By

Ryan Lee

The past never leaves you, even when you're trying to forget. It's always there in snatches of songs you hear on the radio, in the elusive perfumes of strangers you bump into on trains, in tricks of the light and in moments of inexplicable sadness. It never goes away. Your ghosts may lie sleeping but they cannot die. The past never leaves you.

*

A few weeks ago I was contacted by an author who was working on a book about sensational murder cases. Or a new book, I should say, because the nameless author in question has written many such books. You may even have read some of them - if you are the type of reader who is attracted by excitingly tasteless headlines such as They Died Screaming! or colour photographs of bloodstained axe-blades. And let's face it, most of us are. Maybe that's not such a bad thing either. I have seen the bodies of children pulled out of cold black rivers and buried under brown leaves and rotting ferns in lonely woods. I have felt the sadness and the terror and the strange, demonic mockery that linger around those places. I have stood beneath the shadow of evil wings. I think it is best therefore to distance yourself from the reality of murder with a good book.

I am not an easy man to contact. There is no direct line to my office. If you want to reach me at work you must either go through my secretary, my wife, or the Prime Minister. If you choose the former, as most people are bound to do, you immediately surrender your right to privacy (if such a right truly exists) and become a temporary file that is never quite closed. In a way I am cocooned from the outside world, hidden in the reeds while the rest of you swim the clear blue water.

It was not an accident. I have journeyed deeper and deeper into the convoluted structure of this institution seeking only to hide from my past. There are times when the voices are so far behind me they are no more than a single nameless sorrow, tiny fragments of shrapnel stirring in my heart. And there are times when the voices speak my name with such assailing clarity that I hold my breath and turn around.

I always thought that Jordan Moody would be the one to uncover my secret. That day he came to see me, which was many years after the horrors I am about to reveal, the past and the present became one inextricable moment. And it happened again when I was informed that a young female writer had been asking questions about me.

Because I thought she knew.

In the days before I met with her I began to write about Benny Catlin. The truth is a dangerous drug. The right amount can pacify, too much can sometimes be ruinous, but not enough is the most toxic dose of all. There is a truth to be told - and that truth will shock you to pieces - but it has to be the whole truth or nothing at all. I owe that much at least to a child who was murdered nearly fifty years ago, so that she might finally rest in piece and haunt me no more.

I thought she knew, but of course she could only know that there were bones buried four fingers deep in the past. She would know those bones were human but she would not see the heart that once beat within them. She would find evil without discovering hope, and that really would be a crime.

So I began to write my story, and I began with a burial. I am certain that my young friend the crime writer would recommend a more dramatic opening - and having read some of her books I am convinced that if one was not available she would have no trouble suggesting one - but the more I think about that dreadful summer the more significant that day becomes. And besides, I'm saving the car chases for my official autobiography, when my whole life will no doubt flash before my very bank balance.

This is what happened. It is for you to distinguish the guilty from the innocent, the evil from those who merely survived.

But a word of warning. Look long and hard at yourself before you point the finger. There is a state of existence beyond that which we call ourselves. It's where the dog meets the wolf, and where the human spirit's extraordinary capacity to hope and survive is matched only by its will to avenge.

Part One

ONE

We buried him in an unmarked grave after carrying him through the woods wrapped in a blanket that smelled faintly of whiskey and vomit. Benny walked in front of me, head bowed, feet shuffling, a pale, puny arm hooked around his end of the heavy bundle. Sweat was pouring down the back of his neck, loosening days-old grime into a pattern of blackish streaks.

We weaved through the coppice wood like a badly co-ordinated pantomime horse. Benny was far too weak to hold the dead weight for any length of time but with straining grunts and rapid puffs of sheer determination he made it into the deep wood before resting to gather his strength.

We were far up the main woodland path before we stopped again. This time Benny pulled up without warning. Momentum carried me an extra step. Benny jerked forward and absently adjusted his grip on the body.

For a long time Benny was as quiet as the woods themselves. I often thought of him that way, like some deeply camouflaged mystery teaming with hidden life.

"There's a good place down that way," he said, indicating a faint track which seeped from the path and vanished into a deep sea of ferns and horsetail."I want to put him there. We played down there a lot." He had done a lot of crying and now his voice was as dry and bland as a cream cracker."We were down there yesterday morning, just me and Lucky, and we saw that pig Mavis Molem said she lost three years ago." Benny's head dropped."Well I saw it. Lucky was busy chewing something."

We veered from the path and trekked through a jungle of giant, dull green plants, following the trail that Benny and Lucky had cut the day before. The canopy was dense and blocked out all but the occasional magic pool of July sunshine. All around us was the sharp smell of wild mint mingled with a dark, damp undersmell of decomposer. Being this deep in the woods always made me think of the gloomy parlour in my grandmother's house, a sepulchral room which had never recovered from having my grandfather's body laid out in there, a room where the curtains had remained drawn for more than eight years and the extendable rosewood table still bore the faint outline of a coffin.

Soon we came to a rough clearing where the branches of a giant oak tree stretched out over a deep bell-pit. Benny looked over his shoulder and regarded me soulfully.

"This is it," he said."I want to bury him here."

I dropped the spade and we lowered the weight of the dead dog gently to the ground. I stretched my back and attempted to massage some feeling back into my arm muscles. Benny just stood there limply, staring down into the shadowed depths of the pit. He looked lonely and exhausted. I knew he would also be hungry and weak, too weak to dig the grave himself.

