Someone Else's Son (36 page)

Dennis picked out Samms’ and Driscoll’s files. They’d been in trouble before, of course. Samms for joyriding and Driscoll for, well, pretty much everything except murder. ‘I don’t think it’s either of them.’ He dropped the papers back on the desk. His heart missed a few beats then caught up with itself in a flurry of tiredness and caffeine. ‘God, I feel like shit.’

‘So sure?’

‘We can’t be certain that the youths we’ve got on the CCTV heading to the station were even part of our gang.’

‘Doesn’t mean that these two weren’t involved.’

‘All we’ve got is a stack of statements from some manky school kids. Two of them reckoned they saw Samms and Driscoll hanging about. It’s as good as speculation at the end of the day.’

‘We can’t rule them out. We’ve got nothing else.’

Dennis smiled as sweetly as he could manage. He was past being nice. ‘Get the girl in again. I want her here within the hour.’

‘Are you sure that’s wise?’

‘Nope.’ Dennis drained his mug and headed off for the coffee machine again. ‘But I can tell you one thing. She’s not been telling us the truth.’

‘Oh? Rather certain about everything this morning, aren’t we?’ Jess brought her herbal tea to her lips.

Dennis stopped in the doorway. ‘Forensics confirmed earlier that the blood on the kitchen knife was indeed a match for Max’s. Pathology also reported that the abdominal wounds were consistent with a fifteen-centimetre, unserrated blade. We’ve got our weapon.’

‘There you go then.’

‘There we go what? She was lying. Obviously. She said it was a flick knife.’

Jess shook her head. ‘Would you have been cool headed enough to notice what kind of knife was used? The poor kid watched her boyfriend get stabbed to death.’ Her eyes narrowed.

‘She knows more than she’s letting on. She was there, for God’s sake. Is she protecting someone? Is she afraid to speak out?’

‘Yeah,’ Jess replied. ‘Protecting herself from the likes of us. The poor kid’s traumatised, grieving for her boyfriend, has a shit life at home and is bullied at school. She was born cagey. I’ll get her in again, but we need to be careful.’

‘And
you’re
telling
me
that?’ Dennis grunted and walked off. Remembering a further email report he’d received earlier, he backtracked in time to see Jess giving him the finger. ‘By the way, the wounds were consistent with someone shorter than the victim wielding the knife.’

‘That would fit either Samms or Driscoll. They’re both short-arses.’

‘Max was six feet two. He was taller than most. And it went in underarm. Like someone who didn’t know what they were doing might use a knife.’ Dennis returned the finger to Jess before heading off to the coffee machine.

 

Dayna Ray said
no comment
to every question that Dennis put to her during the hour and a half interview. This time her mother accompanied her daughter to the station, obviously having heard of the free smokes they dished out. She puffed her way through at least ten cigarettes while telling Dayna not to say a word to
them pigs
. The girl left in tears, her mother dragging her by the arm, clutching the packet of remaining cigarettes. When they’d gone, Dennis turned to Jess, both of them sitting in the cloud of residual smoke.

‘Nice lady,’ he said, folding his chin on to his hands. He didn’t think he’d ever be able to sleep again, he was so tired.

‘I thought it was interesting.’ Jess Britton didn’t get a chance to explain why. A young officer poked her head round the door.

‘Message for you, sir.’ She handed Dennis a note from the switchboard, nodded and left.

Dennis read it. He handed it to Jess, who raised her eyebrows and blew out in a half whistle. ‘What do we do?’

‘Let her go to air,’ he said. ‘If anyone can get the girl to talk, it’s Carrie.’

 

‘This proves things were once normal.’ Still feeling flat, calm, unreal, as if she would soon wake up, Carrie sat on the floor with a photograph album resting on her legs.

‘Do you think it’s such a good idea, you know, to be looking at those so soon after . . .’

‘That’s what they’re for.’ Carrie looked up at Leah. ‘I didn’t know it at the time, but when I took these pictures, they were really for the day when it would all be gone. If I’d ever once thought, when I was trying to stop Max crying as a baby, or when I moaned because Brody was late home, or when I was bogged down with work . . . if I’d ever once thought that one day it just wouldn’t be there . . . that, bam, it would disappear just like that . . .’ She exploded her hands in a limp gesture, ‘I . . . I . . .’

