Lost River

28

Strain, line, breeding, blood. It was strange how those words could sound like a curse. Fry trembled with unreleased emotion as she made her way back to her car.

There had been little left to say to William Leeson once she’d realized the truth. Oh, there were plenty of questions she could have asked him. But there were no answers he could have given her that she would have believed. This was the man she and Angie had been taken away from as children, the man who had abused her sister. His name was the one missing from her birth certificate, the reason she carried her mother’s surname. And this was the same man who was now setting about wrecking her life in some way that she didn’t even understand.

‘I thought I’d better tell you all this, Diane,’ he’d said. ‘It’s time to be honest about things.’

‘You’re telling me because you know the truth is going to come out anyway. That’s not a conscience you’ve suddenly developed — it’s a defence mechanism. It’s the response of a cornered animal.’

‘Everything you’ve ever done is wrong. You never had any concern for other people.’

‘So you’re moralizing now? Spare me. I know lots of ways to kill you. It would just be a question of whether to make it quick…or whether I want you to suffer.’

He smiled, a slightly nervous smile. He was trying to show that he knew she was joking, while deep down he wasn’t quite sure if she was serious.

‘You don’t understand a thing,’ he said.

‘I wish people would stop telling me that.’

There was only one feeling that Fry was left with as she climbed back into her car and drove away from Leeson’s house. Hatred. It was the most corrosive of emotions. If it found no outlet, hatred would eat you up, bit by bit. It could drip acid into your heart and gnaw your brain to useless wreckage, like a self-inflicted cancer. Hatred would kill you in the end. Now and then, it killed someone else along the way.

Within a couple of miles, she began thinking of some of the things Leeson had said to her during the time in his house.

‘You know what they say, Diane. Blood is thicker than water. You might not believe it right at this moment. But you’ll learn the truth soon enough.’

And there had been something else.

‘Everyone thinks what they want to think. That’s the reason we so often put our trust in the wrong people.’

She called Angie, who had taken the case file away from her hotel room for safety.

‘Can you bring the file and meet me? I’ll be back in the city in half an hour.’

‘Yes, no problem.’

Diane swept into the hotel lobby in a hurry. Angie jumped up from a chair, sensing her urgency. She had the file clutched under her arm.

‘Di, what’s going on?’ she said.

‘Are the PNC print-outs there that Ben brought?’

‘Yes.’

‘Read the details of Darren Barnes to me again.’

Angie began to read hesitantly.

Darren Joseph Barnes, also known as ‘Doors’. She went though his address, date of birth, and ethnicity codes, and got to his conviction record.

‘Stop. Go back.’

‘To which bit?’

‘The ethnicity codes,’ said Diane.

‘Really?’

‘Yes, go back and read them again.’

‘This is for Darren Barnes. Ethnicity Code. PNC: IC1. Sixteen point self-determined system: Ml. That’s mixed race, White and Black Caribbean.’

‘I knew that,’ said Fry. ‘Damn it, I knew that. And Marcus Shepherd? Is he the same category?’

‘Ethnicity Code. PNC: IC3.’

‘So he’s black?’

‘No, wait. Under the self-determined system, he’s m1 too. They’re both classified as mixed race, Diane.’

‘They class themselves as mixed race. Although, to the arresting officer, one looks white, and one looks black.’

‘I guess we’re talking shades of colour here.’

‘Shades of colour, right.’ Diane jumped up. ‘Oh, Christ. I don’t believe it.’

‘What?’

‘The m1 Crew.’

‘What about them? Where are you going?’ But Diane was already on her way out of the door, not even looking back to see if her sister was following.

‘Diane, where are you — ’

Tower blocks looked even worse in the day time. At night, they had a certain mystery, a brooding presence, the curtained windows of their flats forming a pattern of light against the sky. Now, in the daylight, the Chamberlain Tower looked grubby and forlorn, the cracked concrete and graffiti’d walkways oozing despair, all its flaws exposed by the sun.

Vincent Bowskill was alone this afternoon. He was unshaven and bleary eyed, as if he wasn’t long awake. His flat smelled like a derelict laundry, full of unwashed clothes. But underneath it was that sweet, faint chemical odour of recently smoked crack.

‘Diane,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’

‘I need to talk.’

‘I did what you asked me to. There was no need to send Angie round. She’s mad, that one. Dangerous, you know? I don’t want her coming to mine again. Keep her away. I could get in deep shit here, you understand. Some of these guys don’t mess around.’

‘Vince, shut up.’

He ran his fingers nervously across his mouth as he looked at her face.

‘What? What?’

‘The m1 Crew.’

‘What about them?’

‘The name is nothing to do with motorways or rappers, is it? It refers to the sixteen-point ethnicity code, the self-determined system. It’s what you describe yourself as when you’re stopped by the police. You say you’re mixed race, White and Black Caribbean. They put you down on their stop-and-search forms as Ml.’

