‘Why?’
He looked at me as if that was the stupidest question he’d ever heard. ‘Because knowing things is my shtick,’ he said. ‘Remember?’
‘Okay, Nicky.’ I made my tone emollient because I was too tired and sore right then to want an argument. ‘What about Kenny Seddon? You turn anything up there?’
He shrugged with his eyebrows.
‘A little. I mean, I got what was there to be got, but there wasn’t much. And none of it is what you’d call illuminating.’
‘Go on.’
He pointed at the thick stack of pages. ‘It’s in your reading material,’ he said.
‘Give me the highlights.’
‘What highlights? He’s born, he lives, he maybe dies. Bit of a cliffhanger ending there, but that’s as good as it gets.’
I held his gaze, and after a few moments he took an in-breath so he could sigh theatrically. ‘Okay, whatever. Full name, Kenneth Christopher Seddon. Born, Walton, Liverpool, late 1960s. The exact date is in there somewhere. He gets to age fourteen without incident, then has his first run-in with the police — possession of stolen goods. Court appearance, rap on the knuckles, off he goes. That’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship — he turns up on the magistrates’ court dockets six more times before he hits eighteen. Couple of affrays, couple of B-and-Es, drunk driving, and one moderately juicy wounding with intent.
‘Then he cleans up his act. Puts away childish things and doesn’t put a foot wrong for about five years or so. Or so we assume. Certainly doesn’t leave any footprint on the world. I’ve got a few possible pings on the name from Glasgow and Oldham — credit checks of one sort or another, mostly — so maybe he was on his travels.’
‘Maybe,’ I allowed. I’d already left Liverpool myself by that time, and truth to tell I hadn’t gone back much since. I’d never seen Kenny on any of my brief trips home, but then, I hadn’t been looking for him. I had no idea whether he’d stuck around. A lot of my generation were shaken loose when the slums around the hospital were knocked down and new estates were built there. A lot more had already gone, deserting the sinking ship that Liverpool had looked like back in the Thatcher/Hatton era.
‘But then we get a solid sighting in January 2001,’ Nicky went on. ‘In the exuberant spirit of the new millennium, your man Kenny head-butted a cop after being pulled over on the M25, which places him in London and tells us something about the deficiencies in his survival instincts.’
He made a gesture towards the sheaf of paper. ‘I decided to narrow the search then, and hit a rich seam. There’s a K. Seddon working casual shifts at a haulage firm in Newport Pagnell in August 2001. He doesn’t stick around long, but then he pops up again at a Lada garage in Welham Green, where he works for a year on and off. Pays his taxes, keeps his nose clean.
‘He’s down on the council register in Brent in 2002, on the waiting list but not yet in residence. He gets sick of that, presumably, and heads south. Bribes, blags or begs his way onto the list in Southwark and in due course gets his offer. Not the Salisbury, at first. Somewhere a bit classier than that. He lands in a two-bedroom conversion in Curtin’s Grove — the only council estate in South London where most of your neighbours live in fucking Grade Two listed buildings. And two bedrooms makes you think, doesn’t it? There’s no mention of dependants on the application form, but obviously there had to be some. Presumably it came up at the screening interview, and the records were filed with the housing department’s formal assessment. Which was erased, as per the stipulations of the Data Protection Act, when he left that address.’
I was momentarily distracted by the memory of that stark, unlived-in second bedroom at Kenny’s flat.
‘So then he moved to Weston Block?’ I asked.
Nicky nodded. ‘July 2003 to present day,’ he said. ‘But you’re missing out the best part, which is the reason why he moves. Those mysterious dependants? He keeps beating on them. Three domestic call-outs in five months, one of which involves an actual court appearance and a charge of assault, for which he does a month because he’s got some previous. That means we get a name at last. Kenny’s live-in is a Ms Blainey. Tania, Tina, something like that. You’ve got all the details there, but it’s a name that leads nowhere. I know, because I chased it.
‘Anyway, all of this bullshit is too rich for the neighbours’ blood. Complaints and formal warnings follow, and the housing department, as soon they’ve made their nod to the house rules, pick Kenny up by the scruff of the neck and drop him into the oubliette. I mean the Salisbury. There are no employment records from around then, by the way, but we’ve got him signing on at the social and showing up in the DSS database. He’s got a dodgy back and he’s on some kind of invalidity benefit. But he’s still got the two bedrooms, so I guess we can assume that his lady friend sticks around despite the abuse. Maybe the bad back makes him less free and easy with the backhanders. She goes AWOL soon after, though. Kenny reports her missing on 16 December 2005. Police file the report, then do nothing, which is fairly typical copping for a missing-persons notice. File hasn’t been added to since and, like I said, the name goes nowhere.’
He started in on a fairly arid list of other official agencies whose records proved Kenny’s continued existence. ‘What about the kid?’ I said, cutting him off before he could get a head of steam going: I needed to see the wood right now. Individual trees could be examined later.
Nicky looked aggrieved. ‘I was coming to the kid.’
‘I know, Nicky. But visiting hours are almost over. Let’s not piss off matron any more than we can help, eh? This is Mark, right? The boy who died?’
‘Right. Birth certificate has Mark Blainey. Local school records had him down as Mark Seddon.’
‘But he’s not Kenny’s son?’
‘No reason to think so, since he’s living with his mother at seven different addresses that don’t have Kenny in them before they all wind up together in Walworth. But she tends to give him the surname of whoever she’s shacking up with at the time. Maybe she’s an old-fashioned girl at heart — or maybe she thinks it helps the family to bond. But it’s kind of a moot point now, since, as you already pointed out, the kid is dead.’
I felt a twinge of formless regret, thinking of that bare bedroom like an inadequate mausoleum: a memorial to a life, but from which all the visible signs of that life had been scrupulously erased. Didn’t grieving parents keep their kids’ rooms the way they were when the kids died? Wasn’t that how it was meant to work?
In my mind’s eye I’d given this lost boy the face of Bic, the prescient kid with the bandaged hands. And I suddenly realised that the hands were the link I’d unconsciously followed. Bic’s hands were wrapped up in grubby dressings: Kenny’s were criss-crossed with the scars of old wounds. Even the ponytailed woman who was hanging out with Gwillam had her hands wrapped up. And my hands, when I’d visited the Salisbury for the second time, had itched so badly that I’d wanted to tear the skin off them.
‘Tell me about that,’ I said. ‘I mean, how he died.’
‘He was the jumper. I told you there was a jumper, right? Maybe eighteen months ago. Jumped off the walkway between Weston and Beckett Block. Lot of alcohol in the blood, and a lot of speed, too, which is never a good combination. Couple of people saw him climb up on the concrete parapet, yell something and then jump. Verdict was accidental death, mainly because of the bloodwork. He probably wasn’t sober enough to make up his mind to kill himself and then stick to it.’
‘How old?’ I asked. Jean Daniels had already told me, but there’s never any harm in checking against the records.
‘Eighteen. Just.’
Okay. So here it all was in black and white, just as Jean had laid it out for me. This was the tragedy that she didn’t think Kenny had ever got over: a tragedy maybe slightly qualified by the fact that this wasn’t his own flesh and blood. But that wasn’t the main issue here, was it? That wasn’t what was niggling me. It was just that I found it hard to imagine Kenny Seddon loving anyone. Beating up his girlfriend in a drunken rage, that I could see: and then turning his hatred on his own body when he ran out of other targets. Kenny sitting in his bedroom, on the
