Mark Pearson - Death Row

‘So she left the kid with the grandfather. What happened next?’

‘The old man wanted a cigarette and his daughter had taken his fags away with her when she left. The doctor’s told him he’s not allowed to smoke. So. He went out to get some.’

‘What, from the shops? He left the kid on his own at home?’ asked Delaney.

Duncton shook his head. ‘He’s got an allotment. He’s got a shed there where he stashes some cigarettes. He uses it as a bolt-hole, apparently — doesn’t do a lot of gardening any more. He was inside having a smoke and the kid was outside playing, and when he came out to check on him the boy was gone. He swears it was like only sixty seconds, two minutes tops.’

‘What about the father?’

‘Barry Woods. He’s a lorry driver. In France. Due back today.’

‘Anybody spoken to him?’

Duncton shook his head. ‘No response on his mobile.’

‘Possible he came back early?’

‘It’s possible. We’re looking into it.’

At that moment Graham Harper came out of the lounge and looked at Delaney and Sally Cartwright. His face was white, drained of blood, his watery eyes squinting as he focused on them.

‘Have you found him? Have you found Archie?’ he asked in a tremulous voice.

‘No, sir, we haven’t. Not yet. I’m sorry,’ said Delaney and turned to Duncton. ‘Have you got people down at the allotment?’

‘Of course we have.’

Delaney turned to Graham Harper. ‘Maybe you could show me the way, sir, walk me through what happened.’

The elderly man nodded and went to pick up his overcoat hanging on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs.

Duncton grabbed Delaney’s arm. ‘Like I said, this is my watch, Delaney.’

‘Of course it is,’ he agreed affably. ‘But Garnier has dealt me into this game and we need to find out why, don’t we?’

Duncton sighed and nodded finally. ‘We go together. And you don’t do anything on this without clearing it with me first. We clear on that?’

‘Clear as a glass of water from a mountain lake in the Ring of Kerry,’ said Delaney, slipping into a soft brogue.

*

The allotment was a scant six hundred yards or so from Graham Harper’s house. It took them just a few minutes to walk there. At the bottom of Carlton Row they turned left into Rowland Avenue at the bottom of which a public footpath led up to a cast-iron bridge built in the early part of the last century. Painted battleship grey, it had rivets like half-marbles studded across it. Wire meshing stretched either side of the bridge, making it into a cage to prevent disaffected youths from dropping rocks onto the passing Underground and overland trains below as they thundered east towards the city.

Delaney paused for a moment, flashing back to a time in his youth when he’d stood on a bridge at Balleydehob. The river below him snaking out to sea, the dazzling light bouncing off it like a million shattered crystals. He remembered picking up a pebble and lobbing it to send a crow flapping away. He remembered his cousin Mary, whom he had left just a short while back, telling him that it was a raven he had disturbed and that it would bring bad luck down upon him. He looked at where he was today, looking down through meshed wire onto a railway line that carved through an unbroken run of development that stretched from Harrow to Stratford and beyond. He looked at the garbage that littered the sides of the railway, he looked at the grey sky overhead and wondered if his cousin had been right all along. He didn’t know what it was that had brought him here, but if it was luck it certainly wasn’t of the good kind.

He carried on over the bridge, taking the arm of Graham Harper and helping him down the iron steps on the other side. There was more wire fencing at the base of the steps enclosing what looked like some kind of Second World War memorial. Whatever it was was rusted and overgrown with weeds and tangled growth. The allotments were to the left. A small muddy path ran alongside them, with another wire fence between them and the railway line beyond. In all there were probably about thirty allotments that ran alongside each other for a couple of hundred yards or so before ending in a wooded scrubland. A road bridge above the railway loomed high over the undergrowth. In the wooded area Delaney could see a couple of uniformed officers finger-searching the ground.

Graham Harper led the way along to an allotment near the end of the run. It had two areas for cultivation bisected by a simple narrow shingle path that led up to a wooden shed. A door, with one window to the right, a small porch or step in front, plain wood, the varnish on it peeling, all of it bleached by the sun that was now no more than a distant fond memory. It looked to be about twenty or thirty years old, Delaney reckoned, and like its owner not in its prime, to say the least. Judging by the hacking cough he was listening to it was a toss-up which would stay standing the longest. He walked into the shed with Duncton while Sally stayed outside with the elderly man.

Delaney wasn’t sure what he expected to find inside but what he did find didn’t surprise him. The weak sunlight barely filtered through the grime- and dust-encrusted window. Delaney placed his feet carefully, mindful that the floor had rotted in places. It was a bare floor with boxes scattered here and there. Vegetable-seed packets, twine, gardening gloves. Against one wall stood a hoe, spade, and assorted plastic plant pots. In the corner was an old-fashioned wing-backed upholstered armchair. A table beside it with an ashtray brimful of fag ends. The air reeked with the smell of creosote and stale cigarette smoke and for once Delaney didn’t feel like reaching into his pocket for his own packet.

To the right of the chair, as Delaney looked at it, was a shelf filled with all sorts of knick-knacks and oddments, mostly gardening-related. But there was an old fishing reel as well, along with a clasp knife, some empty jars, a can of rat poison, a few tobacco tins. Beneath the shelf was a box of magazines. Old issues of Gardener’s World, Coarse Fishing Monthly .

Delaney nudged the box with his foot. ‘Anyone been through it?’

Duncton nodded. ‘Just what it looks like.’

Delaney looked around the shed. ‘You got any theories?’

‘I read him as genuine. He came in here for a smoke, like he said.’ Duncton shrugged. ‘Someone took the boy, maybe.’

‘Maybe?’

‘His mother said he was really keen to be with his mate Johnny. Maybe he ran off. Maybe he’ll turn up there.’

‘I take it you’ve got uniform out there looking?’

‘As much as we can. Could be he got lost.’

‘You don’t think so, though?’

‘Do you?’

Delaney shook his head. ‘No. Peter Garnier is in this somehow. He has to be.’

‘How though?’

‘I don’t know, detective. I wish I did.’

‘Why did he really want to see you? He was talking to you about the same time this kid was abducted. Is he telling us something?’

‘If he is, I’m sure as hell not hearing it.’

‘He lied about taking us to the burial site of his victims.’

‘He claims he couldn’t remember exactly, that the shot at him put an end to the trip. He might well have led us to them.’

‘You think he was telling the truth.’

‘I don’t think he knows what the truth is any more. The man has maggots in his brain.’

‘So he had an accomplice back then. Why now? Why start again now?’

‘His illness — maybe it all ties in with that.’

‘And where do you tie in?’

‘I don’t. I’m simply a man with a badge, just like you, detective.’

Duncton looked at Delaney and shook his head. ‘You’re not like me at all, Delaney. You’re in this somehow.’