“You should be in bed,” she said. “I thought you were asleep already.”
“Where’s Dad?” said Kip. The question hovered in the air between them, bobbing weakly like a deflating balloon. The hall light glowed a dull orange, reminding Kip of the light in the Midwestern motel rooms Stephen Shore liked to photograph. Kip stared at Lynn Kiplas in her quilted dressing gown and felt envious of Shore’s talent, the way he had of making the most casual Polaroid snapshot look like the opening of a murder mystery. Kip had always hated Lynn’s dressing gown, which was made of horrible fake mauve satin and reminded him of some naff sitcom set in an old people’s home.
She had clearly been crying. Kip didn’t know what he wanted most: to hug her or to slap her face. He became suddenly aware that he was dressed only in his underpants, that he was more or less naked in front of her.
“He’s at Toke’s,” Lynn said. Lyonel Toklin was his father’s business partner. “They’ve been playing cards and drinking, you know what those two are like once they get started. Anyway, he’s not fit to drive.” Her words sounded stilted, a speech she had prepared beforehand. Kip couldn’t decide whether her lying was a sign of courage or idiocy. He took a step towards her, meaning to put his arms around her, but she flinched away as if afraid he might hit her.
“Go to bed now,” she said. “And make sure that computer’s switched off.” She moved away towards the end of the landing. Kip watched her go into the bedroom then closed his own door with a bang. He picked his jeans off the floor and fished his mobile out of the pocket then brought up his father’s number and depressed the call button. The call went straight to voicemail, which Kip knew meant precisely nothing. Andy Kiplas didn’t like mobiles. He kept his phone on during work hours because it would hurt the business not to but as soon as he was finished for the day he switched it off. For the first time Kip saw this behaviour as thoughtless and selfish.
Andy’s pet name for Lynn was the Gipsy Moth.
Kip realized he hadn’t called Sonia that day or even messaged her. He supposed that made him as bad as his father. He felt a sudden, almost urgent need to speak to her, not about his father or monster but about Andrew Watson’s photos of the burned-out office block, how the pictures looked to him like stills from a documentary about hell.
Still, it was too late to call. He sent a text message instead, sleep well and the letter K and then an x. He did not expect a reply, but a moment later his phone buzzed and there was a text from Sonia, the word goodnight accompanied by the little red heart graphic she sometimes used to sign off her messages.
The thought that she was awake and thinking of him made him start to get hard. Right after the second time they had sex he had jokingly asked Sonia what she wore in bed at night, and she had laughed, and said that when the nights were muggy like this she didn’t normally wear anything except a pair of knickers.
He put his phone on to charge. He thought of the picture he had given Sonia, the photograph of the monster that she said she was going to mount in a clip frame. The idea of Croft on Sonia’s writing desk or bookshelf looking down at Sonia’s naked body made him feel queasy, and once again he found himself wishing he had never given her the photograph in the first place.
Two days later Rebecca Riding was on Crimewatch. They showed the same photo again, Rebecca Riding in her red school jumper and with the gap between her teeth, and then they staged a reconstruction of what they called her last known movements. A small girl wearing a red cardigan came out of the school gates on Manor Lane and trotted along Northbrook Road towards Manor Park. Just before she crossed to the park side she stopped to talk to another girl, a child actress playing the part of Rebecca Riding’s friend Tanya Baker. The actress playing Tanya said she had to go home and change out of her school clothes but that she’d meet Rebecca in the park by the swings in ten minutes’ time.
Then there was an interview with the parents of the real Tanya Baker. They looked dazed and spoke slowly, like people who had narrowly avoided being involved in a major road accident. After the interview with Tanya’s parents they showed the photo fit of the monster again and repeated the number of the police hotline. Any information at all, they said, might turn out to be of vital import-ance in the search for the killer. Kip thought the word killer sounded worse even than the word murderer. Murder always sounded rather grand, something planned out in advance and with at least the semblance of reason to back it up. Killing was just an action, simple as that. A killer was brutal and thoughtless and probably stupid.
With Dennis Croft it was hard to tell where the murderer left off and the killer began.
“Just think of it,” said Lynn Kiplas. “Those poor people.”
“I’m going out,” Kip said. He left the room quickly, before his mother had a chance to ask where he was going. As he unlatched the front gate he saw his father walking towards him up the road.
“Where are you off to, then?” said Andy Kiplas. “Anywhere exciting?”
“Just out.” His father looked clean and smelled fresh, as if he had recently stepped out of the shower. His plaid shirt had been recently ironed. He spoke jauntily, with a kind of mock casualness, and Kip thought of the Toklins’ dog, which always expected to be made a fuss of even when it had stolen the Sunday joint right off the table. He tried to imagine how it would be if his father left home, meeting him at the site and going off for supper somewhere, to Pashka’s Kitchen in Brockley perhaps, where they would eat potato latkes with apple sauce and his father would tell him in blow-by-blow detail about his latest building project.
He thought he could cope with that. It was going to end up like that anyway when he went to college. But the thought of his mother alone at home made him feel trapped and scared.
He thought of packing his bags and leaving, just him and the Nikon, then realized he would never escape this shit, not even if he went to Australia.
For Christ’s sake, Dad, he thought. It’s your problem. Leave me out of it.
“Fancy a couple of rounds of Harris later?” his father said. Harris was a variant of rummy, something he and Toke had invented. The game was named after Bomber Harris, though the reasons for this had vanished into the past.
“OK, Dad, maybe. I’m not sure what time I’ll be back though.” He stepped carefully around his father and went off up the street.
“I’ll save you a beer, then,” Andy Kiplas called after him. Kip didn’t answer. He felt for the Nikon around his neck then realized he had come out without it. Not that it mattered much. It was now almost dark, with just a narrow strand of pink chafing the horizon. Kip did not know where he was going exactly, only that he had needed to get out of the house. He decided to walk as far as the Lewisham clock tower and then turn back. Lee High Road was quieter now. The traffic was always lighter after the rush hour, and there were occasional moments of complete hiatus. Kip loved the houses on Lee High Road because they were always interesting to photograph. Most of them were pretty rundown, tottering decrepit terraces constructed from the dirty-looking yellowish brick his father said was called London stock. They reminded him of the Polish war widows in Pashka’s, with their camphor-smelling clothes and their vanished hero husbands, their double rows of pearls hidden beneath their moth-eaten cardigans. There were still bomb sites along Lee High Road but not as many now as there had been. Mostly they had been built on. The Lewisham end of Lee High Road had suffered most but even that was being done up. It was all hairdressers and cafés now. Kip fingered the loose change in his pocket, wondering if he had enough for a burger or a sausage sandwich. Men and girls slid by in loud gaggles, pushing aside the darkness with their laughter, the glare from the bars and the street-lamps pooling in orange light slicks on their garish clothes. Kip liked being on the streets at night. There was a restlessness in people, the sense that anything might happen at any time. He wished he had brought the Nikon.