do nothing more than thank him and ask him again to call us. He gives his thighs another slap, impelling himself to stand.
‘Did you find the girl?’ he asks abruptly at the door, as though startled by the sudden recollection of what he’d told us on our first visit.
‘Yes, we found her.’
Putting his hand over his heart, Tom releases a tremulous breath. ‘Oh good, good,’ he says, so relieved you’d think we were talking about a girl who’d been kidnapped. ‘Can she help you?’
‘We hope so,’ says Ian. ‘We have to hurry, John. That meeting starts at six.’
‘Of course. I’m sorry. Thank you for coming by,’ says Tom, with a long handshake for both of us.
‘And thank you again for the information.’
‘I hope it’s useful,’ says Tom. As we begin to move away, he takes a step backwards into the hall. Under the light bulb the skin of his face looks as thin as a film of flesh-coloured plastic.
‘I think it will be.’
‘I hope so,’ he says. ‘I hope so,’ he repeats, smiling, disappearing slowly behind the closing door.
The meeting at six is in the pub, with Mary and Rachelle, but the girls aren’t there when we arrive. ‘It’s da poliss,’ Josh calls across the bar. ‘How’s it going? Any breakthrough?’ There’s no breakthrough, he’s told, but as soon as there is he’ll be the first to know. Josh pours the pints, smirkingly watching Ian, who’s checking his watch every few seconds. ‘I’ll tell you what you should do,’ he says, taking care to place each glass plumb centre on its mat, to crank up the tension a bit. He wipes a scatter of droplets off the bar, as Ian bears the drinks away. ‘What you should do is talk to a woman called Hannah Rowe. Lives near here. I can give you the address if you like.’
‘Why should we be talking to Ms Rowe?’
‘Because Ms Rowe knew the old man, that’s why,’ says Josh, giving a cheery mock-simpleton’s grin.
‘And who is Ms Rowe?’
‘She did this,’ Josh answers, indicating the whole room. ‘Painted the walls, the ceiling, the lot. And that’s hers as well,’ he says, pointing to a picture on a nearby pillar, a painting of the esplanade under mist, with a sea as dark as engine oil behind it. ‘Interesting girl. She’s very good. Not cheap,’ he says, examining the walls, approving the quality of the work, ‘but worth every penny.’ And here, perhaps, it is intended that an innuendo be heard. It’s possible, though, that the tone exists only in the memory of what was said, overdubbed on to it.
Then Mary and Rachelle arrive. ‘John’s just on his way home,’ says Ian to Rachelle, but John stays for another one, and a third.
For the best part of twenty years Jim Jackson worked in a timberyard, but then one Monday morning, blurred by the residue of a weekend’s heroic boozing, he lost his focus at an inopportune moment and lopped half of his right hand clean off with a bandsaw, and after that, one way and another, he wasn’t much good for anything and spent most of the day at home or in the park, drinking and sleeping and drinking some more. In the evenings he might smack his wife about a bit, and from time to time he’d read a bedtime story to his daughter, Jemima, and then, often as not, he’d do something with his daughter that was their little secret and stayed their little secret long after bedtime stories came to an end, until the day Jemima forgot to bolt the bathroom door and her mother walked in and saw Jemima cleaning herself up. So Jim received a hefty sentence and Jim’s wife jettisoned his surname and took herself and her daughter off to the other end of the country, where Jemima Kingham, despite the best efforts of her mother, grew into a desperate and highly volatile young woman, given to dicing her arms with razors and fucking any deadbeat who’d share his bag of glue with her. Jemima was a mess, but she knew she was a mess and when, aged eighteen, she found herself pregnant for the third time, she decided she’d see this one through and would do everything she could to make the kid’s life a good one.
Jessie, her daughter, was born in February 1971. The father, whose name is lost to us, presented himself at the hospital the day after Jessie’s arrival. He put a bunch of flowers on the bed, kissed the baby, sat with Jemima for an hour or two. ‘I’ll be going then,’ he said, giving Jemima a peck on the cheek, and that was the end of his participation in the project. His vanishing was no great surprise to Jemima, nor a great setback, and she knuckled down to the project of raising Jessie alone. She’d do anything to provide for the girl. Saturdays and Sundays were for her daughter; the rest of the week she worked herself stupid. She cleaned other people’s houses during the day and cleaned offices in the evening. For a whole year she scarcely saw daylight, putting in nine hours in a basement laundry before going off to swab hospital corridors through the night. ‘Trust nobody,’ she’d tell the girl. ‘Don’t owe anything to anyone.’ In 1987 she was working in a flower shop from nine to five, in a pub from eight to midnight, and was giving after-hours blowjobs for a fiver. ‘Stay away from boys,’ she would tell Jessie, and Jessie managed to stay away from them until she was fifteen, when Ryan Tate lurched into her life.
With Ryan too you wonder how much of the script was written for him, long before he came along. Semi-employed brawlers and boozers feature prominently in the roll-call of Ryan’s ancestors, and the family tree is richly festooned with convictions for burglary, theft, arson, assault and – in the case of the paternal grandfather – grievous bodily harm, the consequence of a dispute over a bet that ended with a Swiss penknife through the face of the simpleton who had dared to impugn the honesty of the senior Mr Tate. You look at where he came from and you feel they might as well have stamped ‘Go to gaol’ on Ryan’s birth certificate, though you wouldn’t have known he’d go as badly wrong as he did. He had one advantage over Jessie: both parents were around. On the other hand, they were present only in the technical sense for much of the time, because Mr and Mrs Tate were the family’s elite drinkers, never sober for as long as Ryan could remember. At the time of Ryan’s arrest neither parent was in work. His father, Dave, had for years been a man with no visible means of support. Aileen, his mother, had recently been working at a supermarket, a rare interlude of gainful employment that had ended when she was observed waving her husband through the checkout with four unpurchased bottles of vodka in his coat pockets, a routine which had probably been in operation from the day she started the job. As for Ryan, having continued the family tradition by renouncing education at the earliest opportunity, he did a bit of building work here and there, supplementing his income with regular ventures into breaking and entering, and regular spells in custody. He was also a courier for a local dealer, who paid him in cash and dope, and he’d inherited the family predilection for knife work. The Accident and Emergency waiting room should have had a bench named after him.
The third person in this story is Abby Atalay, also aged fifteen. Abby and her parents and her younger sister shared a flat with her childless aunt and uncle, above the kebab shop that the aunt and uncle ran. Money was tight, but the Atalays weren’t poor in the way the Tates and the Kinghams were poor, and they were all perfectly law-abiding. An unexceptional, not terribly bright, somewhat overweight and vulnerable kid, Abby was also half-Turkish, which may be of relevance. Nothing ever happened to Abby, until she had the misfortune to go to the same party as Ryan Tate one night, and get drunk for the first time in her life, and let herself get fucked by him. She imagined that this semiconscious coupling might mean something.
Ryan Tate lived less than half a mile from Jessie Kingham and went to the same school, but it seems their
