He noticed there were some photographs propped by the skirting board, enlargements mounted on cardboard and protected by cellophane. They did not look like forensic shots. Kip bent to look at them, curious. He remembered how Croft had talked of using some of his father’s money to buy a new camera. He wondered what kind of photography Croft was into, now that he was no longer working for the police.
There were six photographs, and they were all of Rebecca Riding. Two were in colour. Kip recognized her red jumper from the Crimewatch reconstruction, the fair hair hitched up on one side by a slide in the shape of a butterfly.
The rest of the pictures were in black-and-white, four miraculous, pristine prints that revealed the child for what she was: the only girl in the world at that moment, and Dennis Croft her only audience. In the final shot she looked straight at the camera, her gappy teeth bared in a sweet, shy smile that seemed to suggest she knew she was being looked at, but didn’t mind.
She did not seem in the least afraid. Kip felt a rush of nausea, and then of cold, as if he were going down with a virus. The girl was so there in the photographs it was impossible to accept that she was no longer alive.
He turned the pictures around to face the wall then went back into the bathroom. He leaned over the toilet bowl, wanting to be sick, but the only thing that came was a kind of dry gagging. He ran water into the basin, turning both taps on full to make the maximum noise. Then he flushed the toilet again. He knew he had to go back downstairs, that his life might now depend on him being able to act as if nothing had happened.
He crossed the landing to the head of the stairs. He stared down into the hallway, at the front door with its stained-glass fanlight, the delicate leaded panes arranged in a design he believed was called fleur de lys. The door was probably not locked, Kip could not remember Croft locking it. The idea that he might have done was crazy, of course, but all Kip could think of was the image that had come to him before: worlds colliding, a wrecking ball spinning on its chain as it crashed through the wall of the known universe.
He heard footsteps at the end of the hall. A moment later Croft’s voice came rising towards him up the stairs.
“You okay up there?” Croft said. “I want to show you the darkroom. Dad’s cellar was part of the reason I moved back in here permanently.”
Kip stayed where he was, paralyzed by the sound of his own breathing. He knew that what he did in the next few seconds would decide everything.
WHO KILLED SKIPPY? By Paul D. Brazill
ONE
“COULD BE WORSE, could be raining,” said Craig, pretty much as soon as it started pissing down.
A big grin crawled across his flushed face like a caterpillar. He was sniffling away and wiping his runny nose with the sleeve of his leather jacket. Craig had just snorted a sugar bowl full of Colombian marching powder and popped a veritable cornucopia of multicoloured pills. He was talking ten to the dozen and doing my napper in no end.
I forced a smile, though I was none too pleased. I was getting soaked to the skin in a vandalized cemetery after spending the last half-hour digging a grave while Craig turned himself into a walking pharmaceutical experiment.
“Let’s get on with this,” I said, grabbing the dead kangaroo by its legs. But Craig was away with the fairies again, watching a flock of black birds land on a cluster of graffiti-stained gravestones.
“A murder of crows,” said Craig. “That’s the collective noun for crows, you know? A murder.” Craig was an autodidact, hooked on learning a word a day, as well as many other things.
“Yes, Craig, I did used to be an English teacher, you know,” I said. My patience was getting frayed. The rain had slipped down the back of my shirt, trickled down my spine and crept into my arse crack.
“They say that crows are harbingers of death, eh, Ordy? Have you ever wondered why they never seem to talk about harbingers of good things?”
I was now inches away from picking up the shovel and twatting Craig, but thankfully he suddenly seemed to break out of his trance. He bent down and grabbed the kangaroo.
“Let’s get a move on, Ordy, eh?” he said. “It’s Super Seventies Special at the Grand Hotel tonight. We haven’t got all day, you know.”
TWO
The Grand Hotel, like a fair number of its clientele, was all fur coat and no knickers. It had lived up to its name once upon a time and its façade was still pretty impressive but the interior, however, left a lot to be desired. For many years, it had survived as a nightclub which was just about bog standard, with the emphasis on the bog.
Every Thursday it was Super Seventies Special because, unsurprisingly, the music that was played was from the seventies and all drinks were seventy pence. Unfortunately, most of the clientele were knocking on seventy, too, which was why it had the earned its reputation as a “grab a granny night”. Which suited Craig Ferry down to the ground.
Craig was the youngest of the four Ferry boys and he’d been born premature and weak, leading his mother to become a tad overprotective of him. For most of his childhood he hardly left her side and had, it seemed, developed a bit of an Oedipus Complex. Hence, his regular attendance at the Super Seventies Special.
Which meant that I had to go there too, since, to all intents and purposes, I was Craig’s minder. Not that I was anyway near a tough guy. And not that Craig needed a bodyguard. He was well over six foot with a physique worthy of Mike Tyson.
Craig had been a sickly child, as I said, but when he reached sixteen and his mother died, he transformed himself, in a manner akin to that of Bruce Banner turning into the Incredible Hulk, albeit at a decidedly slower rate.
When he was a kid Craig was almost anorexic, but with his mother off the scene he soon became a fast-food-and-beerconsuming monster. And that, combined with his scoffing of steroids and frequent trips to the gym, spawned the behemoth that was stood before me, gargling cider and blackcurrant and singing along to Sparks’ “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us”.
No, I wasn’t employed by the Ferry family to protect Craig from other people. I was paid to protect him from himself.
THREE
I’d first met Craig when I was about twelve. We went to different comprehensive schools, so I didn’t have much contact with him but I’d sometimes notice this gangling, scarecrow of a kid hanging around the local betting shop, which was owned by Glyn and Tina Ferry. He always looked lost, sat on the step reading Commando war comics and sipping from a bottle of Lucozade.
One day, during a long hot summer, bored and kicking a ball against a wall, I noticed Craig and asked him if he fancied a game of football. I never would have bothered normally, you could tell by the look of him that he’d be rubbish at football, but all my friends were away at Butlin’s or Pontin’s, or some other holiday camp, and needs must.
Craig must have been bored himself, I think he’d read the ink from the stack of comics he had next to him, and he said yes.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll do penalties. You’re in goal.”