Forests of the Night (3 page)

Beulah's singing was more erratic and less assured in the second set. She certainly lost her way through ‘Love for Sale', although I could see what she had been aiming for. It was clear that she was at her best before she powdered her nose.

I stayed on at the club until just after eleven, buying myself another double Scotch. My pockets now had lost their chink. As the crowd began to thin out, I decided to add to the process and make my way home.

The fog had cleared considerably, just leaving behind phantom wisps of grey that floated like ectoplasm on the stiff November air. Junior ghosts on their way home. The streets were empty and, as I walked along, I was accompanied by the clip clop of my own footsteps. I began to feel a little guilty now at leaving the office unattended for most of the day. It would be just my luck if I'd missed some rich client, or better still some exciting case, with a missing diamond and beautiful blonde – the sort that Tiger Blake gets. At the thought of my hero Tiger Blake, I grinned an inane, inebriated grin.

I was about two streets away from Priors Court when, as I passed a darkened shop doorway, I heard a noise emanating from the blackness. It was the sound of crying. Gentle, stifled sobs in the shadows. Breathing in the cold night air to help clear my head, I investigated.

As I moved nearer to the doorway, the sobbing stopped abruptly and there was a frantic scrabbling sound like some animal in distress. In the gloom I could make out the shape of a young boy cowering in the corner, his knees bent up to his chest and his face turned into the corner, hidden from view as though he was desperately trying to make himself invisible.

‘Hello,' I said softly.

As soon as I spoke, the youth gave a cry of alarm, scrambled to his feet and rushed forward in an attempt to push by me. I side-stepped so that he ran straight into my arms. He gave a shriek of terror and kicked me on the shin. I winced but hung on.

‘Let me go. Let me go,' he yelled, as he wriggled furiously in a desperate attempt to escape my grasp.

‘Whoa,' I said quietly, but holding him firmly. ‘Just stop your struggling, sonny. You're not going anywhere.'

He kicked me again and although it was quite painful – painful enough to make me mouth a silent swear word – I held on to the boy.

‘Look,' I said, ‘you might as well give in. I am bigger and stronger than you and I'm not going to let go.'

Slowly the boy relaxed his efforts and slumped like a puppet with its strings cut. ‘Don't hurt me, mister,' he said softly. ‘I'm doing no harm.'

I led him from the shadow of the doorway towards the light of a street lamp. He was dressed in short trousers and a dark belted raincoat. His hair was ruffled and his features tearstained and grimy. I'd seen him before. This was the spectre at the feast – the haunted face that had stared at me through the steamy window of Benny's Café.

‘What are you doing out at this time of night on your own?'

The boy averted my gaze and said nothing.

‘Where do you live?'

‘I … I haven't got a home. I don't live nowhere.'

‘What about your parents?'

‘I got no parents. They're dead. Both of them … dead.'

Now he started to cry and without embarrassment he clung to me and sobbed. I didn't know what to think. Parents or no parents he had come from somewhere. It was clear from his appearance that he had not been living rough for long.

‘I'm Johnny. What's your name?'

‘Peter.'

‘Peter what?'

‘Just Peter.' He wasn't going to be caught out like that.

‘Well, Peter, my lad, you can't sleep in that doorway all night, that's for sure. You'll catch your death in this weather. You'd better come home with me.'

To my surprise the lad offered no resistance to this suggestion. I reckoned that he was too weary to object. I took his hand in mine and we walked down the empty street looking for all the world like father and son returning home from some event – a party or a trip to the cinema. I thought it best not to pressure him with questions about his home and family. I needed to let him learn to trust me a little first. It was clear that for whatever reason he'd done a bunk. Maybe his parents were really dead and he had scaled the walls of the orphanage to explore the big wide world, or he'd been farmed out to some strict spinster in the country and he'd skedaddled back to town but was now too afraid to face his parents. I'd find out in due course. After all, I was a detective.

