Michael Dibdin - The Tryst

‘Me?’

Aileen nodded and gave him an approving smile.

‘Once they’d learned your real name, you see, they checked their records and discovered that you’d been taken to a police station once before. The sergeant who was on duty that day remembered that two other young people had been there at the same time. One of them had claimed that you were his brother, and you’d gone away with them. Their names had been taken too. One of them was called Jimmy and the other one Dave.’

She paused for a moment, watching the boy. He was glacially still, as though in a state of suspended animation.

‘Dave is now in prison. He was arrested for assaulting an old lady and taking her money. Another boy, called Alex, was arrested with him.’

The squelch of shoes came and went in the corridor. A voice called, ‘How should I know where it’s got to? First I heard we’ve even got one.’ ‘Didn’t you read the circular?’ someone yelled back.

‘Dave refused to co-operate with the police, but Alex did. He said that you used to live with them in a house they were squatting in. There was a girl there as well, a girl called Tracy.’

‘Did they get her too?’ Steve demanded.

‘Who?’

‘The police!’

Aileen shook her head. The boy released a long sigh and every muscle in his body seemed to relax.

‘Alex said that he and Dave saw you at the supermarket one day,’ Aileen continued. ‘They realized that someone was paying you to go shopping. Dave and Jimmy had started robbing old people in the street by this time, but they never got much money. Jimmy decided that the person you did the shopping for must have a lot of money hidden away somewhere to pay you with. He told the girl to try and find out from you where the house was.’

A spasm like a single shiver ran through the boy’s body. Then he was absolutely still again, the pulsing of an artery on his neck the only sign that he was still alive.

‘But before they could do anything, workmen arrived to demolish the house. Jimmy and Dave started to argue about what to do and how to divide up the money they thought they were going to get. Alex and Tracy went out to fetch something to drink. When they came back, Jimmy was lying on the floor. His face was all discoloured. Dave said that he’d had a heart attack. He told Alex to help him carry the body upstairs and hide it in a cupboard. When they got upstairs, Jimmy suddenly started to twitch, but Dave got a coat-hanger and twisted it around his neck. Then he and Alex hung the body up in the cupboard to hide it from the workmen.’

The Unit was swathed in mist as though in cotton wool. Normally you could hear the distant noise of traffic, but today they might have been somewhere deep in the country. Aileen’s efforts to make her voice calm and soothing made her sound, to her own ears at least, like a radio programme called Listen With Mother . Every afternoon she and her mother had sat down in front of the wireless set and listened to a well-modulated female voice telling stories about the doings of bunnies, ducks and teddies. While she listened, Aileen had studied the lighted panel at the top of the wireless, displaying the names of foreign cities: Moscow, Rome, Warsaw, Berlin, Tokyo. The world was vast and various, fascinating but utterly safe, populated by furry little creatures who might occasionally be just a little bit naughty. No wonder people go mad, she thought.

The only point at which Steven had seemed at all disturbed by her narrative had been when she mentioned the girl. Aileen noted that this might be a sensitive area, so she decided to skip the part of Alex’s story in which he described how Tracy had got the boy to reveal the address of the house he visited. Alex said that Steven had also told the girl that the man who lived there had a trunk filled with treasure which he kept in an upstairs room, but the police seemed to feel that this unlikely detail must have been invented by Alex to justify what happened next.

‘When you got home after your newspaper round that week,’ Aileen resumed, ‘Dave and Alex took you upstairs to the room where they’d hidden Jimmy’s body and locked you in. Then they all went to the house in Grafton Avenue. The girl kept watch in the street while Dave and Alex went to the door and rang the bell in a special way you’d talked about.’

Steve suddenly twisted to one side in another convulsive shiver. Aileen waited, but he said nothing.

‘When Mr Matthews opened the door, they pushed their way in and told him to show them where he had hidden his money. He gave them about thirty pounds, which he said was all he had. But Dave didn’t believe him. He searched the house, looking for a trunk full of money which he thought was hidden there. When he couldn’t find it he got very angry. First he threatened the old man with a poker, and then when Mr Matthews still wouldn’t say where the money was, Dave started to hit him.’

‘No!’

Steve spat the word at her.

‘It wasn’t him! It was the other one, the one with eyes that glow in the dark and burn you up! I seen him just before, just around the corner! He was on his way home after doing it. He opened him up like you’re supposed to, tapping and tapping, only he was wrong, it wasn’t like a golf ball inside, it was all messy.’

Aileen frowned. She had had just about enough of the boy’s amateur mad scenes.

‘There’s no point in going on pretending, Steven,’ she said sharply. ‘I know you’re trying to protect the others, but there’s no need. Dave has already confessed. At first he denied knowing you and Alex, but the police showed your photograph to the security guards at the Tesco supermarket and one of them recognized it. He said you used to go there every week, and he remembered that one week two youths had an argument with you at the checkout. He was taken to the police station where he identified Dave and Alex. After that Dave admitted everything.’

‘But it wasn’t him!’ the boy insisted. ‘Why won’t you listen? Why won’t anyone listen? I didn’t listen either. I thought he was crazy. I thought it was all a story he’d made up. But it was all true! He killed the old man and now he’s after me too! I saw him leaving. He knows I know just like he knew what he done to him in the wood. That’s why I got to stay here, see? He won’t come near hospitals. He told me.’

Aileen held the wild eyes with her own, trying to decode this jumble of words.

‘Mr Matthews told you this man would leave you alone as long as you were in hospital?’

The boy nodded. Aileen tried to hide her satisfaction as the last piece of the puzzle dropped into place.

‘Now listen, Steven, there’s something else which you must know. When the crime was discovered, the police tried to trace Mr Matthews’s relatives. It turned out that he hadn’t got any, but in the process they found out quite a lot about him. When he was young, a long long time ago, Ernest Matthews was a soldier. There was a big war and lots of people were killed. Mr Matthews was badly wounded. It wasn’t his body that was hurt but his mind. He was suffering from what’s called battle fatigue. Shell-shock, they used to call it. You see, when things get too bad, too horrible and frightening, then after a while human beings break down and get ill. One of the things that happens is that they imagine that people are threatening them, trying to kill them. They go on thinking that even after the danger is over, when they’re perfectly safe and surrounded by people who care for them. That’s what happened to Ernest Matthews. He must have been very ill indeed, because he was sent to a special hospital and stayed there for almost twenty years.’

‘But I seen him!’ the boy cried. ‘I told you what he looked like, didn’t I? And I told him too, and he said that was him, the man that was after him!’