‘His parents?’ With his finger, he herded some scattered sugar crystals into a little pile. ‘Haven’t a clue. Timmy and I mostly saw each other at school. I didn’t go over to his house much. He usually came to mine. Come to think of it, I don’t remember ever seeing his dad at the house. Just his mom, but not much of her either.’
A group of teenage girls burst through the door, noisy as a flock of starlings.
Jeremy fidgeted and drummed his fingers on the table.
Kyle paused his game long enough to ask where the bathroom was. Erin waited until the boy left the table. Now was the time to ask some of the more delicate questions.
‘What was his mother like?’
As Jeremy scanned the room, his gaze rested briefly on the girls in their tight jeans. ‘Like I said, I hardly ever saw her. Whenever I was at Timmy’s, she was mostly somewhere else. Or lying down in her room maybe. Who knows? She wasn’t like my mom, hanging around the kitchen with plates of cookies and glasses of milk. I remember a lot of ashtrays filled with cigarette butts. Pink lipstick on the filters.’
Erin shifted in her seat. This line of questioning was going nowhere. ‘What about other friends, or enemies? Was Tim ever bullied at school?’
‘Sure. Him and me both.’ He rubbed the angry patch of eczema on his neck. ‘We were the class dorks, total losers in the eyes of the cool kids. There was this one guy everybody hated. I don’t know where he was from, but he would roll into town at the end of June like clockwork, strutting around like he owned the place.’
Her ears pricked up. Was he talking about Graham?
Kyle returned to the table and tapped his father on the arm.‘Can we go now?’
A look of confusion crossed Jeremy’s face. ‘What time is it?’ He scrambled for his phone. ‘Damn. I’m supposed to drop Kyle off at soccer practice.’ He jerked his chair back. ‘Time to go, buddy.’ He shot Erin an aggrieved look. ‘Are we done here?’
‘Not really, but—’
‘You can ride along if you want,’ he said, heading for the door. ‘But we gotta go now, or my ex will have my ass in a sling.’
*
With a screech of tyres Jeremy pulled up to a football pitch on the other side of town. Kyle jumped out to join a group of small boys in green jerseys and yellow shorts swerving across the playing field, iridescent as a school of fish.
Jeremy checked the time on his phone. ‘Not too bad, only ten minutes late.’
He waved at his son, but the boy had joined his mates and took no notice.
‘Okay. Shoot. What else you got?’ He made as if to grab the notebook from her hand, but she yanked it away.
Now that they were no longer moving, she could finally identify the smell inside the car. Congealed grease from the empty fast-food cartons peeking from beneath the seats. She cracked the window for some air.
‘What about this bully you mentioned,’ Erin asked, ‘the one who came to town in the summer. What was his name?’
‘Huh?’ Jeremy dragged his attention away from the boys on the field. ‘Can’t remember the guy’s real name, but he had this stupid nickname. Called himself the Viking. What an asshole.’
She dropped her pen. Graham kept popping up in other people’s stories like a bad smell. ‘The Viking?’ Erin subtly retrieved the pen from her lap and scribbled a note.
‘Yep, can you believe it? A summer kid. He was like this… kingpin of a group of toughs. They had these stupid names for themselves, the Viking, the Enforcer, the Duke. Then, to make things worse, he enrolled at Belle River High my senior year. Timmy was gone by then, and I remember thinking he was lucky. Better the loony bin than having to deal with that idiot for an entire school year.’ He touched the side of his head. ‘I’ve still got a scar from the time he slammed me against my locker. But his real specialty was forcing your head into the toilet and flushing it. Don’t know how many times I had to suffer that. It was even worse for Timmy, though he didn’t like to talk about it.’
Erin wondered if the scar on Tim’s cheek was another legacy of her brother’s bullying. She felt a senseless urge to apologise for Graham’s reign of terror. But having been a victim herself, she was on Jeremy’s side, hoping that the Viking, in a delicious stroke of karma, had been made to pay for his crimes.
‘Did you ever report this Viking person to a teacher or the principal?’ She purposely avoided his eye.
‘Are you kidding? I was trying to stay alive, not sign my death warrant.’
She ran down her list of questions. ‘What about in the months leading up to the murders, did you have any sense that Tim was unstable, or prone to violence? Did he mention hearing voices or act unusual in any way?’
‘Voices?’ He scratched his ear. ‘Not that I remember.’
‘What about drugs?’
‘A bit of weed now and then. If Timmy was hitting the harder stuff, he never told me.’
Jeremy’s attention was focused on the boys scrambling after the ball. He was fast losing interest. She’d better speed things up a bit.
‘Does this mean anything to you?’ She handed him the sequence of letters she had copied from under Graham’s yearbook photo.
He squinted at the paper. ‘In what context? Like a, waddya call it, an anagram?’
‘Belle River High School, 1978.’
Jeremy flicked the paper back to her. ‘No idea.’
She was running into one brick wall after another. ‘One more question,’ Erin said, ready to wrap things up. She had a long drive back to Lansford, and a stack of patient files to get through before she could call it a day. Not to mention that her car was across town, and she’d have to find her own way
