An idea like that, once planted . . . Jesus . . . any interaction with Hannah would appear suspect.
‘Fuck!’ Walter snapped suddenly, angrily punching the side of the yacht’s cockpit. The fibreglass rang hollowly. He was angry enough he could throttle the vicious bitch, and he could start his guessing that it was Alice Harton who came up with that kind of poison.
The thought enraged him. The idea that everyone back on the rigs must actually now be wondering if he’d taken Hannah down there, done things to her . . . then killed her? That he was capable of that?
No. Jesus, No. Not any child . . . not anyone, in fact. And certainly not someone he’d known since she was born, grown to love as if she was his own flesh and blood, for Christ’s sake. He’d been a friend of Jenny’s and her family since before the rigs. He’d known them when they’d lived together outside Newark. They were bloody family.
The truth was, Hannah had been down there, where she knew she shouldn’t be. Messing around amongst pipes that should have been more securely attached. And that . . . that was what he was guilty of. Carelessness. There should have been a lock on the door. There should have been adequate ventilation.
Unless, of course, that’s what happened to her. That she was . . .
Latoc.
He slapped the cockpit once again. ‘You fucking bastard!’ he hissed. ‘You fucking bastard!’
He’d seen the pair of them, as thick as thieves: Hannah and Latoc. The man helped around by Hannah, cared for, nursed by Hannah. His arm around her shoulders, his face so close to hers that their hair tangled, talking in hushed conspiratorial voices.
He almost laughed at the irony. Now the idea of Latoc being a pervert had taken hold in his head, every interaction of that Belgian bastard seemed to take on a sinister dimension.
Maybe that damned rumour had come from somewhere other than Alice’s big flapping mouth. Maybe that sick twisted fuck, Latoc, had put the idea about somehow. Just made a veiled suggestion and let it evolve and transmit and grow as it spread like swine flu from one gossiping mouth to the next.
But why?
The first answer seemed obvious. He wanted to strip away Jenny’s allies. Leave her isolated. He’d done a swift job of winning Martha over. Maybe Tami Gupta was next? If he couldn’t woo the woman, maybe he’d start some nasty rumour about her as well?
Another thought occurred to him. Latoc didn’t seem to like other men; didn’t like them around him. Oh, yes, Valérie Latoc seemed very comfortable amongst women, but other men . . . ?
He sees us as a threat.
Perhaps the bastard wanted to make the rigs his own ‘lady palace’; a procession of dutiful acolytes for him to choose from. Perhaps that was his game; getting rid of potential male challengers one at a time. They’d rescued him. He’d woken up in the infirmary and saw the place was mostly women and like a greedy little boy in a sweet shop decided he wanted it all for himself.
That made a hell of a lot of sense. Like a rogue lion coming across another pride and coveting it, the first order of business was removing from play the existing alpha male. Before the explosion, before the bastard had arrived, Walter knew he wasn’t particularly popular, especially amongst the womenfolk. He knew they found him rude and gruff and impatient. Maybe a little arrogant. He didn’t suffer fools gladly. And maybe, yes . . . probably, he was a pompous old bastard. But he was tolerated and extended due courtesy because he was Jenny’s right-hand man. Because he knew how to fix things up. Because he knew how to pilot the boats. Because he’d built a generator that gave them electricity and light after the sun had gone down.
They wouldn’t have managed without him. He was the alpha male.
There were no rumours back then, were there? No icy stares.
Then Latoc came along.
Then the explosion.
Then people pointing fingers at him for allowing Hannah down there.
Now this - that he was some sort of a paedophile.
Latoc wants me off. Wants me out of the way.
A final thought occurred to him. There were other girls Hannah’s age.
Fuck you, you bastard.
Tomorrow morning he was going back. Tomorrow morning he was going to stand right in front of Valérie Latoc, in front of as many people as possible, and he was going to accuse the son-of-a-bitch of molesting and killing Hannah. And if the obtuse foreign fucking bastard tried wriggling his way out of it, then he was going to take a swing at the shit.
From where he sat in the cockpit Walter could see faces lining the railings all the way up from the spider deck to the main deck. A welcoming committee. Every last person, it seemed.
