Zoë stared at the name, moving her jaw from side to side. She put on a calm smile and raised her head to him. She hadn’t taken much notice of him until now. He was slight, medium height, with wiry dark hair and olive skin. Apart from his tie, which was knotted the way they all seemed to these days, puffed up and wide, like some seventies TV cop’s, he was dressed more conventionally than the others, in that at least his trousers appeared to almost fit him and the spikes in his hair weren’t totally outlandish. His fierce brown eyes were bloodshot.
‘So.’ She forced her voice to sound casual. ‘What can I do for you all?’
There was a moment’s silence. Then the one called Nial nudged the one called Peter. Sophie and Millie kept still, their eyes on the floor. Ralph rubbed the back of his sleeve nervously across his forehead.
‘It’s like this,’ said Peter. ‘Ralph’s scared.’
‘Concerned,’ Ralph corrected. ‘A little concerned. That’s all.’
‘I see. And why are you concerned?’
‘I was …’ He scratched his arms. ‘I was …’
‘He was with Lorne,’ Peter said, ‘the night she was killed.’
Zoë cupped her chin with her fingers. Gave the teenagers a ruminative look. In her chest her heart was knocking like a tomtom. Here was Debbie and Ben’s ‘killer’. All five foot ten of him. And meanwhile, if she was right about that message on Lorne, the real killer was out there somewhere. Maybe thinking about number two. ‘OK,’ she said calmly. ‘And obviously there was a reason you didn’t mention this before.’
‘I’ve never told my parents I’d got a girlfriend. And Lorne never told anyone about me either. It was supposed to be a secret.’
‘His parents are Catholic. They find that sort of thing a bit – you know.’
‘Can you help him?’ Nial asked. ‘He doesn’t know what to do.’
‘Help? I’m not sure about help. This is serious. I know you know that – you’re not stupid. But we’ll take this slowly. Ralph, Lorne was your girlfriend. How long had you been seeing her?’
‘Only a couple of weeks. But I loved her. I mean that. She was the one for me.’ There was something tight in his voice that said he wasn’t lying. ‘Please,’ he said, and for a moment he sounded like a little kid. A kid left out in the rain and begging to come inside. ‘Please, I just don’t know what to do.’ He straightened against the wall and put his head back against the plaster, shaking it. ‘Honestly, I think I’d be better off dead.’
‘Come on,’ she said, leaning forward, ‘let’s take a deep breath, shall we?’ Technically she should be thinking about calling in the child-protection units, with a minor saying things about wanting to die, but she’d never get the story out of him if she did that. ‘OK? You OK?’
After a moment or two he licked his lips and muttered, ‘Yeah.’
‘And calmly now, Ralph, just calmly, knowing how awful you feel about all of this, and knowing how much you want to help us catch whoever did this to Lorne, take me through what happened that night.’
The room fell quiet. All the other teenagers had their attention on him. He lowered his eyes to his hands, which he held in tight fists. ‘She told her mum she was shopping, but actually she was meeting me. Up near Beckford’s Tower. Where we always met.’
Beckford’s. The great Victorian monument that drunken farmers were supposed to have used to find their way home at night, with its neoclassical belvedere, its gilded lantern. It stood in a cemetery at the top of Lansdown and could be seen from all across the city. It was also on one of the bus routes that came through the stop near the canal. Zoë sighed. Lorne must have been on the bus because she’d been up at Beckford’s with Ralph. ‘So, what time was that?’
‘About five thirty, I think.’
‘How long were you there?’
‘I’m really not sure. It could have been an hour. It could have been an hour and a half.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘I didn’t check my watch. I just didn’t. Otherwise I’d tell you.’
So, up to ninety minutes maximum. Add to that the ten minutes or so bus ride to the centre of town and there was still the outside chance Lorne had gone somewhere after leaving Ralph – before going to the canal.
‘And then?’
‘And then she left. And I walked into town. I met up with, uh –’ he rubbed his arms again ‘– with Peter and Nial.’
‘We went out for a beer,’ Nial said hurriedly. ‘The school had won a cricket match the day before so we felt like having a little celebrate.’
‘The three of you?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Are you old enough to be cruising round the local pubs?’
‘Well – no. Not really. We kind of used fake IDs.’
‘Kind of?’
‘Yes. Why? Are you going to give us a lecture on it?’
Zoë raised her eyebrows at him. Impressed by his guts. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Of course I’m not. In the scheme of things it’s not exactly the crime of the century. So what time did your little fake-ID celebration finish?’
Nial shot Peter a look. Peter scratched his head. ‘What time was it? About midnight?’
‘About that, yeah.’
‘Where did you go, Ralph?’
‘Home. Weston.’
‘How did you get there?’
‘I walked.’
‘Did anything unusual happen on the way? Did you see anyone you knew?’
‘No.’
‘So let’s backtrack a bit. You met Lorne. What happened while you were together?’
There was a silence. Ralph’s head was quite still but his hands weren’t. They made little trembling movements. His shoulders were shaking. He shook his head imploringly – as if he couldn’t trust himself to speak without crying.
Zoë met Peter’s eyes. She jerked a thumb at the door. ‘Give us a few moments here?’ she mouthed. ‘Some privacy.’
The other two boys and the two girls exchanged glances. Then, as if they were a single organism, capable of reaching decisions without words, they filed out. In the corridor they stood with their hands in their pockets, each with one foot up against the wall. Like the cover of a Ramones album. It never went out of style to be skinny and sullen.
Zoë kicked the door closed, grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on the window-sill and turned back to Ralph. He had slid down the wall and was in a little huddled squat, his hands over his face. ‘OK, OK.’ She crouched next to him, put a hand on his shoulder and felt the warmth of his skin through the thin shirt. The tremor of his breath coming in and out. ‘Look, you’ve done the right thing by coming to me.’ She handed him a tissue. He took it and crammed it against his face. ‘You can be proud of that.’
He nodded and wiped his nose. His breathing was thick and nasal.
‘But I need to get it all clear in my thoughts, Ralph. I asked you if something particular happened at Beckford’s Tower and that seemed to upset you.’
He nodded miserably. ‘We had an argument. She wanted to tell everyone about us and I …’ He had to take deep breaths to calm himself. ‘We split up. We split up and she said she never wanted to see me again and … And … And that’s what happened. And it’s all my fucking fault. All because I’m scared of my fucking parents.’
‘It’s not your fault, Ralph. It’s really not your fault.’
‘What’s going to happen? Do I have to go to court? Are my parents going to know about it? My father’ll be furious. He thinks lying should be counted as a mortal sin.’
She rested her arm on his shoulders. He really was just a little boy. She could see the faint white of his scalp at the neat parting of his black hair. ‘I think, Ralph, that most parents would be more concerned about your welfare. And that you’ve had the courage to tell the truth.’
‘Christ.’ He’d used up the tissues so he wiped his nose on the shoulder of his shirt. ‘I wish you were my mother.’
‘Oh, no, no. I’d be a terrible mother. You can trust me on that one. Now, coming here was a huge decision for you, but it was the right one. This information is really, really important. With it we can build a picture of what happened to Lorne. But there’s not a lot I can do with the information if I can’t share it with my colleagues. If I gave you a guarantee that nothing will be said to your parents until you’re happy for them to hear, would you come and tell the rest of the team? The ones who can make a difference? You could stop this happening again. To someone else.’