Kid Alone Page 4

  Singh glanced sideways, nodded briefly.

  “But you came down here to investigate. Must have seen lights on or something.”

  Singh said nothing.

  “You found Gimpel downstairs, and got hold of Magee up there?”

  Silence.

  “Come on, man. You can at least describe the layout for me. I could find that out anywhere.”

  Singh sighed. “There’s a lobby through the entrance, a room behind that, and then the corridor to the storage facility units.”

  “One of which is owned by Magee.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Why would they meet in a place he didn’t have access to? He wouldn’t want to waste time finding the alarm control panel or mucking about with thin card or sticky-tack, would he?”

  Singh looked at him, nodded at last. “You’re right.”

  “And is that where you found Gimpel? In his storage unit?”

  “Pyotor was in the communal room behind the lobby.”

  “To which any of the storage unit owners had access?”

  “Yes.”

  “What sort of people are they, the storage unit owners?”

  Singh hesitated and closed his mouth.

  “Doesn’t matter. Easy to find out. Not the very rich. Small traders, I’m guessing. Mechanics, shopkeepers, parts dealers, that sort of thing. What about upstairs?”

  “It’s not used. Condemned, actually. The whole place should have been pulled down years ago.”

  “So what’s up there?”

  “Nothing at all. Just rubbish.”

  “And an armed maniac called Martin Magee.”

  “Actually … ” Singh fell silent.

  “Come on. Keep going. You were doing so well.”

  “Enough now, Garvie. Stop with these silly tricks. I’m not saying any more.”

  “You might as well. This is the exciting bit. Detective Inspector finds murdered boy, legs it upstairs, and overcomes the killer. It’s a straight-up case, isn’t it? There’s even a witness saw Magee dragging the boy in there.”

  Singh said nothing.

  “All right, tell me this. Was Gimpel’s gun loaded?”

  Singh’s eyes flicked onto Garvie and off again.

  “Course it was. He was a very thorough boy. But that’s the odd thing, isn’t it? That’s the whole difficulty right there.”

  “What is?”

  “Gimpel was armed, but the person who’s meant to have shot him wasn’t. Magee wasn’t armed at all, as you were about to tell me.”

  Singh stared at him in silence. “This is ridiculous. You’re just making assumptions. Besides,” he added, “we haven’t got all the forensics back yet. We don’t know the facts ourselves.”

  “I’m just making the obvious deductions. Which is what you’ll have been doing yourself.”

  Singh said nothing.

  Garvie went on. “If the gun was Magee’s, he’d have been charged straightaway, and he hasn’t been. You’re still looking for the murder weapon, aren’t you? That’s what all this is about.” He gestured at the cordoned-off area. “And I don’t suppose your witness is very reliable, either,” Garvie said. “Those vagrants drink too much.”

  Now Singh sighed. “We’re going to have to release the information, so I suppose it doesn’t matter if I tell you. He swears he heard the boy talking in Polish, but he can’t identify Polish from any other language. He says the boy was wearing the Marsh Academy uniform, but he never describes it the same way twice. He’s even confused about whether he heard the shots before or after he saw them in the street.” He clicked his tongue. “It’s very frustrating.”

  “There you go, then. You need my help.”

  “You can’t help me, Garvie.” He corrected himself. “I will not allow you to help me.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why. Because I won’t put you at risk.”

  “That it? Anything else?”

  “Yes. Because I don’t trust you.”

  Garvie said nothing.

  “Listen to me,” Singh said. “You lie to people. You do what you like. Wherever you go, you cause chaos. If I allowed you to get involved in a high-security case like this, I would have to answer for you. Why would I take that risk?”

  Garvie said nothing.

  “Tell me,” Singh said. “Why should I trust you?”

  Garvie thought. “I can’t think of any rational reason.” He thought further. “No, none.” He looked at Singh. “Do it anyway.”

  Singh looked at him. He said softly, “What do you even know about trust?”

  Garvie had no answer.

