Kid Got Shot E-Book

Simon Mason

• Herausgeber: David Fickling Books
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Serie: The Garvie Smith Mysteries
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 408

Beschreibung

It's exam season - but Five Mile is in shock. A teenage boy was shot last night, with no clear motive and no clues.Garvie Smith - reprobate, genius and waster - was just getting down to a spot of revision. But he knows he's the only one who has any idea where to look for the answers. Starting with his best friend's girlfriend.Exams. What exams?

Leseprobe

Only your actions shall go with you

– Guru Granth

Contents

Title PageEpigraph1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344454647484950515253AcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorAlso by Simon MasonCopyright

1

The others were already there, waiting in the darkness, and Garvie Smith went through the park gate and across the slippery grass towards them. Haphazardly arranged on the tiny swings and miniature roundabout of the Old Ditch Road kiddies’ playground, dim, low-slung and damp, Smudge, Felix, Dani and Tiger raised hands and touched knuckles with him, one by one, and he settled down among them, yawning.

Smudge looked at him. ‘What you got for us, big shot?’

Garvie shook his head.

‘What, not even the Rizlas?’

‘Next time.’

‘Next time! Might not be a next time, mate. The world’s a strange and uncertain place. Who knows what’s going to happen in the future?’

Garvie looked at him; yawned again. ‘We all know, Smudge. Nothing, that’s what. And, if we’re not that lucky, maybe a bit less than nothing.’

He took out his Benson & Hedges and offered them round, and Smudge passed him the almost-empty half-bottle of Glen’s cheapest and the sherbet lemons, and they sat there smoking, drinking, sucking sweets and grumbling.

Ten o’clock on a Friday evening in Five Mile. The wind getting up, drizzle, a few smokes and a bit of banter before the cop car came by to chuck them off.

Half an hour passed.

Smudge had another go. ‘Come on, Garv, you haven’t said hardly nothing since you got here. Anyone’d think you were fretting about your exams.’

No one who knew anything about him would think Garvie was fretting about his exams; he was not only the boredest but also the laziest boy in the history of Marsh Academy, perhaps of the whole city, or even the whole history of boys anywhere. Slacker Smith, all brain and no energy, the despair of his school. Black-haired, blue-eyed and sixteen years old, sloppy in slouch jeans, hooded sweatshirt and broken-down high tops, he sat on his stamped-metal circus horse with a cigarette dangling out of the corner of his beautiful mouth, rocking gently, breathing out smoke, gazing in quiet boredom across the black grass towards the city lights downtown. The truth was, exams didn’t bother him. What bothered him was the people who talked about them. His mother, for instance. Uncle Len. Miss Perkins, Marsh Academy’s principal enforcer. A few weeks earlier, as a result of some bother with the police, during which, through no fault of his own, he’d missed a good deal of school work, he’d been officially assured that his exams would be deferred – only for the school to decide a few days later that he’d be sitting them anyway. He would sit his exams as scheduled, Miss Perkins had told him, he would fulfil his potential as required, he would at long last show the world the abilities of a boy with a certified record IQ and famous photographic memory. Only he wouldn’t. He didn’t like Miss Perkins. He didn’t like the world either and he wasn’t going to do anything for it. What had it ever done for him?

‘So what’s your problem?’ Smudge asked.

‘Nothing,’ Garvie said. ‘Or a bit less.’

A disturbance came from down Old Ditch Road, a bass bumping noise shaking the ground. After a moment a car appeared alongside the hedge that divided the park from the street and came to a throbbing, brightly lit standstill by the park gate a few metres away, a tall black Cadillac Escalade Platinum with limo tint windows and Lexani wheels in electric egg-yolk yellow, hi-vision headlamps pulsing, coloured light panels racing like lasers along the roof. It fumed with music for twenty, thirty beats and suddenly fell silent. Transfixed, the boys stared at it as the nearside back window slid down with a thin whine and a face appeared, grinning and blinking. Smudge let out a small burp of fear.

The face looked at Garvie.

‘Got a light for me, boy?’ A hoarse, whispery voice.

Garvie looked back, puffing smoke, thinking about it. ‘No,’ he said at last.

Smudge stifled a moan.

The back door swung open and a short, skinny guy stepped out and stood there. He was wearing a black leather jacket over an outsized retro tracksuit in turquoise and a Dirty Rat swag hat, and his glasses flashed in the streetlight as his head bobbed, idiot eyes blinking big and slow. He was no longer grinning.

‘You got a light,’ he said, nodding towards Garvie’s cigarette.

Garvie took a long drag on his Benson & Hedges, dropped it and ground it out with the heel of his shoe.

‘No, I haven’t,’ he said.

Smudge groped hastily in his pocket for matches and made a few faltering squeaks, but fell silent as more car doors opened and two men in matching vests got out. They were big men, blank-faced behind shades, and they stood in the road as if waiting for instructions.

Blinkie grinned again. He was a fool. Everything about him was idiotic: his gangster outfit, monster bling, dental grille, those enormous, inhuman eyes. His teeth were too big for his mouth. He was the only white man in Five Mile with cornrows. But he was a fool no one laughed at. People were very careful around Blinkie. He was what was commonly known as ‘a bit psycho’.

The street was quiet for a moment, no sound but a car on the other side of the park. Blinkie looked at his watch.

