‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It’s me. Hello, Richie. Thanks for getting in touch.’
‘You’re welcome. Keighley said you wanted to talk. I want that, too.’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘Do you know where my mum is living now? It’s just on the–’
‘I can’t come to Walton,’ Richie said, categorically.
‘Why’s that, then, Richie?’
‘I just can’t. I’ll tell you when I see you. But choose somewhere off the street, Castor. Somewhere where nobody will see us. And it needs to be out in the open.’
‘Why?’ I asked again.
‘So I can see you coming,’ Richie said.
18
The Linacre Lane cemetery in Bootle was looking a lot less overgrown and graffitied than when I’d seen it last. There were fewer used condoms on the ground, too, so someone was clearly making a real effort; but I wasn’t here to admire the view.
The 61 bus put me off within sight of the gates, but I walked on by and did a circuit of the place first — both to see if I’d been followed and to think about what I’d already picked up while I’d been here.
Not the jackpot, obviously — that I could only get from Anita herself — but a few little nuggets of possibility. Kenny’s obsession with Anita meant that the two of them playing house together two hundred miles from home was a smaller camel to swallow: particularly since Kenny had done his level best to drive Anita away from the ’Pool in the first place. Mind you, I reflected, there wouldn’t have been a lot keeping her here: as a single mum in Walton with no man in tow, she would have taken a lot of cheap shots, a lot of innuendo and collateral contempt from the matriarchs of my mum’s generation. There would have been no shortage of places where she’d have set tongues wagging and heads shaking: and, little by little, that kind of shit wears you down.
And then there was Steve’s obvious hatred of Matt. It had shown in his face, both times he’d been mentioned. Steve disliked me cordially, that was obvious, and I didn’t blame him; but there was some additional weight of animus when he talked or thought about Matt: something that gave his aggression a whole lot more forward momentum. Maybe his mother had been frightened by a rabid priest while he was still in the womb: they say that leaves an impression.
Lastly, there was Richie’s paranoia about being seen in public, which I was evidently starting to share. What had he done that had caused him to drop off the map so precipitously? And did it have anything to do with either his missing sister or Kenny Seddon?
Finally, satisfied that nobody was dogging my shadow or shadowing my dog, I turned in at the gates. I’d told Richie exactly where to meet me, and I’d described the spot with enough circumstantial detail so that not even a blind man could have missed it. There was a chestnut tree, for one thing: one of the dozen or so mature trees that were still permitted to stand within the cemetery grounds, even though their roots spread out a long way and put some of the ground off-limits for burials. And there was a headstone a couple of aisles away where a stone angel had been painted by some street artist who for once had some ideas in his head besides writing his own name: painted in gilt and silver and metallic blue, so that she now looked like some cybernetic robot seraph come down from Silicon Heaven, which of course — as even Kryten finally had to acknowledge — doesn’t really exist.
Richie was pacing backwards and forwards under the tree, sucking on a fag: it wasn’t the first, either, as the dog-ends at his feet testified. He looked up as he saw me coming, took the nearly dead dimp out of his mouth and flicked it into the long grass with evident ill humour.
I watched it smoulder. ‘You remember seeing the Smokey the Bear cartoon at school that time?’ I reminisced.
‘You’re late,’ Richie said with asperity.
I nodded. ‘Which gave you plenty of time to get into position so you could see me coming. Your ground rules, Richie. Now what the fuck is going on?’
He tapped me on the chest with a finger. ‘You tell me,’ he suggested. ‘I’m only here because you asked me to come.’
Unlike Steve, Richie had grown outwards as well as upwards. His voice might still be a choirboy’s, but his frame was a full-back’s, and he seemed to be on something of a short fuse. He jerked his head to the side suddenly, a nervous gesture that flicked his long blond hair out of his eyes, and an avenue of memories opened up in my mind, so that I could see him doing the same thing a hundred times, in a hundred different places.
‘Where’s Anita?’ I asked him.
‘Why?’ Richie snapped back.
‘Because Matt’s in jail.’
This seemed to be news to Richie, and it gave him a moment’s pause. He blinked twice, staring at me. ‘What for?’ he demanded at last.
‘Murder. Kenny Seddon’s murder. Someone sliced him to ribbons in a parked car, and the police think it was Matt.’
Richie laughed, but it was from incredulity rather than amusement. ‘Kenny’s dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘Kenny Seddon is dead?’
‘Still yes.’
‘And your brother did it?’
‘Well, that’s where me and the official version part company,’ I said. ‘I don’t think he did. He was in the car with Kenny — they’ve got his prints on everything up to and including the murder weapon. But he says he didn’t kill him, and I believe him.’
Richie shook his head in wonder. I waited for him to say something, but he took out his fags again and lit up first. ‘I don’t care who did it,’ he said, blowing smoke out of his nose. ‘I’m just glad the cunt is under the soil. That’s the best news I’ve had all year, Castor. Thanks. Thanks so much.’ His voice shook a little.
‘You’re welcome,’ I assured him. ‘But at the risk of repeating myself, where’s Anita? She was living with Kenny until a couple of years back. She might know who the real killer is.’
Richie held my gaze for a moment, his expression turning into a grimace of remembered pain. Then he looked away, up into the branches above.
‘Richie . . .’ I said.
‘I get it.’ He waved me silent. ‘You want Nita to get your brother out of the shit by fingering someone else.’
‘Well, ideally, yeah. And if she can’t do that, then maybe she could give me some leads. Something to go on.’
‘I could ask what he’s ever done for her,’ Richie said, still staring at the sky through the interlacings of the chestnut branches. ‘For any of us. But I won’t bother, because you already know the answer. Give it up, Castor.’
‘Why?’
‘Because Anita’s dead.’
The words hit my stomach like slingshot stones: or rather, not so much the words as the absolute conviction with which he said them. Here we were, then: at ground zero.
And it looked like I’d come all this way on a fool’s errand.
We sat with our backs against the stone, facing towards the cemetery gates because Richie still wasn’t sure that some unspecified enemy wasn’t going to try to sneak up on him while we talked. Consequently his gaze wasn’t on mine and I could watch him while he talked; look for any chink in that heavy armour of certainty.
‘She was living in Derby when he found her,’ he said, his beautiful voice elegaically lowered. From his tone, you knew that as far as he was concerned, that was where Anita’s death had begun. ‘He paid some private- detective bloke to chase her down, with some bullshit cover story about how they were separated but he wanted to give it another chance, and then he turned up on her doorstep one morning.’
