The Unquiet Dead (31 page)

‘I made the man up,’ he finally blurted out.

‘I know,’ said Jessie calmly.

‘You know!’

‘There was no dealer, no one pushing drugs on you innocent young boys. You were all in it up to your necks. That’s why the teachers couldn’t control you that day: you and Jonny, Michael, Tony and Vincent were all off your heads on speed.’

‘You’ve put me through hell this week.’

‘No, Mr Boateng, you did that to yourself by
taking drugs on the eve of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.’

He bowed his head. ‘You’re right. I was a fucking idiot. We both were,’ said Peter Boateng. ‘I had a full scholarship – not like Jonny, he was only awarded half a scholarship – a real chance and I so nearly blew it. Those teachers should have been pleased Jonny and I had got into the private school, but you could see the envy in their eyes. They would have stopped either of us going, given half a chance. The black kid and the spic – seems we didn’t deserve saving. They’d been watching our every move for weeks. We’d been scrutinised, picked on, shown up wherever possible … I had to do it. I had to pass the blame or lose my chance.’

‘If you’d been under that amount of scrutiny, why risk it by taking drugs?’

‘Maybe that was why, because we’d been put under so much extra pressure. I don’t know, Detective. We were being idiots. Maybe Jonny knew he was never going to get to that school, maybe secretly he wanted us to get caught.’

‘Why?’

‘Half a scholarship isn’t very useful to a boy who can’t afford the other half.’

‘I see that,’ said Jessie. No one likes to be left behind.

‘I didn’t know what I was risking. It’s only with hindsight that I can see those six months were the most crucial of my life. Had I fucked up then, I wouldn’t be here now.’

‘But you did fuck up, Mr Boateng,’ said Jessie. ‘That seventeen-year-old boy may still have jeopardised everything.’

He shuddered as the door to the restaurant opened and another blast of cold air hit them. Jessie turned involuntarily. The door clicked shut. The figure of a man walked quickly away. Something about his hurried stride caused Jessie to frown. The unfamiliar dining companions sat in silence for a while. From the outside it may have looked like a comfortable stillness, but there was nothing comfortable about coming face to face with your own demons. Jessie read the blackboard with one eye, observing the young lawyer with the other. He must have been imagining this moment since the day he was called to the bar.

‘So who was he, the man you described?’

Even unravelling, there was nothing sloppy about Peter Boateng’s attire. When he shrugged, his sharp suit moved with him. ‘I’d seen this creepy bloke around the place. I found myself describing him before I’d even realised that was what I was doing.’

‘So you left out the one defining trait that would identify him?’

‘Yes. I left out the limp.’

‘Was he there often?’ asked Jessie.

‘Every Tuesday. Sometimes he’d sit and watch us – which is pretty odd in itself, right?’ Jessie wasn’t going to demonise Malcolm Hoare so readily. ‘No one talked about that sort of thing –
you didn’t in those days – but I suppose my description ignited something in the kids’ imaginations. The next thing I knew, everyone had seen him. Everyone knew the scary drug dealer with the black ponytail; he’d approached us all, one by one, with his terrible wares.’

‘And yet no one mentioned the limp.’

‘Well, it wasn’t really him we were talking about. You know what it’s like when a drama unfolds: people want to be involved in it, they want to have played their part. That’s what happened. I knew they were all making it up, they probably knew they were making it up, but there was credence in numbers – and you should have heard the conviction in their voices. It was just like
The Crucible
. Everyone pointed their finger at the evil drug dealer. I don’t even know when he got a name.’

‘So the man with the limp wasn’t called Ian?’

The lawyer looked at her. ‘I don’t know what his name was, but I very much doubt it was Ian, and I’ve no idea who added the surname Doyle. You have to understand, everyone was in on it. Subconsciously, we all fed the conspiracy.’

‘That may make you feel better, but it started with you.’

‘I don’t feel better. I certainly don’t expect to justify to you what I cannot justify to myself; I’m simply telling you what happened. I promised myself that if the man with the limp was ever found, I’d come clean. But he never was.’

‘Fortunately for you.’

‘I followed the story, all this time, through every stage of Romano’s mad search. He disappeared, he was never found.’

