“No one ditched me,” said Payne. “I ditched them. Waste of oxygen, the lot of them. Decided it was time to get me a new life.”
“A neat trick, that,” said Fleet. “Moving on without moving anywhere.”
Out of his old gang of four, it was only Stephen Payne who hadn’t left town. Fleet knew because one of them had written to him. The postbox, fittingly: Nigel Sullivan. Five, six years ago now, this had been. In shockingly bad handwriting and with spelling that would have foxed the Forensics lads, Sullivan had not only revealed what his former friends had amounted to (Jimmy Cooper, the ringleader, was an accomplished housebreaker—or not so accomplished, arguably, given the amount of time he’d evidently spent in prison; Matthew “Morgue” Morgan was dead), he’d also apologized for everything he’d been a part of. He’d listed things Fleet hadn’t even been aware had happened, though they didn’t fundamentally alter the overall picture. Below the radar—below Fleet’s radar, anyway—his little sister had suffered over a year of relentless bullying and abuse. She’d been made into a pariah at school, something else Fleet, in his dumb, dipshit existence, had failed to notice. To notice, or to take note of? Either way, he hadn’t lifted so much as a fingernail to try to stop it, nor to attempt to understand the anguish his sister was going through. And he hadn’t been there for her, either, when Stephen Payne and his cronies had followed Jeannie into the woods one day and subjected her to an assault that had only stopped short of rape by virtue of the fact she’d been having her period.
It freaked them out, apparently. Sent them running.
In his letter, Sullivan admitted to it all, and apologized for having denied it at the time. Which they all had, obviously, after Jeannie had admitted to her mother what had happened, and she in turn had insisted on taking the matter to the police. The problem, of course, was that it had come down to one person’s word against four, and the boys’ parents somehow managed to get the community on their sons’ sides. They called into question Jeannie’s character—did everything but put up posters declaring outright that she was a lying slut. They made out Jeannie had been obsessed with their boys, with Jimmy Cooper in particular, and that when he had rejected her advances, she’d concocted the entire story as a form of retribution. And so it had been Jeannie herself who’d paid the price for what had happened, while Payne and his buddies walked away scot-free.
Sullivan, when he’d contacted Fleet over a decade later, had offered to testify, but ten years into his career as a copper by then, Fleet had known precisely how much good that would have done. How insultingly slim the chances would have been of a conviction. Besides which, any charges that could have been brought against the three men who’d still been breathing would have fallen well short of the crime they deserved to answer for. Because in Fleet’s mind, suicide wasn’t the cause of Jeannie’s death. The way he saw it, his sister had been murdered.
“Wasn’t there something you wanted to say to the nice policeman, Steve?” said Lion, with an expression somewhere between a smile and a snarl.
Payne sniffed and wiped his nostrils with the side of his hand. Fleet could practically taste the cocaine dribble at the back of the man’s throat.
“Yeah,” Payne said, stepping forward—level with Lion but no farther, Fleet noted. Perhaps another pint of Foster’s, another line of coke, would have carried him the extra few inches. “Leave my kid alone,” Payne told him, pointing a finger. “He ain’t done nothing and you know it. Not his fault some stuck-up bitch decided to take a swim and forgot to bring her armbands.”
Fleet edged forward himself, far enough that Payne felt the need to withdraw a fraction.
“Are you offering to provide information that might be pertinent to an ongoing investigation, Mr. Payne?”
It was evidently too many syllables in quick succession for Payne to handle. “Huh?” he grunted.
“What I’m asking you,” you dumb, child-beating piece of shit, “is whether there’s something you’d like to tell me. Because it sounded just then like it might be worth my time hauling you down to the station. Asking what you know about Sadie Saunders’s disappearance.”
How dearly Fleet would have loved to do exactly that. To rattle Payne into believing he was a suspect. But Fleet already knew the man had an airtight alibi. The night of Sadie’s disappearance, and following a brawl outside the boozer, Stephen Payne had been shut in a police cell. That was part of the reason Mason’s alibi was so weak. He’d claimed he’d been asleep in his bedroom, but his old man being locked up meant there hadn’t been anyone else in the house.
Still, it was worth putting the wind up Payne, just to see him rattled.
“Nuh-uh. Fuck you. You can’t do that. You ain’t pinning Sadie on me.”
“Maybe I should just insist that you turn out your pockets,” Fleet pressed. “You’re looking a bit twitchy there, Steve. I wonder whether it’s just cash you’ve got tucked away in your wallet. Or, if I searched you, whether I might find something a bit more . . . illegal.”
Payne melted away, his skittering eyes landing on Lion in a plea for help.
Dismissing the men with a headshake, Fleet made to walk on, but once again Lion stepped across his path. Through it all, he’d been the only one of the foursome to hold his ground.
“All our mutual friend is trying to say,” he said, his tone dangerously reasonable, “is that he thinks it would be a good idea for