‘Shouldn’t you be in bed, boy?’ he said to Garvie.

‘Shouldn’t you be in prison?’ Garvie said.

Smudge flinched so hard he almost fell off the swings, and Blinkie stopped grinning. He took a step towards Garvie, and one of the men behind him leaned forward and muttered something, and he hesitated and glanced down the road.

He looked back at Garvie. ‘Know what I like?’ he whispered.

Garvie shrugged. ‘I’m guessing it’s not normal clothes. Or mirrors.’

‘Fun,’ Blinkie said. ‘So I’ll be seeing you.’

He slipped back into the car, the door closed with a satisfyingly shushy clunk, the music pumped out again and the rocking car slid away down Old Ditch Road like a fairground ride.

Garvie got to his feet and sauntered towards the gate after it, and Smudge and Felix called after him, anxious as baby birds.

‘What you doing now? Are you insane? What if he comes back?’

‘Relax. He’s not coming back.’

‘How do you know?’

Garvie reached the gate as the squad car drew up with its lights turned down low, and he went up to it and tapped on the window.

The window came down and a policeman in a bullet-proof turban looked out, and Garvie looked at him in surprise for a moment.

‘You’ve just missed them,’ he said. ‘They went that way,’ he added.

Detective Inspector Singh made no reaction. He said, ‘What are you and your friends doing here?’

Garvie said, ‘What are you doing here, on the night shift? It’s usually Constable Jones here who comes along to move us on.’

Jones, the driver, scowled, but Singh simply asked again, ‘What are you doing in the park?’

‘Swings, mainly. Sometimes we go on the roundabout.’

Singh waited patiently.

‘OK, you’ve got me,’ Garvie said. ‘Smoking, drinking, occasionally doing drugs.’ He stretched his arms out wide. ‘Do you want to search me?’

Constable Jones made a move to get out of the car, and Singh put a hand on his arm to stop him.

To Garvie he said, ‘Go home, Garvie, and tell your friends to go home too.’

The window went up, and the squad car pulled away, and Garvie stood there a moment thoughtfully, before returning to the playground.

‘That was lucky,’ Smudge said. ‘Plod turning up just in time to scare Blinkie off. Thought you’d successfully killed yourself, talking like that.’

‘You need to check your watch, Smudge. Half ten. That’s the time Plod usually turns up.’

‘Not always, mate. Not always at this time neither.’

Garvie shook his head. ‘Ignore the noise, Smudge. Find the signal.’

‘What signal?’

‘Plod shows up, what, four times a week? Weekdays it’s half past, Saturdays eleven, Sundays he doesn’t come. That’s a two in three chance of him turning up exactly when he did.’

‘Yeah, but …’ Smudge fell silent.

‘Also,’ Garvie said, ‘proves I’m not stoned.’

‘Does it?’

‘I know it’s Friday. If all I knew was it wasn’t Sunday, it’d be one in two, wouldn’t it? If I was so out of it I didn’t know what day of the week it was, it’d be three in seven. But I’m not stoned, so I get better odds.’

Smudge said warily, ‘Well, if you put it like that …’

‘Besides,’ Garvie said, ‘I saw the car on the other side of the park before it arrived.’

Nodding, he left them there and walked back to the gate, out into Bulwarks Lane and along Pilkington Driftway, homeward.

The wind had picked up. Clouds tore themselves to pieces and tossed the bits across the dark sky, wire fences chattered as he went past, litter scudding across the road. The flats at Eastwick Gardens were dim in the darkness. Garvie let himself into the lobby, retrieved the book he’d left under the stairwell, Modern World History Student Book, and went up the stairs to Flat 12, where his mother was preparing to go out for her shift at the hospital. She was an imposing lady from Barbados with a broad face, greying hair clipped into a halo and a Bajan accent thick as pork pepperpot, and she regarded Garvie mistrustfully.

‘You were a long time fetching that book,’ she said.

Garvie shrugged. ‘Felix hadn’t finished with it so I had to wait a bit.’

‘Two hours? What was he doing, rewriting it?’

‘And then we got caught up discussing the French Revolution and stuff.’

Her mistrustful look grew more mistrusting, but she looked at her watch and went to get her coat, hanging by the door.

‘OK. At least you’re back now. You can do a bit of revision and get to bed at a reasonable time for once.’ She looked at him through narrowed eyes. ‘You’re not thinking of going out to the kiddies’ playground, right?’

Garvie returned her stare. ‘What would I want to go there for? There’s nothing going on there.’

For a moment longer she regarded him with that flat look of disbelief. Then the door closed behind her. Sighing, Garvie drifted into his room, kicked his way through discarded clothing and lay down on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. The incident with Blinkie had been a momentary diversion. There was nothing to do at the kiddies’ playground, nothing to do at home.

He sighed again, put his hands behind his head and focused on the ceiling.

2

After they left the park Singh and Jones continued their rounds, the squad car sliding quietly under the streetlights, up and down the hills of Brickfields and Limekilns, through the spacious suburbs of the affluent north, around the ring road, back towards town. The city grew quiet, the hours passed slowly, eleven o’clock, twelve, one o’clock, two, as they tracked the frail linkages of lights rippling across the estates, thinning out along the ring road, massing in grids around the tower blocks of the deserted business district, as at last they approached the police centre downtown and the end of their shift.

