Burnt Paper Sky Read online

  ‘OK – I’ll see you then. I’ll be more with it by then, I promise.’

  We said our goodbyes, and they were affectionate enough, but I ended the call feeling a bit cheated, because the conversation hadn’t lifted my spirits the way I’d thought it would.

  At work our priority for the morning was to go and talk to the member of the fantasy role-play group who’d already given some difficulties to the pair of DCs who went to interview him. First thing in the morning checks had thrown up some previous on him, indecent exposure no less, meaning that he’d just shot straight to the top spot on our interview list.

  DCI Fraser stuck to her guns by insisting that she’d like to talk to him herself. ‘We’ll see this young chappie in his home I think, Jim,’ she said. ‘But let’s not book an appointment, eh? We’ll surprise him.’

  It was a long time since I’d been accompanied to an interview by a senior officer, and I tried to fight off the thought that she wanted to keep an eye on me after the balls-up at the press conference. More likely, I hoped, she was living up to her reputation as somebody who liked to stay in touch with the roots of her investigations. She asked Woodley to come along too.

  We took an unmarked pool car. I drove and Fraser studied the stereo, glasses halfway down her nose. Woodley sat in the back, but took the middle seat and leaned forward each time Fraser said anything.

  Fraser asked, ‘Did you see the email from Press Office this morning?’

  ‘I did. Pretty brutal.’

  ‘Indeed. I’m meeting DS Martyn about it at eleven and he’s not going to be a happy bunny.’

  DS Martyn was the officer ultimately overseeing this case, and Fraser’s senior officer. He was never a happy bunny. I waited for her to say more, but she turned on the radio.

  ‘What do you like to listen to, Jim?’ she asked.

  ‘Five Live usually, boss,’ I said. ‘Or Radio Bristol.’

  ‘Those are very pedestrian choices,’ she said. ‘How about a little culture? Have you ever heard of culture, DC Woodley?’

  ‘I played the recorder at school,’ he said.

  I glanced in my rear-view mirror; he had a deadpan expression, hard to know if he was taking the piss. Fraser looked amused. She put on a classical music station, turned up the volume.

  ‘I would have had you down for a Radio Four listener, boss,’ I said.

  ‘No, no. There’s far too much danger of hearing one of our pals from Scotland Yard crucifying himself and the entire force on Radio Four. I like to avoid that if I possibly can.’

  She leaned her head back on the headrest and when I glanced at her as we stopped at traffic lights, she had her eyes closed.

  We turned up at the address at 09.00. Our man lived in a basement flat, in a shabby street in Cotham. From the looks of it, the street was mostly student flats, which had been carved out of a terrace of tall flat-fronted Victorian buildings. The Bath stone facades had probably been attractive once, but were now dirty and cracked in places. Not a single building looked well looked after. Wheelie bins littered the pavements or were crammed into the tiny areas that fronted the street. Most of them were disgorging overstuffed black bin liners. In front of our man’s property, a bin for food waste had tipped over and deposited its rank contents on the threshold.

  ‘Not a proud household then,’ said Fraser, stepping carefully around the muck in a pair of little heels.

  We had to repeatedly press the buzzer to get an answer. Our man eventually buzzed us in through the communal door and we waited in the hallway for him to appear. Fraser flicked through the post that had been dumped on a communal table. Food delivery flyers littered the floor, and these, together with Fraser’s shoes and lipstick, were the only sources of colour in the drab space. The light was on a timer and clicked off just as he inched open the door to the basement.

  ‘Edward Fount?’ asked Fraser.

  He nodded. Fraser introduced us. We produced our badges and he squinted at each one in turn. He was a slight man, with very pale skin and hair so black that it must have come out of a bottle. It fell in greasy tendrils around his face and made him look feminine.

  He lived alone apparently. There were only three rooms: his bedroom, a corridor that was pretending to be a kitchen, and a room that must have been a bathroom if the smell coming from it was anything to go by.

