So He Takes the Dog

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‘I tend to be the listener.’

‘Like good cop, bad cop? Talking cop, listening cop?’

‘Something along those lines.’

For an instant Hannah comes close to smiling. ‘He was nice to talk to, you know?’ she says, letting the tears run. ‘He was such a nice man.’ For a few seconds she maintains eye contact, then her eyes change with a flash of anguish that makes them widen, as if startled by herself. ‘Fuck,’ she says through clenched teeth, swiping the tears off her face, but you can’t tell if she’s cursing her own crying or the fate of her murdered friend. ‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,’ she repeats passionlessly, glaring at the wall, at the sky, at her wetted hands. Her fury expelled, she turns back to the favoured policeman, presenting herself as someone who is now ready to talk. And talk she does, at length, as if she’s been called as a character witness for Henry Whoever.

It is important to her that we should appreciate his resourcefulness, his toughness, his gentleness, his refusal to complain about the lousy hand that life had dealt him. Despite the kindness of Malak (whose name is invoked like the name of the Good Samaritan), there were days on which Henry ate nothing, but Henry didn’t moan about going hungry – he simply remarked on it, as you or I might comment on a day on which the sun didn’t shine. In short, indigent yet uncomplaining, Henry had a rare air of dignity about him. Henry was charismatic. Henry was his own man.

‘Which is the reason we’re here,’ mutters Ian, who has been studying a fish tank that stands in a corner of the room, a fish tank filled with clear water and one-quarter filled with shells, crab claws, stones and miscellaneous beach debris, but apparently devoid of fish. ‘When he went AWOL, where did he get to? Any idea?’ he asks, addressing the side of Hannah’s face.

‘Last year it was Penzance, during the summer,’ she replies, as though the question had been put not by Ian but by his companion. And he was in Plymouth too, on the same trip. Why he’d gone there, how he’d got there, how long he’d spent there, she can’t say. When he came back from his travels he usually didn’t seem to know where he’d been. Once he was away for a short time, no more than a week, and when she next saw him a bus ticket fell out of his pocket while they were talking, and he picked it up and looked at it as if he’d never seen it before. And a couple of years back, she remembers, Henry reappeared wearing a T-shirt that had come from some car museum, yet Henry was almost certain he hadn’t been to any such place.

‘Almost certain?’ Ian interjects, having decided that the fishless fish tank is evidence in favour of the judgement he’d made on the basis of the black rag by the door.

‘That’s right,’ Hannah responds coolly, again to the non-speaker.

‘So he was confused,’ Ian summarises. ‘Mentally confused.’

‘That’s not how I’d put it.’

‘How would you put it?’

‘He was confused when he saw the ticket. When I asked him about the museum. But from day to day his mental state wasn’t confused.’

Mimicking the perplexity of the dense, Ian scratches his head, scowling at the effort of thinking. ‘You’re going to have to run that one by me again,’ he says. ‘He goes walkabout for a few days and when he comes back here he doesn’t have a clue where he’s been but his mind isn’t confused? I’m not getting it.’

Bestowing on Ian a brief irritated glance, Hannah explains, speaking slowly to the wall behind him. ‘When you talked to Henry he wasn’t confused. He made sense. He understood what you were saying to him. He answered in sentences. OK? But when he came back from his walkabout, as you put it, he seemed to have lost the time that he’d been away. It was as if he’d been sleepwalking. Make sense to you now?’

‘In my experience, when people wake up after sleepwalking they tend to be confused.’

‘He was, at first, a bit. But he wasn’t confused in the way you meant it.’

‘And how did I mean it?’

‘On the way to ga-ga. He was more blank than confused.’

‘So if you said to him, “Henry, where were you yesterday?” he’d say, “I haven’t a clue?” Is that right?’

‘He’d remember stuff. Things he’d seen.’

‘In that case he wasn’t blank, was he?’

‘Not entirely, no. He’d remember bits and pieces, but they wouldn’t join up. Things would be vague. Like remembering a dream.’

