Savage Moon

Thirty-Four

They started going through the front room, pulling out drawers, leafing through papers, searching for any clues as to what James Field might be planning next.

Rick went over to the answer phone and pressed play. Three messages from the owner of the garage asking where he was. They'd moved to his bedroom when Jon heard Rick announce,

'This is weird.'

Jon paused at the open wardrobe and glanced over his shoulder. Rick was on his knees, bent almost double so he could see under the bed. 'What is?'

'There's nothing of a personal nature. I was expecting some porn hidden in here at the very least. Would you have any meaningful idea of who lived in this flat if we didn't know already?'

Jon bowed his head in thought. Rick was right. The flat was missing the usual items that made it someone's home; photos of friends and family, phone numbers on scraps of paper, even documents such as phone bills, bank letters or nectar card statements. James Field had left as much trail as a ghost.

He turned the wardrobe inside out. Old trainers, battered jeans, a hooded top. The bathroom bore even less fruit. No bottles or pills bearing a GP's label or a pharmacy's price sticker. Jon slammed the cabinet shut. 'There has to be something in this place.'

They pulled up carpets, tapped for fake floorboards. Nothing.

'Right,' said Jon. 'The bastard thinks he's clever. Let's check outside.'

They went to the walled off area containing the residents' bins. Green containers were lined against the wall, each one bearing the number of a flat. Jon zoned straight in on number three, flipping it over and dragging out a single bag of rubbish. He ripped it open, spilling potato peelings, blackened bananas and several empty pots of yoghurt, green mould ringing their rims. 'Let's check the rest.'

They started tipping over the others and hauled out rubbish sacks, the sweet smell of putrescence filling the air. Scrunched up letters, pizza boxes, clumps of hair, empty wine bottles, used tampons, plastic containers, lumps of festering chicken, crumpled tins and cans.

'No wonder the country's landfill sites are overflowing. Have this lot heard of recycling?' Rick muttered, crouched before a knotted bin liner. He pulled the plastic apart and his hands stopped. 'Jon.'

Jon turned. A shoebox was at the top, its lid slightly off. 'Lift it out, carefully.'

Using the tips of his gloved fingers, Rick lifted the object clear of the debris surrounding it. The layer of grey dust covering the lid had finger marks in it. Rick flipped it off and they stared at the pile of letters inside. The address on the uppermost envelope read, James Field, Flat 3, Oakdene Flats, Thomas Street, Ryder Brow, Manchester.

'Gotcha,' Jon grinned.

Back in James' flat, they started laying the letters out on the living room floor. Most of the envelopes were written in a childish style. 'Danny Gordon's writing,' Jon said. The remainder of the envelopes were written in a neater hand. At the bottom of the shoebox was an envelope with Kenyan stamps on it. No letter was inside, just the stubs of two plane tickets. 'He flew to Nairobi on the fifth of March, two thousand and one, returning on the twenty-sixth.'

Rick had slid a letter out from one of the envelopes bearing the childish writing. 'You're right, it's sent from Strangeways. Jesus, Danny Gordon couldn't have been awake in many of his school classes, the spelling is atrocious.'

'What does it say?' Jon asked, picking up a letter with the neat handwriting.

'Just going on about being bored. Slagging off his padmate, talking about what they'll get up to when he gets out.'

Jon unfolded his letter, a frown slowly appearing on his face.

'It's from a Pat and Ian Field.'

'His parents?'

Jon read the letter in its entirety. 'They adopted him.' He turned the letter over, glanced at the date at the top. 'This was written after James returned from Nairobi. They're asking his forgiveness for what happened, saying it wasn't their decision about his name. They tried to do what was right and they still love him as their son.' He looked at Rick. 'Are you thinking what I'm thinking?'

Rick looked at the note James had left for Jon. 'The one more place he has to visit. Surely not?'

'I don't know. I hope not, but… Christ, they obviously infuriated him.'

'Is there an address or phone number?'

'Both. They're asking him to at least call them. I've got a really bad feeling about this.' He took his phone out and entered the number.

A woman answered. 'Yes?'

'Pat Field?'

'Yes, who is this speaking?'

