dozens of faces watching, but he forced himself to hold his head up, not because he wanted to evidence pride but because he wanted to look among the watchers for the only watcher who mattered. But again, even up here on the street, Neal Wyatt was not among them.
At the Harrow Road police station, Joel and Toby were ushered into an overheated interview room, where four chairs fixed permanently to the floor sat two on a side at a table. There, a large tape recorder and a pad of paper stood waiting. The boys were told to sit, so that was what they did. The door closed, but it did not lock. Joel decided to take hope from this.
Toby had stopped crying, but it was not going to take much to set him off again. His eyes were the size of tea cakes, and his fi ngers clutched the leg of Joel’s jeans.
“I was hid,” Toby whispered. “But they found me anyways. Joel, how you ’spect they found me if I was hid?”
Joel couldn’t think of a way to explain things to his brother. He said,
“You did what I tol’ you, Tobe. That was real good.”
When the next thing happened, it happened in the person of Fabia Bender. She entered the room accompanied by a hefty black man in a business suit. She introduced herself first and then the man, saying he was Sergeant August Starr. They’d begin by taking the boys’ names, she said. They would need to contact their parents.
Having never met the other two Campbells, Fabia Bender drew the pad of paper towards her once she and Starr were seated. She picked up the pen and waited to use it, but when Joel told her their names, she didn’t write. Instead she said, “Are you Vanessa’s brothers?,” and when Joel nodded, she said, “I see.”
She was thoughtful. She looked down at her pad and tapped the pen against it. Starr, glancing at her curiously because this was generally not a moment in which Fabia Bender hesitated, said to the boys, “Who’re your parents? Where are they?”
“Mummy’s in hospital,” Toby offered, encouraged by the pleasant tone that both of the adults had taken and not understanding that this pleasant tone was designed to wrest information from children and not to befriend them, no matter how needy for friendship they were. “She pots plants sometimes. She talks to Joel but not to me. I ate her Aero bar once.”
“We live with—”
Fabia Bender interrupted Joel. “They live with their aunt, August. I’ve been working with the sister for some months.”
“Trouble?”
“Community service. The girl who did that mugging directly across the street . . . ?”
August Starr sighed. “You lot got no dad?” he asked the boys.
“Dad got kilt outside the off licence,” Toby said. “I was little. We lived wiv Gran for a while, but now she’s in Jamaica.”
Joel said, “Tobe,” in a warning. The law of survival that he knew was a simple one. Nothing about it involved talking to cops. They didn’t mean well because they’d crossed over, and what they’d left behind was their understanding of how life really was. Joel could tell by looking at Sergeant Starr—by looking at Fabia Bender as well—that to them the story was a simple one. The death of Gavin Campbell was a case of black men doing what black men always did: shooting, knifi ng, beating, and otherwise killing each other over drugs in the street.
Joel had successfully silenced Toby, and he intended to say nothing more himself. As for Fabia Bender, she had the information she needed since she knew Ness. So she settled back in her seat to do her job, which was to monitor the interview that August Starr would conduct.
Although Joel and Toby could not know it, they were lucky in their assigned interlocutor. Joel might have thought August Starr was a turncoat with preconceived notions about his own people, but the truth was that Starr saw before him two boys who needed his help. He knew their physical appearance—not to mention Toby’s manner— made life difficult for them. But he also knew that a life made difficult sometimes led boys into trouble. He needed to get to the bottom of what was going on before he could come up with a plan to help them. This, unfortunately, was not something that Joel was conditioned to understand.
Starr flicked on the tape recorder, reciting the time, the date, and the names of the people in the room. Then he turned to Joel and asked him what had happened out there. Don’t fib, he added. He could always tell when people were fibbing.
Joel told him a sanitized version of the story, one that conveniently mentioned no names. He’d gone to the football pitch in Wornington Road to meet some blokes, but the arranged time had got bollocksed up or something because the boys never showed up. So he returned to Meanwhile Gardens and that was when he saw the barge on fire.
To the question of what Toby was doing on the barge, he told the truth. He’d instructed Toby to wait for him there. Sometimes he got aggro from older kids in the area, and Joel wanted to keep him safe. He added the fact that an Asian man had tried to tell the cops all this right there on the bridge above the canal, but those cops weren’t having anything off him. All they wanted to do was hustle Joel and Toby over to the Harrow Road station. Here they now were. That was it.
Unfortunately, Joel did not anticipate what Starr would next ask: the names of the boys he was intending to meet at the football pitch.
“Why d’you want to know?” Joel asked. “I just tol’ you—”
Fabia Bender interrupted to explain the procedure: They’d be wanting someone to confirm Joel’s story. It wasn’t that Sergeant Starr didn’t believe Joel’s claims, by the way. This was just procedure when a crime had been committed. Joel understood that, didn’t he?
Naturally, Joel more than understood. Like other boys his age, he’d grown up on a diet of films and television shows in which cops were always trying to get the bad guys. But he also understood a much more pressing concept than the apprehension of whoever had set fire to an abandoned barge: Grass on Neal Wyatt and he’d make things worse. So Joel said nothing. He knew he was safe from Toby’s saying anything either, for Toby didn’t know the boys’ names.
“Do you want to think about this for a while?” August Starr asked pleasantly. “You understand that private property has been destroyed, don’t you?”
“Barge was a wreck,” Joel said. “’S been there f’rever, innit.”
“That’s of no account. It belongs to someone. We can’t have people setting fire to other people’s belongings no matter their condition.”
Joel looked at his hands, which he’d folded on the table. “I wa’n’t there. I di’n’t see,” he said.
“That,” Starr said, “won’t buy you a bag of crisps, Joel.” He recited the time once again for the tape recorder and then switched it off. He told Joel he’d give him a little while to sit here and think about things, and he told Fabia Bender that he’d leave her with the boys while he made some phone calls. When he got back, he said, perhaps Joel would have something more to tell him.
Next to Joel, Toby whimpered as the sergeant left the room. Joel said, “Don’t worry, mon. He can’t keep us here. He don’t even want to.”
Fabia said, “But he can hand you over to me, Joel.” She paused and let
Classic good cop, bad cop was how Joel saw this. Sergeant Starr was the tough guy. Fabia Bender was the marshmallow. Together they would do the scare-and-soften routine. It might work with other kids caught in this sort of circumstance, but Joel was determined it would not work with him.
“I tol’ you what happened,” he said.
“Joel, if you boys are being bullied—”
“What?” he asked. “What’re you ’tendin to do if we are?
Fabia Bender studied him, all too aware of the truths he spoke. There were so few resources and so many people in need of them. What