Getting down to the bottom of the bell-pit proved to be tricky. From the top it looked as harmless as a giant salad bowl but the abundance of plants hid a steep slope embroiled with thick, writhing roots.

We picked our way down the slope - gingerly at first, but by the time we reached the bottom we had broken into a funny little quick-march. The giggles fizzed inside my chest like effervescent bubbles in a shaken pop bottle. Any other day we would have been screaming with laughter but today deserved all the solemn ritual we could muster.

The first thing we did after setting down the dog was to clear a small patch in the undergrowth. I began by using the spade like a scythe to chop through the muscular stems of the thickest plants. After that we both dropped to our knees and began tearing out great clumps of strange flora.

Now we were down to the moss and the fungi and a rich, mushy compost of rotting leaves that was crawling with beetles and earwigs. I scraped most of this away and started to dig.

"He just kept punching it until it was dead," Benny said suddenly.

I stopped digging and looked up, one foot resting on the shoulder of the spade. My sweat-drenched tee-shirt was moulded to my body like wet plaster of Paris. Benny was staring down at the broken body of the dog that his father had bet a fellow drunk he could kill with three punches.

"Lucky never did anything wrong."

There was a long silence, broken only by a brief announcement from a cuckoo. Even that was no more than a sound that touches you through a dream, just a rumour of other worlds. I breathed in the old smells of the woods.

This overwhelming strangeness was not new. I had witnessed it many times in the past, and always when Benny was trying to convey the unutterable horrors in his life. One moment he was there, the next he was snatched away in mid-conversation. My father sometimes spoke about the god of small prey, a being that supposedly smothered the pain of any animal about to be devoured alive or killed in some other awful way. I wondered if Benny had a similar god, one that wasn't powerful enough to stop the misery in his life but which now and again tried to distract him from it.

"Benny!" I said harshly. He lifted his head and smiled. For a moment I was chilled, because for a moment I might have been looking at Benny's father. He had that same mocking curl to his smile, the same cold, unfeeling eyes, the same reeking vibrations of madness.

"I'm alright, Robert," he said, sounding puzzled. He smiled his own sad smile."Just thinking, that's all."

There was no way that I could dig a hole deep enough to bury a dog. My strength was up to it - just - but the ground at the base of the tree was a junction box of ropy roots. The best I could do was to evacuate a shallow ditch. Into this we lay Lucky the boxer dog, then using our bare hands we raked back the soil and moss and dead leaves and patted everything down as best we could. Finally we covered the macabre little hump with broad leaves and strands of wild grass.

From the top of the bell-pit there was very little evidence of a shallow grave. In a couple of months time, when all the plants I had chopped down had grown back, there would be nothing to see at all. The woods would keep this secret.

"Nobody will find him there," Benny said. I was spooked by the coincidence. Benny turned his head and looked at me with strange, pondering anxiety."It's only four fingers deep but nobody would ever know there was a dead body under there, not unless we tell."

I just shook my head, not quite understanding where he was going with this.

"I mean..." Benny turned away from me and gazed fixedly into the bell-pit. I was absently flicking the gnats away from my face but Benny seemed oblivious to them. I could feel him drifting away from me again.

"Benny?"

"Imagine that," he said softly.

TWO

Benny Catlin was a loner. I often saw him scampering about the village in his torn shirt and baggy urchin's trousers, sniffing in corners and picking through scraps of paper and cigarette tabs in the gutters. Sylvia Burrows called him a little tramp and said he would end up like the piss-stained old men who rooted through the rubbish bins at the bus station. I thought of telling Sylvia that more than one of my father's customers had predicted that she herself would end up being some kind of tramp, just like her mother and her mother's mother before her. In any case I didn't think she was right. Benny didn't remind me of a tramp. Tramps didn't care who saw them eating out of the bins - they were like cows grazing mindlessly from one place to the next - whereas Benny hurried about his furtive business with the cringing self-awareness of a stray dog.

My first real contact with him occured on the day his father began to disappear into the swirling depths of his own addiction. I was down on my knees slotting papers into the sacks for myself and Ronny Bent, the other paper boy. I smelled Benny before I saw him, a kind of over-stewed meat smell mixed with the unmistakable reek of crusty shit. I didn't feel pity for him, only the snooty disdain of a clean ten-year old from a relatively comfortable family.

Benny stood in the doorway like an eerie miniature of his father, warily scanning the inside of the shop. He was woefully small and thin, more like a boy of seven than ten, with a pinched, grubby face and untidy ginger-blond hair.

He tugged up his baggy trousers and walked towards the counter. I could see his nose twitching keenly at the lingering smell of breakfast bacon drifting down from the living area. His eyes moved constantly, searching, appraising, recording.

My mother was behind the counter that morning. I saw her shoulders slump a little as if a physical weight of pity had been placed upon them. She smiled at Benny, and for a few moments he seemed strangely hypnotised by her face.

"I want my dad's stuff," he said at last. Even his voice was small and pathetic.

"What do we say?" my mother said. Her eyebrows arched expectantly. The expectancy was serious enough but her eyes were teasing and gentle.

Benny reddened, a guilty little smile flickering across his lips."Mmmm...please," he added.