A city of light and dark, Detective Inspector Raminder Singh thought to himself, looking out of the window as he sat silent and unbending beside the slouching Jones, his posture and appearance as usual absolutely correct from the soles of his regulation boots to the tip of his police-issue turban, thirty-two years old, ambitious, uptight. A chequered city, a city of endless permutations, of luck and chance, where a man could make a life, or fail to. It was the end of a long shift. Jones was grunting and scratching irritably as they slowed to turn into the drive to the sallyport.

That was when the call came through.

Jones took it, listening to his headset with disgust. Frowned.

‘Where?’ he said bitterly into his microphone. ‘For God’s sake. Next shift can take it. We’re back already. They’ll be here any minute.’

Singh looked at Jones, who openly scowled back at him.

‘Alarm going off,’ Jones said to him. ‘East Field industrial park. Be the wind, night like this.’

Singh said decisively, ‘We’ll take it. McKendrick can hand over when the others arrive.’

Jones pouted at him, but Singh stared him down and he swung the car round viciously in the road and they went at speed back down Cornwallis Way, heading west towards the ring road. Without speaking again they drove across the flyover onto the dual carriageway and turned east, the speeding car buffeted by shouldering gusts of wind. Northwards the humped darkness of Brickfields slid past, then the pale lots of empty retail parks, then the brighter glow of The Wicker, the city’s fluorescent strip of clubs and casinos. Ahead were the tower blocks of Strawberry Hill streaked into life by the shadows of racing clouds, and the low, dense mass of Limekilns. Impassively Singh watched it all go by. Everywhere the wind-pressed city seemed to bend under wavering lights, as if the whole town swayed underwater.

With a show of petulance Jones put the siren on.

‘It’s going to be a false alarm,’ he said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

‘Then we’ll log it and be on our way.’

He switched on the radio channel, and the car prickled with background static.

At the sewage plant they turned south, away from the city into the darkness of farmland, accelerating along an unlit country lane towards the industrial estate. A robotic voice broke in over the radio.

‘Hey, you guys. Report just in.’

Singh took up the handset. ‘Try to remember Airwave Speak, McKendrick.’

‘Loosen up, Tango-man. Do you want this information or what?’

Singh bit his lip. ‘Go ahead, police centre.’

There was a snicker at the other end of the line. ‘OK then. Some guy walking his dog just phoned in, says he thinks he heard gunshots.’

‘Where?’

‘East Field somewhere. Could even be the industrial park. But you know phone-ins. Nights get all the paranoids. Chance of it being true: slim to invisible. I’m just doing my job passing it on. OK, I’m off. The others are coming in now. Enjoy your field trip, children. Tango, Tango.’

They came to the end of the lane, pulled into the industrial estate through an open gate in a high wire fence and went slowly down the pitted, unlit road between decaying warehouses and low-rent lock-ups. Jones turned off the siren. From up ahead came the squawk of a burglar alarm, the noise flapping in the wind like a far cry from out of a stormy sea.

‘Told you,’ Jones said.

The warehouse stood before them, dark and shut as if disused and undisturbed for centuries, the alarm echoing emptily from inside.

‘Wait,’ Singh said, peering through the window. ‘There.’ He pointed the other way along an access road towards a lock-up glinting in the darkness, light spilling out of flung-open main doors.

Jones pursed his lips, said nothing.

Singh put his hand on the door handle. ‘You check the warehouse. I’ll see what’s happening down there.’

Jones hesitated. ‘You heard what McKendrick said. You strapped?’

‘I never carry a weapon.’

Jones shrugged, and they got out together and went in different directions.

Like much of the estate, the lock-up was a beaten piece of industrial architecture from the dawn of time, two storeys of mouldy brick and iron girders, once a factory, then a warehouse, now the cheapest sort of storage, its ground floor sub-divided into a dozen smaller units, the upper floor disused for years, unsafe and prone to water damage.

Singh glanced back at Jones disappearing casually into the shadow side of the warehouse up the road. There was no one to see Singh go into the police-manual crouch. Tense, alert and rigidly correct, he crept crab-wise to the main doors of the lock-up and peered through before swinging inside, cocking his head like an animal tracking a scent. The lobby was bare but for a reception desk used apparently as a bin. Three doors led off it. One was half open, light shining through it, and he slid silently to the side of the doorway and cocked his head again. For a moment he heard nothing; then, faintly, from just the other side of the door, vague noises. A scrape of feet? A hiss of talk? Hairs went up on the back of his neck. Peering through the crack between the door and jamb, he saw nothing. He leaned backwards, took a breath and pounced suddenly through the doorway into a square, brightly lit, whitewashed concrete room. It was empty except for a boy. Dressed very neatly in school uniform, he was lying on the floor staring impassively up at the ceiling. He still had his glasses on. Next to him was his school bag, and next to that an empty violin case, and next to that a handgun. The pool of blood he was lying in had reached the bag and the case but not the gun.

Singh rushed over, already talking into his radio.

The boy moved his lips, blinked once and stopped breathing.

‘No,’ Singh said, uselessly. He put his fingers on the chest of the boy’s soaked shirt and felt the gunshot wounds slippery under his touch, and looked around, still talking into his radio, issuing instructions and giving directions. Beyond the room was a short corridor between padlocked units, at the end of it an open door. From above came the noise of something being knocked over, a clatter immediately stifled. Wind, Jones would have said.