‘Sounds to me like he needed medical attention.’

‘That’s not the sort of help he needed.’

‘What sort did he need?’

‘Some money wouldn’t have gone amiss,’ Hannah replies. Asked whether Henry was as vague about the more distant past as he was about the weeks just gone, she confirms that he was and smiles faintly to herself as she says it, as if Henry had cleverly anticipated the problems his vagueness would cause after he’d gone. He once lived in London, many years ago. Sometimes he talked about buildings or places in the city and he’d struggle to see them clearly, because it was so long since he’d been there. He said that explicitly. Did Henry ever name any friends or acquaintances he might once have had? No, there were no names, none that she could recall at the moment. How did Henry come to be homeless, did she know that? She knew that he’d lost his job and that he lost his home as a consequence. What was the job? Henry didn’t say. Where was it? Henry didn’t say. How long ago? Henry didn’t say.

‘You didn’t ask him?’ Ian intervenes.

‘If he wanted to tell me more, he’d have told me more,’ Hannah firmly replies, as if repeating a rule that Ian had forgotten. ‘If he didn’t, he’d change the subject. He’d shrug and go quiet, and that would be the end of it.’ Again she consults the sky, which seems to bring the recollection of a particular episode with Henry. She is about to speak, then halts herself, narrowing her eyes, putting her thoughts in order. ‘With Henry the past was dead,’ she says, and grimaces at herself, because that’s not quite right. ‘It was irrelevant to him. He was lonely and bored a lot of the time, but he never gave the impression of being nostalgic for the life he’d lost. Or hardly ever. There was no bitterness in him. What was gone was gone. He was where he was, and he was making the best of it. But occasionally he’d remember something,’ Hannah goes on, offering a rueful smile. She inspects a finger, attending to a speck of dirt caught under a nail before continuing. ‘He’d be struck by a memory. It would just seem to hit him, out of nowhere. Little things: what something looked like. A street, a market, a face. He’d be really jolted by it, and delighted, for a while, then he’d begin to get sad and he’d do this,’ she says, with a swat of the hand. ‘Move on. No dwelling on the past.’

Stifling a yawn that appears rhetorical, Ian closes his notebook. ‘Cuts down the topics for conversation, doesn’t it? If your past is off the menu,’ he observes. ‘You say you liked talking to him. What was there to talk about? I mean, it’s not as if he’d had an action-packed day at the office.’

The crudity of the question makes Hannah sigh. They talked about the things they could see, she explains. They talked about what she’d been doing since the last time he saw her, about things that had happened in the town, about the weather, the news, the things people talk about.

Ian’s notebook goes into a pocket; it’s time to wind up. ‘But he never named anyone he knew? He saw faces but they had no names?’ he asks in conclusion.

‘No.’

‘Remarkable.’

‘That’s the way it was,’ says Hannah, again not to Ian. She’s staring at the photographs of the field with the drystone wall, remembering something about Henry, it appears.

‘Well, if you think of anything else, call us on this number,’ Ian finishes, depositing a card on the floor beside her knee.

She gives the card a second of her attention. Henry could tell when it was going to rain, she adds. His fingers would swell up and shrink with the changing air pressure. The pulse in his wrists would become so prominent, it was like looking at the flank of a frog as it breathed. He was like a human barometer, never wrong, she says.

The next day new flyers were issued, using Hannah’s photograph instead of the fuzzy beach snap, and stations in London were given the new improved mugshot. The response was silence. It felt as if we were lobbing marbles into a bog.

9 (#ulink_067a3f9a-6cd1-565d-a3d0-73af82b98b75)

One Monday lunchtime we take a message from Tom Gaskin, saying he has some information that might be useful and asking us to drop by his house, whenever was convenient, so as soon as the paperwork is out of the way, around five, we drive over there. As when we’d left him all those days ago, he’s sitting at the table in the window, wearing a crisp white shirt, though on this occasion the tie is a stripy blue-and-yellow cricket-club number. When he sees us arrive he gives us a stiff slow wave of the forearm, a tired and polite little gesture, like the wave of a man at a car park barrier greeting the five hundredth driver of the day. You get the impression he’s been sitting there for hours, staring out at the sea and the hills.