  ‘They don’t like him,’ Fraser had told Woodley and me before we left. ‘The organisers of the fantasy meetings – the ones we’ve spoken to – are wary of this boy. He’s a new member, and they don’t know him well. And, on top of that, nobody saw him leave the woods on Sunday. Some of them say that he doesn’t play by the rules, which is a cardinal sin in role-play apparently. Some of them complained that he’s dirty too.’

  He was dirty. His body odour was powerful even before we stepped into his squalid bedroom, which had only one small window through which you could see a small section of the back yard: all concrete and the winter carcasses of rampant self-seeded buddleia plants.

  The bed was a single, with bedding on it that had probably never visited a launderette. A desk, roughly constructed from bits of MDF, was the centrepiece of the room. It had a PC on it, and a dusty iPod dock, which cradled his phone. Music was playing: Celtic sounding, the lyrics in German. It wasn’t mainstream. The walls were covered with posters and artworks depicting dark and bloody fantasy worlds.

  Edward Fount sat down on the side of his bed and was unafraid to study us intently from behind his fringe. Fraser took the computer chair, adjusting it for wobble before she settled on it, crossing her legs. I saw Fount’s eyes run down her calves and linger on her shoes, which were a dark maroon patent leather. Woodley and I stood against the wall. There weren’t more than a few feet between us all.

  ‘Does that window open?’ said Fraser.

  Fount shook his head. ‘It’s painted shut. Doesn’t matter, it’s always cold down here anyway.’

  ‘You need ventilation,’ she said, ‘or you’ll get sick.’

  ‘I take vitamins,’ he said. A feeble gesture indicated a tube of Vitamin C tablets on his desk, beside a warped black plastic tray with the remains of a microwaved meal in it.

  ‘Well that’s good,’ said Fraser. ‘It’s important to take care of yourself.’

  Fount nodded.

  ‘Especially, I’d say,’ she continued, ‘when you are out doing battle every weekend. Would I be right?’

  ‘Not every weekend,’ he said. ‘Once a month. And it’s not always a battle. It’s a narrative, a storyline we enact.’

  ‘Narrative’s a very grown-up word Mr Fount and so is enact. I’m impressed. So tell me, what character do you play in these “narratives”? I understand you all develop roles for yourselves, would that be right?’

  ‘I’m an Assassin,’ he said. He knew she was toying with him now, there was nothing stupid behind those furtive eyes, but still he couldn’t disguise the pride in his words.

  ‘Uh-huh. And would Assassin be an important role in the game?’

  ‘Very. It’s very, very important. The Assassins lie in the shadows, they watch, they wait, they know secrets.’

  ‘Do they now?’

  He nodded, his chin up, trying to assert confidence.

  ‘And would an Assassin have a lot of power?’ Her voice lingered mockingly on the sibilants.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would an Assassin be a match for a big man like, say, DI Clemo here?’

  ‘Assassins have their methods. They’re afraid of nobody and everybody fears them.’

  ‘That’s very clever. Good for you. By the way, are you not curious to know why we’re here?’

  ‘Is it because of the boy who went missing?’

  ‘You’ve shown a remarkable lack of interest. Why is that?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me. I didn’t see anything.’

  ‘What happened to Benedict Finch wouldn’t be one of your secrets then?’

  ‘I never tell my secrets.’

  �
�And why’s that?’

  ‘Because they’re secret.’ He laughed, a quick, high-pitched sound, a fish gulping air.

  ‘Or is it perhaps because you’re ashamed of them? You have a previous conviction for exposing yourself, don’t you? I can understand why you’d like to keep something like that under your hat, or should I say under your Assassin’s cape? Probably wise.’

  ‘I never did it.’

  ‘That’s not what two little girls who were trying to play a nice game of tennis said. How old do you think they were? I’ll tell you. They were eleven years old, and their nice game was interrupted by you sticking your wee tadger through the netting around the court, was it not?’

  ‘It’s not how it was. I promise.’

  Fraser leaned forward, fixing her gaze on Fount. ‘Did you see Benedict Finch in the woods on Sunday afternoon?’

  Fount shuffled his backside across the bed until he was sitting with his back against the wall. He had a sharp Adam’s apple and angry ingrown hairs along his jawline. He said nothing, but there was defiance in his expression.

