‘I won’t keep you long,’ Gerry said, when she had her mug of tea in one hand and her pen in another, the notebook open on her knee. While she questioned them, she looked primarily at Sean, whom she knew was the elder of the two by several weeks, and who appeared to be the leader. ‘Do you often play down on Hollyfield Lane?’
Neither boy said anything at first. They glanced shiftily at one another and eventually Sean said, with a guilty glance towards his father, ‘We’re not supposed to go down there. But we weren’t doing any harm.’
‘There are all sorts of dubious characters on the streets,’ Sean’s father added.
‘But you do go, sometimes, right?’ Gerry insisted.
Sean nodded. ‘Most of the houses are empty now,’ he said. ‘We thought that one was empty.’
‘We like to play in the empty houses,’ Luke added.
Sean gave him a withering look.
‘That’s all right,’ Gerry said. ‘I was the same when I was a girl.’
Both boys stared at her open-mouthed, as if they couldn’t believe that a girl would be brave or adventurous enough to play the way they did.
‘Believe me,’ Gerry went on, ‘you’re not in any trouble for going in there.’ She glanced at the parents. ‘Not from me, at any rate.’
‘He won’t be going anywhere for a few weeks,’ Mr Bancroft said, through clenched teeth.
‘Had you seen the man on the mobility scooter before?’ Gerry asked.
‘Dunno,’ said Sean. ‘I mean, we didn’t get a really good look at him, did we, Luke?’
Luke shook his head. ‘We legged it,’ he said.
‘And it was pretty dark in there.’
‘So you don’t know if you’ve ever seen him before?’
‘There’s a bloke on a mobility scooter with long hair and a beard like his who comes in the park sometimes.’
‘What?’ said Mr Bancroft. ‘In our park?’ He glanced at Gerry. ‘It’s at the bottom of the hill,’ he explained. ‘Just a small park, like. But our kiddies play there. There’s been trouble about people from the old estate hanging around there before. There was a convicted paedophile—’
‘A park’s a public place, Mr Bancroft,’ Gerry said. ‘Hard to keep people out. But I get your point.’ She turned to Sean again. ‘What was he doing when you saw him in the park?’
‘Nothing,’ said Sean.
‘Just sitting there,’ Luke added.
‘On his scooter?’
‘No. On a bench. He’d have it beside him. The scooter. He could walk, but not very much.’
‘Did he ever say anything to you or any of the other children?’
‘No. He’d usually be reading a book or something.’
‘Did you ever see him with anyone else, talking to anyone?’
‘No. He was always by himself.’
‘Did you hear about that young lad we found on the East Side Estate yesterday?’ she asked.
‘The boy in the bin?’ said Luke, parroting a Daily Mail headline.
‘That’s the one.’ Gerry took the computer-generated photograph from her briefcase and showed it to them. ‘That’s what he looked like. Did you ever see him while you were playing?’
The boys shook their heads. ‘He’s an Arab,’ said Sean. ‘Dad says—’
‘That’ll do,’ cut in Mr Bancroft. ‘Just answer the lady’s questions.’
‘Yes, he’s an Arab,’ said Gerry. ‘Though that’s a bit of a broad description. Covers a wide area. We don’t know what country he came from yet.’
‘Is he one of those boat people?’ Luke asked. ‘Or an asylum seeker?’
‘I see you’ve been keeping an eye on the news.’
‘We do it at school,’ Sean explained. ‘Current affairs. Anyway, we haven’t seen him around here. If he did come from the Hollyfield he must be new there.’
‘But nobody’s new there,’ Luke said. ‘They’ve nearly all left.’
‘He could be a squatter or something,’ Sean argued. ‘They take over empty houses, don’t they?’
‘Not seen him in the park, on the swings or anything?’ Gerry asked.
‘No,’ said Sean, adding for no good reason, ‘we always play there with other boys and girls we know, and there’s always a grown-up there to keep an eye on us.’
‘A good thing, too,’ said Gerry. She glanced up at the boys’ parents. ‘I understand you have a Neighbourhood Watch in the area. Do either of you belong to it?’
Mr and Mrs Farrar said they did. Gerry showed them the photograph, too, and the Bancrofts.
‘We’ve never seen him,’ said Mrs Farrar. ‘Mind you, we stay on our side of the park. That’s our boundary. We don’t go over to the Hollyfield Estate. No reason to. To be quite honest, we’ll all be glad when it’s been flattened to the ground. They say the plans for the new houses are quite nice. Then there’ll be the shopping. And the cinema.’ Mrs Bancroft smiled at her.
Gerry was running out of questions. Her cosy flat and a large glass of Chardonnay before bed were feeling increasingly attractive. ‘When you were in the house, did you touch anything?’ she asked the boys.
‘No,’ said Sean. ‘We just walked in the room, like. It was dark and it smelled funny. Then I saw the scooter. It wasn’t until I got around the side that I saw the man sitting in it. I saw his hair and his beard first, then his eyes, but that was enough. We ran out of the front door.’
‘Was the door open?’
‘No. I had to open it.’
‘I mean was it locked?’
‘Oh. No. It opened when I turned the handle. Why? Do you think someone went in and killed that man? But they could have gone in the back like we did. The back door was unlocked too, and even open a bit.’
Gerry smiled. ‘No, we don’t think that. It seems like an accidental death. I’m just trying to get all the details straight, that’s all.’ She set her mug down on the coffee table, put away her notebook and pen and stood up to leave.
‘Ooh, look at the time,’ said Mrs Bancroft, also standing. ‘We’d better be taking Sean home now, too.’ She patted her boy’s head. ‘It’s school tomorrow.’ Sean scowled and edged away, embarrassed. Gerry winked at him. He blushed.
It was going on for half past eleven when Banks got home from Gateshead, where he had taken his daughter Tracy and her fiancé Mark to The Sage for a Richard Thompson concert: over two hours of mostly powerhouse electric guitar, bass and drums, along with haunting acoustic versions of ‘Beeswing’, ‘1952 Vincent Black Lightning’ and ‘From Galway to Graceland’. RT could certainly tell a long story in few words. There were a lot of songs from the new album, of course, but he had also played some old Fairport Convention numbers, such as ‘Tale in Hard Times’ and ‘Meet on the Ledge’, along with ‘Wall of Death’, which he had first recorded years ago with his ex-wife Linda. Banks’s ears were still ringing with the music on the drive home down the A1.
Tracy had been unimpressed in the way only a daughter can be with her father’s taste in music. It just wasn’t her ‘cup of tea’ she had said. But Mark had loved every minute of it and talked enthusiastically about the concert all the way back to Tracy’s flat, where Banks had dropped them off. Banks already approved of Mark as a prospective husband for Tracy, and this display of good taste cemented his approval. It would be nice if Mark had chosen a more interesting career than accountancy, he thought, but you can’t have everything. Besides, he would never be short of work, and he had already introduced an element of stability into Tracy’s sometimes erratic life’s journey.