If we are all, all of us star-stuff, composed of the atomic residue of a light long gone to nothing—and we are, believe me, we are—then it follows necessarily that we are all, all of us also nuclear waste.
I like that. Glory turns to stinking ash, and the ash gets up and walks around and does things. I guess you could call it the corruptibility of man.
I was lying on one of the lads’ bunks, idly scanning a newspaper, essentially doing nothing; keeping just half an ear on the sounds and scuffles of the fresh young waste behind me, the occasional thud of footsteps overhead.
I’d been stupid that morning, sent Scuzzy running off to do the shopping. That boy can hardly read, but he knows what he likes, better than he knows what’s good for him. So he’d come back with the Sun, along with the milk, the eggs and bacon for my breakfast. So he was still sitting very quiet, very still up front, nursing his bruises; so I was picking through nudie-pics and soap stories, trying—not too hard—to find anything that might masquerade as news. Trying for the second time: we’d only just come out of a long darkness, one of the major tunnels on our route. I’d lain there listening to the boys howl at the echo, hadn’t bothered to switch the lights on.
A vicar had run off with a bishop’s wife; it sounded like a joke, but I wasn’t sure which might be the straight man. A helpline had been set up in the States, for women called Monica Lewinsky; there were probably dozens of ’em, all freshly deed-polled, hot in pursuit of notoriety. It seemed to be what they did best, the Americans, sought reasons to make a public display of their uninteresting selves. Another of them, a millionaire this time, Stephen Learfoot, was holed up on his yacht in Great Yarmouth harbour, with wife Roxanna and two-year-old child Stacy; notoriously reclusive—for the sake of contrast, no doubt, for the sake of the constant pursuit—and claiming to be phobic about lenses, they hadn’t been seen on deck for days. Photo of blank deck, to prove it. I wondered why they didn’t up anchor and away if they cared so much, if they were so anxious to escape the banks of paparazzi on the shore; but no doubt there’d be more wherever they touched land. No doubt if there weren’t, they’d come back to give these a second run. What kind of damage would that kind of lifestyle, those kinds of lights do to a kid…?
I didn’t even envy them the boat. I had one of my own, that I liked better. And a hand-picked crew, and privacy, that I liked better yet. I stretched out happily, thought about going up to check on what kind of damage my own sweet boys were showing, this time of the afternoon when I hadn’t been watching them for hours. I’d heard no serious fights, though, no men overboard. I could probably afford not to watch ’em for a little while longer.
Just then, though, the noises changed outside, above, around me. There was a breathy call from the bow, and that was Scuz; he wouldn’t dare to call above a breath, for fear that I might be sleeping. I’d even heard him try to shush the others in the tunnel. A moment later, anxious mutters from the boys at the back as they woke up to whatever Scuz was seeing. The engine-noise cut to a sullen murmur, startlingly quiet after the steady rumble that had been at my back since lunchtime, since I’d handed the tiller over and come below. Just a lock, I thought, most likely. Any minute now there’d be a clatter and a whoop as boys gathered up lock-keys and leaped ashore, wild yelling as they raced ahead to open the sluices.
Except that that didn’t happen, only more quiet talking. I was just picturing the afternoon’s route in my head—tunnel to pub where I’d meant to step off for an hour and no, no locks between—when the hatch swung up behind me, and one of the lads came padding down.
“Uh, Skip…?” Geo: big, solid, sensible, worried Geo. Vice-captain, and no pun intended; the boys hadn’t got it, anyway. Sharp they were, my latest crew, but bright not. Bright made for problems; I didn’t look for bright.
I’d told them not to disturb me before the pub. If Geo thought he had to disobey, he was probably right. I lowered the paper, propped myself up on one elbow and said, “Well, what?”