With a thud of boots Jones ran in swearing.

‘Occlude the wound,’ Singh said.

Jones stared, white-faced and astonished. ‘It’s too late.’

‘Do it anyway. Assist the paramedics when they get here.’

Leaving Jones crouching indecisively over the boy, Singh ran down the corridor and through the door at the far end to the bottom of an unlit metal staircase, and went up two steps at a time to the level above. There, the whole of the upper storey lay before him, dark and disorganized, its low ceiling supported on iron girders, empty spaces filled here and there with incomplete breeze-block partitions and piles of building materials. A prickling smell came off it of wet plaster and rust. Weak light shone through in torn patches from broken skylights.

Everything was silent; nothing moved as Singh swept his flashlight over cracked concrete and gleaming puddles.

He waited.

Nothing. No sound. No movement.

Quietly, he crept as per the police manual round the perimeter, cocking and uncocking his head, scanning the debris around him, and took up a strategic position in the corner of the building. From there he began to sweep across the warehouse with his flashlight once more, and someone hiding behind a rack of old ridge tiles leaped up and blundered into him, and he fell sideways, his torch skittering across the floor. Then he was on his feet running, dodging girders and rubble looming at him out of the darkness, chasing in and out of the shadows after a bulky figure hunched and hooded, their footsteps echoing in the emptiness. Doglegging around a girder, the other man skidded and fell and Singh tumbled over him, grabbing wildly at nothing. Up again, they ran the other way, the man gasping and groaning, Singh silent, elbows pumping. He caught him by a pile of used tarpaulins, got a blow in the face and after a brief struggle they came apart and stood facing each other in a dusty beam of moonlight, panting and swaying.

The man was taller than Singh by a head, and broader. In his hand something metal glinted. He swung it up and round, and Singh skipped backwards, keeping his distance. Some memory came to him then, not of the police manual but of viraha yudhan from martial-arts classes in Lucknow when he was a boy. It was a vision of sudden clarity: he could see the orange dust of the ground, the flawless blue of the sky. It loosened him, he felt his body relax, and as the man reared upwards and lunged forward, he spilled sideways light-footed and finger-punched twice him in the armpit. He yanked the man’s head round by his hood and chopped down with his elbow on the side of his neck.

The man lay at his feet, still.

Singh closed his eyes briefly, saw again the orange ground, the blue sky, heard the silence of his teacher. He murmured the required phrase Waheguru ji ki fateh – Victory belongs to God – and turned anxiously towards the staircase as he heard the noise of the ambulance arriving outside, in time for the man at his feet but too late for the boy downstairs.

3

Next morning’s media was dominated by news of the murder of a sixteen-year-old schoolboy shot dead on East Field industrial estate. For the present his identity was withheld for legal reasons. A man named as Martin Magee was in police custody, having been apprehended at the scene of the crime by serving patrolmen on the City Squad night shift. The city’s chief constable, a quiet-faced man with a reputation for implacable efficiency, appeared on television in a hat overflowing with gold braid, to express disgust at the crime. In interviews, Detective Inspector Dowell, in charge of the investigation, praised the diligence of the two patrolmen who had made the arrest and assured the city’s public that justice would swiftly follow. Although no formal charges had been brought yet, a gun had been retrieved from the scene of the crime, and there was a witness – Dowell said – who had seen the suspect dragging the boy into the lock-up moments before the police arrived. Dowell would not be drawn on the boy’s reasons for being at the estate; nor would he comment on the rumours that he had been found wearing the uniform of the Marsh Academy at Five Mile and that he’d had with him his school bag and violin case. These rumours spread quickly, however, and a widespread sense of outrage grew, together with bewilderment as to what a boy, dressed for school and carrying his school things, could possibly be doing in a disused building on a semi-derelict industrial estate at two o’clock in the morning.

Given that it was the second killing of a juvenile in Five Mile in two months, in fact the second killing of a student from Marsh Academy, the media coverage was extensive and intense; many commentators took the opportunity to ask what had become of a place where this sort of thing could happen not once, but twice, where violence was so intimately part of daily life and where security forces seemed unable to prevent it breaking out.

All day such stories dominated the media, overshadowing other overnight news in the city: an armed robbery at a corner shop in Strawberry Hill; a small pile-up on the ring road; a break-in at Jamal’s in Five Mile; and suspected arson at a house at Tick Hill.

Back at the police centre in Cornwallis Way, Singh sat outside Interview Room 3, waiting to be summoned by Inspector Dowell to be told his role in the forthcoming investigation. As usual, by personal preference, he was in uniform, crisp and correct, complete with Detective Inspector insignia – though, as a result of the recent disciplinary action against him, he was not currently performing a Detective Inspector’s duties. Temporarily, he was a ‘patrolman’ again. As he thought of it, he stiffened his posture and concentrated on the dossier on his lap. Marked Homicide: Classified, it was open to an official school photograph of a Year Eleven boy in Marsh Academy uniform. The boy had wet-looking light-brown hair brushed flat across his scalp and black-framed glasses with thick lenses that magnified his pupils to the size of squash balls. His uniform was neat but shabby in places and looked too tight for comfort. His expression was self-contained, his mouth set, his eyes deadpan. His lack of smile was unnerving. He didn’t look as if he had chosen not to smile – he looked as if smiling was something he knew nothing about.