For a brief moment I remembered my own longings to leave the orphanage. How sometimes I'd get up in the middle of the night, clamber on to a chair and stare out of the window. When the moon was bright I could see the trees and fields beyond the confines of Brookfield House. That was the real world – the world of mums and dads and houses and hugs and kisses, birthday presents and laughter. I never did anything about ‘escaping'. It was just a dream – but when I talked about it, my brother Paul, who was a realist, told me not to be so stupid. He knew that I wouldn't find what I longed for. There was a completely different life agenda for orphans.

‘When was the last time you had something to eat?' I asked, as we approached Hawke Towers.

The boy shook his head. ‘Dunno. I had some choc'late this morning.'

I grinned. ‘Well, let's see what I can rustle up.'

Not much is what I could rustle up. The Hawke larder is on a par with Old Mother Hubbard's. However I did possess a rather rusty tin of Spam and some baked beans – not exactly cordon bleu but as I prepared this midnight feast the boy's eyes lit up with excitement. He sat on the sofa, still wearing his grubby raincoat and watched with fascination as I prepared the food – lighting the gas ring to warm the beans and unkennelling the spam.

The food was wolfed down in minutes.

‘You enjoyed that, eh?'

He nodded shyly. ‘Thank you, mister. Can I go now?'

‘Go where?'

The boy pursed his lips. He had no answer.

‘Another doorway somewhere, eh? I have a better idea – you kip down here on my sofa tonight. It's a bit lumpy but it's a damned sight more comfortable than stone flags. How about that? No strings attached.'

The worried eyes looked uncertain but the temptation of somewhere warm to curl up overcame his misgivings.

I grabbed the eiderdown from my bed and flung it at him with a smile. ‘OK, Pete, you make yourself comfortable and get a good night's sleep. And remember, no snoring.'

For a moment that weary tear-stained face lost its frown and the ghost of a smile touched his lips.

Within minutes he was curled up in a tight ball on the sofa, almost lost under the eiderdown, and purring gently as he sank into deep and, I hoped, untroubled sleep.

four

The boy slept soundly for two or three hours and then a disturbing dream brought him savagely awake. He had been running down a long, featureless corridor, but no matter how hard he tried he could not shake off the dark, hooded figure that was chasing him. Indeed, the figure was gaining on him. Then Peter tripped and fell and the figure loomed over him, its darkness seeping outwards ready to envelop the boy.

Gasping for air, Peter sat up, his chest heaving silently as he tried to contain his panic. For a moment he didn't know where he was. The shadows in the room were alien to him and then he remembered. The strange man with the black eye patch and the warm food. As he shifted his position, he felt the dampness between his legs. He had wet himself again. He bit his lip in shame and sorrow. He had thought that in leaving his mother, he would never do that again. Now he would smell of wee and everyone would know he was ‘a fucking bedwetter'. He sniffed back a tear. He would not cry. All that baby behaviour was behind him now that he was a grown up, alone in the world.

Gradually his eyes became accustomed to the gloom and he was able to make out the features of the room. To his dismay he saw that the man with eye patch was slumped in the chair by the fireplace. He was fast asleep, his head lolling back and his mouth wide open. Every now and then a gentle guttural snore escaped from the gaping aperture. The man had been nice to him, but he knew that sooner or later he would try to take him back to his mother and he didn't want that. He had to escape.

Carefully, so as to make no noise, he pulled back the eiderdown and collected his shoes from under the sofa. He tied the laces in a simple bow – the only way he knew how – and stood up. He spied his raincoat hanging on the back of a chair by the window. Like a character in a film shot in slow motion, he crossed the room and retrieved it. He had no idea where his carrier bag was but there were only a couple of shirts and a couple of pairs of underpants in it anyway. He would have to leave it. He couldn't risk waking the eye patch man.

Then he spotted the man's jacket lying on the table. Peter felt in the inside pocket and pulled out a wallet. It contained two one-pound notes only, some stamps and a few receipts. Taking one of the pound notes and slipping it into his trouser pocket, he returned the wallet. He didn't like the idea of stealing, especially stealing from a man who had helped him, but in the short time Peter had been on the streets he had learned that he had to be practical rather than sentimental. And anyway, he hadn't taken both pound notes – he had left one.

Slipping the latch up noiselessly, the boy let himself out of the room.

