‘Don’t apologize,’ Mumford said mildly. ‘Just take him back to the home and we’ll say no more about it.’
‘Good one, dad. So…’ The tall kid with the zips looked around. ‘This is it, then, is it? The official Robson Walsh closing-down sale? Everything must go, yeah?’
‘Knew Robbie, did you?’
‘We was only his very best mates, dad. We had some awesome laughs with Robbie.’ He turned to the others. ‘Am I right?’
The eleven-year-old giggled. The other small kid – yellow fleece, combat trousers, watchful eyes – looked down at his trainers.
‘You had some laughs.’ Mumford’s voice was a thin, taut line. ‘With Robbie.’
‘So, like, basically, we thought we’d like to buy something to remember him by. Not the books, though. The books are shite.’
‘What kind of laughs you have with Robbie?’
‘See, I was thinking that computer. How much?’
‘Not for sale,’ Mumford said.
‘Tell you what, dad… forty quid.’
‘You en’t listening, son.’
‘All right – sixty. You en’t gonner get sixty for a second-hand computer that old, are you?’ The tall kid unzipped his jacket, felt in a pocket of his jeans, took out an amazingly dense wad of notes. ‘OK, I’ll go seventy. Seventy quid. How’s that?’
Merrily saw that the boys had arranged themselves in a rough semicircle around Mumford and her, the width of the garage, so that nobody was going to get past them.
‘Lot of notes you got there, Jason.’ Mumford’s face was set like cement, his eyes steady on the tall kid. ‘Been nicking little children’s dinner money again, is it?’
Jason? Mumford knew him? Merrily kept quiet, staying in the corner beside the workbench. They were only boys, after all. The eleven-year-old… he could even be ten. The other younger one, maybe twelve or thirteen, kept glancing nervously at the tall kid, as if he was worried about where this was going.
Merrily felt the heat of sweat on her forehead.
‘You talking to me?’ the tall kid said. ‘Is that my name, dad?’
‘Ah well…’ Mumford reached up and unplugged the computer from a socket over the workbench; the screen sighed and faded. ‘Could be I made a mistake. Just you reminded me for a minute of Jason Mebus, star of a whole stack of CCTV nasties – urinating in High Town… nicking Big Issues from a disabled man. Jason’s just waiting for his seventeenth birthday, he is, so he can be in prison videos.’
‘Fuck are you?’ the tall kid said.
He might as well have pinned on a lapel badge that said Jason.
‘Then again, it’s a bit dark now.’ Mumford looked into the black screen. ‘So I might’ve been mistaken. And if you was all gone from yere ’fore I had a chance to get a good look…’
Good. Merrily breathed slowly. That was sensible.
Jason didn’t move. The gnome with the chain stifled a laugh.
Merrily saw something dance into Jason’s eyes. He reached out a hand, laid it on Mumford’s shoulder.
‘You a cop, dad?’
‘Take your hand off me, boy,’ Mumford said mildly.
Jason’s grip tightened. ‘No, come on, dad… are you a c—?’
Mumford came round faster than Merrily could have imagined, had the boy’s arm down behind his back, had him swinging round and rammed up – smack – hard against the side wall, squashing his open mouth into one of its concrete blocks.
‘No. For your information, I en’t.’ Mumford’s forearm in the back of Jason’s neck. ‘Which means I can do what I like to you, ennit, boy?’
Merrily saw a bloody imprint on the wall where Jason’s mouth had kissed it.
‘Andy…’ She came out of the corner. If Mumford had smashed this boy’s front teeth, they were in trouble. ‘Let’s just—’
‘You can start by explaining why you want the computer, Jason,’ Mumford said, ‘or mabbe who sent you in to get it for them, and then—’
And then Merrily was dragged aside from behind, and stumbled to her knees, and saw across the bench that the boy in the yellow fleece had hold of the plug on the computer lead and had started to pull on it, his face red with effort and a kind of panic in his eyes.
By the time she was back on her feet, the dog-chain was around Mumford’s throat, the fat kid tugging on it from behind, swinging on it, both feet leaving the ground, and Mumford’s eyes bulging out of his veined, florid face.
19
The Joy of Death
SADGIRL. OK, IT wasn’t sophisticated, but it was simple and it sounded vulnerable and inoffensive: SADGIRL, HEREFORD, ENGLAND.
It would do.
So Sadgirl left a message in the Departure Lounge.
i lost my baby, and i lost my fella. i’m seventeen and i dont want to get any older. dont want to do any of this again. i listened to belladonna and shes given me the courage to do what i have to do. i want to rest for ever with my child. this is serious.
Rest for ever with my child. Jane thought this was moving and resonant. She felt better hiding behind Sadgirl. Putting her own name in there would have been awfuclass="underline" planting some part of herself in the electronic depths – a suicide seed.
Sadgirl was cyber-bait. It just needed someone to come through and harden the link between Belladonna and suicide. Jane had a picture of the dragon lady lurking, logged on from Ludlow, waiting to entrap damaged people.
Which wasn’t entirely ridiculous. She instinctively didn’t like this woman. OK, she hadn’t even been born when Belladonna was famous, and she hated almost all 1980s music on principle, but it went beyond that now. She’d logged on to the Belladonna websites – surprised at how many there were, mostly unofficial – and they were all creep sites. You had an immediate sense of something unhealthy, sexually perverse and kind of slick and clammy, like those things people put up to catch flies.
And the woman – her music, at least – was sharing the same cyberspace as Karone the Boatman, sultan of sickos.
Maybe – and the idea wasn’t total fantasy because anything was possible in cyberspace and everyone was equal – Sadgirl could lure Belladonna into the open. She just needed to know more. Mum had not divulged enough to give her much of a handle, and Mum was out of reach, which left…
Lol.
It was useful, not to say comforting, to have Lol just across the street. Jane stayed connected to the Net and phoned him on her mobile.
Lol said, ‘She’s out with Mumford? At this time of night?’
‘It’s not a date, Lol. And like, I’m sure that, while a certain kind of woman wouldn’t be able to resist that gruff, monosyllabic—’
‘I’m backing off, all right?’ Lol said. ‘Just because I’m across the road—’
‘No, I like you to be concerned about her. It’s old-fashioned.’
‘Meanwhile, what exactly is bothering you about Belladonna?’
‘Just need a clearer picture of where she fits in. Like, why is she in Ludlow? What’s she doing there?’
‘Everybody’s got to live somewhere, Jane. It’s a very sought-after place these days. However… apart from the fact that her stepdaughter’s in the area, we really don’t know.’
‘But there is a definite connection between her and Robbie Walsh, right?’
‘Seems that way. However—’
‘Therefore, if I was to firmly link her with Jemmie Pegler, as well…’
‘You haven’t…?’
‘Got to be close. Mum says Pegler was visiting suicide chat-rooms, and if they’re the ones I’ve just peered into, they’re more or less recommending Belladonna as, like…’
‘Music to slash wrists by? That’s no surprise. It doesn’t mean she’s authorized it.’