“There’s another boat,” he murmured, shuffling bare feet worriedly on the lino, rubbing sweaty hands on his jeans, the weight of responsibility visible on his naked, sun-scorched shoulders. “Wedged right across the canal, we can’t get past…”
“Stuck, are they?” It happened: holiday-makers, incompetent with a heavy boat in muddy shallows. “Take the poles, then, and help to push ’em off.”
“We can’t see anyone, Skip, it looks empty.”
“They’re probably shagging inside.” I’d known that happen too, where the moorings slipped and happy humpers simply didn’t notice. “Have you tried shouting?”
“We didn’t like to.”
Sometimes I thought I trained these boys too well. My fault, if so; I didn’t blast him for it. I just sighed, let the paper drop and rolled easily to my feet. Gave him a slap to get him moving, and followed him up the steps and out into dense sunlight, the tense silence of my waiting crew.
A smile would have resolved their doubts in an instant, but I didn’t give them that. I glanced around—Benjy on the tiller, Michael and Domino perched on the taffrail, all three in their uniform T-shirts, cabin boy, mutineer and scrubber, all three warily watching me—and then turned to gaze forward. With Scuz in the bows, there was only one missing from that roster; he was standing on the roof, staring straight ahead and right in my line of sight. He was stripped down to swim-shorts, catching more sun than Geo; I gazed at the lean bones and the honey-brown, money-brown skin of him and almost did let that smile loose, though I kept it out of my voice. “Shift, Shabby.”
“Sorry, Skip…” Shaban scuttled to the side, and I had my first clear view of what lay ahead.
As Geo had said, it was another narrowboat lying athwart the canal at an angle, her bow buried in the reeds on the port bank and her stern strayed all the way over to starboard. As I’d suspected, she was a holiday hire, decked out in company livery. Not a full sixty-eight footer like my own Screw Archimedes, closer to forty, but long enough to block this narrow waterway. Her engine was still turning over; I could see the dark water threshing into froth around her stern, as the screw drove her slowly deeper into the soft, crumbling bank. I called out once, twice, but there was no reply, no movement. “Must be the Marie Celeste,” I grunted.
“Skip, it’s called Daffodil, I can see from here…”
“Never mind, Shabby. Listen, I’m going to bring us up to her bows,” waving Benjy away and taking charge of the tiller, stretching one hand to the idling throttle and pushing it one notch forward to give the Screw some weigh, “and try to nudge her out of that reed-bank. You and Geo are the boarding-party. Stand by to jump across as soon as we’re alongside; switch that engine off, then see if there’s anyone aboard. If not, bring her to the bank and tie up. Understood?” If she was a drifter, I’d just have her moored and leave her; let the idiots who’d let her drift track her down, or explain themselves to the owners.
“Yes, Skip. Sure…”
It took more than a nudge to free the Daffodil’s nose, with her engine pushing her ever deeper into the bank. I nudged, backed off, tried again harder; ended up having Scuz busy in the bow with a barge-pole, just to fend us away from the reeds to be sure we didn’t join her as I flung the Screw forward full throttle. I think I heard him yelling “Ramming speed!” as we advanced.
One thing about narrowboats: with a quarter-inch steel hull, they’re hard to bend. I’ve done it, but never in the Screw and only against a concrete abutment, which came off considerably worse.
It was the mud beneath the Daffodil’s bow that gave way, as it had to: with a sucking sound and a swirl of filth rising to the surface, an almost visible stench that had Scuz suddenly choking and clowning a faint, staggering around and almost losing the pole, almost falling in to join it.
A double thud told me that the boys had leaped over and landed safe as the other boat swung free. We ran slowly parallel for a short way, till Geo cut her engine; I knocked mine back to idle and we waited, no one speaking, while Shabby opened up the hatch and went below.
He was back in short order, looking oddly grey in the sunlight. He glanced at Geo, his mouth working wordlessly; then he turned towards me. “Skip, you’d better come.”
“What is it?”
He couldn’t tell me, he didn’t have the words. I handed the tiller back to Benjy, and bounded lightly across the gap. Shabby’s eyes moved between me and the hatchway; this close, I could see that he was shaking.
