Summoning the Dead (DI Bob Valentine #3)(30)

The DI approached the centre of the long wall that dissected the room from the rest of the floor. At the whiteboard, Donnelly had been busy posting photographs from the crime scene and further along, on an office desk shoved against the wall, the main exhibits from the bagged evidence sat out.

The detective scanned the photographs as he passed, but his attention was on the items in clear plastic bags. The boys’ boots and shoes. Items of clothing, some of them filthy, muddied, but others with bright patches that stuck out like obscure, inexplicable highlights.

Valentine reached down for the smallest of the bags, a tiny item, sealed with a white sticker that looked outsized by comparison. In the bag, the detective saw the small silver St Christopher that had been retrieved from inside the oil drum where the boys had been buried.

It was a dull, unpolished item, the markings on its reverse – the initials C. B. S. – visible by the blackness of their centres. He removed the label and tipped out the contents into the palm of his hand. He held the pendant up to the light, between thumb and forefinger, and proceeded to turn it from front to back in slow succession. C. B. S. Were they one of the boys’ initials? They must have meant something for someone to inscribe them on the back.

‘C. B. S.,’ said Valentine. He looked at the St Christopher, small, slightly misshapen, and battle-scarred with scratches and dirt. He could see nothing that spoke to him, but he felt something.

It was a strange sensation, almost a direct communication without words. As he gripped the little piece of silver in the palm of his hand the DI felt calm – far calmer than he had all morning, perhaps in days.

He knew someone would have something to say about it – it was theft after all – but he didn’t care as he slipped the small silver St Christopher into his jacket pocket and tapped the outside seam to make sure it was in there.

The doubts he held about the job didn’t seem to matter any more. What mattered was those boys – those nameless children that he had sworn to find some kind of justice for. After what they had seen, and what they’d been through, Valentine knew there was no justice to be found that could possibly mean anything to them. They’d lived and inhabited a world that had forsaken them and one that he was growing to despise, but finding justice and letting them rest in peace was all he could do for them. And he would do it.





18

September 1982

I don’t know how it happened, it just did.

I don’t want anyone to know. I’m trying to be quiet about it, but the floorwalker has found out.

‘What’s this, Welsh?’ he says.

I don’t answer, just stand there, but he sees me shivering and pulls back the blankets.

‘You’ve pissed the bed, you little bastard.’ He slaps me. The sound of the crack on my head echoes in the room, and I duck away to avoid the second blow. But I’m too slow.

‘Ah, leave it!’ I shout out. There’s boys mumbling now – they know what’s happened. I want to run or find something hard to hit the floorwalker with. He yells again, but I don’t hear the words, just feel the grip of his hand on my neck, the fat fingers digging into my flesh. The pain of it is making it difficult to walk. I have to go up on tiptoes and he drags me along, into the bathroom.

The floorwalker sticks my head in the toilet bowl and pulls the chain. He holds me there, and I wonder will I drown, but then he yanks me out and I gulp deep breaths. That’s when I see the others; the boys are gathered at the door – silent, watching.

‘Piss the bed, eh?’ he yells.

I vomit now. A little at first, just on my nightshirt, and then more splashes on the toilet-room floor. I’m smacked again, on the head, and again, in the stomach this time. I fall over and land on my hands and knees.

‘Pick it up!’

‘What with, I have nothing.’

‘Your bloody hands or your mouth, I don’t care which.’ He plants his boot on my backside and I fall into the vomit, and that’s when I feel more of it coming. I grab the rim of the bowl and retch loudly.

‘You little . . .’ The floorwalker grabs my head and pushes it into the toilet bowl again. There’s my vomit in there, floating in the water. The smell of it makes me sick once more. I hear the boys jeering.

‘Get back to your pits, there’s not one among you that isn’t liable to this sort of performance.’ He takes a short step towards the boys, one hand raised over his head, and they scatter.

I’m out the water now, resting and gathering my breath on the floor. I’m soaked through and stinking of my vomit.

‘On your feet.’

I stand up and I see even my feet are wet.

‘Mop up that mess – now.’

‘I’ve no mop.’

‘With your hands, you fool.’

I kneel down and try to scoop up my sick with my hands. It escapes through the gaps in my fingers and runs down my arms. There’s fuller bits, undigested lumps of lamb from the broth we had earlier, and I pick those up with my fingertips as he watches. There’s still some there, some sick, when he says give it a wipe with my sleeve. My nightshirt is filthy smelly.

‘Right. Wait here. Don’t move.’

The floorwalker returns with a tin pail and there’s a wooden handle sticking out the top. He takes a bottle of powdered bleach and tips some in the pail. There’s water there and it mixes.