The sky was still black as Peter emerged once more into the cold November night. He could grab a few more hours' sleep in a doorway somewhere before it was light. Then he'd go in search of a place for breakfast with his newly acquired wealth.

five

When I awoke, the miserable grey light of dawn was already forcing its miserable way through the miserable crack in the curtain and illuminating my miserable dump of a room. My tired, drink-befogged brain had rested while I slept but was still only functioning in first gear as I regained consciousness and it took me some time to recollect the circumstances leading up to me kipping down in the armchair instead of the lovely lumpy bed in the alcove. Ah, yes, I told myself, as I rubbed my prickly chin and blinked my good eye: the boy. I sat up, yawned and gazed over to the settee, expecting to see Wee Willie Winkie cradled in the arms of Morpheus. But of Wee Willie Winkie there was no sign. The eiderdown was on the floor and the settee was vacant. The lad had done a bunk. What a fool I'd been not to lock him in. He was a fugitive after all. I pictured that small, gaunt face with the haunted eyes. He was running away from something or someone and was terrified that I'd take him back. So terrified that he'd wet my settee and then gone back to a life of cold doorways and scrabbling for food.

Well, I'd done my best. Well, the best I could muster after a long day and several whiskies. What the hell, it really was no concern of mine. This thought had hardly entered my mind before I rejected it. I hadn't done anywhere near my best and it
was
a concern of mine. I swore and then put on the kettle. A mug of scalding tea and a cigarette would civilize me and sharpen the brain. My pal at Scotland Yard, Detective Inspector David Llewellyn, might be able to help. He certainly would be able to provide me with a list of any dark-haired boys of about ten years old who had been reported missing in the last week. By the state of Peter's coat (if Peter was his real name, of course), he'd not been living rough for more than three or four nights. And then I could do the rounds of the down and out shelters along the Embankment and see if I could pick up a scent. Well, I'd be guaranteed to pick up a scent mixing with the army of the great unwashed. What I meant was a clue. At least it would give me something to do. A purpose.

I sat at the table, pouring the hot tea down my throat, wondering where the poor blighter was now. However much that little bastard voice at the back of my mind tried to deny the fact, I was involved and I had to do something about it.

Ah, but it's the way of the world: when one makes definite plans, something crops up to disturb then. By 9.30 I had got myself washed, dressed and presentable. With a smooth but slightly bloody chin courtesy of a geriatric razor blade, a clean collar round my neck and two slices of toast within me, I was feeling almost human again and ready to make my way to Scotland Yard when my office doorbell rang.

That could only mean one thing: I had a client. Or clients to be precise. There were two of them: a middle-aged man and woman. They stood on my doorstep, side by side as though they had fallen off a shabby wedding cake. They introduced themselves as Mr and Mrs Palfrey – Eric and Freda. If I were a film director shooting a sequence where I needed a dull, middle-class couple in their late forties with precise manners and limited imagination, Mrs and Mrs Palfrey would be ideal casting.

The matter was obviously urgent. One could tell that by the way Mr Palfrey gripped his rolled umbrella, trying to strangle the furl and Mrs Palfrey tapped her nails on her shiny imitation crocodile-skin handbag.

I sat them down in my office, while I perched above them on the edge of my desk. ‘How can I help you?' I said, smiling benevolently.

‘I'm afraid our Pamela is absent without leave,' said Eric Palfrey with a nervous grin, staring at me through a pair of spectacles borrowed from Arthur Askey. He had a precise manner of speech as though he had rehearsed his lines several times before spouting them.

My smile turned to a puzzled frown. ‘I'm sorry…'

‘What Father means,' interrupted Freda Palfrey, ‘is our daughter Pamela has left home … is missing. She's been gone two months now.'

Left home. Who could blame the girl? I was already beginning to feel edgy with the Palfreys and I'd only been in their company for a few minutes.

‘How old is your daughter?'

‘She is twenty-seven,' said Father, as though describing the blackest sin in the Bible. His tone and the curl of his lip suggested that to be twenty-seven and female was the equivalent of being a brothel keeper in either Sodom or Gomorrah – or both.