Ramsay 04 - Killjoy (18 page)

She nodded and he pulled in under a street lamp close to the Seamen’s mission. They crossed the road together and she wondered if he would put his arm around her, give her some sign of affection. She longed to touch him but he seemed wrapped up in thoughts of his own and oblivious to her presence. A queue snaked around the inside of the chip shop and they joined it, standing one behind the other as if they were strangers. Inside the shop it was beautifully warm and the windows were misted with condensation. The talk in the queue was comfortingly domestic: of family rows and minor illnesses. No one mentioned the murders. Anna turned to John hoping to establish some contact with him but at the same time a customer opened the door to leave the shop and John’s attention seemed caught by a movement outside.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I thought I saw someone I recognized in the street. But it couldn’t have been.’

Because he thought he had glimpsed his mother running across the road towards Chandler’s Court, her raincoat blown open, and he knew that was impossible. His mother would be at home in their dull grey sitting room waiting for his father to return and provide a brief vicarious excitement with news of his work.

John would not let Anna eat the fish and chips in the car. It was his mother’s, he said. She would object to the smell and not let him borrow it again. They sat, huddled in their coats against the cold on a bench looking out over the river and still there was no physical contact between them.

He jumped up impatiently before she had finished, making a ball of the chip papers and throwing it into a rubbish bin.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘ We’ll have to go now if we’re going to get any sort of view.’

She followed him, caught up by his mood of expectation and his restlessness. Suddenly it seemed the most exciting thing in the world to be out with him with no idea how the evening would end.

This is it, she thought. This is how Abigail Keene felt when she left her stuffy family and went out into the world looking for adventure.

He drove up the hill away from the river past an old industrial estate. Most of the factories were empty and grass grew in cracks through the concrete. The few units still in production were protected by grilles and covered by spray painted graffiti. John turned into a wide street which Anna recognized immediately.

‘This is the Starling Farm estate,’ she said. She had never been anywhere near the place but she had seen it on the television. There was a small row of shops—a launderette, a bookmaker’s, a general store—which had been pelted with rocks and petrol bombs. Further up the street she saw the boarded-up houses, from which even the roof tiles had been looted. Because she had seen it on television she thought the estate was glamorous. It was like seeing a famous film star walking down the street.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

‘I told you,’ he said. ‘ To the races.’ He reached into the glove compartment and took out a cassette. The car was filled with music and she had no chance to ask what he meant.

The roads were quite empty and almost dark. Some of the street lamps had been shattered in the previous weeks’ disturbances. Anna thought it must have been like this in the blitz. She found it hard to believe that behind the blacked-out boarded-up windows families were living normal lives. The association with war-time Britain made the place seem exotic, different from anything she had ever known. It conjured up the nostalgia of an age—big-band music, Land Girls, stolen love affairs before men went away to fight.

John pulled off the road on to a piece of grass, a school playing field. Once it had been separated from the street by a high wire-mesh fence but the fence had been flattened and lay in a tangled heap to one side. In the headlights she saw white football goals, a climbing frame. There were dozens of other cars parked in an orderly line, facing the road. John found a space, switched off the music and the engine. In each of the cars were passengers staring at the darkness. Somewhere in the distance a clock struck ten.

‘We were just in time,’ John said. His hands were still clenched tight on the steering-wheel. ‘Now you’ll see.’

But still the street was quiet and she sat, waiting for something to happen.

She heard the engines first, revving up somewhere to the right of them, shattering the silence. Then there was the sound of a horn, loud as a starting gun, and the race had started. Two cars sped past them, bumpers almost touching so close to the audience that Anna could feel the vibration, smell the burnt rubber as they braked to turn the corner. John leaned forward, tense with concentration. It was as if he were competing himself.

‘This is the finishing line,’ he said. ‘They’ll do two complete circuits of the estate and end up here.’

‘Isn’t it dangerous?’ she asked.

‘Of course it’s dangerous!’ he said, not taking his eyes from the road. ‘That’s the point.’

