Initially a couple more cars passed by, drowning out everything, and then –damn him, what timing – Doc started talking.
‘Well that’s certainly gone and done it,’ he murmured, turning to Hooch conspiratorially. ‘Happen to know whose house that is?’
Doc’s voice, Jo felt (perhaps even for her benefit), was slightly louder than it had been previously.
‘I don’t know,’ Hooch answered, staring wide-eyed at his mentor, opening his pad and priming his pen in sweet anticipation. ‘Should I, Doc?’
Jo silently noted the obsequious way in which Hooch repeatedly used the Old Man’s name in conversation.
‘Katherine. Katherine Turpin. Remember her?’
Doc pronounced this feminine appellation only seconds before the huge, dusty, moose-like man echoed the self-same three syllables himself during the course of his own conversation.
Jo glanced up from her shoes.
‘Katherine who?’ Hooch quizzed.
‘Katherine Turpin.’
‘Turpin?’
‘As in Dick,’ Doc said.
‘It rings a bell, Doc,’ Hooch muttered, glancing sideways at Jo for the first time, as if supremely protective of the information he was gleaning. He suddenly lowered his voice, presumably hoping to encourage Doc to do the same, ‘And the connection?’
‘The walks book,’ Doc announced, sounding justly proud of his coup, ‘the section on Canvey. All that crazy stuff about boundaries. I never understood a word of it…’ he chuckled, ‘nor did Wes himself, more than likely. But this is where she lives. That much I am sure of.’
Hooch chewed on the end of his finger for a moment, frowning, then suddenly his monolithic mien brightened. ‘Of course,’ he squeaked, jabbing his biro into the air with a quite savage delight, ‘of course of course. You mean Katherine. You mean the Katherine Turpin. What on earth was I thinking? You mean Katherine the whore…’
Hooch proclaimed this slanderous defamation with all the uninhibited joy of a miserly man who unexpectedly finds his long-lost gold cap tucked inside a three-week-old carton of pasta salad.
‘Sssh!’
Even Doc had the good grace to seem embarrassed by Hooch’s complete want of delicacy. Dewi and the kid were currently well within earshot, standing on the opposite kerb, impatiently waiting for a van to pass. He scowled, quickly pushing his pager into his coat pocket –as if to free his hands for something (combat, possibly) –but then held them limply by his sides, open, loose.
They crossed the road. Dewi roughly yanked Patty up onto the grass verge in front of them. ‘Is the boy with you?’ he asked Doc, proffering the child, who dangled as weakly in Dewi’s huge grip as a faded old bathrobe on a big, brass doorknob.
‘The boy? Mine? Good Lord, no,’ Doc exclaimed, lifting his hands and smiling as if this was possibly the most preposterous supposition he had ever yet been party to.
The boy, his?
Patty stared up at Doc, unblinking, his head yanked sideways by Dewi’s tight grip. He was just a boy. He had no agenda. There was nothing unspoken or sly or resentful in his gaze. But even so, almost out of nowhere, Doc’s smile suddenly faltered. His hands froze, mid-air. His lips twisted. Because he had indeed been the father of a son, once.
A father. This strangely alien yet acutely painful notion hit him like a karate kick. Two kicks. In the kidneys. It winded him. How on earth could he have forgotten? Even passingly. His own flesh and blood, his boy, dead. A too short life, curtailed, emptied, drained, exhausted…
Doc’s loose hands clenched, just briefly, as if he was seriously considering doing something wild and magnificent –venting his rage. Perhaps calling death or fate or destiny to task. Going five rounds with the bastards. Pulping them –but then they unclenched again and hung inertly.
Dewi didn’t notice Doc’s distress. It was all much too subtle. He was far too irritable. He turned to Jo. ‘What about you?’ he asked, then paused for a moment to inspect her face more closely. He had mistaken her for a boy, possibly a brother. But she was a girl, and as if to prove it categorically, a fierce blush –like two clumsily upended measures of sweet cherry brandy –slowly stained the impeccable cream cotton tablecloth of her soft complexion.
Jo shrugged, burning inside, burning outside, utterly mortified, yet still silently mesmerised by the layers of dust which –close up –coated Dewi’s features and hung above either eyebrow like precarious hunks of soft, pale honeycomb.
‘Why should the kid belong to anybody?’ Hooch butted in –observing Doc’s temporary state of disquiet and feeling bad for him. ‘Why can’t he simply be here under his own steam?’
Dewi loosened his grip on the child –he couldn’t be much past eleven, at best, Jo calculated –and slowly drew closer to Hooch. Soon he stood only inches from him. He was a good foot taller, even hatless (if they’d suddenly begun slow-dancing, Jo couldn’t help imagining, then Hooch’s flat pate would’ve fitted with a reassuring snugness under Dewi’s jutting chin).
As it was, Hooch’s mean streak of a nose pointed with an almost stoat-like determination towards Dewi’s left nipple. Eye contact was not maintained –it was not desirable –it was barely even feasible.
Patty, for his part, instantly busied himself in trying to eradicate a large smear of dust from the arm of his cheap, shiny green bomber jacket. He slapped away at it, vigorously.
Doc, in turn (and somewhat to his discredit, under the circumstances), stared fixedly off to his left, towards the distant smudge of sea at the road’s end, as if he’d just received urgent word of an Armada.
Dennis –who’d stood up, initially, to sniff at Dewi’s trouser leg –sat down again, glanced up at Doc, tightened his eyes, drew his lips back into an apprentice snarl, shook his head and then sneezed.
‘It’s very plain, my friend,’ Dewi murmured softly into the crown of Hooch’s slightly dented beanie, the curling vine of a Welsh accent suddenly twisting into audibility and looping with an almost unspeakable sincerity around each and every syllable, ‘that there are some things, some important things, which you don’t yet seem to know about Katherine Turpin.’
He inhaled deeply. ‘The first of these,’ he continued calmly, his voice deep and smooth as a stagnant loch, ‘is that I am her friend. I am her guardian. I am her self-appointed foot-soldier. It is a service that I perform for her out of loyalty and love and veneration. And while you’re at liberty to interpret my guardianship in any way you please,’ he smiled (it wasn’t friendly), ‘you might benefit from knowing that my name is Dewi and that I live in this bungalow…’ he pointed (somewhat gratuitously), ‘directly opposite her bungalow, and that if she ever troubled to ask me I would happily break my own two arms for her…’ a significant pause followed, ‘or anybody else’s,’ a further pause, ‘for that matter.’
Dewi took a small step backwards, down into the gutter, and nodded his head curtly, as if in parting. He half-turned. But then he thought better of it, stuck out