Singh stared at the photograph. The boy’s hands were visible at the bottom of the picture. They weren’t relaxed but clenched, holding on tightly to the neck of a violin.

He closed the dossier and sat there, rigidly upright, thinking. The name of the boy in the photograph, currently protected, was Pyotor Gimpel. The school had provided the police with a copy of a statement of special educational needs issued in recognition of Pyotor’s autism spectrum disorder. The rest of the school report was strikingly bare. Pyotor had been gifted at music and mathematics, average or poor in other academic subjects. His disciplinary record was impeccable. His social circle was described as ‘nil’. There had been no connection between him and Martin Magee, nor any possibility of one.

Waiting for Dowell on his plastic seat in the overlit corridor, Singh thought of these things. But what he thought of most of all was the photograph, and the impassive expression on Pyotor’s face. He could not get it out of his mind. It was exactly the same expression he had seen himself in the lock-up the previous night as the boy lay dying at his feet.

4

Jamal’s convenience store stood in a row of shops along Bulwarks Lane, a long, shabby, busy road running eastwards through Five Mile from the edge of the Marsh fields by the Academy almost as far as the ring road and the car plant. Like everything in Five Mile, it did its job and no more. At the shops there were three bus stops, a pelican crossing and a taxi rank. There was litter, cracked concrete, a savoury smell of petrol fumes and deep-fried food, and the shops themselves, sitting as if squashed under a line of first-floor flats with grimy windows: a mini-supermarket, newsagent’s, launderette, hairdresser’s, bakery, kebab and burger places, and, round the corner, O’Malley’s bar. They did their jobs too, without any fuss.

At Jamal’s, chipboard panelling covered one of the two front windows, a shiny metal plate the other. There was a new split in the door, pinned with metal brackets. Garvie glanced at them idly and moved on.

‘Third break-in in a month, yeah?’ Khalid said. ‘Like a vendetta, know what I mean?’ He looked at Garvie sourly. ‘Abbu’s still on crutches, got all these attacks going on; I ask myself, what’s the point?’

Garvie said nothing. He watched Khalid getting his Rizlas from a shelf above the counter. Since his father broke his leg, Khalid had run the shop, and the strain was showing. He was nineteen, thin-faced, bent-nosed, with bruise-like shadows under his eyes. He had developed a nervous tremor, Garvie noticed, in his left hand.

The shop was even untidier than before. The racks of sweets at the till – packs of gum, chocolate bars, penny chews in green-and-yellow wrappers – were mixed up and overflowing. Garvie whistled to himself. He glanced at the headlines in the Saturday evening newspapers. Fear in Five Mile. Schoolkid Gunned Down. Murder Academy.

‘Bad news about the Gimp,’ he said.

Khalid shrugged. ‘Didn’t know him.’

‘Second murder in two months, man. That’s tough.’

Khalid shrugged again, as if to say he had his own problems, and Garvie put down the Rizlas.

Khalid sneered. ‘That it, yeah? No baccy to put in it or nothing?’

‘Got all I need, thanks.’

‘Not baccy you’re smoking these days. I know.’

Garvie put the money on the counter and Khalid cracked down the change. His phone rang and he looked at it, scowling. He went down the shop to the far end, and disappeared through a door plastered with posters for ice cream and hairspray. ‘Nah,’ he was saying. ‘I need them, like, really big. Like megalocks. You got-mega locks? … Why? Why? ’Cause I got, like, mega-burglars kicking down my doors, that’s why.’

Garvie turned to Sajid, Khalid’s younger brother, thirteen years old, sitting in his basketball kit at the end of the counter with Jamal’s laptop. White T-shirt, navy shorts: Marsh Academy colours. Sajid played point guard for school, and took his basketball seriously: a match every Saturday morning and fitness drills twice a week. A pity he wasn’t taller. Alone at the counter, staring at the screen, he looked younger than he was, vulnerable. Rumour was, his brother gave him a hard time.

‘Twenty pence,’ Garvie said, holding up the pack of Rizlas.

‘So?’

‘Mark-up, say, twelve per cent.’

Sajid shrugged.

‘Do the maths. Cost to your brother is 88% of retail price: 17.6 pence. Margin 2.4 pence a pack. On a box of two hundred and twenty packs, a profit of five pounds twenty eight. Takes, say, a month to sell a box. Seventeen pence a day. Yeah, your brother’s right.’

‘Right about what?’

‘Crap money on Rizlas. What’s the point? Why doesn’t he pack it in and sing in a boy band instead?’

Sajid clicked his tongue. Concentrated.

They heard Khalid come back into the shop, still talking on his phone as he stacked shelves down one of the aisles. ‘I don’t know what you talking about, man,’ they heard him say. Then: ‘A grand!’

Garvie went on, conversationally. ‘I’ll tell you why, Sajid. Look at the rest of the stuff here. High-price booze and cigs, high-turnover soft drinks, all the food and that. Factor in the long hours, the number of greedy punters like me. What do you reckon?’

Sajid ignored him.

Hidden in the background, Khalid hissed, ‘What? He’s got to be having a laugh, innit?’