‘Someone found him. Someone tied him up in chains, threw him into an open pit and let him slowly drown in rising sewage on the day of Jonny’s death or sometime soon afterwards.’

Peter Boateng remained steadfast. ‘If you say so. But it had nothing to do with Jonny’s death. Deep down, everyone knew the evil drug dealer didn’t exist. Why would they kill a man that didn’t exist?’

He poured them both another glass of red wine. Jessie needed to order before she drank too much on an empty stomach. She chose snails, followed by roast lamb and flageolet beans. She believed Boateng was a kid who’d told a lie and the lie ran away with itself. Even so, it was possible that the mob had wound themselves up into such a frenzy that when they saw the man who resembled Peter Boateng’s description, they turned on him with enough ferocity to kill him. Maybe he pleaded his innocence, tried to tell the mob who he really was, but they were beyond reason. Maybe, after everything he had done, what Malcolm Hoare received in the basement of Marshall Street Baths – if it was Malcolm Hoare – was not revenge or retribution but poetic justice.

‘I can see you don’t agree with me, but I’ve spent a lot of time trying to rationalise what happened that day and the days that followed. The reason why the idea of “Ian” took hold was because his
very presence made us all feel less guilty. Jonny’s friends, his teachers, the pool staff, the lifeguard, his parents – everyone got away with the small part they played in Jonny’s death. Even Jonny himself. They didn’t go looking for him, Detective. They just wanted someone to blame. If they’d found him, he would have been able to defend himself, prove his innocence – no one wanted that.’

‘When the mob rules, anything can happen. Remember the
News of the World’s
“Name and Shame” campaign? An innocent man was hounded out of his home. It happens. Sometimes it gets out of hand.’

He drowned. It was an accident
.

Peter didn’t say anything. Jessie’s food arrived. She prised out each rubbery snail, dipped it in the melted garlic butter, and put it in her mouth.

‘I’ve always wondered,’ said Peter Boateng, ‘who the man with the limp was.’

‘I can’t tell you,’ said Jessie chewing.

‘Can’t, or won’t?’ he asked.

Jessie didn’t reply.

‘There was something about him that just gave me the creeps. He had the look of the hunted.’ The lawyer shook his head. ‘The haunted.’

Jessie had seen those hollow eyes stare back at her from a mug shot. Empty eyes, with no guile or guilt or look of remorse. Soulless eyes that would sneer at forgiveness.

‘Sometimes,’ Peter continued, ‘when work is really stressful, I have dreams about him – well,
not him, but those hollow eyes.’ From nowhere, tears filled his own eyes. He wiped them away. ‘It’s really smoky in here,’ he said.

‘Never underestimate the power of your conscience.’

‘You’ve got to believe me, he wasn’t killed because of what I said.’

‘Let’s hope not, Mr Boateng, or that brass plaque may soon be spelling another name.’

He folded his arms defensively in front of his chest and tried to sound more in control, less frightened. ‘What do you think is going to happen?’

‘You tell me,’ said Jessie. ‘You’re the lawyer.’

He had no answer to give her, and she had nothing more to give him. He put some money down on the table and stood nervously. ‘You will let me know,’ he said, ‘when you do identify him?’

‘Why? Would you sleep easier?’

Jessie knew she had touched a nerve, because Peter’s skin took on a chalky appearance. Whatever part the younger Peter Boateng had played, he hadn’t played it intentionally.

‘I don’t know for sure,’ she said, suddenly wanting to ease his misery, ‘but I believe his name was Malcolm Hoare.’

Peter Boateng landed back on the wooden chair heavily.

‘He was a thief,’ she said, trying to reassure him, to quell the look of panic on his face. ‘But then he upped the ante and kid—’

‘—napped a young girl called Nancy
Scott-Somers on February 23rd, 1976 from Farm Street in May fair.’

Jessie stared at him. Peter stared back.

‘How do you know that?’ she whispered.

‘It can’t be Malcolm Hoare – you’ve got it wrong. He was big and blond and … he was big and –’

‘How the hell do you know about Malcolm Hoare?’ demanded Jessie.

‘Edmonds, my mentor – you’ve seen his name on the plaque – it was his case, his first fucking case. I spent my articles studying the fucking thing. It can’t be
that
Malcolm Hoare.’