Then my mother winked at him. I'd never seen my mother wink before. Superseding the surprise was a hot, thunderous surge of resentment that she could save a gesture like that for so long and then give it to someone other than her only son.

Benny paid for his father's order with money that had been held almost jealously in a squeezed fist. He was about to leave when my mother plucked a bar of Bournville from the display and held it out to him. Benny's eyes widened with comical surprise. Once he had registered my mother's apparent intentions his instincts must have warned him to be on his guard. He looked distrustfully at my mother, then at the bar of chocolate, then back to my mother, back to the chocolate...

I read my mother's silent signal. It was a subtle narrowing of her eyes, urgent, prompting. All of a sudden I found myself willing Benny to take the chocolate.

Benny also read the signal. He snatched the chocolate out of my mother's hand like a greedy monkey grabbing food from a tourist. He spun neatly on shoes that were splitting at the seams, and then he bolted out of the open door.

"Was that Terry Catlin's lad?"

My father came through the doorway which divided the shop quarter from the staircase leading up to the living area, making as if he hadn't been standing there all along. My mother busied herself at the counter, fussing with papers and tidying things that were already tidy."Think so," she said absently.

My father came up behind and gave her shoulder a brief but obviously comforting squeeze."Go put the kettle on." he said, and my mother nodded and hurried out of the shop.

It took me a few more minutes to finish off packing the newspaper sacks, but that was long enough for Pipe Younger to wander into the shop, long enough to hear my father telling Pipe how Terry Catlin had sent Benny into the village for his cigarettes and newspaper instead of coming himself.

"He might be ill," my father speculated.

"Like shite," Pipe said. Pipe was built like the world's oldest heavyweight boxing champion. He was about eighty, people reckoned, but that was all just candles on cakes as far as Pipe was concerned. He was cute to look at but you couldn't pet him."I heard he took a pasting from a bunch of gipsy lads in town. He was out of drink, Eric, and the only thing meaner than a drunk is a drunk who can't get drunk."

They started talking about Terry Catlin and how his drinking was going from bad to worse. These were not new stories to my ears. I knew that Terry was an alcoholic but that was something I couldn't fully get my head around. I'd never seen Terry Catlin acting in a drunken state, hiccupping in mid-sentence or singing about four and twenty virgins coming down from Inverness. It was not Terry's voice I heard in the street below me when the Straw Man finally spilled its loud and merry punters into the night.

But talk was talk, and one thing I had already learned was that when it came to hard facts the newspapers my father sold were far less reliable than the people he sold them to.

Benny's name was mentioned quite a few times in the gossip that followed his visit to the shop. The men spoke about him as if he was a car that Terry was letting go to neglect, but the women of the village were naturally less concealed in their sympathy. They called him poor Benny or that poor boy, and sometimes they lowered their voices and spoke about Eleanor and how she would turn in her grave. By now I had figured out that Eleanor was Benny's mother. What I couldn't figure out was why everyone had an opinion but nobody had a solution. Not once did I ever hear anyone suggest a way of saving Benny from his miserable life.

Benny began to show up regularly after that. He was tentative at first, suspicious of me and anyone else who happened to be in the shop, but he trusted my mother, who gradually cajoled him into smiles and even the odd short conversation or two. From Benny's viewpoint these must have been the kind of awkward conversations you might have with a teacher who you happened to bump into beyond the structured repression of the classroom. For my mother there was the danger of infringing into territory that neither of them were ready to enter, while for Benny the anxious moment came at the end, when the conversation tailed away and he would wait to see if my mother would slip him a bar of chocolate. There was an inescapable element of perform and reward about the routine, but even that builds trust. Like all strays, Benny came to rely on the simple warmth of human company as much as he relied on the handouts.

After about a couple of weeks the bar of chocolate was replaced by a warm bacon sandwich wrapped in grease-proof paper, and then one morning she simply asked Benny if he would like to have breakfast with us. Benny didn't answer immediately. He looked confused by the unexpected change in the routine.

"Show Benny where the bathroom is," my mother said to me."Both of you wash your hands and I'll be up in a minute."

It was my turn to look confused. I had already eaten my breakfast.

My mother gave me an encouraging smile, one that was also meant to discourage me from arguing. It was bright and sharp at the edges like something nice to look at but dangerous to play around with.

I went upstairs, Benny trailing cautiously behind me. The bathroom was small and clean and quickly filled with Benny's sour body odour. He gazed raptly at the polished tiles and sparkling chrome, the delicate bars of coloured soap arranged like fruit in a basket on the edge of the bath, the pristine white towels folded neatly over the rail.

"Wash your hands," I said. It came out like an order.

Benny stepped up to the sink and turned the cold water tap. He glanced uncertainly at me before reaching for one of the decorative soaps in the basket.

"Not those!" I almost yelled. Benny shrank from my voice."Those are ornamental. We use the liquid soap in the dispenser."

Benny looked helplessly around the bathroom.

"There!" I pointed to the bottle of liquid soap shaped like a sea shell."Just push the head down with the palm of your hand."

Benny stared distrustfully at the novelty soap, then pushed the dispensing tap with the palm of his hand, exactly as I had instructed. A blob of green soap squirted into the sink, and Benny's grubby face grew comically alarmed. For a moment he looked like someone who had just lit an exploding cigar.

I sighed heavily."You're supposed to catch it."