  Singh pondered. “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  Singh nodded. “When I was sixteen, I took amrit, the Sikh vows. Making my commitments. Before the ceremony I asked my father what I would get in return. He laughed. It wasn’t a purchase, he said. It was a leap of faith. It was a dedication. Five years later I entered the force, I took on the police code. I dedicated myself to the service. It’s not what you get for yourself, Garvie, it’s what you give.”

  He looked at the boy hard, but Garvie’s face was blank. A memory came to Singh, a stubborn boy standing silently in front of his guru on a ground of orange dust under a blue sky. A boy who hadn’t always done what he was told. Frowning, he shook his head. “Anyway, I won’t do it.”

  Garvie said, “Listen, you’ve got to stop being emotional about it. It’s in your best interests to trust me. I’m just being logical.”

  Now Singh turned angrily in his seat. “In my best interests? I trusted you last time. And look at me now!”

  Garvie said nothing.

  “Don’t you understand?” Singh said. “Why do you think you saw me in the patrol car last night? Why is Inspector Dowell leading this investigation, not me? I’ve been disciplined, Garvie. Because of you. All the things that happened after you got involved in the investigation into Chloe Dow’s death, all the irregularities, the mess that you caused, they all were used against me. You made enemies of the top people, and they couldn’t punish you, so they punished me. I’m the only detective inspector in the service doing night shifts. What do you say to that?”

  Garvie said nothing to it. He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and scribbled on the back of it. “Here.”

  “What’s this now?”

  “My number. Call me if you need help.”

  Singh snorted. “Well, I’m not giving you mine.”

  “No need. You gave me your card before; it’s easy enough to remember: City Police Child Helpline, 01632 960951, Police Child Protection Program, City Squad Police Center, Service House, 30 Cornwallis Way.”

  Singh controlled himself. “The problem with you, Garvie, is you don’t know how to think. The issue here isn’t memory or logic. It’s trust. You can’t put that in one of your mathematical equations.”

  Garvie shrugged. He got out of the car, shut the door, and tapped on the window.

  Sighing, Singh wound it down. “What now?”

  “I’ll give you something for free. Just so you know you could have trusted me. You’re overlooking the most important thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “His violin.”

  “His violin?!”

  “Yeah. His gun must have been in the case. So where was his violin? That’s the question you should be asking yourself.”

  Singh wound up the window. Through it he watched Garvie Smith walk away through the late morning sunshine and shadows. Then he closed his eyes and rested his fingertips against the lids.

  In the kitchen of Flat 12 Eastwick Gardens, Garvie’s mother sat facing him.

  She said, “You don’t care, do you, Garvie? That’s the truth.”

  The principal feature of the kitchen was a steamed-up window. Some of the steam extended beyond the kitchen into the main room, which contained two easy chairs, a sofa covered in a red cotton throw piled up with big green cushions, and in the fireplace a small gr
oup of papier-mâché sculptures of women dressed in yellow-and-orange shawls, brought over from Barbados, where Garvie’s mother grew up.

  “You don’t even think. Do you?”

  The secondary feature of the kitchen was the spicy-hot smell of Bajan fish stew. Uncle Len and Aunt Maxie and their toddler son, Bojo, were coming for supper.

  “You don’t care what happens to you, you don’t think about your future, you don’t … Look at me, Garvie, when I’m talking to you. I’m right here. Don’t ignore me.”

  Garvie’s mother was rarely ignored. She had a voice like a reversing truck. Ever since Garvie’s father went back to Scotland—just after Garvie was born—she’d been sole carer, like thousands of other single mothers, only bigger and louder.

  “Well?”

  He blinked and stirred slightly, as if until that moment he’d been asleep with his eyes open. “Well what?”

  “I’m asking you. How did it go?”

  “Fine.”

  “Which subject was it?”

  “Biology. I think.”

  “Biology? Even I know biology’s next week.”

  “History, then.”

  His mother’s eyes narrowed and her voice thickened dangerously. “You took an exam this afternoon, and you don’t even remember what it was?”