I took the steps quickly, lowered my head below the hatch and saw immediately what he had seen. It was dim down there, but there was no mistaking, no fooling myself. In the little kitchen area lay a woman’s body. A couple of flies were buzzing around the dark pool that surrounded her dark head, that glistened a little in the available light.
This was death, there was no mistaking it. I went in anyway, calling needlessly to the boys to stay outside. Crouched above her, not quite reaching to touch, I saw that she was young, little more than a girl; and I thought her hair had been blonde once in its matted dreadlocks, before the blood had matted it further. Her face was almost gone, it had been so brutally battered.
As I rose slowly to my feet, I caught a movement in the shadows at the far end of the boat. “Who’s there?” My voice was sharp and rising. No one answered. I couldn’t see a figure, and there was nowhere big enough to hide a man; I was sure of what I’d seen, though, and moved forward slowly, making softer, encouraging noises in my throat. I was expecting a pet, a dog or perhaps a cat. What I found instead, huddled in the furthest corner, mattered more. It was a child, a toddler, a stout and sturdy little boy with huge eyes, his hair cropped roughly, inexpertly short with a pair of blunt scissors by the look of it.
I could have left him, left her, buttoned the crew’s lips and moved on; but canals breed dog-walkers, cyclists, lovers. It’s better to break news than to be broken. I hoisted him out, held him in my arms; tried an unaccustomed smile and said, “Hi, kid. What’s your name?”
“John,” he whispered, as the air filled with a rank and familiar odour.
I sighed and said, “Okay, John. Don’t worry, you’re safe now. We’ll look after you, till we can get you home. Come on now…”
I tried to hold my body between him and that other on the floor, but it wasn’t necessary. As we passed her, he buried his face in my shoulder, both arms clinging tight around my neck.
It was an effort to disentangle him as we came out on deck, but I
managed it at last, thrusting him into the arms of the gaping Geo.
“His name’s John,” I said abruptly. “He’s your charge, for now. Get him cleaned up, he stinks. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a nappy underneath those dungarees.” They were cheap and looked grubby, like the T-shirt he wore beneath; that fitted, I thought, with the girl below.
“Uh, what shall I…?”
“I don’t know. Improvise, use what you can find. You’ll manage, Geo.”
With that vote of confidence, he nodded and reached for a boat-hook to draw the Screw closer, so that he could step across safely. Geo had looked after kid brothers in his former life, before he’d left it; he tended to mother the other lads, when they’d let him. That was why I’d made him vice-captain, it wasn’t just a joke.
All the boys knew now what lay out of their sight, I could see it in their faces. Shabby must have found some way to tell them, in my absence. I had as much of their attention as I was going to get, what wasn’t busy imagining the scene below; I gave orders, snappily.
“Benjy, take the Screw and moor up, as soon as the bank gets firmer. Domino, you jump ashore and run ahead; there’s a pub less than a mile on. Phone the police, tell them where we are, say we’ve found a body. Then come back.”
“Skip—what about your mobile?”
I just looked at him, for a moment; then, wearily, “People have scanners, they listen in. The police have scanners too. If I call this in on my mobile, they get the number; if they overhear any other messages from the same number, they know who made the call. We don’t want that. Do we?”
“Er, no, Skip.”
“No. So run. I’ll bring this boat behind, Benjy, and moor alongside.” I looked for the key to get the engine started, and checked suddenly: it wasn’t there. “Hold it!” Just in time, just as the Screw started to move away. “Scuz! Over here, now!”
He looked startled, then clambered up onto the roof and ran back to a point where he could jump over. The Daffodil rocked a little beneath his sudden weight.
“What’s up, Skip?”
“No key. Think you can get her started?”
He bounced down onto the deck beside me, glanced at the control-panel and grinned. “No problem, Skip.” I hadn’t expected one. Scuz could get into a car, past its immobiliser and away in thirty seconds; I’d encountered him first in my own BMW, with about ten seconds to spare.
