into the room, Gribbens closed the door behind him.

‘Shane, come on in. Sit down.’

He did as he was asked, his gaze passing quickly from Pam’s face to the window behind her, the walls, the scuffed toes of his shoes.

‘So, how do you think you’re settling in?’

‘All right, I s’pose.’

‘No problems with the other residents?’

Donald shook his head.

‘How about the staff?’

Donald blinked and chewed on a nail.

‘Shane?’

‘No, there’s nothin’. ’Sfine.’

‘You’re sure? Because if there’s anything bothering you, now would be a good time to say.’

‘No, like I said, it’s okay.’

‘And your room-mate? I assume you’re sharing a room?’

‘Royal, yeah. He’s good. Leaves me alone.’

‘All right. Now, there are just a few things about the terms of your licence we ought to go over again, just to make sure they’re clear. See if there are any questions you want to ask. Okay?’

Donald nodded. Rules and regulations. He knew about rules, knew the games you had to play. Do this, do that.

He had been aware of the clock almost immediately this time, the small click that came with each movement of the hands. Report to me regularly, Pam was saying. Try not to be late. Respect the hours the hostel lays down. If there’s every anything seriously worrying you, talk to your key worker first and then to me, all right, Shane? All right? Donald fidgeted a little on his chair.

‘What it all comes down to,’ Pam said, ‘you have to avoid doing anything which breaks the terms of your licence. Anything at all.’

She was coming down hard on him, she realised that, not the best way to keep him trusting her, not at all, but each time she looked at him, that whippet face, the way the skin was picked and sore around his fingernails, she couldn’t prevent the images rising in her mind. What he’d done with those hands.

‘Shane? You do understand?’

‘Yes. Yeah, of course.’ And then he smiled his quick and thin-lipped smile and it was Pam who looked away.

‘We’ll help you to find a job,’ she said, recovering. ‘Help you to ease yourself back into the day-to-day, but a great deal has to be down to you. This is a chance you’ve got, a chance in a way you’ve earned. It’s up to you to make it work.’

Donald mumbled something she didn’t catch, didn’t understand.

Pam shuffled one of the pages from his file in front of another. ‘Your sister, Irene, have you been in touch with her yet?’

A shake of the head.

‘But you will?’

‘Yeah, tonight. Tonight. I was goin’ to ring her tonight.’

Donald’s elder sister and her family lived close by in Marsden, Pam knew. Somewhere she had driven through numerous times on the way into Oldham and Manchester, little more than a village filtering away on either side of the A62. Irene had been the only member of the family to have visited Donald with any regularity during his time in prison, her presence in the area one of the reasons Huddersfield had been chosen for his relocation.

‘We talked about it, didn’t we?’ Pam said. ‘How it would be good for you to spend time with her, her family. Arrange for you to stay for a weekend.’