Benny regarded me with a sheepish smile."Never seen one of them before."

"Got it from America," I said.

His eyes widened."You've been to America?"

"My dad's brother lives there. He sends all sorts of stuff over."

"And you've been?"

I shrugged vaguely."Mmm, once or twice."

That wasn't strictly true. My father did have a brother in New York, a brother I'd never met and knew only through the strange and wonderful gifts which occasionally arrived through the post, but impressing other small boys with casual lies was an amusing enough pastime. We all did it. We all had uncles in exotic places or living adventure-filled lives aboard merchant navy ships and the like. The war had left our generation with plenty of absent fathers, uncles and older brothers, so nobody bothered to question the facts too closely.

Benny tried to work the soap again. This time he pressed the dispenser and tried to catch the soap a fraction later, as you might attempt to snatch at a tossed coin you weren't expecting. The result was another slimy blob of green soap plopping into the sink bowl.

I laughed. Benny's cautious laughter began a few seconds after. His eyes were narrow and funfilled but at the same time he seemed to reserve a part of him that stood back and kept a vigilant watch over the situation. It was as though he was acting as his own bodyguard.

I heard feet on the stairs - mother coming up and father going down - and quickly showed Benny how to use the soap. Benny dutifully rubbed his hands under the cold tap and then wiped them dry on his dirty trousers.

My mother was in the kitchen, already laying strips of bacon into the frying pan. Benny sat down at the table only when I told him to. His body remained stiff and erect while his eyes swivelled around in their sockets like small ball bearings.

My mother prepared a large breakfast for two with all the mind-boggling dexterity of a one-man band. Arms went this way and that, snatching bread from the bread bin, turning over browned toast, cracking eggs into the pan, flipping strips of bacon, buttering, grabbing, serving. Benny was mesmerised.

The plates were set down before us. Benny was honoured with the huge manhole plate normally reserved for my father's evening meal. Nobody else in the family could eat as much food as would fill that plate. I seriously doubted that a scrag like Benny could do more than break into the edges of a meal so substantial.

Benny lifted his eyes from the plate. He looked like a man who had just glimpsed more money than he could ever spend. His throat worked quickly to swallow the saliva forming in his mouth.

"I'll just get you some knives and forks," my mother said. But she didn't go straight to the cutlery drawer. Instead she went to the sink and began to rinse out a clean cloth, all the while watching Benny over her shoulder with something like furtive anticipation. A few moments later Benny was ambushed. His head was clamped and pulled back as far as his scrawny neck would allow, then his face was violently scrubbed with the damp cloth until it shone like a newly minted coin.

"There!" my mother declared, snapping Benny's head back into position. Her eyes were gleaming with ferocious triumph."I'll get you some knives and forks now."

Benny devoured the meal with all the defensive urgency of an animal expecting the inevitable thieving scavengers to surround it at any moment. He ate everything on his plate, and then he ate just about everything on my plate. Slices of buttered bread were whipped from the side plate, folded into quarters and stuffed into his mouth. Every mouthful was swallowed after the shortest possible processing by his teeth.

I sat there and watched with disgusted fascination, the way I might have watched someone dress a septic wound. In contrast my mother remained by the sink, clutching herself in horror and pity.

Benny washed the king-sized meal down with hot sweet tea served in my father's white pint mug. Finally he wiped his mouth on his sleeve and gazed around the table with an expression of slightly inebriated disorientation. Then he smiled, a large, dopey smile full of a friendly drunk's peaceful bliss.

"Why don't you take Benny into your room," I heard my mother say. She sounded distant, shocked."Show him your comics."

I gave my mother a loaded look. When Benny lifted the pint mug to his lips in order to drain the very last drop of tea (the base of the mug obscured his face like an eclipsing moon) I mouthed the words: "He stinks!" and punctuated them with an expression of revulsion.

My mother marched out of the kitchen, hooking my left arm with her hand as she passed. I was pulled out of the chair, spun round, and dragged out behind her before I knew what was happening. I thought I knew how a fish must feel when it finds itself shooting out of the water on the end of a wire.

My mother pushed me against the landing wall. I hit the back of my head. It wasn't hard, just a bump, but it was enough to frighten her a little. My mother had never hit me before, except for all those times she'd slapped me in that casual, fly-swatting way of mothers, but I believe to this day that if I hadn't bumped my head against the wall she would have beaten me like a dusty carpet.

I stared up at her, too scared and confused to speak. She glared at me with real fury, absently rubbing the back of my head at the same time.

"How dare-" she began. She broke off and bit back some of her anger. When she looked down at me next there was disappointment all over her face. Somehow that was worse.

"Who would feed you if I wasn't around? If I was dead, Robert, and your father was a drunk who spent every penny he had on booze and gambling, who would buy your food and clothes?"

I shook my head and swallowed a hard, spiky lump in my throat. I could feel my eyes beginning to burn.

"Who would see that you washed yourself?" My mother's eyes softened. She stroked the back of my head with a gentle, soothing hand."Who'd hold your pajamas in front of the fire so they were warm when you got out of the bath? Who'd buy you all those comics, Robert?" And then, lowering her voice as she drew me back to a secret we held between us like an unbreakable chain,"Who would clean you up when you wet the bed, and bring you hot cocoa after and sing you back to sleep under fresh covers? Who would do that, Robert? If I was dead, and you were still a little boy, who would do all that for you?"