Nothing. She couldn’t say any more.

‘Here, take this.’ Leah crouched down with two tablets in her palm and a glass of water. ‘I’m making some food if you’re interested.’

Carrie shook her head. The pills would be enough. She swallowed them and turned the pages of the album. She’d labelled and dated every photograph, arranging the albums in order on the shelf. Brody had mocked her, preferring to keep his pictures in a shoebox under the bed.

‘That’s the difference between us,’ she’d told him once. ‘I like to be in control and you don’t.’ She’d always thought it odd that for a mathematician, Brody thrived on disorder.

‘But there’s nothing more chaotic than the science of maths. Come to one of my classes,’ he’d argued a few months before they married. ‘You’ll be stunned.’

Carrie had slipped in at the back of the lecture theatre and prepared to learn about ‘The Beauty of Mathematics’. She didn’t understand a word of what her future husband was telling the thirty-eight bleary-eyed undergraduates during freshers’ week, but she knew that he had convinced them all – all except one – that elegance and perfection were abundant within their chosen field.

‘But is there any beauty in error?’ the girl asked. She stood nervously, but Brody waved her to sit down again. Carrie liked the casual way he interacted with his students.

‘Ah,’ he said, flapping his arms in appreciation. ‘A true mathematician in our midst.’ Carrie noticed the girl blush as the other students stared at her. ‘Our mistakes, Miss . . .’

‘Caldwell,’ she replied.

‘Our mistakes, Miss Caldwell, are the most beautiful part of mathematics. It is only by making them that we are able, finally, to see the absolute elegance of the truth.’

The girl nodded slowly although a frown formed as she thought. ‘So what if there weren’t ever any errors?’ She chewed her pencil. Carrie thought how young she looked.

‘Then, Miss Caldwell, may you ever remain blind to the most dazzling, breathtaking experiences you are ever likely to discover during your time as a human being.’

‘You know,’ Carrie said to Leah, not realising that she’d been back to the kitchen and brought in a tray of soup and rolls. A glass of water quivered as she placed it on the footstool. ‘A short while before he went blind, he went round measuring everything.’

‘Brody did?’

Carrie nodded. ‘I had no idea why at the time. He used precise instruments, mapping every millimetre of our house and garden, from the distance between chairs to the height of a light switch from the floor to the size of the holes in the colander. When he’d finished doing that, he went outside and did the same thing. He was obsessive, Leah. Only when he was satisfied that he’d got it all mapped out did his sight finally fail him.’

‘Oh my God,’ Leah said. ‘That’s weird.’

‘Then, finally, when he couldn’t see a single thing, he got a team of removals men in to rearrange the entire house.’ Carrie eyed the soup and felt sick. ‘He said there was beauty in error. That he wanted to discover as much of it as he could by making hundreds of mistakes every single day.’

‘That’s scary, Carrie.’ Leah sat beside her. She picked up the bowl of soup. ‘You should eat.’

‘I wonder if he sees the beauty in
this
?’ Carrie began to tremble as the tablets hit her empty stomach. ‘It’s his fault,’ she whispered. Her teeth clenched together. ‘He was too stupid to notice what was going on under his nose.’

‘Carrie . . .’

‘He said he
knew
, Leah.’ Carrie stood but her legs buckled and she found herself dropping on to the sofa. ‘Brody told me that he knew Max was being bullied but he didn’t do anything about it.’ Her voice was quiet yet piercing, each syllable laying blame on her ex-husband. It had to go somewhere. ‘Max spent a lot of time with Brody in that shithole he calls a home.’ She attempted to stand again. Her voice was an echo of her mounting anger. ‘No wonder the poor boy fell in with the wrong crowd. What was Brody thinking, allowing him around there? It’s his choice if he wants to live like that but he shouldn’t have forced our son to be a part of it.’

‘Carrie, calm down . . .’

Her hand suddenly came up beneath the bowl and sent an arc of tomato soup across the room. Leah gasped and reached out to pull Carrie into an embrace but she was shoved away.

‘It’s his fault,’ she screamed. ‘Brody killed our son!’ She stood and charged from the room. She had to see him, to make him see what he’d done. ‘Let’s see how beautiful he thinks his mistakes are now.’ She grabbed her car keys and pulled on her boots. She opened the front door and was faced with a thousand bright lights flashing before her. She raised a hand to her brow and squinted. They’d finally found out where she lived.