He forced that boat’s ignition with a penknife, in five seconds flat. I put her into gear and motored slowly in the Screw’s wake, until we found a stretch of solid bank. Domino had already made a wild leap to shore, and was barely a dot along the towpath; that boy was the fastest thing afloat.
Ten minutes after we’d tied up he was back, breathing hard, his T-shirt clinging damply to his skinny copper body. “They’re coming, Skip. Told us to wait, not touch anything…”
“All right. Just tell them what you saw, all of you,” as I scanned their taut, anxious faces. “Nothing more than that. Okay?”
Tight nods, from every one of them.
“Good lads. Here, Benjy, share these around.”
I tossed him a pack of cigarettes and went down into the Screw to make sure that Geo was up to speed. I found him quietly cradling John, whispering nonsense into the kid’s ear.
“How is he?”
“He’s fine, I guess.” He was clean at least, wearing one of the boys’ T-shirts, its bagginess knotted into a tail between his legs. I wondered briefly what arrangements Geo had made beneath the knot, and decided not to ask. “Except he’s not talking.”
“That’s no surprise, Geo. Given what he’s seen.” His mother battered to death, most likely, and then her motionless body for however long afterwards. Small wonder, if he found nothing to say about it to the strangers who’d plucked him out. “You just keep him happy, till the police come.”
He nodded. “I think he’s happier down here, away from the others.”
I was sure of it. I slipped him another couple of cigarettes for company and left him, going up to keep an eye on my high-wired crew. Thoughts of the police might quell them, but not for long; they could turn dangerously hyper, if I didn’t watch them. Indeed, Scuz was already daring Domino towards the Daffodil: “Go on, one quick look…”
“Leave it, Dom. You, Scuz—do you need another lesson in common sense?”
He flinched from the memory of that morning, when he’d brought me the wrong kind of newspaper. “No, Skip.”
“No. Good.” Come to think of it, his bruises were showing. I added, “Go below—quietly!—and put a shirt on. Fetch one for Shabby, too. And shoes for everyone who needs ’em.” I’d have my crew looking spruce and shipshape, before the police turned up.
When they came, they came in waves: at first just a couple of officers who’d parked up at the pub and walked down, to check that this wasn’t a hoax. They took one glance inside the Daffodil and called for back-up. That followed half an hour later, in the form of a plain-clothes inspector and a bunch of uniforms. The inspector was quick and easy with the boys, who after all had little enough to tell him; inevitably, he took more time over me.
“Mr Stewart, I confess that I’m a little confused. I gather that none of these boys is related to you?”
“That’s right.”
“Can you explain exactly what your relationship is, then, how you come to have charge of them?”
“Surely. A friend of mine runs a hostel in London, for homeless lads. They’re persistent runaways, all of ’em; troubles at home, of course, and sometimes other problems, drink or drugs or whatever. He takes them in off the streets, gives them food and a bed, a place of safety. So he has a houseful of difficult adolescents, I have a boat; he talks me into giving some of them a week’s holiday, come the summer.”
I had the paperwork to prove it, and showed it to them. That’s the advantage of Mickey’s place, it’s all very official and above-board. That’s one reason why I always go back to Mickey when I’m looking for a new crew. The boys know the score, and so do the authorities. They just don’t know that they’re singing from a different score-sheet.