  ‘So did you?’ asked Fraser. ‘See Benedict Finch in the woods on Sunday afternoon?’ She hadn’t looked away from him.

  Fount crossed his arms. ‘I only answer to the authorities of my kingdom,’ he said.

  Fraser snorted. ‘You’ve got three authorities in the room with you now, how much more authority do you want?’

  ‘I only answer to the authorities of my kingdom.’

  ‘How about: how did you get home from the woods on Sunday? Nobody saw you after three o’clock.’

  ‘You don’t understand. I inhabit the Kingdom of Isthcar. I recognise the Isthcarian authorities only. Assassins answer only to the Knights of Isthcar, the Holders of the Hammer of Hisuth.’

  ‘What? What nonsense is that? You’ll answer to us. Let me tell you something, you’d better grow up, young man, and you’d better do it quickly. We’re investigating the disappearance of a child here. There are two facts we can’t ignore: you were there, and you’ve got previous.’

  She stared at him until his eyes dropped. He picked at a frayed hole on the knee of his jeans.

  ‘Can you tell us anything about what you saw?’ I asked, inserting my words carefully into the stalemate that was brewing, although I felt like wringing his scrawny neck. ‘It would be very helpful.’

  Fount closed down his face. He wasn’t going to talk.

  ‘If I find out later that you know something that could help in the investigation, and you’re not telling us, then you’ll pay for that,’ said Fraser. She got to her feet. ‘Have no doubt about that. Right, we’re finished here for now, but we’re certainly not finished with you.’

  ‘You can see yourselves out,’ said Fount, to Fraser’s back. There was a hint of a smirk on his face. We paused at the bottom of the stairs when we realised Woodley wasn’t behind us. He’d waited in the doorway of the room.

  ‘Isthcar,’ he said to Fount. ‘Isn’t that an ancient tribe? From Nordic mythology?’

  ‘The finest tribe,’ said Fount. ‘The most noble.’

  ‘It sounds fascinating. Is the game very complex?’ Woodley sounded impressed.

  ‘To play properly, there’s a lot you have to understand.’

  ‘Awesome,’ said Woodley. He said it simply, his voice light. ‘See you again maybe.’ He nodded at Fount, a man-to-man gesture.

  ‘Bye,’ Fount said to him.

  ‘What a prick,’ said Fraser. ‘It’s meeting pricks like that that makes me actually look forward to getting back to my desk.’

  I knew that wasn’t true. However high she’d climbed, at heart she was a street cop through and through.

  We were in the car. Woodley and I had pulled on our seat belts, we were ready to leave; Fraser was taking a few moments to rage. ‘I bet he wishes he was still sucking at his mammy’s breast. What do you reckon?’

  ‘I think we need to be careful. He’s almost too much of a cliché, he looks so good for it on paper. Young, single male, all of that. But I think we need to be careful not to make assumptions about him.’

  She ignored me. ‘You know as well as I do that if there’s a cliché there’s usually a good reason for it. Christ! That little prick’s given me a headache with his skanky flat and his self-obsessed, smug little bucket and spade ideology. He needs to get out of the sandpit and get into the real world. Knights of Isthcar, what’s that about when it’s at home?’

  She sighed. She looked tired. She was putting in the hours this week, just like everyone else.

  ‘I suppose it makes a change from asking for a lawyer. I feel like I’ve got something in my eye, have I got something in my eye?’ Fraser pulled down the mirror and pulled down an eyelid.

  ‘I don’t think he did it,’ I said.

  She flicked the mirror back up brusquely.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I agree that he looks good for it on paper, but he couldn’t take his eyes off your legs in there, and your…⁠’ I felt shy suddenly.

  ‘My what, DI Clemo?’

  ‘Your shoes, your red shoes.’

  ‘Oh right. Well, for a moment there I thought you were going to say something else.’

  Woodley snorted from the back seat and then tried to turn it into a cough.

  ‘So what’s your point, Jim?’

