Kid Alone Read online

  “Wiem jam jest Ci trudno,” he went on in a quiet and respectful voice. “Pyotor był dobry chłopak.”

  Bogdana took both Garvie’s hands in hers. “Tak, tak,” she said. “Twój chłopak jest bardzo uprzejmy,” she said to Zuzana, smiling.

  Zuzana blushed and frowned. “Yes, but he’s not my boyfriend,” she murmured.

  Garvie went on gracefully. “Pyotor był wspaniałym muzykiem i genialnym matematyk. Duma dla szkoły, dlatego wszyscy będziemy za nim ogromnie tęsknić. Chciałbym ci pomóc, jeśli tylko potrafię.” He finished with a little bow, and there was a flourish of gestures from Bogdana, who went into the kitchen to make raspberry tea, and, before he joined her, Zbigniew took Garvie’s hand and shook it silently, over and over, then went to help with tea.

  Garvie and Zuzana sat side by side on the old upright sofa with the bag of personal effects that the Gimpels had put out for them.

  “What?” Garvie said, catching her eye.

  She was looking at him critically. “So. You are pleased with yourself.”

  He shrugged.

  “You show off your famous memory. This is why you wanted me to speak Polish for you.”

  Garvie said nothing.

  “But you do not know what it means. You did not mean any of it.”

  He shrugged. “If they like me, it’ll be easier to find out from them what I want to know. I’m just being logical.”

  She did not stop looking at him. She began to frown. “Wait. There is something I do not understand.”

  He glanced at her, found her staring at him, puzzled, and glanced away again. “Yeah? Don’t let it worry you. I’m just a big show-off. We’ve got stuff to do.”

  “But—”

  “Listen.” He turned to her. “My advice to you: focus. Don’t get distracted. Don’t fuss. Don’t get sentimental. Right. What’s in the bag?”

  He took the clear plastic bag from her and they began to go through it. The Gimpels had not touched Pyotor’s belongings since the police had delivered them, and showed no sign of wanting to see them now. They had told Zuzana that they were going to destroy the things; they held too much pain. The police had destroyed the clothing already, in fact. In the bag there was only the schoolbag, the violin case, and the things that Pyotor had carried in his pockets. Garvie began to examine them rapidly.

  In the schoolbag was an exercise book for English homework, a textbook entitled Supporting Advanced Mathematics, the Little Oxford Dictionary, and a pencil case containing pens and pencils, an eraser, a pencil sharpener, and other bits and pieces. The last entry in the exercise book was an essay headed “In My Room,” which began: “My room is square, it has one door and one window.”

  He handed it to Zuzana and she began to examine it. “Look how neat his handwriting was,” she said.

  Garvie was already sorting through the things that had been in Pyotor’s pockets. He glanced in turn at a balled-up tissue, latchkey, hair comb, and membership card for the Polish Youth Society and put each of them back in the bag.

  “He was neat all over,” he said, turning his attention to a mobile phone, now in pieces held together by an elastic band. “The interesting thing is that he’d torn out three pages from the exercise book. That’s not something a neat boy would normally do.”

  Surprised, she examined the book, holding it up to her eye and running her finger along the gutter of the pages. “It is true. But why?”

  Garvie ignored her. “His phone’s been stamped on.”

  She looked at it. “To stop him calling for help?”

  “Or destroy what was on it.”

  “What was on it?”

  “Nothing was on it anymore. He was too careful for that. But look.” He held out the remains of the phone, a splintered pulp of plastic. “The person who did this had a temper on him, all right.”

  He began to examine the violin case. He turned it over in his hands, held it up to the light, weighed it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing useful. It’s not the case I’m interested in. But unfortunately the violin isn’t here.” He examined the inside of the empty case, felt along the lining, held it upside down, and shook it. “Unless I’m being unusually dense.”

  “Where is it, then?”

  He ignored her again. “Listen. In a minute the Gimpels are going to come and ask if we want to see Pyotor’s room. Tell them yes.”