Once the police were content with my credentials, they moved on to what they thought were more relevant questions. If anything, though, I was less help than the boys: I’d been below decks for a couple of hours before we’d met the Daffodil, so no, I’d seen no one on the towpath. No dog-walkers, cyclists or lovers—certainly no one who might have recently abandoned a boat, a boy, a body. I confirmed that the Daffodil’s engine had been running and the key missing; they should check their records, I suggested, see if any holidaymakers had reported a stolen boat. They’d done that already, they said, and had turned up trumps. An elderly couple had tied up for lunch at a canalside restaurant a few miles back, before the tunnel; when they made their way back to their mooring, the Daffodil was gone. It wasn’t unknown for youngsters to pinch a boat for an afternoon’s joy-ride; you can start one with a penknife, they said. Really? Fancy that, I murmured…
They were keeping an open mind, but their best guess lay along those lines: a couple with a kid, from society’s margins to judge by her appearance and his, indulging a reckless temptation that was perhaps fuelled by drinking. They took the Daffodil, perhaps against the girl’s objections; an argument led to violence and the man fled, abandoning boat and child together. It was unfortunate that none of us had noticed him on the bank, but not surprising. He would likely have run on ahead, rather than turning back. There was no towpath through the tunnel, and no easy footpath across the hill it bored through. They would ask questions at the pub, they said, and of any fishermen they found along the way.
I asked if I could take the Screw down as far as the pub, and tie up there for the night. They’d know where to find me, if they had any more questions.
That would be fine, they said. Don’t let the lads inside, they said that too. I nodded wisely, and assured them that I wouldn’t.
Geo handed the kid over to the care of a policewoman—difficult for both of them, I thought: the little boy struggled and clung, the big boy looked like he wanted to do the same; I heard him giving her instructions—“He doesn’t talk, except that he says his name, he says ‘John’ when he needs the toilet. Usually too late. I guess he’s potty-trained, except that he’s so shocked he’s half forgotten”—and we went that extra mile at a slow chug. We’d lost half a day on the journey, which meant we’d also lost a full night’s work; I spent the time on the phone, making rearrangements.
The sun was setting, by the time we moored. I set Scuz and Domino to cooking, then went to the pub alone; had a couple of pints while I pondered myself and what I’d done that day, what others had done before me. Then I headed back with bounty for my loyal crew, a carrier bag bulging with carry-outs. The police were a watchful presence in the pub, on the towpath, parked a little way up the road and talking to everyone. Clearly they hadn’t caught their running man. Likely, I thought, they didn’t even have a witness yet. Certainly not a reliable description, or why work the night-time crowd so hard, so hungrily? They’d be here still tomorrow, I thought, and staging a reconstruction next week, as like as not. The girl had looked like a traveller; while students often looked the same, deliberately dirty, they didn’t often have little kids in tow. And travellers travel, in borrowed boats or otherwise, and have holes all over to hide up in. I thought their running man might have run far by now, far indeed, and be seriously difficult to trace. I though they might have trouble enough just putting a name to the corpse.
I let the lads sleep late next morning. Now that the schedule had been changed, we had only a short day’s journey ahead of us. When they were up and we were moving slowly through the heat, I lay as before on a bunk with a newspaper that I’d fetched myself from a village down the road. A sensible broadsheet this time, it made only small mention of an unidentified girl’s body found on a stolen boat on the canal, a toddler at her side. The tabloids might be full of it, as the pub had been full of journos and photographers—another reason the boys had got a carry-out, not to have their pretty pictures on page two: I knew I couldn’t trust ’em not to point the finger at themselves, so I kept them below decks all night—but I wasn’t curious enough to care.
Neither was my interest piqued by the trouble stirring again in Chechnya, nor the leaking rumour that yon US millionaire’s baby was missing, lost or kidnapped or gone overboard. Bombs and bullets far away, who gave a fuck? Dead bodies close to home could cost me time and money both, but not a distant war. And missing kids I knew all about already, their care and resettlement not a speciality but a sideline of mine, a hobby really. Like many hobbyists I took more pains than the professionals, I thought; I did the thing precisely, did it well.
As witness my boatload of boys, moving serenely through the summer’s day, dozing and smoking and soaking up sun while they waited for the long, long summer’s night to come.
When we came to the appointed place, there were hours yet to kill
before our first appointment. I set the boys to scrubbing up, to mopping and polishing inside and out before I let them think about showering themselves. Clean bodies in a clean boat, that’s how I like my crew to be presented.