There was nothing I could say. She pulled me towards her big bosom and held me there for a few moments. She smelled of bread and butter and green Fairy soap.

"Be his friend, Robert," she said, easing me away from her."He needs a friend more than he needs a bath."

*****************

We played in the woods a lot. Benny loved the woods and knew them intimately. He once said that the woods were the only place where he could hide from his father.

"I can hide for days if I want to," he said. We were sitting on the branch of a tree, legs swinging beneath us. We rarely played the kind of games that other boys of our age were playing, like War and Explorer and Hide and Seek. We talked an exciting game, though. Being with Benny had opened up my imagination in a way that no book or comic had ever done. He seemed to take something - a shape in the undergrowth, a pattern of light, a rustle in the trees or the call of a bird - and that would inspire his imagination to produce the most fantastic possibilities, sometimes so fantastic that my mind would have trouble grasping things. He reminded me of those people who could make deliciously rich soup from a few bare bones and a couple of root vegetables.

"Days?" I said. I wasn't doubting his ability to do it, only his reasons for wanting to.

"Days," he said simply."I once lived out here for nearly two weeks."

"Why?"

"Because..." His mood darkened instantly. I experienced a momentary sense of danger and something like foreboding. I felt as though I was looking down into the threatening blackness of a cellar.

"Because he's wicked," Benny finished.

Wicked was a word I had never come across in real life. It was a word I associated with sinister fairy stories. It seemed an appropriate word all the same. Benny often made me think of those frail, frightened children in the Brothers Grimm stories. And he was, I soon learned, a boy constantly pursued by an unimaginable terror.

THREE

Something bad happened to Benny during the winter of 1957. This was about six months before Terry Catlin punched his dog to death for a bet, which makes me believe that Benny was planning his revenge long before Terry finally pushed him over the edge.

Benny's life had improved greatly thanks to my mother's kindness. He was a fatter for a start. I wondered what my mother was putting in the food until I discovered that Benny was eating at more places than the restaurant critic from the local paper. He took breakfast at my house ( which included a packed lunch to take to school), Sunday lunch with the dotty Frudd sisters, and his evening meal at any one of a dozen houses in the village. Apart from that he could walk into the butcher's shop just to say hello and walk out again with a slab of stand pie big enough to wedge a door open.

I felt proud of my mother for changing things. Of course people had always pitied Benny, but interfering in other people's business was probably the worst social crime you could commit in those days. West Gelder was no different from any large town or city. Of course it had its own unique quirks and eccentricities - anything evolving in relative isolation will develop its own peculiar personality - but below the calm, stagnant surface there was the usual breeding colony of social and psychological diseases. The people who lived there were driven by the same compulsions, the same obsessions as people from larger places. They yielded to the same temptations. It was just the same as anywhere else, full of small things living urgent lives in transient pools.

My mother's actions could have undermined the whole fragile stability of the community. Instead she gave a desperate child a bar of chocolate and inspired a kind of revolution. But while everyone was doing their non-interfering Christian best to keep Benny healthy by cooking a few extra potatoes and slicing the family roast a little thinner, the secret regime of indescriminate cruelty he lived under was killing him. And nobody, not even my mother, lifted a finger to help. If one person - one adult, I mean - had gone to our laconic local plod, Mike Bronson, and demanded he investigate Benny's mysterious disappearance, things might have turned out differently for everyone concerned.

But nobody did. For all their scraps of kindness he might have been buried four fingers deep in the woods.

Benny was supposed to be staying at my house on the night he vanished. My mother had cooked a chicken and peeled some extra potatoes. A brand new bar of Fairy soap had been unwrapped in preparation for Benny's weekly bath ( and a new tin of Ajax powder to scrub the resulting tide mark - a belt of gunge that bore a close resemblance to wallpaper paste ), and his pajamas were washed and folded on the bathroom chair. The only thing missing was Benny himself.

He didn't come that night. My mother ate very little of the meal she had cooked. From time to time my father would glance up from his plate ( not the manhole plate - that was now reserved exclusively for Benny) and smile encouragingly at my mother. She smiled back but her eyes were distant and embraced some unspeakable anxiety.

I didn't see Benny Catlin for three weeks. Every morning my mother would stand behind the counter and wait for him to come. Each customer was greeted with the same nervy expression of desperate hope, quickly followed by the same crestfallen look of disappointment.

By the second week of Benny's absence from the village the private anxieties had given way to shared fears, murmured conversations that left shattering conclusions unvoiced but nevertheless free to spread like disease. It was as if a weird telepathy existed between people. Their vocal concerns were of accidents and illness, but all the while they were nudging one another with their eyes and body language, hinting at foul deeds and a gruesome fate.

Mike Bronson must have heard the rumours. For all I knew he might even have taken a walk over there. If he did it was to allay his own suspicions and not the fears of the villagers. If he, like many people, was beginning to suspect that Terry Catlin had murdered his son, he did no more about it than drift idly past the decrepit cottage on the McDonald property where Benny and his father lived. I know this because if Mike Bronson had knocked on Terry Catlin's door and demanded to see Benny he would have been confronted by something that would have shocked him into action.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps Terry would have lied and said that Benny was away visiting relatives, and perhaps Mike would have believed him. One thing I do know, and it's that Benny Catlin was chained in a hellhole for three weeks and given just enough food and water to keep him from dying. And I believe it was there, alone and suffering, that Benny gave up hope of ever being rescued from this life. He must have realised the only way out was to save himself.