'My name is DI Spicer. I work for Greater Manchester Police.'

'Oh.'

'Mrs Field, is your husband there?'

'Yes.'

'With you in the house?'

'He's out raking leaves off the lawn.'

'Is anyone else with you?'

'No. Detective, your tone of voice. Is this bad news?'

Bad news? You could say that. 'I don't mean to alarm you, but can you get your husband inside the house and then lock the doors?' He paused, wondering whether he should say any more. You've no choice, he thought. He could be in their garden right now. 'Do not allow anyone inside, unless they're a police officer. I'll send a patrol car round and I'll be there soon.'

'What is this about?'

'Mrs Field, this concerns James. Do not let him in, do you understand?'

'James.' There was a note of resignation in her voice. 'What's he done?'

'There isn't any time. Just get your husband inside, we'll be there soon.'

He hung up, eyes still on the letter. 'Bollington. That's about forty-five minutes away.'

They were on their way out when the support car arrived.

'Seal the flat,' Jon barked, handing the letter to the officer in front. 'And contact the police station nearest to this address. Get them to send a patrol car round, it's where James Field might be heading. Tell Summerby we're on our way there.'

They passed the Welcome to Bollington sign forty minutes later. The sky resembled an old sheet, dull white as far as the eye could see, bare twigs on the trees outlined sharply against it.

The narrow high street ran on and on, leading them past several pubs. At an aqueduct a lane led off to the left. 'That's it, Owen's Lane,' Rick said, an A to Z open on his lap.

Jon took the turn and the car bumped over rough cobbles. Waterview was the fourth cottage they reached, ivy creeping over stone walls. A patrol car was already outside, a uniformed officer leaning against it.

'Thank God there are no ambulances,' Jon said.

They parked behind the vehicle and jumped out. 'DI Spicer and DS Saville. Your colleagues are inside?'

'Yes, Sir,' the officer replied. From his expression, Jon could see he was dying to know what this was all about. 'Keep in your vehicle and lock the doors. Maintain contact via your radio.'

The young man began to smile.

Rick stepped forward. 'The guy we're after? He's a total fucking head case.'

The officer's expression dropped like a stone when he saw they were serious. Quickly he clambered inside.

Jon and Rick strode up the short path and knocked on the wooden door. Movement behind the frosted glass and the door opened. 'Don't do that again,' Jon said to the officer, voice low.

'You ask the person to identify himself first, understand?' The man nodded. 'Sorry, Sir.'

Jon and Rick stepped into a low hallway lined with watercolours of the local area. Lyme Park, Kinder Scout, Fernilee Reservoir.

'They're in the front room, Sir.' The officer pointed to the left.

Jon was surprised to see that the couple were both white. He was completely bald, she had grey hair tied back in a bun. He guessed they were in their late fifties. They were sitting side by side on a floral patterned sofa, their hands clasped together. Mrs Field wore slippers and the husband an old pair of mud-caked shoes. Bits were on the cream carpet. 'Mr and Mrs Field, I'm DI Spicer. Sorry for all the commotion.' He looked at the wife. 'We spoke just earlier?'

'Yes,' she replied nervously. 'What happened?'

Jon took a seat opposite them. Where do I start, he wondered, extracting his notebook to give him a few seconds. 'It's about James. Your adopted son?'

They both nodded in perfect unison, the action of lifelong partners.

'Why all this?' The husband's voice was deep. He waved a hand at the mullioned window and the patrol car outside.

'I'm afraid it appears James is involved in a couple of incidents that have involved the use of violence.'

He watched as they turned to each other. Tears had sprung up in Mrs Field's eyes and her fingers tightened on her husband's.

'Oh Ian.'

Mr Field put an arm round her shoulders and cleared his throat. He looked at the wall to his side. 'We were afraid something like this would happen.'

Jon followed the direction of his sad gaze. The framed photo above the fireplace was of a young boy running through a carpet of bluebells. The shattered hopes of proud parents.

'Was it robbery?' Mrs Field asked.

Jon didn't reply. How can I tell them? It wasn't possible. Instead he dipped his head as if in agreement, unable to actually say yes.

