With the help of paracetamol and vast quantities of water, Grant was thankfully feeling more human by the time his final lecture of the day came around at four. He’d woken up earlier that Thursday morning at five a.m. with a stinking hangover. It wasn’t like him to drink so much during the week, and especially not like him to have drunk so much so early in the day with those early beers after golf, followed by him and Mary finishing what she and Julie had earlier started. Namely a litre bottle of gin and a bottle of Chablis.
Annie had been faintly amused, though also slightly embarrassed, when she’d returned home from her friend’s house to find her parents merrily sloshing the wine in their glasses and the words in their mouths. She’d made the sensible decision to shut herself in her bedroom for the rest of the evening.
Grant and Mary hadn’t much minded that. Annie would get over it and Grant knew it was good for him and Mary to both let their hair down, and spend an evening giggling and flirting with each other like they were carefree twenty-somethings rather than middle-aged parents with a violent loser for a son.
Inevitably, though, the alcohol had done its work and by ten p.m. Grant was fast asleep on the sofa in the lounge. He wasn’t sure what time he’d dragged himself to bed, but his confused body clock had woken him up at five, and all in all he felt horrendous for it.
He’d left Mary gently snoring in the bed – she always slept better than him, which really riled him – and after a shower and some plain buttered toast he’d arrived at the university campus just after seven. He’d missed out on an entire day’s work the previous day so it seemed sensible to catch up on some lost time before the grind started again.
After his first lecture in the morning, when he’d staggered about like a zombie, looking and feeling as ropey as the gaggle of students did, he’d steadily worked through his backlog. Now he just had one lecture to go until finally he could call it a day.
That lecture, a specialist criminology module that Grant had titled Deviance, Youth and Culture, was an optional module that students from a variety of degree subjects, ranging from sociology through to politics, were eligible to take. As with Grant’s other modules, the class was generally filled with a mishmash of students from different backgrounds – Birmingham was a renowned multi-cultural city after all. The one uniting similarity of the majority of the students was their inability to pay full attention to proceedings.
Grant by now recognised the faces of the small group who would actually sit with genuine eagerness, and he knew that one of those students for the module was Jessica Bradford. This would be the first time he’d seen her following the brief fangirl moment earlier in the week.
Which was why he was feeling slightly anxious as he headed inside the theatre and over to the podium. He really didn’t want the embarrassment of her swooning over him again.
When he spotted her in her usual position on the front row, she gave him a coy smile and he quickly averted his eyes and tried to clear his head. He carried on through his patter, and was part way through discussing Robert K. Merton’s strain theory of deviance – a theory that attempted to explain how societal pressures lead to criminality – when he noticed his phone, which he’d left on the podium, light up with an incoming call from Mary.
He thought about answering. Would the students care? Would they even notice? Grant thought about which of Merton’s five responses to strain could be used to describe his action if he did answer the phone. Rebellion, probably, exhibited by people who rejected both cultural and social goals.
Actually, no. Rebellion might be the response that best described the simple action of answering a mobile phone at an inappropriate time, but Grant knew the social response that his reaction to pressure fit perfectly; ritualism. This described the response of people who rejected society’s goals (largely because they were unable to achieve them), but still accepted and adhered to society’s means of achievement and social norms. Like Grant, people who exhibited ritualism were most commonly found in dead-end, repetitive jobs.
Dead-end? What was he thinking? Many people would consider being a professor of criminology an upstanding and rewarding profession. So why didn’t he?
Grant carried on with the lecture but couldn’t quite shake the feeling of a lack of fulfilment in his life. He wrapped up the session five minutes early, intent on calling Mary back. As usual the room cleared within seconds. Not fully, though. Jessica came idling up. Her friend, this time, hadn’t bothered to wait.
‘That was fascinating,’ she said.
‘I’m glad you thought so.’
‘I’ve had some further thoughts about my thesis. Could we chat about it again when you have some time?’
Grant looked at his watch. ‘I really can’t today,’ he said. ‘Perhaps later in the week?’
She looked disappointed, but she had more than two years before she’d need to hand it her thesis. She could surely wait a day or two.
There was a bang at the top of the stairs as the doors to the lecture hall opened. Grant looked up and did a double take when he saw Mary standing there.
‘Honey?’
She didn’t look happy as she stomped down the steps towards them. Jessica looked from Grant to Mary and back again, looking sheepish all of a sudden.
‘I tried calling you,’ Mary said.
‘I was in the middle of a lecture,’ Grant said. He looked at Jessica.
‘Let me know,’ Jessica said, before turning and, scuttling up the stairs and out of the room, avoiding eye contact with Mary as she went.
‘Keen student?’ Mary asked, sounding a little aggravated.
‘Apparently so,’ Grant said, feeling a little embarrassed.
‘The police came around again this afternoon,’ Mary said, and Grant wasn’t quite sure whether he was happy about the abrupt change of subject or not.
‘Ethan?’
‘Yeah.’
Grant had absolutely no doubt as to which of Merton’s responses to strain Ethan most closely aligned with; retreatism, used to describe people who rejected both cultural goals and means, and who committed acts of deviance to achieve things outside of normal society’s values. Basically drop-outs. True deviants, some would call them.
‘What’s he done now?’ Grant asked, putting his hand on Mary’s shoulder to offer comfort.
‘He was arrested last night for drunk-driving and possession. Again. He was released on bail this morning. Apparently your lawyer got him out. You didn’t know?’
‘What? I had no idea!’
But then Grant did remember that he’d seen a missed call and voicemail on his phone earlier. He’d been in the middle of something else at the time though and, not recognising the number, had forgotten all about it.
‘That isn’t what the police came over for today, though.’
By now Grant’s mind was racing with confusion. Where would the problems stop with that boy?
‘So, what then?’ he asked.
‘They were looking for him in connection with two murders – that woman who was stabbed and was on the news the other day. And a man, too. One of Ethan’s friends. Paul Reeve. But they also asked about a Jimmy Colton and what we knew of him.’
She didn’t need to say anything more than that. Grant had never met Jimmy Colton, as far as he was aware, nor Paul Reeve for that matter, but given the conversation he and Mary had with Annie the other day about Ethan’s no-good friend Jimmy, the police’s questions surely couldn’t just be a coincidence? Grant put his hand to his forehead and squeezed his temples as hard as he could until the pressure caused a stabbing pain at the front of his brain.
‘What should we do, Steven?’
‘I think at this stage the real question is; what else can we do?’