  She pursed her lips, frowned. “You like this, don’t you? Playing the detective, giving orders.”

  “I’m just trying not to waste time. Look, here they come. Tell them you’ve seen Pyotor’s story about his room in the exercise book; you can tell how happy he was living here with them.”

  Zuzana gave him an irritated look, but as Bogdana and Zbigniew came into the room with the tea things she spoke to them.

  Bogdana nodded and became upset.

  “His room is not the same,” Zbigniew said, “since we had the break-in. It has upset Dana.”

  Weeping, Bogdana took hold of Zuzana’s arm, talking loudly.

  “She wants us to see his room,” Zuzana said over her shoulder to Garvie. “To see what the racists have done to it.”

  They went out to the stairs and up to the landing, where Garvie had a sudden and surprising fit of coughing. He clung to the banister, eyes streaming, and Bogdana patted him on the back, talking to Zuzana.

  “She says Zbigniew will get you a drink of water.”

  “It’s okay,” Garvie croaked. “I can get it. I don’t want to make Mr. Gimpel go all the way back downstairs. Tell her”—and he smiled winningly through his coughs—“she’s much too good to me.”

  He left them on the landing, Bogdana watching him go with maternal concern, and went back down to the kitchen, ran the tap briefly, and jogged into the living room, where the desk was.

  It was a tall, old-fashioned piece of furniture with a slatted rolltop. Dark wood polished almost red. The top was locked. Garvie tugged at the handle twice, peered critically at the big old keyhole, and sighed. Fishing a piece of oilcloth from his pocket, he unwrapped the tension wrench and half-diamond pick Felix had loaned him. He put the short end of the wrench into the plug of the lock, prodded the pick in underneath, and felt around with the end of it to find the pins of the lock shift. The rolltop slid up with a softly rhythmic sound and he began to search through the compartments and shelves inside, listening out for noises from the floor above.

  When Garvie and Zuzana left the apartment an hour later, the Gimpels gave them slices of apple cake—szarlotka—to take with them, and said their good-byes wistfully. Bogdana held on to Garvie’s hand, talking in Polish and patting his cheek.

  On their way back through the streets Garvie said nothing for a long time. He seemed barely aware that Zuzana was with him. In the end she took hold of his arm and stopped him on the sidewalk.

  “Now you must explain. You are being funny with me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t trust you. You have been keeping secrets. When you spoke Polish to Bogdana you said something strange. I have realized what it is. You told her Pyotor was genialnym matematyk—an excellent mathematician.”

  “So?”

  “You did not hear me say this. How did you know to say it in Polish?”

  Garvie looked at her a moment. “It’s what Pyotor wanted me to call him when he solved a problem.”

  “Solved a problem?”

  “When I was helping him with his math.”

  She stared at him. “You were the one? The one they talk about in the newspapers? The one they try to find?”

  Garvie shrugged. “I didn’t ask them to look for me.”

  “I did not think you knew Pyotor. But you were with him every week.”

  “It’s not a big deal.”

  She frowned. “Why did you help him?”

  “He was having trouble with vector notation.”

  “Did he ask you for help?”

  “I offered.”

/>   She made a baffled face. “But you do not do things for other people. You do them only for your own amusement. You told me this.”

  “Yeah, well. I made an exception.”

  She thought about this. “Who did you tell about this help?”

  “Why would I tell anyone?”

  “Did your mother know?”

  He looked at her in surprise. “You think I tell my mother what I’m doing?”

  “You kept it secret? She will think you were out drinking and smoking at the kiddies’ playground.”

  He shrugged.

  She clicked her tongue. “You are very strange. Much stranger than Pyotor. Now you tell me properly: What happened when you were with him? What did he talk about? Did he seem upset? Did he say anything suspicious?”

  Garvie held his hand up. “Listen. You’re getting too emotional. It wasn’t like that. We didn’t talk. He did the problems, I showed him where he’d gone wrong, that was it.”

  “But you must have learned something about him.”