He seats us around the table, asks if either of us would like tea or coffee, glances at the view from his window, passes comment on the weather. He asks us how the investigation is proceeding and immediately revokes the question, apologising for its impertinence. Then there is no longer any way of delaying. Stroking the backs of his hands, as if trying to rub the creases out of his skin, he begins. ‘This may not be of any consequence,’ he says, and gives the scratches in the table top a quizzical look, as if distracted for a moment by the problem of how the table came to be scratched. ‘Well, you can tell me if it’s of any consequence, can’t you?’ he continues. ‘I was sitting here, last Sunday, in this very seat, last Sunday lunchtime. It was shortly after one o’clock. I know that, because the news had just started. On the radio. I was sitting here and I looked over that way, towards where that boat is.’ He points steadily towards the horizon, leaving his finger in mid air until we have both looked in the indicated direction. What had caught his attention was a kite, a bright-pink kite, that had come loose and was flying across the beach. Then he saw this young man, a rather unkempt character, walking very slowly, round and round the same spot, close to the sea wall, where Henry sometimes used to bed down for the night. Round and round he went, examining the ground, as though he’d dropped something, then he sat down on the parapet and stayed there for quite a time, looking out at the sea, which was also a bit peculiar, Tom thought, because it wasn’t a nice day. Lightly raining, in fact. After that he walked off, around the headland. An hour later he came back and resumed his search of the sand. This went on for another ten minutes or so. Quite odd behaviour, Tom thought, but in itself perhaps not worth remarking on. ‘Some folk like the rain, don’t they?’ he adds. ‘I quite like it myself.’

It would be difficult to be more long-winded than Tom Gaskin, and we know that this conversation is going to yield nothing that could not have been relayed to us over the phone. And that’s the reason for all the words, to disguise the fact that our presence isn’t strictly necessary, not for us, anyway. Tom Gaskin is the loneliest man in town.

‘Unkempt?’ asks Ian, applying a full stop with an audible tap that he hopes will convey a need for greater momentum.

‘That’s right. But the thing is,’ Tom resumes, dragging his chair closer to the table, ‘on Tuesday, after lunchtime, soon after 1.30, I saw the same young man, on a bicycle this time, one of those mountain bikes. He was riding on the sand, and he stopped in the same place and stayed there for a quarter of an hour I’d say, looking around, before he went off towards Straight Point. And again he was gone for an hour or so.’

‘Definitely the same person?’ Ian enquires. ‘I mean, it’s quite a distance down to the beach. I don’t think I could positively identify someone from this range.’

It was unequivocally the same person, says Tom, and to support his certainty he pulls back the curtain to reveal a huge pair of binoculars on the sill. He used to be a teacher, he explains, a schoolteacher. Biology was his subject, and zoology was always his great love, ornithology in particular. He does a lot of birdwatching, locally and all over the country and abroad, since Helen died, which was eight years ago now, almost. Last year he went to Spain, for the migration, and the year before that as well, he tells us, adjusting the curtains, then he notices the fleeting impatience of Ian’s expression. ‘I’ve wandered off the point,’ he observes, shaking his head. ‘That was always my problem. At home and in the classroom. Always meandering. But where was I?’ he asks with a smile for Ian in which there seems to be dismay, bordering on alarm, at his own incoherence.

‘Definitely the same person.’

‘Oh yes. It was. No question about it. And on Thursday he was there again. The middle of the day, on his bicycle, same place. The same young man. Definitely the same person. Three times within five days, that’s what you’d call a pattern of behaviour, isn’t it?’

‘It’s certainly notable,’ says Ian, making a note.

Tom waits for the pen to stop moving. ‘And four times in a week, that’s suspicious, I’d say,’ he adds, and is gratified to see the upturn of Ian’s eyebrows.