'Armed?' Mr Field asked.

Oh shit, thought Jon. Now I'm getting dragged in deeper. He dipped his head once again. 'Could you tell me about James? We need to know as much about him as possible.'

The couple's eyes met once again and he could see Mr Field was waiting for his wife's assent. Jon was suddenly aware of a clock ticking in the room. Finally she gave a single, reluctant, nod.

With a sigh, Mr Field began. 'We adopted James when he was six. He was an orphan and had spent all his life inside children's homes. He'd never known anything else. Pat and I couldn't have children. This was in the early eighties, before they tightened the rules about white parents and different race children.'

Jon nodded, aware of how the adoption agency had altered its policy in the light of problems arising from Vietnamese, then later, Romanian adoptions.

'We were living in Manchester at the time. Near Prestwich. James was a very intelligent child, but restless, insecure. He couldn't understand so many things when he first moved in. How we would trust him.'

'Like money,' Mrs Field explained in a tremulous voice. 'The way we didn't lock away our cash. He would steal it at first, hoarding it in places round his bedroom. It took a while before he realised there was no need. School was where the real problems started.'

Her voice fell away and the husband took over once again.

'Kids — and some adults I regret to say — couldn't understand how a black child could be dropped off by a white mum. Pat got some comments, but nothing, I suspect, to what James suffered. He became rebellious, that old streak re-emerging. Fights. He's a powerful lad and soon no one was prepared to take him on. The bad elements accepted him into their group. We found it harder and harder to control him. He was arrested for stealing from cars. Then he started taking the cars themselves.'

Jon noted it all down, the familiar path leading to prison opening up before him. An image of his younger brother crossed his mind.

'He was sent to a young offender's facility called the Silverdale when he was fourteen. School had expelled him already. That was for eight months and he returned worse than ever. Now we did have to lock up our money. He'd made new friends in that place. At sixteen he was able to give up on education completely. His home tutor was glad, scared of him in my opinion. Anyway, we saw less and less of him after that. He was back in the Silverdale within months — joyriding and assaulting a police officer — and the few times he did return home, he kept asking about his real parents. The issue became more and more important to him.'

Jon looked up. 'Who were they?'

'We only had limited information, and that's because the authorities didn't know that much either. His mother, we gathered, was of Kenyan descent. She was from a tribe called the Kikuyu, but she had also been brought up in this country by a white couple. She died giving birth to James.'

'And the father?'

'No one knew who he was. Although James looks more black than white, he is mixed race. So we knew the father was white.' Jon thought about the letters. 'We found some correspond- ence in James's flat. You had written to him there.'

Mrs Field's chin went up and she wiped a tear from her eye.

'He'd kept those letters?'

'Yes,' Jon answered, not mentioning that they'd been dumped in a neighbour's bin. 'You were talking about his real name. We didn't understand.'

Mr Field glanced up at the ceiling, as if to gather strength from above. 'On his eighteenth birthday, James exercised his legal right to see all his documents held by the adoption agency. He came to see us immediately afterwards. The lad was very upset, angry even.'

The lad, Jon thought. No longer your son by this time. 'What had he discovered?'

'He wouldn't show us. But he'd learned that, although his mother was called Mary Sullivan, her real surname was Gathambo. As I mentioned, she died giving birth to James. Twenty-sixth of November, nineteen eighty-two, the Wythen- shaw hospital. She had turned up there pretty much destitute, her few personal effects had been retained by the adoption services and given to James all those years later.'

Jon sighed. Things were opening up. Past deeds, motives for revenge. 'Go on.'

'There were letters from other members of the Gathambo family still in Kenya. She must have made contact with them. She was, James told us, planning to return to Kenya and live with them, but then she fell pregnant.'

'I don't follow,' Rick said. 'The mother was brought up by a white couple with a surname of Sullivan, yet she had real family in Kenya?'

Mr Field ground his teeth together. 'We tried to work it out too. James was… distraught. I don't know anything more about his mother's adoptive parents. It was never mentioned to us.'

'But James flew to Kenya?' Jon asked.