‘How can they afford that sort of car,’ she asked, ‘living here?’ They had passed so quickly that she had not been able to identify the make but could tell they were big, powerful, expensive.

‘Don’t be dumb!’ he said. ‘They’re all stolen. It’s hotting. Haven’t you heard of it?’

Where do you think I got this one? he wanted to say. I chose it specially because it looks respectable, but it’s stolen just the same. I’m an expert. When I put it back tonight they won’t even have missed it. But he said nothing. Perhaps some faint instinct of self-preservation remained.

Before she could answer him the cars flashed past again. This time there was a gap between them and he said, almost to himself: ‘That’s Baz in front. I knew he could do it.’ Then, under his breath: ‘Hang on, man.’

‘You know these people?’

For the first time he looked at her cautiously. ‘Some of them,’ he said. ‘I went to school with some of them.’ Then more aggressively: ‘It doesn’t make them different, you know, living in a place like this.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘ Of course not. I didn’t mean that.’ But as she watched the tail-lights disappear into the darkness she thought that they
were
different. Her conventional upbringing re-asserted itself. ‘They’re breaking the law,’ she said. ‘ They’re criminals.’

‘Abigail Keene and Sam Smollett broke the law,’ he said savagely. ‘We think of them as heroes. It’s all a question of perspective.’

As the race reached its climax she expected the audience to leave their cars, to gather together at the roadside to cheer and shout but they remained where they were, insulated from each other by the vehicles. Still she could sense their tension and excitement. John wound down the window to listen for engine noise.

‘They’ll be changing gear at the Community Centre,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘Up the hill to the Keel Row… Here they come.’

Suddenly the place emptied into noise and light with the blaring of horns and the flashing of headlights to make the end of the race.

‘Who was it?’ she demanded. ‘Was it your friend?’

He looked at her. ‘Do you care?’

‘Of course I care.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘ It was Baz.’

‘What does he win?’ she asked.

‘Win? Nothing. He does it for the honour and the glory.’

She stared at him but found it impossible to tell if he was being serious.

‘Will you go and congratulate him?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not today. I just wanted to be here to see him do it.’

‘Is that it?’ she said. ‘ Will there be another race tonight?’

‘It depends,’ he said, ‘if they get the chance.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That,’ he said suddenly. ‘ That’s what I mean.’

In the distance there was the wailing of a police siren and beyond the houses she saw a flashing blue light.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to get you out of here.’

‘But we’ve done nothing wrong,’ she said. ‘It can’t be illegal to watch them?’

‘Do you think that makes any difference to them?’

All around them the cars were scattering, some driving over the grass towards the school. John switched on the ignition and pushed the gear into place. He drove forward with a jerk, swerving to avoid the battered mesh fence, and down the street away from the flashing blue light. He felt drained and exhausted. Was it worth it? he wondered. For a few minutes of excitement.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’d better take you home.’

‘I won’t say anything,’ she said. ‘About tonight. I won’t tell anyone where we’ve been.’

He shrugged. ‘It’s up to you,’ he said. ‘As you say it’s not illegal to watch.’

‘I’d like to come again,’ she said. ‘If you’re going.’

He looked at her in surprise and realized that he was disappointed. He had been hoping to scare her and she had been excited. She had treated it all as a game.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘But next time I go I’ll be racing.’

From the kitchen Prue could not hear the traffic at the front of the house and she went every so often to the front bedroom to peer down the street to watch for her daughter’s return. She found it hard to account for her unease. It was not that she believed John could be involved with the murders but she was unsettled. She told herself that there was nothing wrong with him. He was bright, from a respectable family. Most mothers would be glad to entrust their daughters to a boy like that. But it did no good and she could not relax. Absentmindedly she cooked and ate an omelette.

She told herself she should be pleased by Anna’s new confidence. Hadn’t she spent the past ten years wishing she would be more assertive? Yet as the evening wore on her anxiety increased and she remained in the front bedroom despite the cold, with the curtains slightly open so she could look down into the street below and watch for headlights coming up the hill.