He eased the yacht towards the support-leg beneath the dangling hooks of the lifeboat davits, dropping the sails so she slowly bobbed forward on the last of her momentum.
‘Cranes, please!’ he called up.
What’s going on? What’s happened?
The hooks inched down from the davits with a loud clacking as manual winches were turned. Walter gaffed the nearest with a pole and began securing the harness hooks to it.
Dennis and Howard climbed down a rope ladder from the spider deck and dropped onto the foredeck beside him.
‘What’s going on? What’s this all about?’ he asked them.
Howard eyed him coolly. ‘Natasha Bingham went missing yesterday. ’
Walter knew Natasha. She’d been one of Hannah’s best friends. Same age, same frizzy hazel-coloured hair; they used to look like twin sisters from a distance. Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
‘She’s missing?’
Howard nodded. ‘Yesterday morning, same time you left for shore,’ he said. The implication was right there in his voice.
Walter felt his face pale. ‘What?’ He turned to look from one to the other. ‘Howard? You’re not saying . . . ?’
Neither man said anything. Then Howard relented. ‘Sorry, Walter, we need to check.’
‘YOU THINK I TOOK HER!?’ he found himself screaming at them.
A shrill voice from the spider deck, twenty feet above him answered him. ‘If you’ve touched her, we’re going to kill you, you dirty old bastard!’
He looked up to see a row of faces, Alice Harton’s snarling. Beside her the girl’s young mother, Denise Bingham, her face mottled pink with grief and worry. Others either side of them, all of them grasping the rail, knuckles bulging.
‘I didn’t bloody take her! She’s not on my bloody boat!’
From the deck above he heard Latoc shout down. ‘Please check inside.’
Howard and Dennis stepped carefully along the side deck and dropped down into the cockpit. Howard ducked down through the hatch into the small cabin below.
‘There’s nothing down there!’ shouted Walter. ‘I told you, she’s not on my boat!’ He squinted at the railings above, shading his eyes as he tried to make out where Latoc was standing. He spotted the man’s dark ringlets fluttering in the breeze, sixty feet above him, and the outline of his dark, trimmed beard amongst a row of pale faces.
‘You!’ he shouted. ‘Latoc! It’s you! I . . . I worked it out last night!’
‘Oh, we can guess what you were doing last night!’ shouted Alice, from the deck beneath. ‘You dirty old bastard!’
Walter ignored her. ‘You made our generator blow up, Latoc! You did it! You killed Hannah and you covered it up with the explosion!’
Latoc shook his head. ‘God have mercy on you, Walter, if we find you’ve hurt this girl . . . as well!’
‘What?! You know I . . . I didn’t touch Hannah! I never bloody touched her! I—’
‘God have mercy on you if we find something, Walter, because I am certain none of these women will!’
Howard emerged from the cockpit, his face ashen and sombre. His rheumy pink eyes met Walter’s. He shook his head. ‘Jesus, Walt,’ was all he could mutter as he held up a small sky-blue plimsoll in one hand.
Denise Bingham screamed at the sight of it. ‘Oh, no!! Oh, God!!’
&nbs
p; Walter stared at the plimsoll. It was Natasha’s all right. Sky-blue with a butterfly on the strap. She always wore shoes that colour. Every time her feet had outgrown another pair, it was on the ‘Needs and Wants’ list: Denise Bingham = pair of sky-blue shoes, plimsolls pref, trainers if not. Size 4 this time, please!
He shook his head. ‘I . . . I . . . don’t know why . . . I . . .’ he looked up at the rows of faces. He saw Denise’s face crumpled, broken and red. Beside her Alice and others, jaws set rigid in condemnation. Sixty feet up on the cellar deck he saw Martha standing next to Latoc, shaking her head sadly and crying. And further off, a hundred feet up, leaning over the railings of the main deck he recognised Jenny. Her head dipped slowly into her hands and he thought he saw her shoulders heaving.
‘I didn’t do anything!’ he called up to her. ‘JENNY!! I DIDN’T FUCKING TOUCH HER!!’