They were starting to show first signs of nerves by now. Nothing unusual in that. I watched, counting variations on a theme: how this one would go very quiet while that one ramped, how one would pause unexpectedly in his work to gaze at some unseen horizon while another focused intently on his hands and what they did, on a world he could touch and feel.
Nerves were good, I liked to see a boy on edge, so long as he didn’t topple over. That kid yesterday, I thought, had toppled far and gone. Too scared even to shit himself, until Skip came reluctantly to the rescue. I wondered if he were talking yet, and doubted it extremely. The paper had one thing wrong, that he’d been found at his mother’s side; he’d been as far from her as he could get, and not a drop, not a speck of blood on his dungarees that I had seen. No blame to him for that. I thought of Greyfriars Bobby and remembered a dog I’d killed once, a bitch that had run into the road too foolishly close to my wheels. Driving back later, I’d seen her body in the gutter with a clutch of puppies pressed close. Trying to suckle, trying to wake her or simply trying for some last snatch of cooling, carrion comfort. Animal instinct was one thing, human shock it seemed was something other.
I kept a careful eye on my charges, as the sun sank. Fed them on bread and cheese, not to fill the Screw with smells of cooking; sent them one by one into the shower and let her fill instead with scented steam, shampoo and body-wash. No deodorants. The boys knew this routine. They milled quietly in jeans or boxer-shorts, rubbing towels through wet hair and flicking them at bare backs, arguing over the contents of my jewellery-box, adorning themselves with earstuds and cheap gold chains while they jigged and sang along with what music played from the boombox in the corner.
I left them to it once I was sure of their mood, going up on deck to double-check the solidity of the gangplank while I waited for the first customer of the evening to come along the towpath. Wouldn’t want him to slip. Slip-ups were bad for business.
He came on time, big and brisk and cash in hand. I waved that aside. Payment on delivery was my policy, always had been; satisfaction guaranteed, or I’d know the reason why. Besides, if they paid upfront they were less scrupulous about tipping the lads after, and I took fifty percent of any tips.
He went below; I listened to the murmur of soft voices coming up through the hatchway and knew how the boys would be preening, posing, trying to catch his eye. The first score of the night was a challenge to them. They laid bets on it; I bet with myself, but only after I’d seen the punter. This one, I thought it would be Domino who got to lead him through to the front cabin, where my double bed was neatly made up with fresh sheets and flowers. Big men went for slender boys, more often than chance would allow.
The lads only kicked up a racket when they were licensed to do it, I’d trained them that well; they were all but silent when a client was aboard and busy. I heard the shuffle of cards, an occasional protesting whisper, nothing more. And smiled, and thought about being in loco parentis, as people always assumed that I was, as the police had. What else, with half a dozen ripening lads all of an age, who couldn’t possibly all be my own…?
And frowned, and chased that thought a little before I shook it out of my head, no concern of mine.
After a while I caught the scrape of a match clearly in the night’s hush, and the whiff of tobacco smoke that followed it, wafting back from the bows. There was no smoking below decks, on a working night; only a boy who’d done his stint was allowed a cigarette, a rest in the open air before he rejoined the others.
So I was ready when the customer came out, a minute later. He settled up, thanked me gravely and went his way; I checked my watch, heard movement in the boat as Geo went forward, heard Domino’s bright laugh as he helped to change the sheets. Score one to me, I thought, and smiled lightly as I watched the towpath for another man alone without a dog.
The next was older, sadder; he’d take Scuz, I thought, for that boy’s sullen pout, his air of taking on the world and always losing.
I took the pipe from my pocket, for a peaceful blow. As I cleaned it after, my drifting mind remembered something I’d read about gas-companies having a machine that made its own way through their buried pipes, to seal leaks from the inside. That notion triggered another, that I held for a while in my head.
