“Stole?”
“Yes. I found it when I were cleaning his room. From that… that there skeleton. I left it where I found it. I didn’t want to touch it. Anyone would think I haven’t brought him up right. It’s not easy when you’re on your own.”
“Calm down, Mrs. Kelly,” Annie said, stepping forward and resting her hand on her arm. “Nobody’s blaming you for anything. Or Adam. We just want to get to the bottom of it, that’s all.”
The room was hot and a woman on television was explaining how to make the perfect soufflé. Because it was late afternoon and they were facing east, there was very little light. Banks was already beginning to feel claustrophobic.
“May I go up and talk to him?” he asked.
“You’ll get nowt out of him. Clammed up, he has.”
“May I try?”
“Suit yourself. Left at the top of the stairs.”
Banks glanced at Annie, who tried to settle Mrs. Kelly in an armchair, then he made his way up the narrow carpeted stairway. He knocked first on Adam’s door and, getting no response, opened it a short way and stuck his head around. “Adam?” he said. “It’s Mr. Banks. Remember me?”
Adam lay on his side on the single bed. He turned slowly, wiped his forearm across his eyes and said, “You’ve not come to arrest me, have you? I don’t want to go to jail.”
“Nobody’s going to take you to jail, Adam.”
“I didn’t mean nothing, honest I didn’t.”
“Why don’t you just calm down and tell me what happened. We’ll get it sorted. Can I come in?”
Adam sat up on the bed. He was a fair-haired kid with thick glasses, freckles and sticking-out ears, the kind who is often teased at school and develops an active fantasy life to escape. The kind Banks used to defend from bullies, perhaps. His eyes were red with crying. “Suppose so,” he said.
Banks went inside the small bedroom. There were no chairs, so he sat on the edge of the bed, at the bottom. Posters of muscular sword-and-sorcery heroes wielding enormous broadswords hung on the walls. A small computer sat on a desk, and a pile of old comic books stood by the bedside. That was about all there was room for. Banks left the door open.
“Why don’t you tell me about it?” he asked.
“I thought it were magic,” Adam said. “The Talisman. That’s why I went there.”
“Went where?”
“Hobb’s End. It’s a magic place. It were destroyed in a battle between good and evil, but there’s still magic buried there. I thought it would make me invisible.”
“He reads too many of them comic books,” a voice said accusingly. Banks turned to see Mrs. Kelly standing in the doorway. Annie came up beside her. “Head in the clouds, he has,” Adam’s mother went on. “Dungeons and dragons, Conan the Barbarian. Myst. Riven. Stephen King and Clive Barker. Well, he’s gone too far this time.”
Banks turned. “Mrs. Kelly,” he said, “will you let me talk to Adam alone for a few minutes?”
She stood in the doorway, arms folded, then made a sound of disgust and walked off.
“Sorry,” Annie mouthed to Banks, following her.
Banks turned. “Right, Adam,” he said. “So you’re a magician, are you?”
Adam looked at him suspiciously. “I know a bit about it.”
“Would you tell me what happened at Hobb’s End that day, when you fell?”
“I’ve already told you.”
“The whole story.”
Adam chewed his lower lip.
“You found something, didn’t you?”
Adam nodded.
“Will you show it to me?”
The boy paused, then reached under his pillow and pulled out a small round object. He hesitated, then passed it to Banks. It was a metal button, by the look of it. Corroded, still encrusted with dirt, but clearly a button of some sort.
“Where did you find this, Adam?”
“It fell into my hand, honest.”
Banks turned away to hide his smile. If he had a penny for every time he’d heard that from an accused thief, he’d be a rich man by now. “All right,” he said. “What were you doing when it fell into your hand?”
“Pulling the hand out.”
“It was in the skeleton’s hand?”
“Must’ve been, mustn’t it?”
“As if the victim had been holding it in her palm?”
“You what?”
“Never mind. Why didn’t you tell us about it sooner?”
“I thought it were what I’d gone there for. The Talisman. It’s not easy to get. You have to pass through the veil to the Seventh Level. There’s sacrifice and fear to overcome.”
Banks hadn’t a clue what the boy was talking about. In Adam’s imagination, it seemed, the old button had taken on some magical quality because of how it had been delivered to him. Not that it mattered that much. The point was that Adam had taken the button from Gloria Shackleton’s hand.
“You did well,” Banks said. “But you should have passed this on to me the first time I came to see you. It’s not what you were looking for.”
Adam seemed disappointed. “It’s not?”
“No. It’s not a talisman, it’s just an old button.”
“Is it important?”
“I don’t know yet. It might be.”
“Who was it? Do you know? The skeleton?”
“A young woman.”
Adam paused to take it in. “Was she pretty?”
“I think she was.”
“Has she been there a long time?”
“Since the war.”
“Did the Germans kill her?”
“We don’t think so. We don’t know who killed her.” He held out the button on his palm. “This might help us find out. You might help us.”
“But whoever did it will be dead by now, won’t he?”
“Probably,” said Banks.
“My granddad died in the war.”
“I’m sorry to hear it, Adam.” Banks stood up. “You can come down now, if you want. Nobody’s going to do you any harm.”
“But my mum-”
“She was just upset, that’s all.” Banks paused in the doorway. “When I was a lad your age, I once stole a ring from Woolworth’s. It was only a plastic ring, not worth much, but I got caught.” Banks could remember it as if it were yesterday: the smell of smoke on the department-store detectives’ breath; their overbearing size as they stood over him in the cramped triangular office tucked away under the escalator; the rough way they handled him and his fear that they were going to beat him up or molest him in some way, and that everyone would think he deserved it because he was a thief. All for a plastic ring. Not even that, really. Just to show off.
“What happened?” Adam asked.
“They made me tell them my name and address and my mother had to go down and see them about it. She stopped my pocket money and wouldn’t let me go out to play for a month.” They had searched him roughly, pulling everything from his pockets: string, penknife, cricket cards, pencil stub, a gobstopper, bus fare home, and his cigarettes. That was why his mother had stopped his pocket money: because the Woolworth’s store detectives told her about the cigarettes. Which they no doubt smoked themselves. He always thought that was unfair, that the cigarettes had nothing to do with it. Punish him for stealing the ring, yes, but leave him his cigarettes. Of course, over the subsequent years, he had come across many more examples of life’s basic unfairness, not a few of them perpetrated by himself. He had to admit that there were occasions when he had arrested someone for a driving offense, found a few grams of coke or hash in his pocket and added that to the charge sheet.
“Anyway,” he went on, “it took me a long time to work out why she was so upset over something so unimportant as a plastic ring.”
“Why?”
“Because she was ashamed. It humiliated her to have to go down there and listen to these men tell her that her son was a thief. To have them talk down to her as if it were her fault and have to thank them for not calling the police. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t done anything serious. She was ashamed that a son of hers would do such a thing. And worried it might be a sign of what I’d turn into.”