The Tryst

12

‘Well then, it’s about bloody time you got your act together, isn’t it?’

The slow rhythmic throbbing sound from next door continued. It sounded rather like someone trying to start a car with a flat battery.

‘Because it’s your responsibility, that’s why,’ Jenny Wilcox told the phone. ‘This is a stand-up-and-be-counted situation! I’m damned if I’m having my members used as cannon fodder so that you lot can decide whether the battle’s worth fighting or not.’

She slammed the receiver down. For a moment the throbbing sound seemed to have faded, then it returned, peaking and dying as though carried from a distance on gusts of wind. Brushing a few stray crumbs off her leotard, Jenny went over and opened the door to Aileen’s office.

‘Christ, what’s wrong?’

Aileen sat slumped over her desk, head lowered, shoulders trembling. When she lifted her head, her face looked blurred and soft, like pottery which had lost its glaze and was gradually unbaking itself, returning to the damp clay.

‘He waited for her to wake up,’ she murmured.

‘Who?’

‘He just sat there beside the bed, waiting for her to wake up.’

‘Who? Where? When?’

Despite Jenny’s real concern, there was a note of irritation in her voice. Aileen sucked in enough air to stem her sobs and justify her emotion.

‘It’s Steven. I’ve been to the police. They told me …’

‘The police?’

The younger woman’s evident disapproval brought Aileen round like a whiff of ammonia.

‘It’s a police matter,’ she replied flatly, scrabbling in her bag for Kleenex and cigarettes. ‘They showed me the photographs. Everything thrown about, ripped up, smashed, destroyed, the old man beaten to death. Steven was covered in blood from the cuts he got escaping from the other house, so when one of the neighbours saw him leaving they phoned the police. A patrol car picked him up just a few streets away. Naturally they thought he’d done it.’

Jenny tilted her head experimentally in various directions.

‘Just unblocking my synapses,’ she explained. ‘I got embroiled in a slanging match with the area organizer about this planned day of action. Now then, what were you saying? I don’t really understand what this has to do with someone waiting for someone to wake up.’

‘It’s my fault, Jenny, I’m not explaining it well. I’ll tell you some other time.’

‘No, tell me now.’

Aileen would have much preferred not to do so, but after letting Jenny see her break down she felt a need to demonstrate control.

‘All right. Well, let’s begin at the beginning. The police had no difficulty in tracing Steven’s background once they knew his real name. His life is exceptionally well documented, in fact. He’s been in and out of one file or another since the day he was born. That happened in Holloway, where his mother was doing eighteen months for her part in a dope-smuggling operation. Once she got out of prison, things went from bad to worse. Petty theft, a bit of prostitution, then a heroin habit. She ended up in council emergency housing in a bed-and-breakfast in Bayswater. It sounds like an urban concentration camp. One room, one bed, one toilet and kitchen between thirty people.’

‘I hear some councils are thinking of moving their homeless to pre-fab settlements on the outskirts of the city,’ Jenny commented. ‘Sort of a township concept. We’ve a lot to learn from the South Africans in this respect, I always say.’

‘One day Steven’s mother took an overdose, by accident or on purpose. The room was kept bolted from the inside, for protection. Those places are pretty rough, the police said. People get raped and beaten up on the stairs. But Steven was only seven years old. He wasn’t strong enough to open the bolts by himself, even after he realized that his mother wasn’t going to wake up. In the end someone heard his hammering on the door, but it took a long time. No one paid much attention to screams or banging in that place. When they broke down the door the body was starting to decompose. She’d been dead almost a week. Steven had been with her all that time, waiting for her to wake up.’

Aileen grabbed a deep breath and tried to ride the wave of emotion that threatened her. In the end it rolled by without breaking.

‘I must go,’ she said, glancing at her watch. ‘Steven’s social worker is coming to pick him up at three, and I have to try and explain things to him first. What are you doing this evening, Jenny? Douglas is away, and I was wondering if — ’

‘Jon and I have to go to a do at LWT, unfortunately. The usual rent-a-celebrity crowd will be there and it’s important for him to get out and network-build. Did I tell you that he’s in this big new series on famine they’re planning? Off-camera, but you’ll hear him interviewing the victims. He’s quite high profile in Third World disasters, apparently.’

