‘You mean it would have been too difficult for you.’
‘I never forced him to meet with Al. I told him Al might listen to him. I told him Al liked him. He did like him. But I never believed Alex would do what he did. I’ve thought about it often since he left, and after he came back. Thinking is what I’ve got instead of a voice. I’ve wondered whether I would sacrifice what I have now for a moment again with Alex. If I had the time over again, I’m always thinking what choice I might make.’
‘Why would there even be a choice?’
‘Al would have ruined our lives. If he had got his way, we’d be living on the street somewhere, looking in the gutters for dinner. You think he would have had second thoughts? He wouldn’t. So, what Alex did changed our lives. Because our lives carried on. If he hadn’t done that, we all would have been dead, dying in some fucking dump somewhere. There’s a choice, David, believe me.’
He sat down on the edge of the sofa.
‘Eight years ago — it was 29 May — I was working for the bank, and a man came to me and asked me for a loan. When I enquired what it was for, he said he wanted to set up a rehabilitation clinic for kids with problems. A safehouse. A place they could come and start again. I didn’t know how the hell he would ever repay the loan. When I asked him how he was going to make money from it, he didn’t know. Didn’t have a clue. He just wanted to do it because of something that had happened in his life. He had no plan, and a criminal record. So, of course I turned him down. It would have been financial suicide even if he hadn’t been a convicted felon, and if I’d given it to him I would have got the sack.’
‘Andrew.’
He nodded. ‘Then I began to feel very strongly about the idea.’
‘Alex’s brother.’
For the first time he glanced at Mary. A brief look. Then back at me. ‘I watched someone else I loved dearly die on the streets with a needle in his arm, and I wasn’t going to stand by and watch other kids do the same.’
‘The boy in the photograph.’ I thought of the kid kicking a ball around in the picture Jade had showed me the night she’d died. She’d talked about the boy’s father. I think, in some ways, he’s even worse. ‘The boy is yours.’
Malcolm nodded.
Mary made little noise. That surprised me, but I didn’t turn around to look at her. Malcolm was in full flow now, feeding off the fact he could finally say what he’d stored up.
‘He wasn’t Mary’s son?’
‘What do you think?’
‘So, whose son was he?’
‘A girl I met through the bank,’ he said. ‘At the end, she was just a junkie, selling herself to fund her habit. But the boy was wonderful. I tried to see him as often as I could. That was why I took the job with Al. The office was in Harrow. Robert lived in Wembley.’ He paused. ‘But then Al found out about him.’
‘About the boy?’
‘He saw me taking Robert to school one day.’
‘That was why he flipped?’
‘When he found out who Robert was, he wanted me to tell Mary. I refused. He said he’d tell her himself. So I threatened him, told him I’d kill him if he said anything. He said, if I didn’t tell her, he’d take back everything that was his. I don’t think he believed I would kill him. So, it became a stand-off. Mary hated Al — but, in the end, all Al was doing was trying to help her.’
‘But Mary never found out.’
‘No. It had been going on for two months, Al threatening to tell her. I tried to close off all other avenues, like paying Robert’s mother to keep her trap shut. But she ended up using the money to buy smack. One day when I went round there, I found a needle mark in his arm. He was ten years old. If I’d known that was going to happen, I would have killed her and brought him back here. I would have done that. In the end, she was just a hooker. No one would have missed her. But, a couple of days later, she called me on the phone and told me he’d been found in the Thames. He’d overdosed. A ten-year-old boy.’
I remembered the newspaper cuttings, in the flat and on the farm. BOY, 10, FOUND FLOATING IN THE THAMES. This is the reason we do it.
‘Al didn’t have anything on me then, not once the boy was dead, but all I felt was anger. All I wanted was to hit out at someone. I suggested to Alex we take his money. That was the first step. But that wasn’t enough. It didn’t quell anything. So I started thinking about killing Al, thought a lot about it. Then Alex really did kill him. When it happened, it suddenly seemed so huge. But after Alex had gone, I started to feel it again, eating away at me. I couldn’t suppress it. Couldn’t suppress the hatred I felt for Al, even after he was dead. And the hatred I felt for her.’
‘The boy’s mother?’
He nodded.
‘I’d taken a lot of my contacts from the bank with me when I went to work for Al. Sneaked them out, just in case I ever started up my own business. One of the numbers was Andrew’s. I called him after Al died, told him I wanted to help him with his plan. It was the right thing to do after what happened to Robert. And we grew close, got on well. But all the time, the anger just burned in me. I think if she’d shown any kind of remorse, I would have let her live. But she didn’t. She seemed pleased to be free of the responsibility.’
‘So you killed her?’
‘About a year after we bought the farm, I just exploded. Couldn’t contain the anger any more. So I asked Andrew whether he knew anyone. He said he did, a guy he was in the army with, and that was when he sent Legion out to see her. Some things you regret. I don’t regret that.’
‘What about the other kids you killed? Do you regret them?’
‘We tried to save them.’
‘You murdered them.’
‘No one died who didn’t deserve it.’
‘Did Simon deserve it?’
‘Simon,’ he said, disgust in his face.
‘Did he deserve it?’
‘Simon became a problem.’
‘Because he refused to give up his memories?’
‘No! Because he almost beat one of our instructors to death! I never wanted the violence. I only wanted Legion’s help for that one thing. She killed that boy. She deserved it. But things happened up there, and I started to realize it was the only way we could protect ourselves. What we built and what we worked for had to be protected. And, in the end, we protected what I cared about most. We protected Alex. What we did to Simon protected Alex.’
‘But you murdered Simon.’
‘We gave him a chance, but he threw it back in our faces. Some of these kids were so fucking ungrateful. When they fought back, what the hell were we supposed to do with them? They couldn’t go back. We couldn’t put them back on the streets. They would have talked to people and we would have been found out and everything we built would have come tumbling down. They gave us no choice.’
‘So you killed them.’
‘There were challenges.’
‘So you killed them.’
‘There were unexpected challenges. And when one of our instructors, one of Andrew’s friends, was killed right back at the start, we realized that, in order to continue our work, we’d always have to make a sacrifice. In an ideal world, every kid we took to the farm would understand the magnitude of what we were doing for them. But some gave us nothing in return but their bile.’
‘What did you expect? You kidnapped them.’
‘Kidnapped them?’ He smirked again. ‘Hardly. We invited them, we didn’t force them to come to the farm. We’ve never had a kid turn us down. They took the opportunity they were given because they knew it was a good one.’