The second source was through my interpretation of the police and social services interviews which I’d given at the time. As a child I hadn’t understood them, but the questions were designed to build a consistent narrative, and, through repetition, had made me certain on some points. My sister and I had been woken in the middle of the night. Taken to a car we’d never seen before by our mother and the man she shared a bed with. We’d driven for a long time, out to a grey-brick farmhouse. There, I’d been sent inside by the man I knew as Bateman to retrieve a bag from an attic. I was told not to enter any other room but had disobeyed him when I felt a breeze coming from the kitchen. The windows had been blown in by gunfire and the room itself was the scene of explosive physical violence. I saw a woman who looked as though she’d been tortured. Whose throat had been cut, saturating the walls with blood. Leaving the kitchen, I’d heard the sound of someone crying behind a locked door. Once I’d retrieved the bag, I’d been frozen by this sound. Whether through simple humanity or as a conscious act of disobedience against Bateman, I’d turned the key in the door and left the house.
The final and most illuminating source for what I knew of that night came in the form of newspaper articles I’d searched out as a teen. For years I’d carried around the fear and the facts, as I understood them, devoid of the context. In the late nineties, Nicholas Fisk had been a powerful player in the Northern drug scene, a precursor to the more business-minded success stories that followed him. He eschewed violence where possible, building respect, and a rumoured fortune, through negotiation and deal-making.
Then one day, no one arrived to collect Fisk’s two boys from school. Three men had kidnapped their parents, taking them to a remote, dilapidated farmhouse which, it later transpired, Fisk owned. He’d kept it secret from everyone but his wife as some kind of safe house. The kidnappers had watched him for weeks, believing he stored a part of his vast, illegal fortune there. Locked inside, they’d started a campaign of intimidation against the Fisks to coerce information from them.
I still remember the moment.
Fifteen or sixteen years old, hunched over a newspaper reel in the local library, feeling the world stop when I saw Bateman’s face staring out at me from a black-and-white front page.
He’d been one of the three kidnappers.
Press speculation was that he’d discovered the whereabouts of Fisk’s wealth himself, and betrayed the others. Anonymously tipped off Fisk’s organization and, at the very last second, warned his friends inside the house that there were men approaching. He’d left to a safe distance, watching, while they wiped each other out. Speculation was all the press had, because Bateman had never spoken at his trial or in prison.
It was difficult for him to speak.
The reports all ended the same way. When Bateman had returned to pick over the spoils, Fisk had got loose, found a gun inside the house and shot his kidnapper in the head. There’d been a child on the scene, whose name, sex and age couldn’t legally be reported. But he’d been an eight-year-old boy. He’d run into the trees and hadn’t been found until the following day. Bateman had needed him to get into the attic, to edge inside the narrow space that only the slender Nicholas Fisk, or a small child, could manage. Bateman had been using the boy in con jobs since moving in with his mother. The size, the perceived innocence of a child, was what he thought of as his innovation to the field. He thought of the kids in his care as untapped gold mines, and he called the boy Wally, which was short for wallet.
Everyone else called him Aidan.
2
We were in a hospital waiting room, preparing for the formal identification of Ross Browne. The smiling man. There was Sutty, myself and Amy Burroughs, the nurse who’d been in a relationship with Browne before he left the city.
The only person we’d found who could identify him.
The Coroner’s Officer was explaining her role to Amy, but I wasn’t listening. I’d slept badly and been awoken by another phone call with nothing but breathing on the other end. When I’d looked out of my window on to the street there was no one there, but I knew it was Bateman.
I was wondering why he was back.
What he wanted and why me. If it was for money, he was about to be sorely disappointed by a policeman’s salary. Revenge? On an eight-year-old boy who’d opened the wrong door? That didn’t make sense, either. And he’d been watching me. Waiting. His arrival coinciding with that of the pictures set off a series of internal alarms through my nervous system. All of them saying the same word over and over again: Fuck.