Catching Aileen’s eye, Jenny covered herself by laughing cynically. ‘We’re having a few people over tomorrow for fondue bourguignonne,’ she said as she turned to go. ‘Drop by if you like. I expect we can find an extra fork.’

‘I’m going away, actually,’ Aileen lied.

She stubbed out her cigarette and walked over to the window, with floorboards flexing beneath her. The glass was flecked with drops of rain so fine they seemed to hang motionless in the air, as though the clouds had collapsed under their own weight like an old ceiling. She stood there thinking how clever she’d been, explaining away her emotion without mentioning its real cause. For Aileen hadn’t told Jenny everything she’d learned from the police, not by a long chalk. She hadn’t told her that one reason why Steven and his mother had been living in squalor was that the woman’s lover, who was also the courier who brought the cannabis in from the Continent, had absconded with her savings, which she’d given him to buy them tickets to safety. By then she knew that she was pregnant, and she’d also begun to suspect that her house in south London, which was used to store the drugs, was under surveillance. When the police finally moved in, a few weeks later, her lover was the only one to escape arrest. Steven’s mother told the police that he’d arranged to meet her at Heathrow with the tickets, but didn’t turn up. It was later established that he had flown from Gatwick to Holland and then back to his native America. The case was relatively insignificant by US standards, and it hadn’t been thought worthwhile to apply for extradition, even though the man’s name and address were known to the police, as indeed they were to Aileen.

That explained a lot, she thought. It explained the likeness between Steven and Raymond, which had so disturbed her. It explained Raymond’s frequent unexplained absences from Brighton, and the fact that he always had plenty of money even though his father proved to be neither rich nor generous. It explained why a man so attractive to women had taken up with a girl like Aileen, plain and shy but so ‘typically English and straight’ that her presence on the pillion of his motorbike ensured that he was always waved through Customs after their brief trips across the Channel. It explained why he had flown back to America so unexpectedly, supposedly to visit a mother who later turned out to have been dead for years, and why he hadn’t bothered to answer Aileen’s passionate letters or seemed particularly overjoyed when she turned up on his doorstep that summer. She should have felt relieved, she supposed. Her instincts had been justified; she wasn’t crazy after all. Raymond really was the boy’s father. That should have made her feel better, but it didn’t. In fact she didn’t feel anything very much, not yet. Her tears had been for the boy. As for herself, she was like a character in a cartoon film who has walked off the edge of a cliff without realizing it and strolls blithely on in defiance of the laws of gravity, protected by his blissful ignorance. Sooner or later, she knew, the reality of what had happened would come home to her and she would drop like a stone.

Her breath had misted the glass in front of her, obscuring the view. Idly she traced the words EAT, SHIT, DIE, BOX with her fingertip. Then she hastily rubbed them out, clearing the glass. There was work to do, and thanks to what the police had told her she was able to approach her talk with Steven in a more positive frame of mind than she would have imagined possible a few hours earlier. The information might have been personally devastating, but professionally it was a godsend. For the first time, Aileen felt that she understood the situation in depth, clearly and completely. Steven Bradley had already suffered more than enough pain for one lifetime, but from now on, she vowed, things would be different. His mother and father were both dead, but the boy would be saved from the wreckage to grow up whole and healthy. Everyone who had come into contact with him agreed that the core of his personality was still intact; indeed, this was one reason why he had not been considered ill enough to warrant in-patient status. But the proper treatment of his psychological injuries had been hampered by their ignorance of their real cause and nature. Now that had been cleared up, Aileen felt confident that he would make a swift and full recovery.

She timed her arrival in Green Ward for just before two o’clock, so as to catch the boy before he could go off with the others to start the afternoon’s activities. When she entered the ward sitting room, Steven was gamely trying to clean the floor with a large industrial vacuum cleaner which made so much noise that he didn’t hear her call him. Aileen stood watching with the feeling of slight distaste that always came over when she saw patients performing tasks labelled ‘work therapy’, although in her view this amounted to little more than coping with staff shortages by exploiting the patients in a way that confirmed their tendency to become institutionalized. It was only after some time that she realized that these thoughts were only possible because the giddy sense of vertigo that had always threatened her encounters with the boy was completely absent. Now she knew the source of those mysterious promptings, their power had been exorcized. When Steven finally switched off the vacuum cleaner, it cost Aileen no effort to go up to him, touch him gently on the shoulder and say, in a kindly but restrained tone, ‘Steven, I’d like a word with you, please.’