Because of that she saw the car quite clearly, registered that it was new, a bright red Polo. She was surprised when it slowed down and stopped outside the house. Policemen could not be so badly paid, she thought, if they could afford to let their offspring run around in a thing like that, but she felt no real envy. She was just ridiculously relieved to have her daughter safely home. She shut the curtains quickly before Anna could say she’d been prying. Would she invite him in for coffee? Would they kiss? It was not, she supposed, any of her business. When Anna came into the kitchen immediately afterwards she found her mother apparently engrossed in a book.

‘Did you have a good time?’ Prue asked, stretching as if she had been in the chair for hours.

‘Very good, thank you,’ Anna replied politely and before Prue could express any further interest in her evening she said she was very tired and would go straight to bed.

Hunter sat in Ramsay’s cottage in Heppleburn, looked at his watch, and thought that by the time he got back to Otterbridge the pubs would be closed. He would have liked half an hour in his local to unwind, a couple of pints, a flirt with the barmaid, a quick game of darts.

‘What do you make of it all, then?’ Ramsay asked.

It was one of those open questions again, Hunter thought, which were designed to catch you out or make you look foolish. It was bad enough sitting here after a long day’s work, drinking the boss’s Scotch and pretending they were great chums. What was the man playing at?

Ramsay might have said that he was playing at man management, building a team—he had been sent on all the right courses and knew the jargon—but it was more simple than that. The day had been frantic and he needed time to think, to share his ideas, to test them. Hunter’s scepticism, even his prejudice, made him a useful sounding board. Ramsay could sense his sergeant’s suspicion but could think of no way of putting him at his ease without appearing patronizing, so he repeated: ‘Well, what do you make of it?’

‘I don’t know, sir. Too many bloody complications.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like Gabriella’s bag being found in Amelia Wood’s garden. Like the reservation at the Holly Tree being made in the name of the character Gabby Paston was acting. It’s as if someone’s playing games. I’d like to know what it all means.’

‘I suppose it means,’ Ramsay said, ‘that a certain amount of calculation has gone into the affair. Someone’s trying to cover their tracks. Or send us in the wrong direction. Perhaps there was an attempt to implicate Amelia Wood in the Paston murder by planting Gabby’s bag in her garden.’

‘Why kill her then? She’s not much use as a decoy suspect dead.’

‘No,’ Ramsay said. ‘Quite.’ He stood up and prodded the fire with a poker, letting air under the coal, watching the flame with satisfaction. He had lit the fire when they got in and it was only just starting to release some warmth. The curtains at the back of the house were still open and they could see a thin, hazy moon. A tawny owl called very close to the window and made Hunter start. He was glad he didn’t have to live out here in the sticks.

Ramsay returned to his seat. ‘I know it’s unlikely,’ he said, ‘ but I suppose it’s just possible that Amelia Wood killed the girl.’

‘Then why the second murder?’ Hunter thought it was all in the realms of fantasy. Ramsay was taking the idea of considering all the options to extremes.

‘I don’t know,’ Ramsay said. ‘Revenge?’

‘Hardly. No one cared enough about the girl to bother.’

‘Her family?’

‘Those two old biddies. You must be joking.’

‘I suppose so.’ But the thought of Alma and Ellen disturbed him. He could believe Alma Paston capable of anything. ‘I’d still like to know why Gabriella first left home,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we could make some enquiries on the estate.’

‘We could try.’ Hunter was dubious. ‘But that place is like a tinderbox. It’d only need someone to take offence and you’d have a full-scale riot. They’re not known for their co-operation with the police.’

‘Gabriella was one of them,’ Ramsay said. ‘ They’d surely want her killer found.’

‘Was she one of them? She left, didn’t she? They wouldn’t like that.’

Hunter tried to shuffle his chair closer to the fire.

‘I’ve still not found out who gave her the money to start the savings account,’ Ramsay said. ‘All the payments were made in cash so the building society can’t help. Ellen claims to know nothing about it.’