The Detective's Daughter

7

May 1985

The engine hurtled too fast into the tunnel; he should have applied the brakes sooner. Everything went into slow motion. His tummy churned, his tongue was a dead thing and when he tried to shout the sounds were lost in yawning blackness. Beakers of tea and coffee, books and bags slid gracefully off tables. Suitcases tumbled out of netted racks and blocked gangways as ceilings and floors changed places. He was alive to noises only experts would identify: cogs loosening, axles shearing off, metal grinding and snarling. The engine was swallowed up by the hole in the hillside.

The urgency in the air was intoxicating, yet the engineer in him worried that the collision and consequent vibration would weaken the tunnel roof and expose mistakes. The driver’s cab should survive, he calculated as the engine roared out the other side dragging carnage in its wake like tins tied to a wedding car. The second carriage had telescoped into the first. Too late he blew his whistle: this was the best part and he had looked forward to it but his ribs hurt as if splinters of glass had lacerated his organs and his nostrils filled with the stench of rotting roots and claggy soil. The train careered off the track and came to rest beside a watering can.

Jonathan had been proud of his tunnel, excavated into a mound of topsoil; it was high and wide enough for the rolling stock. He surveyed the damage: there were cracks around the opening which would develop into critical fissures and fatally undermine the structure if not repaired.

‘You went too fast.’ Jonathan dared to be cross with Simon. He rubbed his hand on his shorts leaving a bloody stain; he had been biting his thumb. Someone would be displeased with him; at this moment, dazed by the incident, Jonathan could not remember who that would be.

‘You’re a scaredy-cat, Justin.’ Simon was matter of fact.

Justin, for that had been his name for four months now, shuffled his feet to alleviate pins and needles. Simon sat with his legs apart; there was a graze on his knee from football. Justin’s legs were skinny and pale; his football shorts flapped around his thighs, like a skirt, Simon said.

Simon says: Justin’s a girl.

Simon says: Justin’s a weirdo.

Simon’s willy lolled in the depths of his shorts; everything about him was bigger. Justin concentrated on the tunnel in case Simon caught him staring and called him names. He was fretting about the incident, and wanted to be alone to inspect his train.

The kitchen garden had been a secret but, falling into a routine of going there instead of the playground, Justin grew careless and Simon had seen him. He sneaked up when Justin was doing the opening ceremony for his new cut and cover railway tunnel behind the greenhouse.

‘Can I have a turn?’ Justin should not have to ask for a go with his own train.

‘Unfortunately you cannot. I need to perform more test runs.’ Simon was imitating him. He knew nothing about engineering or trains, Justin fumed.

Simon shoved the engine along flattened soil that Justin had weeded and designated a ‘sand drag’ – intended to prevent a catastrophe such as this. He had not taken human error into account because he did not make mistakes. He would have liked to have installed a Moorgate control but lacked the tools. There were no actual rails; he had constructed the track along a section of earth he had punched flat with a brick. Justin dreamed of real tracks raised on ballast. Simon was pressing down on the engine’s tank until it sank into the mulch at the foothills of the compost heap.

‘Stop doing that with your mouth.’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘You were. I don’t want to have to get cross with you.’ Simon put on a girl’s voice. Justin did not talk like that, but did not point this out. Simon tried to shift the engine, but soil had clogged its wheels and it was mired.

Justin sifted soft earth; he must wash his nails before supper or Miss Thoroughgood would tell him off. She was leaving at the end of term so everyone was supposed to treat her nicely. Simon’s nails, all nine of them, were clean. Justin turned so that Simon would not see his mouth twitching.

He had developed a sniff accompanied by a flick of his fringe to distract attention from the tic that had begun after he started at boarding school. He also gnawed at the skin around his thumbnail. Simon called him ‘the Vampire’, which made no sense to Justin as he did not suck blood. Some of the younger boys called him this out of windows or from around corners.

‘There’s nowhere for the passengers to get out.’

Simon was right; he had not built a station. The tunnel had been complicated: he had worked out the strength of the roof, the width of the tunnel – half as much as its length – drawing and revising diagrams in his notebook after prep but had forgotten about alighting and disembarking.

Had there been other boys, he would have explained how he’d embedded struts made from ice-lolly sticks in the walls. He fixed them with roofing felt made from folded toilet paper layered with leaves and twigs and overlaid with a mortar of earth and some sand he had found by the shed.

I added water from the tap that I carried in this paint tin.

Mortar, he would inform them, dries as hard as concrete. He would run a road over the tunnel or perhaps lay a park with a statue, but Simon must be got rid of first.

Simon had warned that if he told on him Justin would be in trouble for messing up the vegetable patch and trespassing. He explained it was for this bad behaviour that Justin had been sent away.

‘I will kill you and bury your body so that no one will ever find you and then your flesh will be eaten and your bones will crumble.’ Simon stuck the hand with the half-finger inside Justin’s shorts. ‘I’ll say you escaped again.’ At first he was gentle, but then he squeezed and Justin felt sick. Simon’s fist struggled like an animal beneath the school regulation material.

‘Message understood?’ Simon pulled away.

Justin blinked back tears.

Simon never spoke of his random attacks and afterwards they both behaved as if nothing had happened. Justin had an oblique idea that Simon’s behaviour was sanctioned by a higher authority so did not believe he could stop it.

A storm roared about his ears, whipping soil and stones into the air that stung his cheeks. He dashed water from his face, ducking from the paint tin, and clasped his hands over his head. He opened his eyes. Simon had reduced his tunnel to clumps of earth, wads of discoloured paper stuck with splinters of wood and scattered with onions, carrots and wild garlic.

The small boy remained on the raised vegetable bed, a statue save for jerks of his head. He wore an expression of quiet despair.

At last he retrieved the engine from the far side of the bed and wiped sand and soil from the funnel and cylinder with toilet paper. He pushed a loose wheel into place and cleared slathers of wet earth from the carriage windows; the smiling people were gone. He peered in: passengers were sprawled on the floor, or wedged between seats.

Justin’s face was wet; Simon liked it when he cried. He looked around and saw he was alone, which made him uneasy.

He imagined writing to his mummy, putting the case for her to fetch him; she would not think he was a coward – except maybe she would. Perhaps he was.

The boy trailed up the path, past the greenhouse, to the gate to a bridle path that led to the road. He knew this because he had tried to escape. So much freedom just beyond his grasp.

To the little boy, the walled kitchen garden had a quiet of its own, its once richly planted beds now populated by rabbits, only one corner tended on occasional visits by an elderly gardener.

He heard an irregular clinking, persistent and distinct like a Morse code message. A dog lead hung from a washing-line post, the frayed strap weathered to a soft pink. In the breeze the clasp, oscillating like a pendulum, tapped out Jonathan Justin Rokesmith’s plot of revenge on the parched and knotted wood.