They sat down together on a sofa facing the outer wall, whose chessboard pattern here generated two large windows at knee level and half of another just below the ceiling.

‘Did you enjoy your lunch?’ Aileen asked while she waited for the other patients to disperse. As usual, the boy just shrugged.

‘I didn’t have any,’ she went on. ‘I didn’t have time. I had to go and see the police. They’re very pleased, because they’ve finally caught the person who did those terrible things. And it’s all thanks to you, Steven.’

He glanced at her with a look of alarm.

‘Me?’

Aileen nodded and gave him an approving smile.

‘Once they’d learned your real name, you see, they checked their records and discovered that you’d been taken to a police station once before. The sergeant who was on duty that day remembered that two other young people had been there at the same time. One of them had claimed that you were his brother, and you’d gone away with them. Their names had been taken too. One of them was called Jimmy and the other one Dave.’

She paused for a moment, watching the boy. He was glacially still, as though in a state of suspended animation.

‘Dave is now in prison. He was arrested for assaulting an old lady and taking her money. Another boy, called Alex, was arrested with him.’

The squelch of shoes came and went in the corridor. A voice called, ‘How should I know where it’s got to? First I heard we’ve even got one.’ ‘Didn’t you read the circular?’ someone yelled back.

‘Dave refused to co-operate with the police, but Alex did. He said that you used to live with them in a house they were squatting in. There was a girl there as well, a girl called Tracy.’

‘Did they get her too?’ Steve demanded.

‘Who?’

‘The police!’

Aileen shook her head. The boy released a long sigh and every muscle in his body seemed to relax.

‘Alex said that he and Dave saw you at the supermarket one day,’ Aileen continued. ‘They realized that someone was paying you to go shopping. Dave and Jimmy had started robbing old people in the street by this time, but they never got much money. Jimmy decided that the person you did the shopping for must have a lot of money hidden away somewhere to pay you with. He told the girl to try and find out from you where the house was.’

A spasm like a single shiver ran through the boy’s body. Then he was absolutely still again, the pulsing of an artery on his neck the only sign that he was still alive.

‘But before they could do anything, workmen arrived to demolish the house. Jimmy and Dave started to argue about what to do and how to divide up the money they thought they were going to get. Alex and Tracy went out to fetch something to drink. When they came back, Jimmy was lying on the floor. His face was all discoloured. Dave said that he’d had a heart attack. He told Alex to help him carry the body upstairs and hide it in a cupboard. When they got upstairs, Jimmy suddenly started to twitch, but Dave got a coat-hanger and twisted it around his neck. Then he and Alex hung the body up in the cupboard to hide it from the workmen.’

The Unit was swathed in mist as though in cotton wool. Normally you could hear the distant noise of traffic, but today they might have been somewhere deep in the country. Aileen’s efforts to make her voice calm and soothing made her sound, to her own ears at least, like a radio programme called Listen With Mother. Every afternoon she and her mother had sat down in front of the wireless set and listened to a well-modulated female voice telling stories about the doings of bunnies, ducks and teddies. While she listened, Aileen had studied the lighted panel at the top of the wireless, displaying the names of foreign cities: Moscow, Rome, Warsaw, Berlin, Tokyo. The world was vast and various, fascinating but utterly safe, populated by furry little creatures who might occasionally be just a little bit naughty. No wonder people go mad, she thought.

The only point at which Steven had seemed at all disturbed by her narrative had been when she mentioned the girl. Aileen noted that this might be a sensitive area, so she decided to skip the part of Alex’s story in which he described how Tracy had got the boy to reveal the address of the house he visited. Alex said that Steven had also told the girl that the man who lived there had a trunk filled with treasure which he kept in an upstairs room, but the police seemed to feel that this unlikely detail must have been invented by Alex to justify what happened next.