One man left and another came, at steady intervals through the long late evening and well into the night. When the last of them was done and gone off happy, I rewarded my willing, weary boys with crisps and beer and a final smoke before I bedded them down and went through to the forward cabin. Geo had changed the sheets one final time, for me; and had done his best as well against the lingering odours of musk and sweat, opening the windows wide and lighting a rose-scented candle.
I undressed, lay down and thought a little more while I waited for sleep to come: thought of parents and missing children, of boys lost and found, of puppies pressed against the cooling body of their mother.
In the morning, we motored to the nearest town and moored up for a while. I sent Scuz and Shabby off to find a launderette, to wash and dry the sheets; warned the others to behave while I was gone, and went to find a phone. Just for the joke of it, to stamp myself with virtue.
I called the police, that same inspector who’d interviewed me and left me with his number. I said, “You’re asking questions on the wrong side of the hill.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Try the other end of the tunnel. That’s where they abandoned the Daffodil: put her bows into the tunnel’s mouth and jumped ashore, left her engine running. She’d go through on her own, bang the walls a bit but nothing worse than that, they’d knock her straighter every time she did it. You can’t get stuck in a tunnel, it feeds you through. It wasn’t till she met the curve of the canal on this side that she ran into the bank.”
I heard him grunt, I could almost hear him think; I knew the question that must follow before he asked it. “So who are they, then? ‘They,’ you said…”
“That’s right. Is the kid talking yet?”
“No, he’s not.”
“No.” I didn’t think he would be. “That American couple, with the yacht in Great Yarmouth—it’s true, isn’t it, that their little boy’s been snatched?”
I heard him breathing slowly, in and out. “How did you know?”
“He says ‘john’ when he needs the toilet.”
“I’m sorry?”
“He had to be American, when I thought about it. It’s hard to hear an accent in one word, but it is there. And I bet she’s not a Yank: blonde travellers with dirty dreadlock hair, it’s a very British thing. And he hadn’t been near her, and show me the kid who could do that, who could see his mother killed and keep that distance, never once go up to touch, to claim her back…” And no wonder he wasn’t talking else, when he’d been snatched by strangers into a life quite unlike, quite brutal in comparison to what he knew; when that life had abruptly turned brutal for real, under his eyes, a girl battered to death in front of him; when even his rescuers wouldn’t call him by his proper name. It must have felt like we were talking to somebody else. He might learn to take shelter in that when he was older, if he remembered this at all. Some of the lads who washed up at Mickey’s certainly did; they had their noms de guerre, and what had happened to the boy they used to be had happened to a stranger. Or the other way around sometimes, that what they did under their new tag was all acting, all unreal while their true self, their true name was sealed up and hidden deep below. I had both, I thought, aboard my boat right now.
“There are two problems,” I went on sententiously, enjoying myself enormously, “two moments of greatest danger when you’ve kidnapped someone. One is picking up the money; the other is handing back the victim. Money’s not so hard now, these days of electronic transfer; you can send it round the world a dozen times in minutes, with the help of a dodgy bank or two. Lose it in charity accounts, wash it whiter than a sheet. People aren’t so handy. But say the ransom’s paid, the parents want their kid back; what better than to tell them he’s in safe custody, the cops have got him already, up the other end of the country? Dump him with a dead girl, some stray you pick up on the road, who won’t be missed for weeks; of course people will assume that she’s his mother. Pick the right girl, the autopsy will confirm she’d had a kid or two. No one’s going to think of DNA tests, not for a while. They’ll just go chasing phantoms, a mother-and-child and a father too, and none of them ever existed.” It was brilliant, I wished I’d thought of it myself, I loved it.
He did not. “Why go to all that trouble, then, why not just kill the kid if you’re prepared to kill a girl?”
Because there was honour among kidnappers? Because no one would pay up a second time, if the victim died the first? Perhaps the one, perhaps the other; but I hoped that neither of those was true.
“Where would be the fun in that?” I asked him, and hung up.