‘He was there yesterday?’

‘He was. Two o’clock. Same chap. But on this occasion he went that way,’ he says, pointing to the path across the High Land.

‘Could you describe him?’

Indeed Tom could describe him. Most eyewitnesses can give you two or three points, if you’re lucky. Even if they’d had a good clear look, a long look, by the following day it’s likely that all that’s left in the memory bank is ‘blue eyes’, ‘tall’, ‘well-built’. And when you bring the suspect in, he has blue eyes all right, but he’s five-nine and no more well-built than Joe Average. But he has a finger missing from one hand, which nobody noticed. You could point someone in the direction of a particular person for five minutes, tell them to memorise what they are seeing, and twenty-four hours later not much would remain. Tom, though, he gives us height, narrowness of shoulders, approximate weight and age, hairstyle and colour, colour of jacket, colour of trousers, make of trainers (‘the ones with the tick’), colour of laces (‘bright blue’), oddity of gait (‘hunched, flatfooted, listing’), general demeanour (‘very agitated’), size of hands (‘unusually large’). No eye colour, but otherwise all you could hope for.

There’s so much detail that Ian is struggling to keep pace. ‘This is a very precise description, sir,’ he says, turning the page.

‘Birdwatchers tend to be observant people,’ Tom replies, but he lets Ian finish his notes before adding, with a little grin for himself: ‘I followed him, you see.’

‘You followed him?’

‘I did. I was curious. I wanted to find out what he was up to,’ says Tom forthrightly, giving each of us a level look.

‘And what was he up to?’

‘Well, he walked over the headland, to the steps, and he went down to the beach. He walked part of the way to Straight Point, then stopped, and seemed to be searching again. Going round and round in circles. That’s what prompted me to call you,’ Tom says, and now he reaches back and takes from the sideboard a large-scale Ordnance Survey map. He spreads it open on the table, turning the south side towards us, and places a finger with care on the midpoint of the bay. ‘He was standing there. For two or three minutes I observed him and he didn’t move more than a few yards from that spot. Looking on the ground, he was, scraping at the sand with his foot. Then he was staring out to sea for a while and after a minute or so it seemed to occur to him that he might be being watched, which is when he saw me.’

‘How did he react when he saw you?’

‘I couldn’t see any reaction of any kind. He seemed to notice me and then he carried on looking at the sea. He didn’t move from there,’ he says, tapping the map. ‘This is where your chap was found, isn’t it? So this person might know something,’ Tom suggests, almost childishly pleased at the possibility that he may have helped, and we agree that this would appear to be likely. We ask him to phone us right away should another sighting occur. ‘Of course, of course,’ he replies keenly, looking out at the hill with anticipation, as if it were a stage on which a show was soon to begin. ‘If he comes, I’ll see him. I have nothing better to do on a Sunday,’ he jokes, but he means it, and there’s a small fading in his eyes that tells us that he knows that we know that he means it. He allows us to regard him for a moment. We look at him and at the underused room, a room that smells of furniture polish and tedium. It’s easy to imagine the Sundays here: read the papers, a cup of tea and sandwich for lunch, an hour or two sitting at the table, watching the hills and the sea, an hour or two with a book before a microwaved meal for one, a bit of TV, perhaps with a glass of something, then bed. Dead Henry and the shifty lad are a godsend for Tom. ‘Well,’ he says, with a questioning undertone, slapping his thighs lightly, acknowledging that our conversation is concluded while inviting us, tentatively, to share our thoughts with him. We can do nothing more than thank him and ask him again to call us. He gives his thighs another slap, impelling himself to stand.

‘Did you find the girl?’ he asks abruptly at the door, as though startled by the sudden recollection of what he’d told us on our first visit.

‘Yes, we found her.’

Putting his hand over his heart, Tom releases a tremulous breath. ‘Oh good, good,’ he says, so relieved you’d think we were talking about a girl who’d been kidnapped. ‘Can she help you?’

‘We hope so,’ says Ian. ‘We have to hurry, John. That meeting starts at six.’

