Eve feels the tick start up in her cheek. She’s thinking ahead.
“They didn’t call the police in?” she asks, knowing the answer.
“Kept it in the family, so to speak,” says Millward. “Spoke to their priest who said the boy was rotten all the way through, though I think his feelings had been hurt because Cormac had once told him to go get out of his sight before he gave him a Stigmata with a screwdriver. Mum and Daddy were at a loss. That’s when they heard about your school.”
“Silver Birch?”
He nods. “Reputation for helping people find themselves, isn’t that right? Holistic teaching - more carrot than stick. I reckon they’d exhausted all other possibilities by then. The Daddy, Deaghlan, he’s an upright sort of a bloke, though he’s tough as iron when needs be. I honestly think he’d have put Cormac down like a bad dog if Siobhan hadn’t persuaded him to put faith in the school.”
“When was this, sir?”
’79,” says Millward, from memory. “They met with Mr Tunstall, with Mr Rideal. Took the tour, heard the pitch. Cormac dragged himself round there like he was a hungry man at a buffet car. He’d have made mincemeat of those children - the school was right to turn him down.”
“He didn’t pass the admission protocol?”
“The school said no to taking him as a pupil. But Mr Rideal did offer access to a healing treatment that he thought might be good for somebody with Cormac’s specific characteristics.”
Eve sits forward. “Sixpence?”
“The same. Deaghlan had to say plenty of Hail Marys and Our Fathers to make it right with his own faith, but Siobhan persuaded him to try. She said there was something wrong inside him and that anything which could heal him had to be worth a try.”
“And?”
“And the boy spent the next four years living part of the time at home with Mum and Daddy – and the rest of the time up here, sharing Sixpence’s old bus with him.”
“Did it change him?”
Millward smiles, and there’s no mirth in it. “Hard to say. He was better, certainly. Always super polite at home. Helpful, kind, good with the younger children. I don’t know if Deaghlan believed he'd changed or had just learned to hide it better but he wasn’t roasting mice in the barn anymore and that was a positive step.”
“How did you come to be involved, sir?”
Millward stretches, loud clicks coming from both elbows and wrists. He looks at Eve as if he wishes he didn’t have to share any of this: that he regrets having to offload the burden of what he knows onto somebody he cares about.
“He came home for good aged 15. Deaghlan was vague about it, no matter how hard I pushed, but something happened to spoil the status quo. Sixpence had told him he wasn’t welcome any more.”
“Doesn’t sound like the sweet man I keep hearing about.”
“I never got the story on what led to the fall-put, but home he came – all dreadlocks and hand tattoos and looking like something you’d find in a riverbed the day after Woodstock. Even so, as far as Deaghlan was concerned he was pretty much a grown man now and could be put to work. He started him off running one of the slot machine places on the seafront. Changed the name of the place to ‘Cormac’s’ and tried to keep him on the right track. Didn’t take long to go wrong. Went wild on a young lass who worked with him – I’ve asked around and nobody knows what it was that flipped him, but he just grabbed her as she went past him. Those who saw it reckoned he was like a dog that just couldn’t help itself. Dragged her into a storeroom and throttled her until one of her eyes went black. Took three members of staff to drag him off and they’re all too bloody scared to talk about it. All I could get from one of the lads was that he kept talking about ‘healing’ her – about swapping her bones. It was a bloody miracle she survived. Even bigger miracle that she took Deaghlan’s money and kept quiet.”
Eve feels an overwhelming desire to lock up both father and son. “Where is Cormac now?” she asks, tightly.
“True love conquers all, apparently,” says Millward. “Fell for a pretty girl he met playing the penny-slots on Blackpool prom. A ‘hippy girl’ – that was how the family described her later. Boots and no bra, no make-up. The ones who got the stuffing knocked out of them on the drive to Stonehenge. Mona was part of that crowd. The hippies, the nomads, the alternatives. She turned Cormac’s head. Told his parents he didn’t want the life they led. Wanted her. Wanted to bed down beneath the stars and to find his own little patch of Paradise. He started quoting people Bob and Bridget had never heard of – Johannes Guttzeit, Isadora Duncan, Carl Jung, Gustav Graser …,”
“I’ll check them out.”
Millward takes another pull of brandy. ““Cormac left the family home in the first week of July, 1985. He took with him a canvas rucksack, a change of clothes, a handful of paperbacks, a toiletry bag containing a toothbrush and some Euthymol toothpaste, a hair-comb, nail scissors, an empty exercise book, three blue pens, a bicycle repair kit and the battery from his father’s imported Plymouth Turismo. According to an eyewitness, he was picked up in a dark green Military-style vehicle with canvas sides. We think it might be a catering vehicle. The eyewitness reported two females in the back already. He climbed into the back and the vehicle drove off, heading east.”
Eve realises she’s uncomfortable in the chair. Stands up and crosses to the bed, reaching out to take the bottle from her old boss. “And where is he now, sir?”
“That’s what the Pearls are paying me to find out,” he says, pressing his teeth together. He looks at her with deep, inscrutable eyes. “Are we still friends, Eve?”
“Of course, sir,” she says, automatically. “You know me better than anyone.”
He smiles at that, a memory hovering in his line of sight. “You were never cut out to be a WPC. People didn’t know they should be scared of you until you’d kicked them in the shine and stamped on their balls. Too good a brain to go to waste on woodentop work. I’m damn proud of what you’ve achieved, I really am. You were the only person I wanted to see at my retirement do.”
“Sorry sir,” she says, genuinely remorseful. “I couldn’t. That was the weekend of the sergeant exams.”
“You chose right, the way I always knew you would,” he says, fatherly now. “You know the right thing and the wrong thing and there aren’t many coppers I can say that about. So I’m going to tell you something and imagine that I’m talking to my old pal Eve, and not soon-to-be Detective Inspector Evelyn Cater.”
“You think he’s hurt Mr Sixpence,” says eve, pre-empting him.
Millward looks past her, gazing into nothing. “That and so much more. He’s been busy.”
“Busy with what?”
“Healing through pain, I think you’d call it. He’s bedded down in the Travelling community, and the last thing they ever want to do is talk to the police. But those who’ve been willing to share a beer and a bong with a private investigator – they’ve all heard the rumours.”
“Rumours, sir?”
“A predator. Moving from place to pace, camp to camp, following the stars and working his way around some old route made up of laylines and forgotten permissive paths. He finds the people who are vulnerable; replaceable. Charms them into believing he can help them. Drugs them, takes them. Those that have come back are never the same. Whatever he spikes them with, they see things nobody should have to see. One poor girl I met near Salisbury, she’s not much more than an animal after what he did. Just sits with her crayons and draws these terrible stick-men. They’re like cave paintings: all these frightened people fleeing this thing with the face of a pig.”