They walked through the empty London streets together, aimlessly, like a couple on a romantic walk. But their walk was not aimless. And their object was not romance. Jessie had every intention of extracting as much information as she could out of the man before someone told him to keep his mouth shut.

‘So tell me, what happened when Nancy took the stand?’

‘She had identified Malcolm Hoare, so had the nanny. Edmonds had no choice but to go for the jugular.’

‘She was ten.’

‘Eleven, by the time it came to trial.’

Jessie was rapidly rethinking the concept of conscience.

‘We have a duty to defend our clients to the best
of our ability,’ said Boateng. ‘Edmonds is one able defence lawyer.’

She’d heard it all before, and it still disgusted her. ‘If you can afford it.’

‘It was the prosecution who handed what should have been an open-and-shut case to Edmonds. They produced the missing nanny, all weepy and nervous. After the little girl was taken the nanny ran off because she felt so guilty and was, understandably, scared of the Scott-Somers. It may be true that Edmonds was rough on the girl, but he had to discredit her identification of Hoare. She’d been snatched from behind, covered in a cloth bag, and always kept in the dark, down a narrow, empty well. How could she have got a proper look at him?’

‘And no one thought she’d been put through enough?’ Jessie was beginning to realise why the case had made the young Emma Cook turn to Child Protection for a career, and why Paul Cook died an uneasy man.

‘It was a different era,’ he claimed defensively. ‘Anyway, Nancy couldn’t take it. She started to have trouble breathing, so the judge let her out for a few moments to calm down.’

And he should have been disrobed too, thought Jessie angrily.

‘Somehow, Nancy and the nanny ended up in the same antechamber. The stupid French girl started blabbering about how sorry she was, that it was all her fault, that she’d made it all up.
Everyone heard the commotion. “Made what up?” asked Edmonds, naturally. The question didn’t require an answer. Edmonds argued successfully that the case had been compromised, that the two central witnesses had been caught colluding –’

‘She was a ten-year-old girl!’

‘– and the case should be dismissed. The prosecution was weak, they let Malcolm Hoare walk.’

‘Why wasn’t there a retrial?’

‘I don’t know. It was before the CPS existed, so it was up to the police to decide what went to trial. Perhaps someone in the Force decided that the girl had been through enough.’

Paul Cook, probably. Which meant no closure for the Scott-Somers. They were failed by the police and the justice system and were left having to explain the inexplicable to an already traumatised little girl.

‘What a mess,’ said Jessie.

‘It was all the nanny’s fault. She blew it. She should never have approached Nancy like that.’

Jessie and Peter Boateng walked as far as her flat. The lights were off; Bill was out again. She felt bad about how little she’d seen her brother in the last few days. Police work was like that. There was never a convenient time for murder, revenge, betrayal, suicide, abduction. Maybe Jones was right. Maybe this was only a half-life. She spent all her time with one foot over the threshold of life and death.

Tired and feeling depressed, she opened the door. It seemed only fair to let the barrister wait for his taxi inside. She didn’t notice the noise of a motorbike backfiring as the front door closed, she didn’t notice the handbag in the hallway, and she didn’t have the energy to go through the package that Burrows had left for her in the sitting room. After what seemed like an age of small talk, the taxi arrived and Peter Boateng stepped back into the stairwell.

‘Of course, if it is Malcolm Hoare, then it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with me.’

‘Whoever Malcolm Hoare had been, he wasn’t that person any longer. Malcolm Hoare disappeared the day he walked out of court. Thirteen years later, and changed beyond all recognition, he winds up dead in the basement of a swimming pool. Either someone found him and, thinking he was your evil drug dealer and child-killer, sought retribution.
Or
, someone found him, thought he was your evil drug dealer and child-killer, forced him to reveal the person he
really
was and sought retribution for the kidnap of Nancy Scott-Somers. I don’t have an exact time of death; all I have is a watch that stopped on a certain day. A day that meant a lot to whoever killed him. Mr and Mrs Romano, possibly – it was the day their son drowned. Or the Scott-Somers: it was the day all their lives were ruined. Two very different families, I agree, but both hang off your pointed finger. Sorry, Mr Boateng, I don’t think you should look
forward to a good night’s sleep for a little while yet.’