Nkata said to her, “You reported Jared missing? Tha’s what you’re telling me?”
“I tol’ the cops d’rectly he di’n’t show up for the antenatal. I knew right then there was summat wrong ’cause he always come, di’n’t he, to see ’bout his baby.”
Nkata said, “He’s the dad, then? Jared Salvatore’s your baby’s dad?”
“An’ proud to be from the first, he was. Thirteen years old, not many blokes get started so fast, and he liked that, Jared. It made him swell up bigger ’n you would’ve believed, the day I tol’ him.”
Nkata wanted to know what she’d been doing messing with a mere boy who should have been at school making a future and not out on the loose making babies, but he did not ask. Navina herself should have been at school, if it came to that, or at least she should have been doing something more useful than offering herself to a randy adolescent at least three years her junior. She also had to have been doing the job with Jared since the boy had been twelve. It made Nkata’s head swim, just thinking about it. And knowing that at twelve years old, with a willing female, he too might have happily plunged away his life, hot for that fleshy moment of contact and thinking about nothing else.
He said to Navina, “We got the report from his brother Felipe, in the Ville. Jared di’n’t show for visiting when he should’ve, and Felipe called him in missing. This was something like five, six weeks ago.”
“I went to them louts two days later!” Navina cried. “Two days af’er he di’n’t show at the antenatal like he was s’posed to. I tol’ the cops and they di’n’t listen. They weren’t havin none of it off me.”
“When was this?”
“More’n a month ago,” she said. “I go to the station and tell that bloke in reception I got someone missin. He say who and I say Jared. I tell him he di’n’t come to the antenatal and he di’n’t ever give me a bell about that or nothin which wa’n’t like him. They figger he done a runner ’cause of the baby, see. They say wait ’nother day or two and when I go back, they say wait ’nother. An’ I keep goin an’ I keep tellin them an’ they jot down my name an’ Jared’s an’ no one does nothing.” She began to cry.
Nkata got up from his own chair and went to hers. He put his hand on the back of her neck. He could feel how slender it was beneath his fingers and how warm her flesh was where it touched his own, and from that he guessed what the girl’s appeal had been prior to being made hugely swollen and ungainly with a thirteen-year-old’s child. He said, “I’m sorry. They should’ve listened, the locals. I’m not from there.”
She raised her wet face. “But you said a cop…Then where?”
He told her. Then as gently as he could, he told her the rest: that the father of her baby was dead at the hands of a serial killer, that he’d probably already been dead on the day of the antenatal appointment he’d missed, that he was one of four victims who, like himself, were adolescent boys whose bodies had been found too far from their homes for anyone in the vicinity to recognise them.
Navina listened and her dark skin shone beneath the tears that continued to roll down her cheeks. Nkata felt torn between the need to comfort her and the desire to lecture some sense into her. What did she actually think, he wondered and wanted to say, that a thirteen-year-old boy would be around forever? Not so much because he’d die, although God knew enough of their young men never made it to thirty, but because he’d come to his senses eventually and realise there was more to life than fathering babies and he wanted whatever that more was?
The need to comfort won out. Nkata fished a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and pressed it on her. He said, “They should’ve listened and they di’n’t, Navina. I can’t ’xplain why. I’m that sorry ’bout it.”
“Can’t you ’xplain?” she asked bitterly. “What’m I to them? Cow up the spout, done to by the kid got caught wif two nicked credit cards and tha’s what they remember ’bout him, innit? Snatched a purse once’r twice. Wif some blokes, tried to carjack a Mercedes one night. Some rude boy, so we don’t plan on lookin for him nowhere, so get out of here, girl, and stop pollutin our precious atmosphere, thank you. Well I loved him, I did, and we meant to have a life together and he was makin that life. He was learning cookin and he meant to be a real chef. You ask round about that. You see what they say.”
Cooking. Chef. Nkata took out the slender leather diary he used as a notebook, and he jotted the words down in pencil. He didn’t have the heart to press Navina for more information. From what she’d already said, he reckoned there was going to be a treasure trove of facts about Jared Salvatore at the Peckham police station.
He said, “You be all right, Navina? You got someone I c’n ring for you?”
She said, “My mum,” and for the first time she seemed sixteen and also what she probably was at heart, which was afraid, like so many of the girls who grew up in an environment where no one was safe and everyone was suspect.
Her mum worked in the kitchen at St. Giles Hospital, and when Nkata spoke to her by phone, she said she’d be home at once. “She i’n’t startin, is she?” the woman asked anxiously and then said, “Thank Jesus for that, at least,” when Nkata told her it was something of a different nature entirely but her presence would be a great comfort to the girl.
He left Navina in anticipation of her mother’s arrival, and he went from Clifton Estate to Peckham police station, which was only a short distance along the High Street. In reception, a white special constable was working behind the counter, and he spent just a shade longer than seemed necessary at his tasks before he acknowledged Nkata. Then he said, “Help you?,” with a face that managed to be perfectly blank.
Nkata took a certain pleasure in saying, “DS Nkata,” as he showed his warrant card to the man. He explained why he’d come. As soon as he mentioned the Salvatore family name, it seemed he would need no further introduction. Finding someone at the station who didn’t know the Salvatores would have been more challenging than finding someone who’d mixed with them at one time or another. Aside from Felipe doing time in Pentonville, there was another brother languishing in remand on a charge of assault. The mother had a record going back to her adolescence and the other boys in the family were apparently doing what they could to better it before they reached their twenties. So the real question was, who in the station did DS Nkata want to talk to, because just about anyone could give him an earful.
Nkata said that whoever had taken Navina Cryer’s missing-persons report about Jared Salvatore would do. This, of course, brought up the delicate question of why no one had bothered to file such a report, but he didn’t want to travel that road. Surely someone had listened to the girl if not formally recording what she’d said. That was the person he wanted to find.
Constable Joshua Silver turned out to be the man. He came to fetch Nkata from reception and ushered him into an office shared by seven other officers, where space was at a minimum and noise was at a maximum. He had something of a cubby hole carved out between a bank of perpetually ringing phones and a row of ancient filing cabinets, and he guided Nkata to this. Yes, he admitted, he’d been the person to whom Navina Cryer had spoken. Not the first time she’d come to the station, when she hadn’t apparently got beyond reception, but the second and third times. Yes, he’d written down the information she’d offered, but truth to tell, he hadn’t taken her seriously. The Salvatore yobbo was thirteen years old. Silver reckoned the boy’d done a runner, what with the girl on her way to popping. There was nothing in his past that suggested he’d be apt to hang round waiting for any blessed events to be occurring.