‘Of course. I’m sorry. Thank you for coming by,’ says Tom, with a long handshake for both of us.

‘And thank you again for the information.’

‘I hope it’s useful,’ says Tom. As we begin to move away, he takes a step backwards into the hall. Under the light bulb the skin of his face looks as thin as a film of flesh-coloured plastic.

‘I think it will be.’

‘I hope so,’ he says. ‘I hope so,’ he repeats, smiling, disappearing slowly behind the closing door.

The meeting at six is in the pub, with Mary and Rachelle, but the girls aren’t there when we arrive. ‘It’s da poliss,’ Josh calls across the bar. ‘How’s it going? Any breakthrough?’ There’s no breakthrough, he’s told, but as soon as there is he’ll be the first to know. Josh pours the pints, smirkingly watching Ian, who’s checking his watch every few seconds. ‘I’ll tell you what you should do,’ he says, taking care to place each glass plumb centre on its mat, to crank up the tension a bit. He wipes a scatter of droplets off the bar, as Ian bears the drinks away. ‘What you should do is talk to a woman called Hannah Rowe. Lives near here. I can give you the address if you like.’

‘Why should we be talking to Ms Rowe?’

‘Because Ms Rowe knew the old man, that’s why,’ says Josh, giving a cheery mock-simpleton’s grin.

‘And who is Ms Rowe?’

‘She did this,’ Josh answers, indicating the whole room. ‘Painted the walls, the ceiling, the lot. And that’s hers as well,’ he says, pointing to a picture on a nearby pillar, a painting of the esplanade under mist, with a sea as dark as engine oil behind it. ‘Interesting girl. She’s very good. Not cheap,’ he says, examining the walls, approving the quality of the work, ‘but worth every penny.’ And here, perhaps, it is intended that an innuendo be heard. It’s possible, though, that the tone exists only in the memory of what was said, overdubbed on to it.

Then Mary and Rachelle arrive. ‘John’s just on his way home,’ says Ian to Rachelle, but John stays for another one, and a third.

10 (#ulink_38d422ac-a7a6-5b96-b477-74bc0f8707ce)

For the best part of twenty years Jim Jackson worked in a timberyard, but then one Monday morning, blurred by the residue of a weekend’s heroic boozing, he lost his focus at an inopportune moment and lopped half of his right hand clean off with a bandsaw, and after that, one way and another, he wasn’t much good for anything and spent most of the day at home or in the park, drinking and sleeping and drinking some more. In the evenings he might smack his wife about a bit, and from time to time he’d read a bedtime story to his daughter, Jemima, and then, often as not, he’d do something with his daughter that was their little secret and stayed their little secret long after bedtime stories came to an end, until the day Jemima forgot to bolt the bathroom door and her mother walked in and saw Jemima cleaning herself up. So Jim received a hefty sentence and Jim’s wife jettisoned his surname and took herself and her daughter off to the other end of the country, where Jemima Kingham, despite the best efforts of her mother, grew into a desperate and highly volatile young woman, given to dicing her arms with razors and fucking any deadbeat who’d share his bag of glue with her. Jemima was a mess, but she knew she was a mess and when, aged eighteen, she found herself pregnant for the third time, she decided she’d see this one through and would do everything she could to make the kid’s life a good one.

Jessie, her daughter, was born in February 1971. The father, whose name is lost to us, presented himself at the hospital the day after Jessie’s arrival. He put a bunch of flowers on the bed, kissed the baby, sat with Jemima for an hour or two. ‘I’ll be going then,’ he said, giving Jemima a peck on the cheek, and that was the end of his participation in the project. His vanishing was no great surprise to Jemima, nor a great setback, and she knuckled down to the project of raising Jessie alone. She’d do anything to provide for the girl. Saturdays and Sundays were for her daughter; the rest of the week she worked herself stupid. She cleaned other people’s houses during the day and cleaned offices in the evening. For a whole year she scarcely saw daylight, putting in nine hours in a basement laundry before going off to swab hospital corridors through the night. ‘Trust nobody,’ she’d tell the girl. ‘Don’t owe anything to anyone.’ In 1987 she was working in a flower shop from nine to five, in a pub from eight to midnight, and was giving after-hours blowjobs for a fiver. ‘Stay away from boys,’ she would tell Jessie, and Jessie managed to stay away from them until she was fifteen, when Ryan Tate lurched into her life.