******************

Benny surfaced one damp, windswept morning in February. I was trundling through the village on my bike, the hood of my coat pulled up and my face grimaced against the spray of freezing winter rain. It was still dark, and if I didn't know Benny as well as I did I don't think I would have recognised him. He was no more than a blurred shape in my peripheral vision, a feral creature rummaging through the dustbin in Dilly Westwood's front yard.

I pulled the brakes. The wheels of my old boneshaker locked and skidded to a reluctant halt on the wet pavement. The bag containing my papers slipped down my shoulder and almost dragged me over. By the time I had lowered the bike to the ground and adjusted the bag of newspapers, Benny was gone.

I ran into Dilly Westwood's yard, calling Benny's name in a grating, urgent whisper. The lid was off the dustbin. My foot kicked a ball of newspaper sheets that were loosely scrunched up like a lettuce. Inside I could see the unappetising remains of a cooked meal. It looked like pigswill.

I peered into the narrow passageway which divided Dilly's house from its neighbour. Through it I could make out the spongy black shapes of bushes and hedges in Dilly's back garden. There was no movement other than the strange motion of a tall plant shuddering in the wind like a black flame.

I didn't say anything to my mother. Instead I waited to see if Benny would show up for a meal in the evening. He didn't, and nor did he come for breakfast the next morning. In fact it was another two days before I saw him again.

This time he was just mooching through the village with his hands in the pockets of his shorts. All the weight he had put on as a result of my mother's home cooking ( not to mention all the home cooking he got in other places) had dropped off him again. He was critically thin. His face was pale and gaunt. His eyes were so sunken in their sockets they looked like stones dropped into mud. Worse than that, they were the same dull, insensible eyes of a weary old farm animal.

When he saw me he smiled a little. His gums were pasty. A gust of wind plastered his thin white shirt to his chest, making his ribs stand out.

My first thought was of old Lamb Henderson. Lamb had been a guardsman, and even at the age of seventy five he carried himself as though he was expecting to be called out of the ranks for an inspection. Then he went into hospital for tests on the chest pains and breathing difficulties he'd been having, and a month later he came out with cancer, swearing that he had contracted it in hospital. Lamb, who until then had stood as tall and solid as a telegraph pole up, suddenly looked like death on a stick. He looked, in fact, like a skeleton with a balloon stretched over its skull.

I wanted to take Benny home with me but he wouldn't come. He was moody and evasive and acted as though he was harbouring a shameful secret, or a disease he didn't want to spread. After some pleading I finally managed to get him to go to the woods and wait for me to bring some food to him.

"Can you get me a tin of fish?" he asked as I was about to go.

"Like salmon?"

He shrugged without much interest."Pilchards are better."

For the next few days I became Benny's main provider of food. I felt like a bird with a hungry chick to feed, flying between food and nest. The nest was the comfortable den that Benny had made for himself. It was close to the spot where we later buried his dog, and where a dead body was found a month after.

***********************

I found out the reason for Benny's sudden craving for pilchards on the same day that I uncovered the truth about where he had spent the missing three weeks. By this time I had been feeding him for a week, and although he wasn't yet as healthy as he had been prior to his mysterious disappearance he was nevertheless recovering some of his strength.

His mood hadn't improved though. He was still sullen and withdrawn. My clumsy attempts at subtle questioning were met by long, painful silences. Occasionally he would retreat so far that I thought he was sleeping with his eyes wide open.

This reluctance to communicate was the main reason why I never asked about the pilchards. Until then I would bring him food which I had taken from my house or else bought with my own pocket money, and then leave him to eat in peace while I took away his rubbish for disposal. What struck me as curious was that Benny, who was no stranger to the range of gourmet delights lurking at the bottom of people's dustbins, and who happened to be the least fussy eater I knew, should specifically request a small tin of pilchards at least once a day. And pilchards in fish oil, not tomato sauce. I finally asked him about it when I sensed the black cloud around him was beginning to disperse.

First he told me that he wasn't living in the woods, only using the den as a sanctuary. When his father went out, Benny returned to the house to sleep. And to feed a tin of pilchards to the cat.

In fact it was a kitten. Benny's father had brought it home with him in a brown paper bag. Its job was to kill the rats that were threatening to overrun the house, but Benny said it was no bigger than a rat itself and that his father had rapidly lost patience with it. The kitten of course wasn't to be fed. Its main diet was to consist of all the rats it could eat.

"And you've been feeding it?"

He grinned shyly and nodded."I bring the tins back here so my dad won't find out. I think it's getting a bit bored with pilchards though."

"I could try and bring some fresh fish if you want," I said."Will it eat haddock?"

"You must be codding," Benny said. We fell about laughing.

The next day I went into town and persuaded a jaded fishmonger to let me have a few scraps of mixed fish on account...on account of having no money to pay for it. The fishmonger smiled wryly and wrapped the fish into a neat paper package, which I took to Benny.

"I don't think it'll eat raw fish," he said, sniffing carefully at the package."I mean, cold fish, but not raw fish."

