‘He... I don’t know.’
‘He what?’ Cal was facing him now, fists bunched. ‘Which flat’s he in?’ Jamie started to tell him, but Cal snatched the neck of his shirt. ‘Better still, show me.’
But as they walked along the landing to Darren Rough’s flat, they saw that others had the same idea. A group of seven or eight residents stood outside Rough’s door. Most of them had the morning paper with them, rolled up and brandished like a weapon. Cal was disappointed they weren’t the first.
‘Is he no’ in?’
‘No’ answering anyway.’
Cal kicked at the door, saw from the looks around him that they were impressed. Stood back and shouldered the door, kicked it again. Two locks: Yale and mortice. No way to see inside: letterbox was blocked up; a sheet pinned across the window. Everyone was talking about it.
‘Wake up, ya bastardin’ pervert!’ Cal Brady shouted at the window. ‘Come and meet your fan club!’ There were smiles around him.
‘Maybe he works shifts,’ someone offered. Cal couldn’t think of a smart remark to make back. He thumped on the window instead, then went back to kicking the door. A few more residents arrived, but more began to drift away. Soon there were just a couple of kids, plus Cal and Jamie.
‘Jamie,’ Cal said, ‘go get me a spray can. Try under my bed.’
Jamie already knew there were a couple of cans under there. ‘Blue or black?’ he asked, before he realised what he’d done.
But Cal didn’t notice. He was busy staring at the door. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. Jamie went off to fetch the can. His mum was outside, arms folded, talking with a couple of women from the landing. Jamie trotted past them.
‘Well?’ his mum said.
‘Nobody’s in.’
She turned back to her friends. ‘Could be anywhere. Scum like that, there’s no telling.’
‘What we need’s a petition,’ one of the women said.
‘Aye, get the council to rehouse him.’
‘Think they’ll listen to us?’ Van said. ‘Direct action, that’s what we want. Our problem, we deal with it, never mind what anyone else says.’
‘People’s Republic of Greenfield,’ another woman offered.
‘I’m serious, Michele,’ Van said, ‘deadly serious.’ Behind her, Jamie disappeared into the flat.
15
‘Mum and me, we seemed to move around a lot in the early days.’
Cary Oakes was in a chair by his bedroom window, feet up on the table in front of him. Jim Stevens sat on a corner of the bed, holding the tape recorder at arm’s length.
‘Places? Dates?’
Oakes looked at him. ‘I don’t remember the names of towns, people we stayed with. When you’re a kid, that sort of thing doesn’t matter, does it? I had my own life, my own little fantasy world. I’d be a soldier or a fighter pilot. Scotland would be full of aliens, and I’d be out to get them, a vigilante sort of scenario.’ He gazed out of the window. ‘Because we moved so much, I never really made any friends. Not close friends.’ He saw that Stevens was about to interrupt. ‘Again, I can’t give any names. I remember coming to Edinburgh, though.’ He paused, stretched to rub his thumb across the toe of one shoe, removing a trace of dirt. ‘Yes, Edinburgh sticks in my mind. We stayed with family. My aunt and her husband. Don’t remember which part of town they lived in. There was a park nearby. I went there a lot. Maybe we could get a picture of me there.’
Stevens nodded. ‘If you can remember where it is.’
Oakes smiled. ‘Any park would do, wouldn’t it? We’d just pretend. That’s what I did in that park. It was my universe. Mine. I could do whatever the hell I liked there. I was God.’
‘So what did you do?’ Stevens was thinking: this is easy, fluid. Oakes was either a born storyteller or else... or else he’d been rehearsing. But something had jarred, something about family: my aunt and her husband. A strange way of putting it.
‘What did I do? I played games, same as every other kid. I had an imagination, I’ll tell you that. When you’re a kid, nobody minds if you run around shooting up the world, know what I’m saying? In your head, you can kill whole populations. I’ll bet there isn’t one damned person on this planet hasn’t thought about murdering someone at some time. I’ll bet you have.’
‘I’ll show you my collection of voodoo dolls.’
Oakes smiled. ‘My mum, she did her best for me.’ He paused. ‘I’m sure of that.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘She died, man.’ His eyes bored into the reporter’s. ‘But then everybody dies.’
‘You played these games by yourself?’
Oakes shook his head. ‘The other kids got to know me. I joined a gang, rose through the ranks.’
‘See much action?’
Oakes shrugged. ‘There were a few fights. Mostly we just played football and glowered at strangers. Offed a few of the neighbourhood cats too.’
‘How?’
‘Sprayed them with lighter fluid, torched them.’ Oakes’s eyes fixed on Stevens. ‘Typical start to your basic serial killer. I read about it in jail. Loner who torches animals.’
‘But you weren’t alone, you were with your gang.’
Oakes smiled again. ‘But I was the one with the lighter, Jim. And that made all the difference.’
When they took a break, Stevens returned to his own room. Two sachets of coffee into a cup of boiling water. He’d been wakened at four that morning by the telephone. His boss had worked a miracle, and Stevens found himself speaking to a Seattle journalist who’d followed the Oakes case all the way along. The journalist, Matt Lewin, confirmed that Oakes had attended regular Sunday services in the Walla Walla penitentiary.
‘A lot of them do, doesn’t mean they’ve seen the light.’
Now Stevens lay back on the bed and sipped his coffee. He wanted to track down Oakes’s teenage gang. It would be good background, another insight into Cary Oakes. If they ran the story, maybe someone from the gang would read it and come forward. Then Stevens could interview them for the book. He’d asked Matt Lewin if any American publishers would be interested.
‘Not when he’s not one of ours. We like home-grown product. Besides, Jim, serial killers went out of fashion a while back.’
Stevens was hoping for a fashion revival. The book deal would be his gold watch, a little retirement gift to himself. He knew he should do some research, try to check the stories Oakes had been telling. But he felt so tired, and his boss had told him: get the story first, confirm it later. He finished his coffee and reached for a cigarette. Swung his legs off the bed.
Showtime.
Janice Mee took a break, ate at the restaurant at the top of John Lewis’s. From one window, the view was of Calton Hill. They’d climbed it with Damon one day, back when he was seven or eight. She had photos of the trip in one of her albums: Calton Hill, the Castle, Museum of Childhood... There were dozens of albums. She kept them in the bottom of the wardrobe. She’d taken them out recently, brought the whole lot downstairs so she could go through them, reviving memories of holiday camps and days at the seaside, birthday parties and sports days. From one of the restaurant’s other windows, she had a good view of the Fife coastline. She couldn’t see as far inland as her home town. There were times in the course of her life when she’d contemplated a move: south to Edinburgh, north to Dundee. But there was something comfortable about the place where you were born, where your family and friends were. Her parents and grandparents had been born in Fife, the history of the place inextricably linked to her own. Her mother had been a little girl at the time of the General Strike, but remembered them putting up barricades around Lochgelly. Her father had clung to a lamp-post to watch Johnny Thomson’s funeral. The way a family stretched back in time could be measured. But that sense of history misled you into thinking the future would be the same. As Janice was finding out, the thread of continuity could be snapped at any point along the way.