With Ryan too you wonder how much of the script was written for him, long before he came along. Semi-employed brawlers and boozers feature prominently in the roll-call of Ryan’s ancestors, and the family tree is richly festooned with convictions for burglary, theft, arson, assault and – in the case of the paternal grandfather – grievous bodily harm, the consequence of a dispute over a bet that ended with a Swiss penknife through the face of the simpleton who had dared to impugn the honesty of the senior Mr Tate. You look at where he came from and you feel they might as well have stamped ‘Go to gaol’ on Ryan’s birth certificate, though you wouldn’t have known he’d go as badly wrong as he did. He had one advantage over Jessie: both parents were around. On the other hand, they were present only in the technical sense for much of the time, because Mr and Mrs Tate were the family’s elite drinkers, never sober for as long as Ryan could remember. At the time of Ryan’s arrest neither parent was in work. His father, Dave, had for years been a man with no visible means of support. Aileen, his mother, had recently been working at a supermarket, a rare interlude of gainful employment that had ended when she was observed waving her husband through the checkout with four unpurchased bottles of vodka in his coat pockets, a routine which had probably been in operation from the day she started the job. As for Ryan, having continued the family tradition by renouncing education at the earliest opportunity, he did a bit of building work here and there, supplementing his income with regular ventures into breaking and entering, and regular spells in custody. He was also a courier for a local dealer, who paid him in cash and dope, and he’d inherited the family predilection for knife work. The Accident and Emergency waiting room should have had a bench named after him.

The third person in this story is Abby Atalay, also aged fifteen. Abby and her parents and her younger sister shared a flat with her childless aunt and uncle, above the kebab shop that the aunt and uncle ran. Money was tight, but the Atalays weren’t poor in the way the Tates and the Kinghams were poor, and they were all perfectly law-abiding. An unexceptional, not terribly bright, somewhat overweight and vulnerable kid, Abby was also half-Turkish, which may be of relevance. Nothing ever happened to Abby, until she had the misfortune to go to the same party as Ryan Tate one night, and get drunk for the first time in her life, and let herself get fucked by him. She imagined that this semiconscious coupling might mean something.

Ryan Tate lived less than half a mile from Jessie Kingham and went to the same school, but it seems their paths never crossed, not in any significant way, before Ryan was eighteen. The fateful meeting took place in April 1987, a month after the party, outside the florist’s where Jessie’s mother worked. Taking a fancy to her, Ryan offered her a cigarette. The cigarette was declined. They talked for a bit. Ryan offered Jessie one of the cans of lager he had in his bag. This too was declined. Ryan then took a rose from a bucket outside the shop, snapped off the moist end and handed the flower to Jessie. Noticing what was going on, Jessie’s mother came out to demand payment. Jemima knew about the Tates and didn’t like the look of Ryan one bit. To Jemima the eyes of a Ryan Tate were the eyes of a hopeless and very dangerous young man, and she could see in him more than a passing resemblance to her daughter’s father. To Jessie, however, the fierce blue eyes of Ryan Tate gave off the charisma of someone who knew how life really was, and the thick violet scar that ran across his jaw didn’t do his image any harm either. Her mother, upon being told by Ryan that payment was unfortunately out of the question due to lack of funds, sent him on his way, in a manner that made it clear to Jessie that his banishment was intended to be permanent. Less than a week later, Ryan came across Jessie outside the pub where her mother worked. The following day they had sex in Ryan’s flat, in the middle of the afternoon, while his parents snored in front of the TV, pissed out of their heads. Three or four times a week they’d do it, for the next couple of months, always in Ryan’s bedroom. Often his parents were at home, and usually they had no idea that Ryan and Jessie were there too.