'Yes,' Mr Field replied. 'One of the letters from his cousins, or whatever they were, mentioned his mum's pregnancy. They'd told her to be strong, once she got to Kenya, they'd help with the baby. He wanted to meet them.'

Jon circled his pen to form the dot of a large question mark he'd drawn on the page. What the hell was this all about? 'Going back to James's name. Why were you saying sorry?'

'The last letter his mother sent to Kenya, she'd obviously mentioned in it what she was going to call the baby if it was a boy. James was furious her wishes hadn't been followed. But it wasn't our choice, someone at the hospital made the decision.'

Jon's pen stopped its revolutions. 'Field?'

'No, his Christian name. James was just the nearest English equivalent they could think of. He should have been called Njama.'

Rick sat back. 'Jammer.'

Mr Field looked at him. 'No, you're meant to pronounce the N at the beginning. Anyway, we did what we could to help. The flight for instance. We paid for him to go back and meet his relatives.'

'And he was gone for three weeks?'

'About that, I think. He came back a very different person though.'

'How do you mean?'

Mr Field turned to his wife. 'Pat?'

'We picked him up at the airport,' she said. 'He was quiet, brooding. Whoever he had met in Kenya had had a very profound effect on him.'

'Was he happy to have gone?'

'No, not in my opinion. I believe they'd radicalised him.' Bitterness made her words sour.

'Sorry?'

'That's the word they use nowadays isn't it? They'd radicalised him over the history of Kenya. Tell me, what is your impression of the Mau Mau?'

Jon stared back, feeling like a schoolboy caught out in class. To his side, he saw Rick shift in his seat, and to his relief, his colleague began to speak. 'The Mau Mau was a terrorist organisation which sought to overthrow the British government in Kenya. They would emerge from the jungle at night to butcher white farming families. Their attacks were particularly savage, linking into some sort of primitive oath they'd taken to kill all whites. I think they may even have eaten parts of their victims, that sort of thing. I know the British authorities had a really tough time containing the violence.'

Mrs Field nodded. 'But not according to James once he came back from visiting his relatives. According to him, they weren't bloodthirsty terrorists who hacked innocent civilians to death. No. They were freedom fighters nobly trying to reclaim their land from an occupying force. They weren't even Mau Mau, they were the Kenyan Land and Freedom Army. They'd filled his head with all this stuff about British penal camps. How our troops tortured Kikuyu suspects in their thousands. Terrible stories, not like anything I've read in any history book.'

'What had that got to do with James's past?' Jon asked, trying to keep up.

Mrs Field waved a hand, voice stronger now she wasn't talking about the boy they'd tried to raise. 'Who knows? He wouldn't let us in on that. We were now part of the problem, part of the system that had ripped him from his true past. I could see that was what he thought. I shudder to think what part his relatives over there had played in the uprising.'

Jon stared down at his notes. He was fairly certain Peterson was killed because of what he'd done to Danny Gordon. But what linked Rose Sutton and Trevor Kerrigan? Why had they died? And who was the last person James Field was after? Was it his adoptive parents? It could be anyone from the staff on the maternity ward at the Wythenshaw to the members of the social services team who decided to name him James. Too much was being revealed too fast. How could they possibly trace and protect all these people before James made his final attack?

His phone started to ring. 'Excuse me,' he said on seeing Summerby's name on the screen. He got up and walked through to the kitchen. 'Yes, boss?'

'Jon, what have you got?'

'Loads, Sir. I think we'll have to come back in to discuss it all.'

'Exactly my sentiments. The team sent back to the Silverdale have also called; they're returning here with some vital evidence.'

'Sir, I think we should place the staff there under guard.'

'Don't worry. Uniforms are on the doors.'

'We also need to trace the hospital staff involved with James Field's birth at the Wythenshaw. And the social workers involved with the adoption. They may be in danger too.'

'OK, I'll get some people on it. Are you ready for this? The DNA test on the skin caught on Kerrigan's ring has finally come back. Forensics thought the sample had been contaminated, hence the delay. It matched James Field's sample taken after his arrest for ABH in nineteen ninety-nine.'

'That caused confusion?'

'No, this did. Trevor Kerrigan was James Field's biological father. He ripped his own dad's throat out.'