Chapter 58
10 years AC
O2 Arena - ‘Safety Zone 4’, London
Jacob had been transported to another world; a world of neon lights rushing past his car on either side leaving lens-burn streaks of colour, pinks, electric blues, aquamarine greens. Vertical billboards glowed dancing Japanese characters, and streets thick with whizzing brand names he vaguely recognised: Sony, Atari, Panasonic, Mitsubishi.
Flashing yellow chevrons appeared in the corner of the wide plasma screen in front of him; an early warning of a sharp right-hand turn coming up ahead. He eased back on the arcade booth’s accelerator pedal and prepared to make the turn as soon as he could make out where the turning was amongst the hectic whir of flashing graphics on-screen. It wasn’t often he missed his old glasses, cracked, scuffed and discarded a lifetime ago, but he certainly missed them now.
Easing back further on his pedal, the engine noise, pumping out of the seat speakers either side of his head, dropped in timbre from a high-pitched Formula One scream to the throaty roar of a performance car. He picked out the turning ahead and was spinning the wheel in both white-knuckled hands when Nathan’s glistening Lotus blurred past, shunting him into a barrier for good measure and leaving him in his wake as he accelerated up the dual-lane Tokyo highway. The boys gathered around Nathan’s booth, leaning on the headrest, roaring with laughter, slapping his shoulders and urging him on.
Jacob struggled to reverse out of the barrier as other cars barged past him knocking him back into it, one after the other. He could hear fresh choruses of laughter coming from the other player booths further along.
Yeah, everyone pick on me, why don’t you?
He muttered under his breath, not concerned that anyone was actually going to hear him over the pumping beat of music and the mechanical whine of a dozen racing cars. There was no one gathered round his booth urging him on.
He was just about managing to disentangle himself once more from the barrier when the words RACE OVER punched their way out of the screen.
Everyone howled in unison as the results flashed up on-screen. He could see Nathan hadn’t won, but had done well, fourth out of twelve. Jacob watched his friend, several booths along, clamber out of his seat casually knuckling and high-fiving the swarm of boys around him.
Jacob climbed out of his seat and was quickly replaced by another, smaller, boy lingering nearby, eager to get in on the next race.
A strobe on the large circular lighting rig above the stage kicked in amidst whirling spotlights that cast multicoloured beams down through the thin pall of cigarette smoke above. The strobe made everyone appear to move with a jerkiness that reminded him of one of those Victorian moving picture-show drums that played a looped animation you could view through a slit. He squinted. His eyes were already tired from concentrating on the race and stinging from the smoke. The strobe wasn’t helping things.
He caught sight of Nathan’s face over the heads and shoulders of his fan club. Eye contact for a brief moment. His friend nodded and winked at him as he took a pull on a long crinkly cigarette pressed into his hand by someone.
Jacob wasn’t ready for that. Not for the dope. Not that anyone had bothered asking him yet.
Then Nathan was gone, whisked away by several boys, shouting over each other, wanting to see how big a deal he was on ‘StreetFighter’. Nathan said something that had them all roaring with laughter again as they bustled him away through the maze of machines.
Jacob slurped another mouthful from his can. The cider had tasted pretty good with the first bubbly mouthfuls. But now, running flat, he could taste the burn of alcohol. Not a particularly nice taste but at least the buzz he was beginning to get from it was making him feel a little better.
Another race had started and boys were cheering and jeering and trash-talking each other. Nathan was gone. He felt self-conscious standing amidst the carnival of flashing computer game colours and the press of sweaty bodies, pushing hurriedly past him from one group of arcade machines to the next. Holding on to his can of cider and looking for someone, anyone, to talk to, he felt conspicuously alone.
He wished Leona was here.
She’d be loving this, the lights and the pumping sound system. He imagined it was just like one of those rock festivals she used to go to. He looked around. He presumed there’d be more girls than he could see here, though, at a rock festival. Amongst the fifty or sixty boys at the party and not on duty, he’d counted only about a dozen girls. All of them about Helen’s age or thereabouts, drinking and smoking, getting the occasional go on the pinball machines.