  “Now I think about it, maybe it was geog.”

  “You did take an exam, right?”

  “You can call the school and check.”

  “I already did. Written French is what it was. According to Miss Perkins, you turned up ten minutes late and agitated to leave half an hour early.”

  “Oh yeah. I remember now. I’d finished.”

  “Used up all your French, had you?”

  As she spoke, the door buzzer went, and Garvie got up to let his aunt and uncle in downstairs. When he turned back, his mother was still glaring at him.

  He said sweetly, “Do you want me to give the coo-coo a stir? You know Uncle Len doesn’t like it overdone.”

  Garvie’s mother contemplated this with the sort of expression people usually reserve for junk mail stamped Congratulations. “All right, then,” she said at last. “But this conversation isn’t over, Garvie. Later.”

  Uncle Len, senior pathologist for City Police, was a large man with a genial, crumpled look magnified by bifocals. His colleagues knew him as steady and dependable, sometimes inconveniently vocal about police failings. Away from work, he liked to wear Hawaiian shirts, listen to calypso, and drink rum punch. Late in life he had married the much smaller, much younger Maxine, also from Barbados, a social worker with a flair for fashion, and shortly after that Bojo had arrived, now three years old, a velvety sphere of smooth black skin and dimples, with an inexplicable fondness for his “uncle” Garvie, and in fact the only member of Garvie’s family who wasn’t always on his case.

  In the kitchen Garvie mixed his uncle a rum punch.

  “How was the exam this afternoon, Garvie?”

  “Good. Written French. C’était bon. That’s French. At least I think it is. How’s the Gimpel case?”

  “You know I can’t talk about police work. And his name, by the way, was Pyotor.”

  “You were there yesterday morning.”

  “That’s just a guess, I assume. You would have been in school.”

  “And you’ll have done the preliminary autopsy by now. I guess.”

  Uncle Len said nothing, tasted his rum punch, nodded his approval.

  “So you know the cause, mechanism, and manner of death.”

  “Which I can’t divulge.”

  “Cause, gunshot wounds to the chest.”

  Uncle Len was silent.

  “Mechanism, blood loss. Not sure what the technical term is.”

  “Exsanguination,” Uncle Len said before he could stop himself. “Damn.”

  “And manner, of course, homicide.”

  Uncle Len peered enormously at Garvie through his bifocals. “I know what you’re at. You get nothing more out of me.”

  “That’s all right. I was just wondering, though. There are two main questions, aren’t there? Where did Pyotor get his gun from, and where did his violin get to?”

  For some time Uncle Len stared at Garvie, and Garvie stared sweetly back.

  “I know what you’re doing,” Uncle Len said at last. “You think it’s like Chloe’s murder. You think you can get involved, stir things up, annoy the police.”

  “It’s not my fault if the police really need my help.”

  “Listen to me, Garvie. I don’t say the service doesn’t sometimes need help. I don’t dismiss what you did last time, either—some of what you did, anyway. You’re smart, and you showed it. But Pyotor isn’t Chloe. You weren’t Pyotor’s friend, were you? You’ve no reason to involve yourself. If you want to show how smart you are, I suggest you concentrate on passing your exams. You know how much that would please your mother.”

  Garvie looked properly concerned. “I’m sure you’re right, Uncle Len. Thanks.”

  “Besides,” his uncle went on, “this isn’t a case you want to get mixed up in. It’s going to be a lot trickier than people are expecting.”

  “Because that knobhead Dowell’s in charge?”

  Momentarily Uncle Len’s face betrayed his feelings about the knobhead Dowell, but he controlled himself. “I’ve got nothing to say about that man. Nor about what’s happening to Raminder, which is an absolute disgrace if you want my view. No, I mean that there are all sorts of things going to get stirred up here. Racial things. I’m thinking of the Polish community and the feeling there is here against them. You know the issues as well as I do. Half a million Poles arriving here in the last five years looking for work has caused a backlash. There have been some genuine issues, no doubt. But too many people have got it into their heads that the Poles are to blame for everything.”