At around 7.30 p.m. on 17 June 1987, Ryan Tate helped himself to a couple of beers from his parents’ supply, then helped himself to a car that some idiot had left unlocked in a backstreet. He drove past Jessie’s place and, as luck would have it, she was at home. With money from her mother’s purse they bought some more drink. At about eight o’clock they saw a friend of Ryan’s, Trevor Driscoll, walking down the street. He got into the car and they returned to the off-licence, where Trevor contributed a six-pack of lager to the evening’s intake. For an hour they drove around town, with Ryan swigging his lager as he cruised the high street in the stolen car. They dropped in on another off-licence, so Jessie could buy some more cans while Ryan nicked a half-bottle of whisky. Then, shortly before 9.30, they passed the Atalays’ shop and there was Abby, talking to a friend. Since the party Ryan had seen Abby a few times on the street. In Abby’s mind perhaps their relationship had a future. Perhaps she thought that there were some issues to resolve and that now might be the time to resolve them. And perhaps she thought that Trevor Driscoll was Jessie’s boyfriend. She said goodbye to her friend and climbed into the car. Ten minutes later Trevor Driscoll got out of the car outside his brother’s house, and Ryan Tate, Jessie Kingham and Abby Atalay drove up on to Dartmoor.

From here on there are two different versions of events. Ryan Tate claimed that Jessie had known from the start about Abby Atalay, and that there was nothing going on between himself and Abby any longer, but that Jessie – who was drunk by the time they reached the hills – turned on Abby when Abby tried to kiss him. It was a warm night. They’d parked the car and walked a distance, taking the whisky and some beers with them, but as soon as they sat down Abby flung herself at him and the girls had a fight, which ended when Abby got hurt, though why he found himself incapable of keeping the girls apart was something he could never adequately explain. When he saw the blood, and understood what had happened, he panicked. He admitted that. He panicked and he helped Jessie do what she did. Jessie, for her part, said she knew nothing about Abby and Abby knew nothing about her, until they were in the car together, after they’d dropped Trevor Driscoll. The three of them had a huge argument. Ryan stopped in a lay-by and got out of the car, to get away from them, but they both followed him. They were both yelling at him, but Abby was drunk on the whisky and went bananas, so Ryan hit her. Then Jessie just sort of froze. Which is why she did nothing to stop what Ryan then did to Abby.

So one of them, for some reason that we’re unlikely ever to know, hit Abby Atalay very hard with a small rock, hard enough to knock her senseless. Not long afterwards they returned to the car and drove until they came to a petrol station. There they are on CCTV: Jessie in the passenger seat, slurping a beer, laughing at something Ryan says to her as he steadies himself against the pump while he fills the petrol can; and Ryan joking with the cashier, unaware that there’s a streak of blood on the underside of his arm. Abby, meanwhile, had regained some degree of consciousness and begun to crawl away, but she’d covered only a very short distance by the time Ryan and Jessie got back, so they found her easily enough and cracked her with a rock once more. They then doused her with petrol and set fire to her. In the opinion of the pathologist, Abby was not quite dead at this moment, but a few seconds later she would have been: a lifetime’s allowance of pain packed into half a minute. Ryan or Jessie emptied the can over Abby and went back to the car to wait for the fire to die down. Satisfied with their work, they drove the car a couple of miles, rolled it into a ditch and torched it. They then set off on the twelve-mile hike back home.

By midnight Abby’s parents had reported her missing. At two o’clock Jessie’s mother had phoned the police to say that her daughter had disappeared. Smoke-stained and spattered with Abby’s blood, Jessie and Ryan reeled home in the middle of the morning. Within a few hours they were both charged. It took the jury less than an hour to find them guilty, and they only took that long so as not to appear to have rushed the verdict.