‘When you got home after your newspaper round that week,’ Aileen resumed, ‘Dave and Alex took you upstairs to the room where they’d hidden Jimmy’s body and locked you in. Then they all went to the house in Grafton Avenue. The girl kept watch in the street while Dave and Alex went to the door and rang the bell in a special way you’d talked about.’

Steve suddenly twisted to one side in another convulsive shiver. Aileen waited, but he said nothing.

‘When Mr Matthews opened the door, they pushed their way in and told him to show them where he had hidden his money. He gave them about thirty pounds, which he said was all he had. But Dave didn’t believe him. He searched the house, looking for a trunk full of money which he thought was hidden there. When he couldn’t find it he got very angry. First he threatened the old man with a poker, and then when Mr Matthews still wouldn’t say where the money was, Dave started to hit him.’

‘No!’

Steve spat the word at her.

‘It wasn’t him! It was the other one, the one with eyes that glow in the dark and burn you up! I seen him just before, just around the corner! He was on his way home after doing it. He opened him up like you’re supposed to, tapping and tapping, only he was wrong, it wasn’t like a golf ball inside, it was all messy.’

Aileen frowned. She had had just about enough of the boy’s amateur mad scenes.

‘There’s no point in going on pretending, Steven,’ she said sharply. ‘I know you’re trying to protect the others, but there’s no need. Dave has already confessed. At first he denied knowing you and Alex, but the police showed your photograph to the security guards at the Tesco supermarket and one of them recognized it. He said you used to go there every week, and he remembered that one week two youths had an argument with you at the checkout. He was taken to the police station where he identified Dave and Alex. After that Dave admitted everything.’

‘But it wasn’t him!’ the boy insisted. ‘Why won’t you listen? Why won’t anyone listen? I didn’t listen either. I thought he was crazy. I thought it was all a story he’d made up. But it was all true! He killed the old man and now he’s after me too! I saw him leaving. He knows I know just like he knew what he done to him in the wood. That’s why I got to stay here, see? He won’t come near hospitals. He told me.’

Aileen held the wild eyes with her own, trying to decode this jumble of words.

‘Mr Matthews told you this man would leave you alone as long as you were in hospital?’

The boy nodded. Aileen tried to hide her satisfaction as the last piece of the puzzle dropped into place.

‘Now listen, Steven, there’s something else which you must know. When the crime was discovered, the police tried to trace Mr Matthews’s relatives. It turned out that he hadn’t got any, but in the process they found out quite a lot about him. When he was young, a long long time ago, Ernest Matthews was a soldier. There was a big war and lots of people were killed. Mr Matthews was badly wounded. It wasn’t his body that was hurt but his mind. He was suffering from what’s called battle fatigue. Shell-shock, they used to call it. You see, when things get too bad, too horrible and frightening, then after a while human beings break down and get ill. One of the things that happens is that they imagine that people are threatening them, trying to kill them. They go on thinking that even after the danger is over, when they’re perfectly safe and surrounded by people who care for them. That’s what happened to Ernest Matthews. He must have been very ill indeed, because he was sent to a special hospital and stayed there for almost twenty years.’

‘But I seen him!’ the boy cried. ‘I told you what he looked like, didn’t I? And I told him too, and he said that was him, the man that was after him!’

‘But we can’t believe everything Mr Matthews told you, Steven. You didn’t know that at the time, of course. He was older than you, so you naturally believed what he said. Perhaps he even believed it himself. Perhaps he really did still think that someone was threatening his life. Or perhaps that was just a story that was no longer real to him, which he told you so that you would keep on going to visit him. Perhaps he was afraid that you might get bored going to see an ordinary old man, so he tried to make himself more interesting. We’ll never know the answer to that. What we do know is that what happened had nothing whatever to do with any story he may have told you. Mr Matthews was killed by a violent and unpredictable youth called Dave who had already murdered his friend Jimmy and had nothing to lose by killing again, particularly since he thought that the old man had a lot of money hidden in the house which he could use to get away. That’s who killed Mr Matthews, Steven, not some character from a story. I think you know that. It’s difficult for you to admit it, even to yourself. But one day, perhaps quite soon, you’ll realize that there is no reason for you to feel guilty. Because that’s the problem, isn’t it? You feel guilty. If it hadn’t been for you, Dave and Alex would never have heard about Mr Matthews and so he would still be alive. That’s what you think, isn’t it? It’s almost as though you killed the old man yourself.’