  “So don’t you think the police need some help?”

  “Not from you. Anyway, luckily you don’t speak Polish.”

  Garvie frowned. “True. Still, I’d be interested to know, just out of curiosity, if Pyotor’s gun had been fired or not.” He looked sweetly at his uncle.

  For some time Uncle Len was silent. He said at last, “You like technical information, don’t you, Garvie?”

  Garvie thought about this. “Some,” he said at last, warily.

  “Okay, then. This is what happened. It’s all you need to know about Pyotor’s death. Four high-velocity bullets entered the right side of his chest between the second and fifth ribs, tearing through the pectoralis major, causing cavitation, shearing, and compression through all the soft tissue they encountered, penetrating the superior, middle, and inferior lobes of his right lung and crushing the thoracic section of his spine before exiting through the latissimus dorsi muscle in his back. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  Garvie was silent.

  “I’m telling you that Pyotor Gimpel was a boy with a body exactly like yours. That his body was ripped apart by someone firing bullets into it. That he suffered and died. Okay?”

  Garvie nodded.

  “Okay, then. Now I’ll have another of those rum punches that you make so well.”

  After Uncle Len and Aunt Maxie had gone, and Bojo with them, Garvie’s mother sat alone on the sofa with a last drink, staring into the fireplace. Calypso was playing low on the stereo. Garvie was in his room, finally doing some studying. She sipped her drink and sighed as she thought about her son. When, many years earlier, she’d been informed that he had the highest IQ ever registered in the country, she’d been, among other things, worried. She’d heard that abnormally clever children often find it hard to make friends with “ordinary” kids, that they put themselves under pressure to make unfeasibly quick intellectual progress, and are prone to develop obsessions with their academic subjects. She choked slightly on her drink. Probably half of Garvie’s friends couldn’t even spell their own names. His ambition at school had been to avoid intellectual progress at all costs. His obsessio
ns ran to loafing around, staring into space, and, lately, smoking that stuff. The only sensible thing for him to do was stay on at school to study math, but to do that he had to pass at least five of his eleven exams, which he seemed to prefer to fail or avoid altogether.

  She cocked her head and listened. Silence from his room. Perhaps, she thought, he really was studying. On the other hand, he might just have fallen asleep—though in fact he didn’t sleep much, just lay on his bed staring up at the ceiling. An odd boy. It was extraordinary how much of a stranger he had become to her. There were people who found him charming, she knew. His uncle, who ought to be stricter. Girls. There was something unusual about Garvie that appealed to them: the slouch, maybe, or the wisecracks, the rudeness even, or the mixed-race combination of coppery skin and blue eyes. But to his own mother he was an enigma. Could she even trust him anymore?

  She listened intently to the silence from his room. Perhaps she should give him the benefit of the doubt after all. The business with Chloe Dow had irritated the hell out of her, it was true, but there was a part of her that felt proud of him. She knew his attitude was mostly for show. He hid himself out of his own pride. With a little rush of tenderness, blinking, she remembered him when he was young, warmer and more open, a delicate child with a sunny smile, quick to show his feelings, his happiness and his fear, laughing at his uncle, quietly holding on to her hand as they passed a dog in the street, his little phobia. In those less complicated days he knew he needed her. Now he pretended he didn’t—and she no longer knew him. She listened to the silence from his room as she finished her drink. Perhaps he was studying after all. Getting to her feet, she went quietly over to his bedroom door and peered in.

  He was lying on his back on his bed with his phone up to his ear, grinning and whispering. “Alex, mate,” he was saying. “Yeah, good, thanks. Thursday, yeah? Usual place, usual time?”

  His mother stepped through the doorway and positioned herself solidly in a way that suggested she was filling her lungs. Without showing any sign that he’d seen her, Garvie quietly put his phone in his pocket and put on an air of studied innocence.