Garvie said, ‘Open fifteen hours a day seven days a week fifty-two weeks of the year, sale made every five minutes, each sale three items at an average price of three quid. Same mark-up. You’re clearing a profit of, what, seventy grand. Seventy thousand seven hundred and sixty-one pounds and sixty pence, if you want to be exact. That boy band’ll have to wait.’

Still Sajid ignored him. As he leaned forward, peering at his screen, the neckband of his T-shirt slid down to reveal two long bruises round the side of his neck. After a moment he self-consciously pulled his T-shirt up, glanced round at Garvie, who was still watching him.

Garvie nodded at the laptop. ‘Ring of Valor?’

Sajid nodded.

‘Can’t beat WoW, eh? Old games are the best.’

Sajid shrugged.

‘You like playing the arenas?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Who do you play with?’

Sajid glanced nervously down the aisles. ‘Not really playing with anyone,’ he said as Khalid came towards them, still talking on the phone.

‘Nah, man, it’s got to be a mix-up. I’m telling you, I didn’t get no message. Listen. Listen! I’m not being funny nor nothing, but you got to talk to him. It’s just like not happening, all right?’ He stamped up the aisle to the counter where Garvie stood. ‘You still here? What you doing now, nicking stuff?’

Garvie put the Rizlas in his pocket. ‘Just chilling.’

‘Why do people think it’s all right come in, hang out here, buy nothing, crowd up my shop?’

He snarled at Sajid in Urdu, and the boy slid away from the laptop at once and went into the back room, Khalid shouting after him. ‘How many times I got to tell you, spending all your time on that games shit!’

‘Three times in a month,’ he said to Garvie. ‘Yeah, well, don’t worry about me. I got protection.’

‘Have you?’

‘Yeah. Getting it anyway. I’ll introduce you when it arrives. Name of Genghis. Know what I mean? On a big chain and everything.’

‘OK then.’

‘Then we’ll see.’

‘OK. No need to get worked up, man.’

‘No need to get …? All these burglars, right? All these bandits, yeah?’ He shouted after Garvie, who was already going out of the door. ‘All these wasters coming in here, not buying nothing, just nicking stuff!’

The broken door swung. Khalid’s phone rang again, and he hurried towards the back room, talking angrily. ‘Nah, man!’ he shouted. ‘I told you! I want it in and out, three days tops.’

5

Garvie strolled along Bulwarks Lane across Pollard Way and turned into Old Ditch Road, heading for the kiddies’ playground. Shredded blossoms torn off cherry trees by the recent winds lay like party-coloured fish-flakes in the gutters. It had rained before, would rain again, but now the sky was momentarily clear, last of the light fading in an ugly pink glow as Garvie went through the park gate and across the damp grass.

As usual, the others were already there.

‘What you got for us tonight, big shot?’

Garvie put down the Rizlas, all twenty pence worth.

‘That it?’

He produced a smallish package wrapped in foil and put that down too, and Smudge grinned.

‘Knew you’d come through in the end.’

The sun went down, the sky flared up and turned dark, and they sat on the miniature roundabout and tiny swings, passing round the smokables, talking, inevitably, about the murder – specifically about Pyotor Gimpel, whose name, so scrupulously guarded by the police, was nevertheless already known to everyone in Five Mile.

‘I don’t get it,’ Smudge said. ‘First Chloe, now the Gimp. What’s going on? Like suddenly Five Mile’s the murder capital of the world. See the paddy wagons down by the taxi rank? All the cops in the country seem to have moved in.’

The police presence in the estate was unnervingly conspicuous, cruisers and Black Marias parked on every corner. Murders of school kids were rare. The murder of a school kid like Pyotor Gimpel was freakish. Five Mile was in a state of shock.

‘The Gimp?’ Smudge said. ‘Give me a break. Why should anyone want to shoot the Gimp. Sherlock?’

‘Why wouldn’t someone want to shoot him?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, what do you know about him?’

Smudge pondered. ‘Don’t know nothing about him. Except he was weird.’

Felix fixed him with one of his thin-faced, long-suffering looks. ‘Statemented, Smudge. On the spectrum. He couldn’t help it.’

‘That’s what I’m saying. Not weird like deliberately. Just a weirdo, you know, officially.’ With effort he imposed on his potato face an expression of casual insight.

Felix shook his head sadly. ‘There are all sorts of weirdos, Smudge, and some of them don’t even know they’re weird.’

‘True enough,’ Smudge said, his expression loosening until he looked almost normal. ‘Take Garv, for example. All right, it’s a fair point. Come on, what do we actually know about the Gimp? Speak up.’

Garvie, sitting smoking on a dwarf-sized rocking horse, ignored them. The others pooled information about the Gimp the same way they pooled cigarettes and vodka: bits and pieces picked up here and there. None of them knew him personally; he wasn’t that sort of boy. Although he was one of theirs – part of the common scene – he was a loner. They were used to him, they’d seen him around every day, but they knew almost nothing about him.

‘He played the violin,’ Smudge said. ‘That’s pretty weird. I mean, who plays the violin nowadays except people in museums?’