This, she thought, is to proper psychiatric practice what an amputation with a handsaw and a tot of rum is to modern surgery. But there was no time, no money, and a queue of mutilated psyches bleeding to death at the hospital gate.

‘But of course that’s all nonsense! You never harmed the old man. On the contrary, you were his friend, you helped him. Even if you did tell the others where he lived, you couldn’t possibly have known what they were going to do, could you? It had nothing whatever to do with you.’

The boy had resumed his unnatural stillness, locking himself away somewhere deep inside where he thought he could never be traced. Aileen shifted her grip on his arm, patting his wrist lightly.

‘Let me tell you a little story, Steven. One day I was driving home from work when a cat suddenly ran out across the road in front of me. I tried to avoid it, but there was a car coming the other way. I heard a noise under the car and felt a bump. When I stopped and got out, the cat was dead.’

She moved a little closer to the boy, secure in her control of the situation, her mastery of the requisite skills.

‘I felt awful, just terrible! I’ve always loved cats more than any other animal and yet I’d just killed one. It was such a horrible shock that it took me ages to realize that it wasn’t my fault. There was absolutely nothing I could have done to prevent it. It took a long, long time to accept that, but in the end I managed to come to terms with it and stopped blaming myself uselessly.’

She tugged at the inert body beside her, trying without success to draw his eyes back to her.

‘Now, of course, the shock you suffered was very much worse than mine, but one day the same thing will happen to you, too. It may take a long time, but one day you’ll realize that it’s all over. The past is dead, Steven. It’s over and done with, finished. We can’t reach it and it can’t reach us. All we can do is to try and forget and think about today and tomorrow instead. Now I know that being here has helped you, and that’s why I’ve arranged for you to go on coming every day, even though you’ll be leaving this afternoon to go to a new home which Mrs Haynes has — ’

‘You’re putting me out?’

The boy’s face had gone to pieces again, all his composure fled at the notion of being expelled from his hard-won sanctuary.

‘No, not at all,’ Aileen speciously assured him. ‘You’ll be brought back here every morning and you’ll spend the whole day doing all the things you’ve been doing up to now. The only thing that’s going to change is that you won’t actually sleep here any more.’

Steven stared at her bleakly. ‘I can’t stay?’

‘No, Steven. You can’t stay.’

It was better that he should be quite clear about that, she thought. It would only make matters worse if he were allowed to harbour false hopes.

‘And you mustn’t think of pretending to set fire to your new home, either,’ she added, ‘or they’ll just hand you over to the police.’

After a long pause, a small bent smile appeared on the boy’s lips, the first that Aileen had ever seen there. It startled her, because it was the absolute image of the way Raymond used to smile when he was about to say or do something mischievous.

‘I’ll have to be brave little Stevie, then,’ he remarked. Encouraged and relieved at this response, Aileen smiled too.

‘That’s right,’ she said warmly. ‘Try to be brave. I know how it’s hard, but — ’

‘Do you think I’ll get in the papers?’

‘The papers?’

She was lost.

‘For being brave. They often used to have brave kids, the papers did. Brave means they’re going to die. Like when they get the wrong disease or something, and there’s no room at the hospital.’

Aileen gripped the boy’s arm tightly.

‘Steven, you must stop dramatizing like this! It’s absurb to compare yourself with someone suffering from a fatal illness. You are not going to die, I promise you that. Certainly you’re to be pitied, certainly you need care and attention. But no one wants to harm you, no one wishes you anything but good.’