‘Everybody knows that.’

‘You hate being put into a category by the system. So you decided to categorize yourselves. I understand that, I really do. It’s a way of taking back control, asserting your own identity. Everyone needs an identity. You have to belong to a group, a family, a tribe. Or a gang.’

‘So?’

‘You wanted to get into the m1 Crew, didn’t you? You badly needed to be part of the gang, to feel you belong. But they weren’t really like you at all. Were they, Vince? They thought you were much too soft, a kid with no street cred. You couldn’t get their respect. So you made them a gift. Was that the deal you made?’

Fry recalled Andy Kewley’s words. This wasn’t one of the primary suspects, but he knew who was involved all right, and he helped to cover up. A real piece of work. He was as guilty as anyone I ever met.

Vince shook his head. ‘It wasn’t me. You didn’t see me there.’

‘But you were there that night.’

‘You don’t understand anything.’

‘I understand you, Vince.’

‘No way. You can’t ever understand. You’re a copper.’ He stopped and stared at her, as if suddenly scared by her expression.

And so he should be. A vivid memory had come to her now. No confused images or blurred impressions any more. She almost had it last time, stood here in this flat, but she’d been distracted by the crack pipe, the blonde girlfriend. She remembered that shudder when she heard him say, ‘She’s a copper.’ It wasn’t just the accent. The voice was the same. A familiar voice, coarse and slurring. Of course it was familiar. She’d lived in the same house with him for years.

‘Vince,’ she said, ‘I didn’t see you. But I heard you.’

Fry sat for some time in her car, staring blindly at the traffic on Birchfield Road, streams of motorists hurtling past Checkpoint Charlie, oblivious to the fact that they were crossing the borderland in the deadly turf war between Birmingham’s street gangs.

She couldn’t have said how long she sat there before she finally turned on the engine, wound down the windows, and swung out on to the underpass, heading for Perry Barr.

Jim Bowskill answered the door in his slippers, with his sleeves rolled up to expose white forearms. He looked as though he’d been cleaning, or doing the washing up. The impression of domestic banality turned her heart over.

‘Your mum’s not here,’ he said. ‘She’s a doing a bit of shopping.’

‘Good. It’s perhaps better this way.’

‘You should have let us know you were coming, love. I’ll put the kettle on. Alice won’t be more than half an hour or so. She popped across to the One-Stop. She said we needed some fresh meat. I don’t know why, when we’ve got plenty of stuff in the freezer. Would you like tea, or coffee?’

‘No, Dad. Don’t bother.’

Why did people talk so much when there was nothing to say? Fry wondered if they felt they had to fill the silence with noise to prevent reality from leaking into their minds, as if the truth was hiding in the pauses.

‘Can we sit down for a minute? There’s something I want to tell you.’

‘Of course, love. But are you sure you don’t want — ’

‘No, Dad. Sit down.’

They sat opposite each other, Jim in his usual armchair, but perched anxiously on the edge of the seat, Fry on the settee like a visitor.

‘We’ve never really talked about this before,’ she said. ‘I mean, the night of the assault.’

Even now, she felt reluctant use the word ‘rape’ when speaking to Jim Bowskill. It was as if she had to protect him from the harsh world out there, the one he didn’t seem to see passing his window.

‘We’re always here if you want to talk,’ he said. ‘Your Mum would love — ’

‘I know,’ said Fry. ‘I know that, Dad. Thanks, really. But there’s something…a bit of information that I’ve only just realized myself. It affects you personally, Dad. You have to know about it.’

He gazed at her steadily, a look of concern crossing his face. Or was it an expression of fear? Fry hesitated now. Was she about to turn Jim’s world upside down?

‘Go on, love,’ he said.

‘It’s about Vincent. He was one of the group that night. In Digbeth, you know. He was part of the gang involved in the assault.’

Jim Bowskill didn’t say anything, but lowered his head and looked at his hands. They lay in his lap, strong hands but with slightly swollen knuckles, a result of his years spent working at the engineering factory. He was grasping his fingers together, and Fry saw that he was trying to stop them from shaking.

‘Dad? Are you all right? I didn’t think you would be so upset about Vince. You must have known what sort of company he’d got into.’

He shook his head, and Fry was shocked to see a tear break free from his cheek and plop on to the back of his hand.

‘Diane, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We’re both really sorry. We didn’t know what else we could do.’

He spoke in a very small voice, as if it was painful for him to get out the words. At first, Fry didn’t understand. She wanted to go over to his chair and comfort him for his distress, but something was holding her back. Somehow, she knew that his words were more than just an expression of sympathy. That had all been said before, years ago. This was something more, something much bigger. These were words that would change everything. Jim Bowskill was apologizing.

‘Dad?’ she said. And then she asked the toughest question of all. ‘You knew?’

‘Yes, Diane,’ he said. ‘We knew.’