‘Aidan,’ said Sutty, clicking his fingers in my face. I looked up at the Coroner’s Officer who’d been talking to me.
‘Mrs Burroughs would like you to accompany her inside.’
‘Yes,’ I said, looking at Amy. ‘Of course.’
The Officer turned to her. ‘And do you have any questions for me now?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
‘OK. Do you think you’re ready to go through?’ Amy suddenly looked very pale and the Coroner’s Officer smiled. ‘We’re a little early, anyway.’ We all took a seat for a minute, adjusting to our surroundings. The strangest thing about identifying a body is how normal it all seems. You’re sitting in a standard waiting room that could serve any purpose, have any kind of news, good or bad, on the other side of it. It’s just someone’s job and it happens every day. This time it’s your turn. Tomorrow it’s someone else’s.
‘I think I’m ready,’ Amy said quietly.
The Coroner’s Officer smiled again and led the two of us to the door. As ever, the first thing I noticed on the other side was the impossible taste and smell of formaldehyde. The second thing I noticed was Karen Stromer, watching us from the corner of the room like a gargoyle. When she looked at me it wasn’t with prejudice or dislike. It was with disappointment, I thought. The Officer led us to a gleaming stainless-steel table on wheels. There was a dull-green sheet drawn over a body and an ageless, pale man standing beside it. When the Officer turned to look at us I realized Amy had remained by the door, hadn’t walked any further.
‘Amy?’ said the Officer.
‘It’s not him …’
It sounded like denial. The assistant hadn’t even drawn back the sheet.
‘Amy,’ said the Officer. ‘I know this is distressing—’
But she was shaking her head, smiling. ‘It’s not him.’ She looked at me, then at the body on the table. ‘His feet,’ she said. They were the only part of the smiling man’s body that were visible. ‘Ross lost his right leg in Iraq. That’s how we met, he had post-traumatic stress.’
The Officer and I looked at each other. She recovered well. ‘OK, well, that’s good news. Can I ask you to formalize the identification?’ My mind was coming slowly back to the scene in front of me. The dead body didn’t belong to Ross Browne. We’d lost our positive identification on the smiling man.
‘Of course,’ said Amy, stepping forward with a shake in her voice, but also some lightness, some relief. She stood beside me as the assistant drew back the sheet from the man’s head.
I recognized him, of course.
The Palace Hotel.
He’d been sitting there in that room, absorbing the kaleidoscopic lights of the city, emitting a strange energy of his own, as if he was at the centre of something awful. Here, naked on a slab, he was stripped of all that. He seemed mundane, pale and powerless. I looked at Amy. Her mouth had fallen open in shock and I wondered if she’d been wrong somehow.
‘Is this man Ross Browne?’ said the Coroner’s Officer.
Amy Burroughs didn’t speak, and she slowly began to double up, like she’d been punched in the stomach. She tried to reach out for the table but didn’t quite make it. She passed out and I caught her before she fell.
We were back in the waiting room. Amy was drinking a glass of water, being attended to by the Coroner’s Officer. Sutty and I were looking on from the corner of the room.
‘Take it we’ve got our man,’ he grunted.
I shook my head. Kept my voice low. ‘She said not.’
‘What? A nurse fainting at the sight of a dead bloke she’s never met? My arse.’
I turned. ‘She said Ross Browne couldn’t be the man in there. She said Ross Browne lost a leg in Iraq.’
Sutty closed his eyes.
‘I know. But when they pulled the sheet back she had an intense reaction to the body, whoever it was.’
‘Well,’ said Sutty. ‘Even if we can’t pull Browne’s full military record, we should be able to find out how many limbs he shipped home with. Was she telling the truth?’
‘I thought so, but …’
‘But what?’
‘Her reaction says not. It was too much. She saw something in there.’
‘Find out what.’ I looked at him but he kept his eyes locked on Amy. His voice was a whisper. ‘You can be a shoulder to cry on, but a cold fucking shoulder. Take her home and make her talk.’
3