The professional in Aileen recognized that the moment had come to terminate the interview. There was nothing more she could achieve for the moment. It was time for Steven to start the long hard work of facing the facts. Recovery from a serious delusion state is a rather like coming off heavy drink or drugs. Deprived of the flash romance and sinister glitter of your fantasies, life looks pretty dull and drab at first. It’s terrible to believe that everyone is out to get you, but that way at least you’re the centre of attention. It can be almost more terrible to have to accept that most people simply don’t give a damn one way or the other. Meanwhile she had her own life to get on with. Friday afternoons were always particularly fraught: not only was it the moment when the things she had been putting off all week finally caught up with her, but there was also a large helping of bureaucratic roughage in the form of interdepartmental seminars, meetings of consultative review bodies and the like, which tested her boredom threshold to the limit. Nevertheless, regarded as occupational therapy the afternoon was a complete success, for Aileen thought no more about Steven Bradley until she was back in her office preparing to go home, and then it was only to congratulate herself on a job well done. Only that morning she had felt reality slipping away from her like the sand sucked out from under your feet by the waves on a beach. ‘Here I go,’ she’d thought. It had seemed so easy and restful to give in and stop trying to make sense of things. But she hadn’t. That was a victory to celebrate, a success to reinforce. Perhaps she should treat herself to a concert or an evening at the theatre. When she got home, she’d check the paper and see what was on.

She was half-way out of the door when Mrs Haynes phoned.

‘You haven’t seen Steven, have you?’

The social worker sounded breathless.

‘Seen him?’ Aileen snapped. ‘You were supposed to be collecting him at three o’clock.’

‘I was! I did!’

‘Well?’

‘Well, he … he ran away.’

‘He what?’

‘I was driving him to the hostel, the traffic was quite bad — well, it always is these days, isn’t it? Anyway, Gary, I mean Steven, he said he knew a short cut so I turned off, even though it seemed to me that it wasn’t all that short — ’

‘Would you mind getting to the point, please?’

Aileen’s tone of voice was a replica of one her mother used to intimidate people she considered socially vulnerable.

‘Well, all of a sudden he said he needed to go to the loo. We were just passing a park and he said there was a public lavatory by the gate so I stopped. When he didn’t come out again I went to the door and called. It was a bit awkward, it being a Gents and all, but in the end I went in but he wasn’t there. I knew he hadn’t come out of the door because I’d been watching, and then I saw that the window in one of the sit-downs was broken. He must have got out that way and run off through the park. I hoped he might have gone back there to the hospital, you see, that’s why I phoned.’

Aileen squeezed the bridge of her nose between two fingers.

‘Why would he come here? He knows we’d just hand him straight back to you.’

‘But then where could he have gone?’ the social worker wailed. She too was probably exhausted and drained at the end of a long week’s work, Aileen reflected.

‘I don’t know. He showed some interest in a girl he used to know. He may have gone off looking for her. Anyway, don’t worry too much, Mrs Haynes. It’s not really your fault. He’d probably have run off sooner or later anyway. He’s got a history of this kind of thing.’

She replaced the receiver, gathered together her belongings and walked slowly to the car. She knew only too well where Steven had gone. He had gone back to the street, back to the invisible people. The boy had tried to find his feet in the surface world, where people have fixed addresses and permanent names. But that world and its representatives, notably Aileen, had failed him. He had made his needs quite clear, and they had been rejected. And although that rejection was correct in the circumstances, Aileen’s heart was tormented with reproachful questions. What did it matter to Steven whether he had an adequate claim to a hospital bed or not? Does a mother turn a child away because its need for security exceeds the norm, because it has exhausted its quota of love? But, of course, she wasn’t his mother.

As Pamela Haynes had remarked, the traffic in the area was always bad. That afternoon, when Aileen longed more than ever to be home, it seemed by some perverse logic to be even worse than usual. Frustrated and bored, the occupants of the stalled cars gazed vacantly at each other, sizing up make, model, age and condition and hence inferring career, status, income level and probable destination. Aileen felt the eyes scanning her like so many remote-control video cameras: L registration Mini, ropy bodywork, sixty thousand or so on the clock, she’s a bit second-hand and all, minor civil servant or administrative assistant, hit her plateau and stuck there, fifteen thou plus a few rubbishy perks, three kids and a semi in Greenford. She turned on the car radio. As she closed her eyes, the traffic jam melted away and they were cruising along the cliffs at Rottingdean, sunlight flickering and glittering on the waves as though the ocean were signalling to them. ‘What’s it saying?’ Ray shouted back. She hadn’t needed to answer. They both knew by heart the exultant and irresistible message that the universe had confided to their generation. The whole of human history had been leading up to this moment, when technology and consciousness finally reached a sufficiently advanced level to make possible the earthly paradise. Ray laughed and took his hands off the bars, letting the motorbike steer itself around the curves of the road winding eastwards along the cliffs, towards Newhaven and the ferry.