  “I learned he wasn’t a fool,” Garvie said shortly.

  He turned then, and they walked along in silence until they had come out of the tree-lined streets, crossed the road to The Plain, and reached the bus stop underneath the tower blocks.

  “Okay,” she said. “Now you tell me what happened in the flat just now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Glass of water! I am not stupid. What were you doing?”

  Garvie took three sheets of paper from his pocket and handed them to her.

  “Where did you get these?”

  “From that desk thing in the living room. Where he did his homework.”

  “It wasn’t locked?”

  “Not for long.”

  “You have stolen them.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re the pages he tore out of his exercise book.”

  “But why did you take them?”

  “Read what he wrote.”

  She read. She put her hand up to her mouth.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” he said.

  “What does it mean?”

  “Obvious, isn’t it? He was practicing.”

  “He was practicing … a confession.”

  “Trying to get it right. Like a legal document. Same thing over and over, see? With variations. Practice runs. Look what he wrote: I, the undersigned, confess … I promise to cease and desist what I have … I, the undersigned, promise to stop … He was trying to get it to sound proper—legal.”

  “He was going to confess … to something bad. Why?”

  “He thought that if you did something wrong you ought to fess up to it and promise not to do it again.”

  “But what had he done?”

  Garvie stayed silent.

  The Five Mile bus appeared at last, and they got on it and went to sit upstairs at the front. Evening sunshine lit up the dusty windowpane in shifting light-filled cloud patterns as they swayed out of the shadow of the towers and back down Cobham Road.

  For a while they said nothing. Then Zuzana said, “You tell me nothing. I will think it for myself and you tell me if I am right.” She took a breath. “Nearly every evening Pyotor went to Jamal’s to play games with Sajid.”

  “Correct.”

  “And while he was there something happened. He saw it.”

  “Correct. But what?”

  “I don’t know. Something bad. Am I right?”

  “Yes. But you’ve got to ask yourself: Bad for who?”

  She thought about that. Her eyes widened. “Bad for Sajid! He saw something bad happening to Sajid. Or going to happen.”

  “Yes. So what would he have done?”

  “He would have tried to stop it. Even if … even if he had to do a bad thing himself.”

  She looked at Garvie, and after a moment he nodded.

  “What would he have done?” she asked.

  He hesitated. “He would have stolen a gun,” he said at last.

  She put her hand on his arm. “The gun they found at the storage facility? It wasn’t Magee’s?”

  “It was Khalid’s.”

  “Pyotor stole it from Khalid. And he put it in his violin case.”

  “And he took it to the storage facility.”

  “And then he … ” She looked at him. “What?”

  “Obviously that’s what we have to find out.”

  “How?”

  He shrugged. “Usual way. Ask someone who knows.”

  “Who?”

  He said nothing. He had said too much.

  He sat there silently as the bus trundled past the Strawberry Hill shops, ignoring her questions.

  “Garvie? You are being funny with me again. Tell me, what is it you are thinking?”

  He was thinking of quadratic equations. Quads can be fiddly. 45x²—74x—55 = 0. 40x²—483x + 36 = 0. That sort of thing. Three coefficients, lots of different permutations. Tricky. You can factorize them, you can graph them; either way it takes a lot of time and you’ve got to be really careful. Or you can forget all that and just use the quadratic formula. The formula solves all quadratic equations stone-cold dead. Not interesting, not elegant, just 100 percent practical. He thought of Pyotor and his violin and Khalid’s gun. He thought of his mother and her dressing gown and her wet face. He thought of Alex and Blinkie and Zuzana’s back door at midnight. He thought of Zuza, and at last he thought of Zuza and him together. All those tricky coefficients, all those fiddly permutations. And he thought of the formula that would solve them all.

  “Don’t want to be rude,” he said, “but I can handle it on my own from here.”

  She stared at him. “No. No, you can’t.”

  “Best you’re not involved, really.”

  “You need me.”