I could have pointed out that an animal designed by nature to eat sparrows and mice wasn't likely to turn its nose up at a piece of fish just because it wasn't pan fried and lightly seasoned with lemon pepper. But then cats being cats, you never knew.

"I could take it home and ask my mother to cook it."

He gave me a look of bruised, lingering resentment. Do you think I trust any of them now? that look was asking. They put bread and jam in my mouth but where were they when I really needed them?

"I haven't told her where you are. I haven't told anyone. Not even about the cat."

Benny nodded absently, as if that went without saying. His trust in me was implicit but in everyone else it was, for the time being, gone.

"I'll cook it at my house," he said at last."Do you want to come?"

I couldn't have been more wrong-footed if he had suddenly asked me to take off my shorts and roll around in the mud with him. I didn't know what to say. Benny had never invited me home before. In fact he had actively discouraged me from ever going to his house.

"It's alright," Benny said."He's gone out."

Benny and his father lived in the old herdsman's cottage on Tim McDonald's farm. Tim McDonald had died ten years before and bequeathed the farm to his only daughter. Due to one thing or another the farm was by that time quite worthless as a viable business. Most of the land and machinery was sold off at auction and the animals sent to slaughter, but Tim McDonald's daughter apparently still owned the abandoned farmhouse and the crop of outbuildings scattered around it, including the cottage where Benny and his father lived. Benny said that his father paid something called a peppercorn rent on the cottage because he had once worked for Tim McDonald. Tim had made it a condition of his will that the land on which the farmhouse and herdsman's cottage stood could not be sold for twenty five years.

"Then what?" I asked.

Benny just shrugged. The conversation appeared to have tired him. Or perhaps he simply didn't want to be reminded of a time when his father must have been a decent human being like my own father, decent enough to take his son fishing and tell him common stories about the place in which they lived.

"Wait here," Benny said when we were in the yard. He halted me by putting his arm across my chest. The tense look on his face told me we weren't playing a game, although his vigilant manner made me feel like a soldier approaching an enemy encampment."I have to check that he isn't sleeping inside somewhere."

Benny went inside the cottage, leaving me alone in the shadow of Tim McDonald's abandoned farmhouse. A few minutes later he appeared in the doorway and gave a brief thumbs-up sign. I went inside.

For some reason I had never actually given much thought as to what Benny's house might look like. All I had was a rather vague impression of squaller which didn't require any further detail, much the same as my thoughts on fog and oceans. Even as I stepped inside I had no real means by which to judge the state of poverty and neglect that Benny was enduring, and yet I knew instantly that things were much worse than anyone imagined. What I saw when I entered Benny's kitchen wasn't merely the consequence of having very little money. I knew people who traded small items of personal treasure in order to feed themselves or to get paraffin and coal to keep the house warm, and I was also aware of the damage this did to their sense of dignity. But no matter how bad things got, how desperate the times, something inside them fought like mad to maintain their respect in the community. Their clothes might be old and worn but they were also clean and patched. Their gardens were tidy, their parlours always fit to welcome guests, and come Saturday morning you would always see the women scrubbing their doorsteps with fiercely competitive vigour. They had pride still, and they clung to it with all the will and determination they could muster.

What I saw when I entered Benny's kitchen was a house ruled by a single selfish need. The sight that met my eyes was nothing to do with poverty and everything to do with wilful destruction. Something had consumed this house like a fire or a plague, a hungry, primal obsession that existed only to feed itself.

Benny was crouched on the kitchen floor. Newspapers scattered haphazardly served as its carpet. Even these were old and yellow and peppered with rat droppings. There was no furniture other than a few beer crates for stools and an untreated table which had soaked up so much liquid it was beginning to rot. The sink was a junk yard for rusty pans and broken crockery bearing three-dimensional patterns of dried food. The wall cupboard doors were missing, either torn off their hinges or rotted off like bad teeth, and inside I could see a small army of cockroaches teaming over a swollen mound of decaying food. Cockroaches were everywhere in fact, marching boldly across the floorboards and twitching and rustling hideously under the loose newspaper carpet.

There were no curtains up at the windows and yet the kitchen was as dark and gloomy as a basement. There was nothing to reflect the meagre daylight which filtered through the grimy windows, only mouldy walls thickly buttered with grease and dust.

And the smell was the one that Benny carried with him like a brand of shame, only here in its stewing, fermenting source it was a hundred times worse.

Tottering on shaky legs at Benny's feet was a skinny, sickly looking ginger kitten.

"It's called Tiger," Benny said. He fished in his pocket and pulled out an empty cotton reel. The kitten's ears pricked up with interest. Benny rolled the cotton reel across the floor and the kitten trotted after it, swiping at the rolling cylinder with alternate paws.

Benny grinned up at me. The distant sadness in his eyes told me that he was acutely aware of the impact the conditions in here had had on me. Can we not talk about that? he seemed to be pleading. Can we not even think about that, eh? Can we just play with the kitten and pretend you haven't noticed the state of the place?

"It's funny," I said."It looks like one of those dancing horses."

Benny reached out and flicked the cotton reel with the tip of his finger, sending it spinning towards the skirting board. The kitten halted with comical surprise, then bunched itself before pouncing all of six inches. Benny snorted with laughter. I tried to laugh with him - it was funny - but I didn't feel like laughing. It wasn't just the awful, inescapable smell, or any basic squeamishness at being in a house where cockroaches and rats strutted around with arrogant impunity, it was something else, something I couldn't fully understand. I was confused by a real sense of anger and injustice.