  ‘My point is that somebody interested in children is not usually interested in women, especially not in a fetishistic way. He couldn’t take his eyes off the red shoes. I was watching him.’

  ‘I still want him brought into the station. We can’t possibly rule him out because he looked at my shoes. You know that as well as I do. Woodley, I saw what you did at the end there. Very smart. When we bring him in, I want you to interview him and get to the bottom of his dirty little mind whichever way it bends.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’ I could hear the sound of a grin in Woodley’s voice.

  ‘I’m not your “ma’am”,’ she said. ‘“Boss” will do. Right, come on, Jim, what are we waiting for?’

  RACHEL

  Halfway through the morning Nicky announced, ‘I’ve spoken to John. He wants us to go round to his house so we can agree together on a design for a “Missing” flyer, and print some there. He’s got a laser printer.’

  I’d never been to John and Katrina’s new house. Not past the front door anyway. I’d spent plenty of time standing on the gravel outside when I’d dropped Ben off for the weekend.

  ‘Will Katrina be there?’

  ‘I expect so, yes, but at this point I think you need to think of her as another pair of hands. She wants to help and we need all the help we can get.’

  I thought of the blog and the comments I’d read this morning.

  ‘Any port in a storm?’ I said.

  ‘Exactly!’ she said, and she smiled just a little.

  It pleased Nicky when I said that because it’s what our Aunt Esther used to say. ‘You’d been through a storm,’ she would say if we ever discussed the circumstances that had led us to live with her. ‘A terrible storm, and I was your port.’

  ‘A safe haven,’ Nicky would say and Esther would agree.

  Esther had taken us in after our parents’ death. She was our mother’s much older sister. She brought us to her house immediately after the accident that killed our parents and we never left after that. She sheltered us from gossip, which sometimes hung around us like a cloud of biting midges. She gave us the chance to have a childhood, or her version of one.

  It wasn’t a usual upbringing, because Esther was a spinster, who’d always lived alone. She taught English Literature A level to the children of the local wealthy at a small private school and could quote a huge amount of poetry by heart. She also played bridge and had a passion for growing roses. She wore knee-length skirts and flat shoes, with simple cardigans, and had bobbed flyaway white hair that she clipped back with kirby grips. She kept gold-topped milk in the fridge, which the birds had invariably pecked at before she brou
ght it in in the morning, so each lid had neat puncture marks in it when it arrived on the breakfast table.

  I don’t think Esther was a naturally maternal figure. She was unaccustomed to young children apart from a regular annual visit she’d made to our family before our parents died, so when Nicky and I arrived suddenly in her life she treated us as miniature adults, and shared her passions with us. She surrounded us with art and music and books, she pointed out the possibility of beauty in life. Nicky drank this up as if it were nectar, and fell into Esther’s arms gratefully.

  I was different. When I was growing up I always felt like the baby that I’d been when we arrived there, a bit of an addendum to their lives, too little to understand things properly, always in bed when the proper conversations took place. It was ironic, as I’d never known our mother or father, that I was the one who found it most difficult to accept Esther in her role in loco parentis, while Nicky, nine years old when we arrived, wouldn’t leave her side.

  As a teenager I’d meanly thought that Esther was fusty, tweedy and better suited to another era, more like other people’s grandparents than their parents. I’d rejected her gentle offerings of culture and knowledge because they hadn’t immediately bolstered me, or given me an obvious direction or purpose. That came later in life, when I took up photography, when I sat beside John in St George’s concert hall and fell in love with him and with classical music, and then I regretted that I’d never thanked her for what she did for us before she died.

  It was because things hadn’t always been easy when we were growing up that it pleased Nicky whenever I said a kind word about Esther. It pleased her immensely.

  I agreed to go to John’s house. Laura came round to housesit because I still couldn’t stand to leave it empty. Just in case. Nicky and I had to fight through the journalists to get to Nicky’s car. They jostled us, shouted questions at us. We ignored them, but the questions hurt. They were aggressive, and accusatory. Some of the photographers ran alongside the car as we pulled away, lenses at the windows, snapping away at our white, scared faces.