Darkness Falls (Kate Marshall, #3)(31)

“Are you in contact with anyone who lived at the commune?” asked Kate.

“Blimey, that’s a good question. It was eighteen years ago. So many of the guys went by nicknames. Elsie and Vera and Liza . . .” Shelley chuckled. “They were a nice bunch, so different to the guys I’d known from my childhood. My father and my uncle were very touchy-feely, let me just say. It was nice to be in an environment where no one was interested in me that way. It was all run by an older guy, well, I say older—he was probably only thirty back when we were sixteen. Max Jesper. He’d been at the commune for the longest time, and he ran things. It was an old Georgian townhouse that had been empty for years. He became a squatter there in the early 1980s.”

“Did you have to pay anything to stay there?” asked Tristan.

“There was a kitty, a big bowl which everyone had to contribute to. If you were working, you had to put in half of what you earned. If you didn’t work, Max encouraged you to sign on at the Jobcentre, and you had to contribute half of what you got. No one ever had much money. And, of course, the guys would have to spend a night with Max to secure their room.”

“Sounds sleazy,” said Tristan.

“Oh, Max was. Luckily all I had to do was make him bread a couple of times a week, and I was earning and contributing the most. Max wasn’t a bad-looking guy, but he’d often invite his mates over when a new lad wanted to move in . . .”

Shelley saw the look that passed between Kate and Tristan.

“I know, it sounds horrible, and it was, but so many young guys were coming from places far worse. And for me, it was such freedom.”

“What happened to the commune?” asked Tristan.

“Max went to court to claim squatter’s rights on the building, and he won. He became the legal owner of this huge old house. It was in the local paper.”

“Can you remember when this was?” asked Kate.

“I don’t know, four or five years ago. It’s on the other side of Exeter, close to the new industrial estate they’re building.”

“When did you know that David had gone missing?” asked Tristan.

“Our birthday was on the same day, June fourteenth. I was living with Kev. We were having a party, and I’d invited David. He didn’t show up. I wasn’t too worried. As a rule, he was all over the place, but when I didn’t hear from him for a week, that’s when I got concerned. I went around to see the guy he’d been living with, Pierre, and Pierre said that he and David had split up ten days previously and David had moved out. I then asked around at the pubs in the area, and I went to the commune, but no one knew where he’d gone.”

“How long had he been living with Pierre?”

“I can’t remember, exactly. A few weeks, maybe.”

“Do you have contact details for Pierre?”

“No. He died two years later of a drug overdose,” said Shelley.

“Did David ever say that he’d been involved with anyone high profile, any politicians?”

Shelley considered the question.

“No. He was quite the blabbermouth. He would have been very proud of that.”

“Could you give us the names of some of the gay pubs that David used to go to?”

“Yes, but I don’t know how many of them are still open.”

Shelley pulled out a piece of paper and had a think, then started to write. There was a long silence. Kate and Tristan looked to each other and didn’t have any more questions.

“Okay. There’s four that I can remember. I know for a fact I’ve got the first two right because we used to go there a lot; the other two, I’m not sure.”

“Thank you so much,” said Kate. “You’ve been really helpful.”

Shelley took them back to the front door. They passed the kids, who looked up at them and smiled when they said goodbye.

“I had Joanna Duncan’s message on my answering machine for quite a few weeks after she went missing,” said Shelley when they were at the front door. “I had to delete it in the end. I didn’t like hearing it and wondering what happened to her. It gives me the shivers that you’ve turned up on my doorstep all these years later mentioning Joanna Duncan and David in the same breath.”





17


It had stopped raining when Kate and Tristan left Shelley’s house, and the sun was now shining. They hurried to the car and got inside.

“The Spread-Eagle pub is closed,” said Tristan, when they were inside the car. “I think The Brewer’s too,” he added, looking at the list Shelley had given them.

“I’m more interested to go and have a look at this commune on Walpole Street, in case this Max Jesper is still living there,” she said.

It took them half an hour to cross the city. Walpole Street was by the river, and Kate remembered it for being part of a run-down area. She’d accompanied Myra there once when she put her clapped-out old car in for a service, and she remembered a row of boarded-up buildings next to an old car mechanic. The memory came back to her, bittersweet. Myra had had an aversion to discarding anything unless it was truly broken. She’d got rid of the old Morris Marina only when the engine had crumbled away. On the occasion Kate was thinking of, the car had lived to see another service.

Kate was surprised to see the car mechanic’s was now a trendy barbershop with a tattoo parlor, and the rest of the area by the river had undergone a transformation. There was a row of small, independent shops, a beautiful public garden, a Starbucks, and an old art house cinema that she recalled being boarded up.