It was one obvious aspect of the Gimp’s oddity. Another was his unsettling neatness. By choice he wore full school uniform, his shirt always tucked in, his wet-looking hair always brushed down flat, always wearing a tie, though he didn’t have to, looking like a boy from the past in an old photograph. He was small for his age, but his clothes always looked too tight, as if he had outgrown them. In the mornings when he arrived and at breaks he used to sit alone on a bench by Bottom Gate, always the same spot, with his violin case on his lap, impassive and uselessly alert, as if waiting for a bus. Tiger had seen him taking random pictures with his phone; so had Smudge. He spoke seldom, with a quiet, slurry Polish accent. Generally he was silent and immobile. Felix had several times seen him delicately eating an apple from a brown paper bag. No one had ever seen him with a friend. He was quiet, lonely, inoffensive, weird.

‘Thing is,’ Smudge said, ‘he was in his own world all the time; he wasn’t wised up like the rest of us. Natural victim, that’s what he was. Someone could take advantage of a kid like that. What d’you reckon, Garv?’

Garvie said nothing. He smoked.

‘Well, anyway,’ Smudge went on, ‘question is, what happened?’

The others went on discussing it while Garvie smoked quietly. There were various theories already flying around the internet, some of them not entirely stupid. It could have been a straightforward case of mistaken identity. Or a race attack. Perhaps the Gimp had seen something he shouldn’t have and had to be silenced. He could easily have got involved in something he didn’t understand. But why was he in the lock-up with Magee in the first place? He’d been kidnapped, perhaps. Or tricked. Lured there under false pretences, taken advantage of, like Smudge said. But it was hard to explain the bizarre fact that a schoolboy like the Gimp had been at that place with that man at that time, apparently dressed for school. At this point, really, there were only bizarre explanations. One was that he’d been killed in a shoot-out with Magee, to which he’d carried a gun in his violin case. Smudge, a reliable provider of bizarre ideas, thought it possible that the Gimp had sleepwalked to the lock-up. He’d heard of a man who sleepwalked to his car and sleep-drove fifty miles to a cheap hotel to meet a woman he’d never seen before in his life.

‘That’s what he told his wife. He was shocked to find himself there. Think how shocked the Gimp would have been when he woke up in that lock-up. Especially when Magee then shot him. What do you think, Garv?’

Garvie had said nothing now for twenty minutes. Sitting on his rocking horse, he continued to smoke, gazing across the field towards the city lights downtown. The others watched him curiously.

‘Not bothered then?’ Smudge said. ‘Not interested?’

Garvie blew out smoke, dropped his cigarette, ground it out.

‘I am interested, actually.’

Smudge grinned. ‘’Cause of the sleep-walking, I bet.’

Garvie ignored him. He took out another Benson & Hedges and tapped it thoughtfully on his knee. He tossed it suddenly into the corner of his mouth, lit up and blew out smoke in a long blue stream.

He said, ‘Go back to what you said about him. The sort of kid he was.’

‘Natural victim.’

‘Control freak, you said. A loner, even at home with his Polish grandparents in that flat somewhere in Strawberry Hill. Good with lists, bad with people. A planner. Capable of violence.’ He puffed out a little smoke. ‘Doesn’t sound like a natural victim to me.’

They looked at each other. ‘We didn’t say any of that.’

‘Course you did. You said he always sat on that bench by Bottom Gate. Strawberry Hill way, where the Polish shops are. Where else do you think he lived? And who do you think dressed him up like that and gave him an apple in a brown paper bag every day? No one born in the last fifty years. What about that thick old Polish accent? He’d lived here nearly all his life. He can’t have spoken much English at home. The other stuff’s just obvious. Kept his hair neat, tucked in his shirt, brushed his hair down flat. Obsessive, a control freak. Always sat in the same spot. Had a plan and stuck to it. Took pictures of people but never talked to them. Bad with people. What would he do with all those pictures, with his orderly mind? Put them in order, catalogue them. Make a list. That’s what you said. And that’s the way he was.’

Smudge scratched. ‘Well, all right. But … capable of violence? This is the Gimp, Garv. You said it – he hardly dared speak to anyone.’

‘Did you ever see anyone sit in his place on that bench? Did you ever see someone try to take his violin off him?’

Smudge admitted he hadn’t. It was universally accepted, if unexplained, that the Gimp was never parted from his violin: he even took it into the toilets with him. Smudge scratched. ‘So … What’re you saying?’

Garvie got off the rocking horse, put his cigarette pack in his jacket pocket. He drifted as far as the edge of the shadow and paused. ‘I’m saying, don’t wonder how he was lured out there. Don’t wonder if he was taken advantage of.’

‘What then?’

Garvie smiled. ‘Wonder where he got his gun from.’

There was a bit of a silence after he said this. And by the time Smudge had opened his mouth again Garvie had gone, and they were watching him disappear across the grass towards the gate.

6

First thing Monday morning there was a special assembly at Marsh Academy. It began at nine thirty, to give staff and students time to clear the new security procedures and make their way through the groups of police stationed at the school gates and the entrances to the main blocks. There were even policemen on the stage alongside the teachers; they stood immobile and impassive in front of a screen showing a greatly enlarged school photograph of an unsmiling boy with wet-looking hair and a tight grip on his violin, as Mr Winthrop, the head teacher, addressed Year Eleven on the subject of Pyotor Gimpel, who had been, Mr Winthrop said, a diligent student, a dutiful son and grandson and a valued member of the Marsh Academy community.