Listening to the story of the murder of Abby Atalay, Alice cried. On the kitchen table lay pictures of the killer teens: pea-brained, psychotic Ryan Tate, whose face says he knows that everyone knows he’s lying and he could not give a flying fuck what anyone thinks; and pea-brained, confused Jessie Kingham, who looks terrified by what’s happening to her and yet, at the same time, not unpleasantly surprised at finding herself notorious. ‘They feel no remorse?’ asked Alice, peering at their faces, incredulous at their depravity. All that could be said for a fact was that each was claiming that the other was responsible and that neither had expressed the slightest remorse so far. Jessie perhaps was beginning to feel it, however. Soon she’d go berserk with it and take a jump from a second-storey landing, which would break her neck and leave her in a wheelchair for the rest of her life, an outcome that she seemed to accept with equanimity, as a concluding retribution. But with Ryan Tate it was different. You looked at that face and you knew that for him the death of Abby Atalay was no more important than a dog getting run over in the street. That’s how it seemed at the time and that’s how it’s seemed ever since. Jessie Kingham was the one who killed Abby Atalay, he’ll tell you, and it’s as if he’s telling you that Elvis shot JFK and defying you to tell him that he doesn’t believe a word of what he’s saying. ‘There’s no one there,’ Alice concluded, staring at his face, meeting the challenge of his empty gaze. Ryan Tate was never mentioned at home again. It was soon afterwards that Alice became a churchgoer.

As with violence among the Tates, godliness among the Pierces was something of a tradition, albeit – unlike the volcanic idiocy of the Tate dynasty – a tradition that recently had fallen into abeyance. Great-grandfather Joseph Pierce, the fountainhead of the river of piety, was a much-honoured man of the cloth, for whose son, Julian, the discovery of the same religious vocation would appear to have been as natural a process as the discovery of the desire to walk or speak. With the career of Elisabeth, the first Pierce daughter in three generations, the transmission of the holy gene suffered something of a setback, or so it appeared for a time. Obediently, even willingly devout as a girl, Elisabeth was diverted from the path of righteousness by the experience of university, the study of medicine and betrothal to the unswervingly secular Mr Jameson, a man for whom the Financial Times share index was the truest mirror of the real world, just as Gray’s Anatomy became the touchstone for Dr Elisabeth. Yet the agonised death of her husband, killed by cancer within two years of the birth of their only child, seems to have been the catalyst for an outbreak of faith in the soul of Dr Elisabeth. This faith sustained her for the rest of her life. To her great credit, though, she never preached to her daughter. She never so much as invited her to accompany her to church, and Alice’s belief remained dormant for years, until Dr Elisabeth’s final illness, when something began to change in Alice, as she would later say, in the light of her mother’s selfless preparation for her own death, from cancer also, and several years short of the average span.

On the day of the funeral she went back into the church after the business at the graveside was done. There was motherless Alice alone in the empty church, smaller than life-size under the high stone ceiling. A pillar of sunlight smacked the paving to the side of her, as if the finger of the Lord had fired a shot of revelation in her direction and missed by a couple of yards. Dry-eyed, Alice was looking at the brass eagle on the lectern, at the place where the coffin had rested on its trestle throughout the service, at all the vacant pews, as if imagining the faces of everyone who had been there. She turned and smiled, and there was a sort of shadowing in her gaze, a dimming that never leaves the eyes of some people after bereavement, and never left Alice. But still whatever it was she believed remained covert and undefined for a while longer. The subterranean stream that flowed down from the heights of Joseph Pierce broke into the open only when those two ambassadors of the devil, Ryan Tate and Jessie Kingham, did their worst. There was no discussion, only a quiet announcement of intention: ‘I’m going to church tomorrow.’ She was happy to go alone, Alice said, as her mother had said to her, and at first she went alone, gradually becoming someone different. A photo of grandfather Pierce, the blessed Julian, occupies the centre of the very first page of one of the family albums, a veritable lighthouse of virtue, radiating probity through rimless glasses, with a dog collar as bright and stiff as a band of ivory and a haircut like the helmet of God’s foot soldier.