‘The Cream from 1969!’ frothed the announcer. ‘Wow, man, out of sight, too much, heavy, far out and all that stuff.’

Aileen swallowed away the lump of emotion in her throat. A chorus of horns sounded out behind her, and she looked up to find that the vehicle in front had moved forward a few yards. Before she could put the Mini in gear, a brand-new Ford Sierra cut into the space. The driver waved angrily at her as he passed, mouthing inaudible oaths, his eyes full of hatred. High-stress middle management, twenty-five thousand plus a company ulcer, new home on a Wates estate in Uxbridge, thought Aileen automatically.

About half-way along Wood Lane there was a way through the back streets avoiding Shepherds Bush Green. The snag was getting out again the other end, which was why Aileen didn’t often use it, but today the traffic was so bad that she couldn’t see what she had to lose. As she drew near the junction, however, she saw that the traffic this end was not moving at all. After sitting there for ten minutes without progressing an inch, she backed the Mini into a parking space and got out. There was a nice Young’s pub round the corner. She would go and relax over a drink and a cigarette until the rush-hour had passed.

About fifty yards along the main road, a knot of people blocked her path. A policeman was questioning some of them while another stood in the road directing the traffic. Aileen became aware of a siren in the distance and realized that it had been going on for some time without her noticing it. It was presumably an ambulance, stuck in the traffic jam caused by the accident to which it had been called. A white delivery van was stopped at an angle in the middle of the road, almost on the white line. Behind it stood a bus, stalled at the moment of pulling away from its stop. One of the men being questioned gestured towards the van.

‘He didn’t give me a bleeding chance, did he?’

‘How fast were you going?’ the policeman asked, pencil and notebook at the ready.

‘I don’t know! Twenty, twenty-five? It’s a van, not a bleeding Ferrari, you know. Just as I was passing the bus, out he comes like a dog out of the trap.’

‘That’s right,’ the bus driver confirmed. He pointed out a man standing nearby. ‘Him over there, he said something made him run off.’

Everyone turned to look at the man. Amid all the faces marked by anxiety or sorrow, the grin on his lips struck a jarring note. The policeman beckoned him over.

‘What did you say to him?’

The man laughed almost contemptuously.

‘Nothing!’

‘You bloody well did!’ the bus driver exclaimed. ‘I saw you!’

The man looked as though he was only able to restrain his hilarity because not even the most hysterical howls of laughter would be adequate to express the total absurdity of the situation. The whole thing was simply too stupid for words!

‘What did you say to him?’ the policeman repeated coldly.

The man shrugged three or four times in quick succession.

‘I asked if he knew what time it was.’

‘That’s right,’ a woman with a dog put in. ‘I heard him.’

The policeman looked rather exasperated by the woman’s unsolicited testimony.

‘What’s so funny?’ he snapped at the man, whose grin vanished with insulting abruptness.

‘Where do you live?’ the policeman demanded.

‘Paxton Grove. Number twenty-nine.’

Up to this point, Aileen had been hovering on the fringes of the crowd, trying to work her way through. Now she stopped and gave the man a closer look. 29 Paxton Grove was a custodial hostel used to accommodate long-term psychiatric patients whose condition was more or less stable but unlikely to improve. This man was pretty obviously a chronic schizophrenic whose symptoms were being controlled by drugs sufficiently for him to be released into the community.

‘Excuse me, I’m a doctor,’ she told the policeman, exaggerating her qualifications to get his attention. ‘I think I may be able to help.’

He glanced at her briefly and shook his head, pointing towards a blanket-covered bundle lying in the road in front of the white van.

‘Too late for that.’

Aileen was about to explain that she wasn’t that kind of doctor but simply wanted to explain why the man being questioned was acting so oddly, but something about the size of the covered form drew her towards it. Her assumed status as a doctor cleared a passage for her through the crowd, and the police made no move to interfere as she bent to pull back the corner of the blanket. The boy’s head had been broken open and the face smeared like a wet painting, but there was no doubt as to his identity. Steven Bradley’s brief flight was over.