‘Oh hell,’ she heard Leah say behind her before she heard the barking questions.

‘
Is it true your son was in a gang, Miss Kent?
’

‘
Is it true he was expelled from boarding school?
’

‘
Was the stabbing because of a grudge against you?
’

‘
How do you feel now that you’ve been hit by the very issues you’ve made your fortune from?
’

But before Carrie could reply, before any coherent words could form in reply, she dissolved into a puddle on the doorstep.

Dayna’s insides were on fire. She wanted to sleep with Max. She’d never done it before. She wondered if he had.

‘Most of them were appalling.’ Mr Lockhart walked up and down the classroom chucking essays back on their desks. ‘Of those that actually bothered to do any work, that is.’ He hovered beside Dayna’s desk. Again, her stomach swam as he leafed through the tatty pages to reach hers. He pulled it out of the small stack. ‘This is your coursework, you bunch of losers. If any of you want to make anything of yourselves, in other words get a job somewhere other than the local burger bar, then you have to start working. That means writing something like this.’ Mr Lockhart held up Dayna’s essay before fluttering it on to her desk.

‘Thank you, sir,’ she said quietly. She felt her cheeks heat up as all eyes turned on her. There were a few of the expected comments about how she was a loser, how she must be fucking the teacher, how she’d stolen the essay off the internet. In all honesty, Dayna knew it wasn’t that good. Her spelling was bad – she’d only learnt to read and write when she was nine – and her understanding of the play was patchy. But she was determined to get her final piece of coursework in by the deadline. She only wanted to get a couple of GCSEs, just enough to get on a course at college; something to take her away.

‘Sad, isn’t it?’

Dayna looked up. ‘What?’ Mr Lockhart hadn’t finished with her yet.

‘About those kids. You know, all that killing, all that feuding between their families.’ He pulled a face and walked to the front of the classroom.

‘Er, yeah.’ Something hit her on the back of the head. She felt her hair. Chewing gum was stuck fast beneath the clip she had wedged in that morning. She left it there, knowing it would probably have to be cut out in the loos later.

‘How does that relate to issues today? Anyone?’ Mr Lockhart boomed. No one answered. ‘Your next assignment then, if anyone can be bothered, is to discuss the differences between the relationships teenagers have today and the problems faced by Romeo and Juliet. Clear?’ Again, no one spoke. Dayna would have loved to ask questions but she wasn’t going to risk a bashing.

After she left class, she caught up with Max. ‘What did you get?’ she asked.

‘D,’ Max said. He didn’t look at her. Instead, he trudged along with the crowds emerging from all the doors into the soulless corridor that led to the canteen.

‘Me too,’ she replied even though she’d got an A. ‘Did you bring any food?’

‘Nah. I was at my dad’s last night. We ate Pot Noodles.’

‘Wanna get chips?’

‘Not hungry. See ya.’ Max shoved his hands in his pockets and kicked up his pace, knocking into an older boy who lashed out and thumped him on the shoulder.

‘Hey, wait. What’s up?’ Dayna was panting as she matched Max’s pace. He’d left the building and stormed out into the freezing air. It took her breath away. ‘Why are you angry at me?’

Max spun round. ‘Don’t you know? Can’t you see?’

Dayna thought he looked beautiful, even though tears collected in his large dark eyes. She thought she saw the whole world and all its secrets reflected in them.

‘No.’ She caught his arm but he yanked it away. A bunch of kids flowed past, knocking into them and shoving them with their packs. One snarled something about sticking it up her.

‘That’s just it, isn’t it?’ Max said, staggering to catch his footing.

‘Just what?’ Dayna was close to tears herself now. After everything they’d shared the last few months, after the time they’d spent chatting and smoking and doing competitions instead of going to science, after all the hours they’d sat by the stream eating and throwing stones at the junk, after the afternoons they’d wandered round the shopping precinct buying sweets and feeling sick from stuffing their faces, she didn’t think he had any reason to be like this with her. And they’d kissed.

‘Just that we’re never going to get to, you know, do it, are we?’

The fire swelled inside her again. He never talked about stuff like this even though she was desperate for them to get closer. Maybe the problem was her.