There were rumours. He had a ball missing from a childhood accident, couldn’t get a girlfriend, and lived with a blow-up doll he’d speak to and eat with, as well as everything else. He had snuff films in his back room of cows getting shot in abattoirs and swans being stolen from the canal and tortured. You had to have a fiver and you had to put the fiver on the counter in a certain way, something to do with the Queen’s head, and he’d give one of them to you.
It was probably rubbish. All of it. He never did anything to us but we thought, all of us, that he was weird and bad and sinister. The police knew that too. They knew his reputation. Knew that he scared us. I watched him leer as he caught sight of Melanie and Dawn and I realised that while Terry had chosen him because he had a passing physical resemblance to Wilson, the greatest similarity between them was in how they made us feel.
‘While the police continue to go through the motions of investigating the missing man’s sudden disappearance,’ Terry said solemnly, ‘they’ve also been tasked with countering rumours that there’s a connection between Daniel Wilson and the several recent incidents of indecent exposure that have taken place in the City’s parks and green spaces. But while it is true that the police are looking for a man of medium height and build in connection with the offences and there is, apparently, no evidence to connect the missing man to them, the offences seem to have stopped abruptly around the time Wilson was last seen.’
Donald moved the mug around, warming his hands. I looked at him but his expression was unreadable. Barbara came into the room, a corner of a tea-towel tucked into each pocket of her trousers – a make-shift apron.
‘Anything new?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ Donald said. ‘Speculation and misdirection, as always.’
She clipped his shoulder gently, as if to say, ‘What are you like?’
But Donald was right. This, I thought, was what the world was really like. We weren’t supposed to forget. Terry wasn’t trying to help Wilson and his parents at all. If he had been, he wouldn’t have chosen Video Man, who was bound to make us feel bad and remind us of why we really didn’t want Wilson to be found.
‘What kind of man approaches young girls in the park anyway, that’s what I want to know,’ Barbara said. ‘I hope they catch him soon. No wonder he’s left home and gone into hiding.’
We carried on watching. The camera-work was rough. In more than a few shots, you could see the sound-boom at the top of the frame. They’d not bothered too much with costumes – when Wilson/Video Man walked, his jacket flapped open to reveal, quite clearly, the blue and white short-sleeved tee-shirt everyone who worked at the video shop wore as part of their uniform.
Video Man staggered, half stumbling as if he was drunk, towards the two girls. They pretended not to see him at first. Dawn whispered something in Melanie’s ear, and Melanie let her hair fall over her face and laughed. I instantly wondered what it was she’d said – whether they’d been asked to pretend to whisper and giggle for the reconstruction, or if they were really whispering something about Video Man and his balls and his doll or something else, between themselves.
The yellow bottle of Advocaat was on the bench too, but away from them, and although the camera zoomed in on the label and Terry pointed out the windmill and the brand name as if it was an advert and not the news, neither of the girls touched it for the duration of the reconstruction. It was as if it was someone else’s bottle, and Melanie and Dawn had just happened to sit down next to it.
‘Who is that strange man over there?’ Dawn said woodenly, and pointed past the camera.
‘I don’t know. I have never seen him before,’ Melanie replied. ‘Maybe we’d better head on home now.’ She sounded bored. Dawn was smiling at someone off screen.
Cut then, back to Video Man who was still ambling, still tossing twigs, and making his way gradually, in an uneven zigzag, towards the bench the two girls were sitting on. Terry, shrunk to the BSL interpreter’s station in the bottom corner of the screen, gesticulated sympathetically and provided a helpful commentary.
‘The girls were in high spirits on Boxing Day morning and had left their homes and families for a breath of fresh air.’
I knew what that meant. They were pissed. They’d snuck out to drink more, to smoke, to look for boys.
‘They were laughing, and talking about the Christmas gifts they’d each received from their families when an older man neither of them had seen before approached them and tried to tempt them deeper into the park by offering them cigarettes.’
‘Listen to that!’ Barbara said, ‘smoking!’ as if girls who smoked deserved everything they got. I thought of the tab-ends in the shed and bit my lip. ‘I’m away to dish up now. Don’t be too long.’ She disappeared into the kitchen.
‘What is it?’ I whispered to Donald.
He screwed up his face. ‘Corn beef hash.’
‘Sensibly,’ Terry said, ‘the girls accepted the gifts so as not to anger their interlocutor, and after a brief conversation, the man left them and walked in the direction of the town centre. Police are still checking CCTV camera footage, but what we do know is that man – Daniel Wilson – never returned home.’
The film ended and the shot returned to the studio, where Melanie and Dawn were sitting between Terry and Fiona. Fiona leaned forward and opened her mouth but Terry leapt in before she could say anything.
‘The police refuse to be drawn on the matter and obviously there’s a limit to what I’m allowed to say on air until we’ve dug up more evidence. No such restrictions apply to you, viewers. Call us. Tell us. Do you want this man found?’
Fiona frowned and looked pleadingly at someone off screen but Terry went on: ‘These offences are not just the concern of the young girls who are at risk of becoming victims on the cusp of their womanhood,’ he swept a lavishly gesturing arm in the direction of Melanie and Dawn, who flinched out of its way. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, these offences disturb us all. I am offended.’ Terry stared hard at us out of the tiny screen and I shivered.
‘Of course,’ Fiona began, ‘there’s no actual—’
‘Yes, yes,’ Terry broke in. ‘A police spokesman reiterated that there was no evidence to implicate Wilson in any wrongdoing and that vigilante justice would not be tolerated,’ he said.
You could tell he didn’t mean it by the way he said it. You always got a good performance from Terry – he made the cold weather sound like a personal affront and something the City should be doing something about when he reported on it. It was his sense of drama. It got people stirred up. It got things done. And when he read out that part about the police saying Wilson had nothing to do with the flashings, his voice was flat and insincere. We knew what he thought, clear as anything. When Donald reached into my lap for my hand, I jumped.
‘You’re always careful at night, when you’re out with that Chloe, aren’t you?’ he said.
I nodded slowly, hardly hearing what Donald was saying because my eyes were fixed on the screen.
‘This afternoon, the missing man’s parents made an emotional appeal for any information,’ Fiona said.
Now they were showing footage of Wilson’s mum and dad. Donald noticed I wasn’t paying attention to him and used the remote to turn the sound down, but I watched the pair of them anyway – younger than I’d imagined, ordinary, red-eyed and trembling. They were sitting at a trestle table on a platform and there were photographers there. The woman jumped every time the flash went off and the man – Wilson’s dad (I thought about worms, fishing and the ban on smoking) – in a suit and tie, looking hot and uncomfortable, with big rough hands appearing on the table, being drawn away to his lap, and then appearing again. The camera flashes reflected off the lenses of his glasses.