  “In fact, I’m not even sure I can be bothered to take it any further myself. I lose interest in things very easily.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He shrugged.

  She said fiercely, “If I was not here, you would not see the Gimpels; you would not find these papers.”

  He could feel her looking at him hard, an imagined pressure on his face almost as physical as the touch of her hand, but he continued to stare through the window at the road in front.

  “What is it?” she said. “You think you can’t trust me?”

  Now he felt awkward. He didn’t want to think about trust. He said quickly, “It’s not about that, it’s not about Alex or anyone else, it’s about … ” He forgot what it was about, if he had ever known. “… doing my own thing,” he said, immediately wishing he hadn’t.

  The sudden sneezelike noise she made startled him, and he broke his concentration on the road ahead and looked at her in confusion. She was laughing. At him. It was the prettiest laugh he had ever seen. Her nose wrinkled, her eyes scrunched up, her lips parted to show the pink tip of her tongue; she laughed for sheer fun. She laid her head on his shoulder and continued to laugh.

  “What?”

  “So funny. Always to do your own thing. For your own amusement, yes. Like a little boy who just wants to be left alone to play with his toys.”

  He scowled.

  She sneezed with laughter again, holding on to him as if to stop herself falling off the seat. “And why,” she said when she could, looking at him mockingly, “do you talk about Alex?”

  “I didn’t,” he said, remembering at the same time that he had.

  “You think Alex can’t trust me? You think I can’t trust Alex?”

  “No, I—”

  She looked at him suddenly with great seriousness, her eyes black and steady. “Listen. Do not think about Alex. Stop thinking about him, please. For me.”

  When he said nothing, she went on. “I am myself. Do you understand? I am free to do what I need to do.” She took hold of his hand. “Without me you will fail. Believe me.” She lowered her voice. “You think I don’t know what you are like. Pretending always to be s
o cold.” She shook her head. “I know,” she said. “I start to think Pyotor knew.”

  Her face seemed very close to him, and very beautiful, and expressionless, and he had one of those moments in which he could not read her, did not know what she was going to do—argue with him, walk away, or stare him to a pulp.

  “You can trust me,” she said softly. “I will show you how to do this.”

  He got to his feet clumsily. “I’m getting off here.” She held his gaze as he hesitated, her mesmerizing eyes dilated.

  “You agree?”

  At last he shrugged. “All right, then. Not my fault if … ”

  “If what?”

  He looked away from her smile, wincing as if it were a too-bright light. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Good. Tell me what you want me to do.”

  “Remind me how many languages you speak.”

  “Three. Why?”

  “Pick up a six-pack of Special Brew and meet me at midnight outside Jamal’s. And bring a flashlight.”

  Then he was gone, leaping lightly into the stairwell as the bus juddered to a halt at the end of the Bulwarks Lane.

  By moonlight the industrial estate was a mass of silhouettes and shadows. It loomed behind the wire fence like an abandoned city, dark and empty. It had taken them a quarter of an hour to walk down the lane from the sewage plant, where Abdul had dropped them, as far as the main entrance.

  “Not that way,” Garvie said.

  “Why?”

  “CCTV. We’re going round the side. There’s a hole in the fence.”

  A night breeze streamed through the scrub as they found the path and went into the darkness, Zuzana in front of him, a wavering shade tethered to a beam of flashlight, until they reached a wider track rutted with tire marks and went along side by side to the fence, tilted and rucked like an old bedsheet on the other side of a shallow ditch. The hole was a ripple of shadow in the gray fence mesh.

  “Is this it? Garvie?”

  He stood looking at the ground around him, a patch of mud pitted and blurred.

  “Yeah, that’s it. You go. Up the bank on the other side to the road. I just want to check something.”

  She emerged alone from brambles by the storage facility, still packaged in the white canvas rigging of the police cordon, and waited, and a few minutes later Garvie joined her, and they walked down the access road together. Everything around them was silent and still, the dark buildings, the weed-high strips, the unmoving sky, as if they were trespassing on some archaeological remains on a distant star.