‘He trusted, as we all do, that life would at least treat him fairly. But that trust,’ Mr Winthrop said emotionally, ‘was betrayed.’

There was silence in the hall, from the teachers and policemen on stage, and from the students sitting in rows in the auditorium. And, coincidentally, there was silence between three boys not in the hall at that moment, not in school at all, but walking down a country lane past the sewage plant. Smudge, Felix and Garvie Smith. They went through the gate in the tall wire fence into East Field industrial estate as far as the access road and came to a standstill, and stood there staring.

Not only the lock-up but also a radius of fifty metres of waste ground around it had been cordoned off behind scrub-clean plastic screens, three metres high, as if the whole area had been wrapped up ready to ship to a nearby laboratory or art gallery. Boilersuited officials wearing face masks, boots and gloves went in and out, fetching and carrying and looking busy.

‘You got to give them credit,’ Smudge said. ‘I mean, look how white it all is. You don’t usually get that effect this side of Christmas.’

There was a group of press photographers drinking coffee on the broken-up verge, and uniformed constables with dogs going up and down the road sniffing things. Garvie gave them a wide berth. He wasn’t keen on dogs, especially not police dogs, particularly not large ones.

‘It’s not their bite you’ve got to worry about,’ Felix said, ‘it’s their bark. It can really put you off if you’re in the middle of something.’

They walked past police vehicles parked haphazardly along the verge, some with their strobes still going.

Felix said, ‘Will your uncle be here, Garv?’

Garvie shook his head. ‘Been and gone by now. Forensics are the early birds. Yesterday morning he’d have been here. Just the lab grunts now. Maybe the inspectors.’

Felix said, ‘Like that Singh guy who bust you up last time?’

Garvie sighed. ‘I told you before, it was all a misunderstanding.’

Past the empty police vehicles they walked as far as two unmarked cars, one a top-of-the range Humvee, the other a nondescript Ford. In the Humvee were two policemen, who turned to look at them.

Felix said quickly, ‘Let’s go and play somewhere else.’

The car window came down and a face appeared.

‘Hi,’ Garvie said, strolling over. ‘Did you find out where the kid got his gun from yet?’

Detective Inspector Dowell got his face in order. ‘I’ll give you three seconds to step away from the car, son. And about a minute after that to get off the estate.’ His Scots accent was as tough as tyre rubber.

Ignoring him, Garvie looked past Dowell to the other man, impeccably uniformed, who sat nursing a bandaged arm.

‘Inspector Singh. Nice to see you again.’

Singh just looked at him.

‘Good luck with all this, by the way,’ Garvie said. ‘Think you’ll need it.’ He paused. ‘Looks to me like it might be tricky.’

Out of sight, they loafed round the estate. It was, as the media had reported, semi-derelict. The layout was as simple as a noughts-and-crosses board: four cross roads at right angles within a rectangular perimeter, half a dozen lots between intersections. The roads, wide enough for trucks, were pitted and cracked, the verges bald and studded with industrial litter. Some of the buildings were brick, some prefabricated. All were run down, most unoccupied. There was a wholesale timber merchant still operating, a couple of car workshops, the warehouse and the lock-up; the rest of the buildings were disused. Although it was adjacent to the ring road, just south of the sewage plant and only a twenty-minute walk through fields to the edge of Limekilns, the whole place felt remote, its quiet broken only by the occasional freight train going by on the nearby goods line with a tortured-metal noise of squeals and clunks. It was one of those places that seem apart from everything else, separate and lost.

‘Lovely, isn’t it?’ Smudge said after a train had gone by. ‘I think my eardrums are bleeding. What the hell was the Gimp doing out here?’

Scanning round, Garvie said nothing. Smudge said, ‘OK, let’s look for clues.’

They went round the perimeter wire, kicking their way through drifts of litter, keeping an eye out for the police, Smudge giving a running commentary on his thoughts.

‘This Magee must of abducted him somehow, I reckon, drove him out here, where it’s nice and deserted, bundled him out of the car, up the road there into the lock-up, and bang. Like an execution. There’s a witness saw most of it, apparently.’

Felix said, ‘What about the camera, Smudge?’

‘What camera?’

‘CCTV, by the entrance. We just passed it. Police haven’t said anything about a car.’

‘Maybe they drove in a different way.’

‘There is no different way. It’s the only entrance. That’s right, isn’t it, Garv?’

Garvie said shortly, ‘No other way for a car.’

They walked on in silence until they came to a hole in the fence.

‘Wait a minute, I get it now,’ Smudge said. ‘They didn’t come in a car, they came on foot. Magee pushes him through this hole here in the fence, drags him up the road there, bundles him into the lock-up and—’

‘Assuming he gets past the SAFEWAY,’ Felix said.

‘What do you mean, SAFEWAY?’

‘Security.’ Security was one of Felix’s main areas of expertise. ‘SAFEWAY systems, Smudge. Multidiscipline hardware and software, wireless and hybrids. Not top of the range, like the SECO at that warehouse up there, but they’re all right. Only problem is, they don’t come with Smash and Crash. If you can find the control panel in sixty seconds after kicking in the door, you can just switch them off. And usually they’re in the most obvious place. Another thing,’ he said, warming to his theme, ‘two o’clock’s the perfect time to break in. Police shifts