Fell Purpose

‘Did you see that girl while you were walking over the Scrubs?’ he asked. ‘The one that screamed?’

‘The one with the rude knickers,’ Ronnie said, and chuckled. ‘No, she wasn’t there. She’d gone before I left.’

‘How d’you know that?’

‘Everyone’d gone. They was closing down when I left. I don’t like it when they turn the lights off.’ He frowned, but hadn’t the vocabulary or brainpower to describe why he didn’t like the lights going out. Slider could imagine. The glorious, bright, multicoloured gorgeousness of the fairground depended on its lights. When they went off, there was just wood and canvas, dullness, drabness, blown rubbish, and the dark of night creeping in.

But more importantly, Slider thought, they were getting something like a timing now, which was always difficult with a man like Ronnie, who had neither watch nor sense of time. ‘So you stayed at the fair until it shut down?’ he said. ‘You stayed all the time until they put the lights out?’

‘Yeah,’ said Ronnie. ‘I didn’t like it when they put the lights out. The dodgems man told me to clear off,’ he remembered suddenly. ‘So I cleared.’

What had the fat lady said in Atherton’s report? It was near two o’clock when her son got to bed. So the fair probably shut around one in the morning, maybe half-past. Ronnie was walking across the Scrubs between one and one-thirty-ish, and Zellah died some time before two o’clock. And he had seen her at the fair and thought her a dirty girl, the sort like that Wanda Lempowski who let him do things if he gave them money. But he didn’t have any money. And Zellah was not, in fact, a dirty girl.

‘So when you got across the other side of the Scrubs,’ Slider said, ‘what did you do?’ The blank look again. He couldn’t answer non-specific questions. ‘You didn’t go straight home, did you?’

‘Nah.’ He looked sly again. ‘Sometimes you see people round there. I like to watch ’em. Once this couple broke into the changing rooms, and I watched ’em through the window. And people in cars.’

‘Was there a car there that night? Under the railway bridge?’

‘Nah. There wasn’t nobody. Everyone’d gone home. But I found a thingy there, under the bridge. One of them things you wear on your porker. A fresh one,’ he added with a relish to which Slider managed not to react. Ronnie sat back complacently, and then a vague look of unease came over him. ‘You won’t tell my mum?’

‘We won’t tell her anything,’ Slider said warmly. ‘Promise. We’re all men together here, aren’t we?’

‘Yeah. All men. Women don’t understand. My mum don’t like all that stuff. She gets cross with me if I talk about it.’

‘So what happened then, Ronnie?’ Slider said, easing him back to the scene. ‘After you found the thingy under the bridge. Did you see that girl?’

‘Yeah, I see her.’

‘Was she walking home, like you?’

‘I dunno.’

‘What was she doing when you saw her?’

‘She wasn’t doing nothing.’

‘Did you ask her if she was walking home?’

‘She w’n’t walking,’ he said, as if Slider should have known that. ‘I told you, she was asleep.’

‘Asleep?’

‘Yeah, she was lying in the bushes, asleep.’

‘What were you doing in the bushes?’

‘I went to see if there was any more thingies. People do it in the bushes, and they leave ’em around. I see her lying down. I was gonna show her my porker, but my mum said I mustn’t do that no more. So I come away.’

‘Did you go right up to the girl?’

‘Nah, I never.’

‘How did you know she was sleeping, then?’

‘Well, she was lying down.’

‘If you didn’t go right up to her, how did you get hold of her handbag?’

‘I never,’ he said. ‘I never touched her.’

‘We found her handbag in your room, Ronnie. Under your pillow. A nice pink one. You must have taken it from her.’

He stared at Slider for a long, congested moment, and then another light bulb flickered in his head. ‘I found it.’

‘Found it where?’

‘I dunno. I just found it.’

‘Now, Ronnie,’ Slider said, stern but fatherly, ‘you’ve got to tell me the truth. Otherwise I might have to tell your mother.’

Ronnie looked alarmed. ‘No, don’t tell Mum. I won’t never do it again. I promise.’

‘What did you do to that girl, Ron? You can tell me. Tell me the truth and I won’t tell your mum.’

‘I never done nothing to her.’

‘You squeezed her neck, didn’t you? Like you did to Wanda?’

‘No, I never done that,’ he objected. ‘I just looked a bit. At her legs.’

‘You squeezed her neck until she fell asleep, and then you took her bag.’

‘I never. I found it. Finders keepers, my mum says.’

‘Where did you find it?’

‘I dunno. It smelled nice so I took it. I put it under my pillow for in the night.’

Slider had a depressing vision of Oates masturbating over the smell of Zellah’s handbag. But they were no further forward.

‘Tell me about squeezing her neck,’ he said.

Ronnie looked sulky. ‘She told me to. She said I could if I give her money.’

‘No, not Wanda, the other one. After the fair, on Sunday. The one in the bushes. Tell me about squeezing her neck.’

‘I never. I never touched her.’

‘What did she say to you?

‘She was asleep.’ He paused, searching the airwaves for inspiration. ‘I see her knickers, though. On the chairoplanes. She had them dirty-girl knickers on.’

And so the world turned.

In the end, it was Slider who tired first. Ronnie, with no apprehension and no sense of time, could keep it up all day if necessary, but Slider, being carbon-based, wore out. Ronnie was taken back to his cell – pleased to have been given the pack of ciggies – and Slider climbed wearily to his office, with Hollis beside him.

‘We’re not going to get it out of him yet,’ Hollis said. ‘He’s too cunning.’

‘Cunning as a jar of chutney,’ Slider said. ‘I’ve had more intelligent exchanges with my shirts.’

‘He’s out of the shallow end of the gene pool all right,’ said Hollis, ‘but he’s just clever enough to stick when he gets to the dangerous bit. He’s not bright enough to make up a story. He just says he don’t know or he can’t remember.’

‘Unless he really doesn’t remember. Defensive amnesia.’

‘I’m sure there’s something there,’ Hollis said thoughtfully. ‘Something he doesn’t want us to know. But whether it was killing the girl or not . . .’ He shook his head.

‘On the face of it, it could have been the way he said,’ Slider agreed. ‘She could have been already dead, and he took her bag as a souvenir. But then why does he deny going right up to her? And what was he doing in the bushes that he won’t tell us?’

Hollis screwed up his face. ‘Well, guv, what’s his favourite hobby? Say he saw her already dead and got excited, gave himself a hand shandy on the strength of it. He’s told his mum he won’t get Horace out except in the bathroom, so he doesn’t want to tell us in case we tell her.’

‘It’s possible,’ Slider said. ‘All too depressingly possible.’

‘And he picked up the bag as a souvenir, but doesn’t want to say he took it from her body because that’s part of what he’s ashamed of.’