His eyes followed them, glancing at their bare midriffs, the odd enticing flash of a pale leg, the curve of a slender shoulder. Some of them wore make-up smudged on so thick they looked like the models he’d seen on faded advertising billboards; all charcoal dark eyes, ghost-pale cheeks and coral-pink lips.
He was beginning to feel a frustrating yearning in his groin; frustrating because the girls all seemed to be taken; chaperoned . . . led from one machine to the next, more often than not, with one or more male arm wrapped protectively around their necks or waists. Led like poodles being taken for a walk.
Even if there weren’t other boys around - boys who looked like they’d knuckle his face if he even tried looking at their girl - he doubted he’d know what to say to one of them anyway. Although the cider was giving him a tingling urge and just a little courage, he was still about a million miles away from actually walking up to one of them and trying out a simple ‘hello’.
He felt a heavy hand land on his shoulder. He turned round to see it was Snoop’s second-in-command, Dizz-ee.
‘A’ight?’ he greeted him loudly.
Jacob nodded and cracked an awkward too-cheerful grin. ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ He nodded. ‘What a great party!’
Dizz-ee hunched his shoulders casually. ‘Once a fortnight. S’what we got goin’ on here. Right?’
Jacob nodded his head vigorously. ‘Cool.’
‘Praetorians play real hard. S’only ’cause we grind hard too, man. This time tomorrow you gonna be all sweared-in and wearing one of the orange jackets. Get dues from the others.’
Jacob’s vacant smile told Dizz-ee he was falling behind.
‘Get respect, bro . . . the jacket gets you respect.’
Jacob got the distinct impression Dizz-ee had been sent over to chat to him. There was something forced about his grin, the body language. As if he’d much rather be elsewhere.
Dizz-ee nodded at the racing booths. ‘So, you play the games?’
‘Yeah, they’re excellent fun. I think I’m a bit rubbish, really. I—’
‘What about them?’ Dizz-ee said, tipping a nod towards a young girl nearby, watching the current race as she tottered unsteadily on heels too high for her. She pulled slowly on a long joint, trying to look grown up and sophisticated as she did so. The make-up, glittering rouge plastered on her cheeks and crimson lipstick smudged around her mouth, oddly made her look younger, like a child playing at dressing up in her mother’s clothes.
‘You like the look of our girlfriends?’
He watc
hed as young male hands crawled over her like spiders; cupping, squeezing. The girl ignored the pawing, glassy-eyed and lost somewhere beyond the plasma screen in a cartoon Sega-world of golden rings and sprinting hedgehogs.
‘They’re . . . sort of . . . yeah, very pretty.’
Dizz-ee found that funny, shook his head. ‘Pretty? Heh, that’s the gayest sounding shit I heard today.’ He slapped Jacob’s shoulder again. A smile smeared too easily across his face.
He’s laughing at me.
‘Hey, jus’ kidding, man. Listen, you ever boned, bro?’
‘Boned?’
‘You ever do a girl, Jake?’
He was about to ask what Dizz-ee meant by ‘do’, but then the penny finally dropped. He realised Dizz-ee was talking about shagging. No. He’d never. There were plenty of times he wished he’d had, though.
‘No, I uh . . . never had a girlfriend. Not yet. I was—’
‘Fuck!’ Dizz-ee doubled over laughing. ‘Come on, you shittin’ me?’
‘No . . . I’m not sh—’
‘So, lemme go set you up with a girlfrien’, bro. Right now.’
‘What? No . . . I, no really I’m—’
Dizz-ee grabbed hold of both his shoulders firmly, spun him round and began pushing him forward, threading him across the crowded stage, past games booths, past clusters of turning heads, amused faces, some slyly smiling, others laughing openly. Jacob felt his face flush bright crimson, sensed he was being set up for some kind of a very public prank. He caught a glimpse of Nathan on the other side of the stage, playing a dancing game, a joint hanging from his mouth. Snoop was beside him cheering him on as he duelled deftly on a grid of glowing pads against some other boy.
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘Hey, be chill,’ replied Dizz-ee.
In the middle of the arena’s circular black stage was an opening that led down a short flight of stairs into darkness.