"I need the bog," I told him.

"It's out in the yard," he said. He was suddenly absorbed in the kitten's play, too absorbed to lift his head and look at me."There won't be any paper."

It's okay, I'll use the carpet, I nearly said, and I had to bite the insides of my cheeks to hold back an unexpected vomiting of mad laughter.

I didn't need paper in any case. I left the cottage and stood outside the small brick privy, wondering if I could hold it in until I got home. If I had, or if I had merely peed against the side of the privy as an arbitrary voice was suggesting, I don't know that I would be sitting here writing all of this down today.

I pushed the painted wooden door open. The smell wasn't bad enough to drive me out but the sight of the stained toilet bowl did knock me back a step. I held my nose and peered gingerly into the bowl. The sides of the pot, both inside and out, were streaked with long yellowish brown stains, the mother and father of all skid marks. Scabs of dried faeces clung immovably to the rim and on the surface of the wooden seat.

My mother's warnings about using strange toilets came back to me in smug told-you-so tones. Despite this I closed the door with my foot and began to pee, my eyes focused on the ceiling to avoid making myself sick. I didn't bother to flush. It seemed like an absurd protocol under the circumstances.

When I first turned around again I didn't believe what I was looking at. Two short chains had been nailed crudely to the back of the privy door. At the end of each chain was a leather strap which fastened together by means of a silver buckle.

I knew what they were. They were restraining straps. And what filled me with horror was their position on the door.

I fastened one of the leather straps experimentally around my wrist. This left my arm hanging uncomfortably above my head, my elbow forming the point of a triangle. I positioned my free hand against the second strap in an effort to judge the effects of being shackled here.

I remembered once being over at Pipe Younger's workshop with my father. Pipe and my father were talking, and I was left to wander the shop alone, breathing in the hot smell of scorched wood and sawdust as I examined the tools and half-finished projects with my hands behind my back like a boy at a museum.

Don't touch any of the tools, Robert, Pipe had casually warned a few moments earlier.

I didn't intend to touch any of the tools. I would no more touch a man's tools without permission than I would take a stranger's hand. But then I came upon the circular saw and stopped dead in my tracks. It was switched off but there was something highly dangerous about it all the same. It seemed to harbour a residue of menace like a dead wasp or a frayed electrical cable.

I reached out and let my fingertips rest lightly on the shark-toothed blade. My heart was pounding out a nerve-racking alarm. In my mind I saw the circular blade suddenly whizz into supernatural life, splitting the flesh on my fingers, slicing effortlessly through the bones as if they were dowelling rods.

I snapped my hand back. I was left feeling a heady mixture of terror and excitement, an adrenalin high that wouldn't begin to subside for some minutes.

Nothing like that happened when I half-shackled myself to the back of the privy door. I was expecting it to happen. I was anticipating a moment of giddy terror like you get when you look over the edge of a cliff, but it never came. What I felt instead was stranger and even harder to explain.

It was despair. And loneliness.

My feet were flat against the stone floor, my arms limp above my head. This moment of self-imposed torture wouldn't kill me, I quickly realised that, because the object of these gruesome things wasn't to kill someone but to contain them. A small someone. A child, in fact.

I thought about Benny crucified behind a privy door for three weeks. Benny screaming and crying, begging every time his father sat squeezing and squirting on that disgusting pot. And then giving up hope as his body grew weak through exhaustion and hunger. I wondered if he had prayed for death. I wondered if he hated his father more for keeping him alive with barely adequate rations of food and water than he did for stringing him up here in the first place.

I uttered a dry, shuddering sob. I felt something swell and pop in my chest. I realised that the sense of despair and abandonment I was feeling wasn't merely sympathy for Benny. It was something deeper, a loss more traumatic and personal.

If nobody came to rescue Benny, there would surely come a time when nobody would rescue me. My unquestioning trust in adults was gone. It occurred to me that my life until this moment had been like a game. It had rules and boundaries and marshals who monitored the safety of the competitors. It was a game where teachers always intervened before a playground fight got out of hand, a game where strangers were just friends you hadn't met yet, where there were ladders but no snakes. Suddenly I stopped believing in the power of adults to protect children from harm. I guess that Benny Catlin had already reached a similar conclusion.

I tore the buckled strap from my wrist in a fit of hot, dizzying rage. The rage didn't last. As I threw open the door and marched back to the cottage I could already feel it going down like a burst tyre. What remained was a dull, fightless futility. I didn't know how to help Benny because up until now my whole strategy had relied on adults being there to take up the heavy end. All I knew was that nobody would lift a finger even if I did tell them about the restraining straps. It was private business, definitely no meddle territory.

When I went back into the cottage Benny was boiling water in a blackened milk pan. He was staring uncertainly into the open packet of fish bits.

"Do you boil the water and then put the fish in, or do you put the fish in cold water and then boil it?"

"I don't know," I said."I don't think it matters. Not to cats anyway."

"Right," Benny said doubtfully. He plopped a few of the fish bits into the pan. The water hissed a little.

"It turns white when it's cooked."

"The water?"

"The fish."

"Are you a chef all of a sudden?"

I grinned and shrugged."I know what cooked fish looks like, that's all."

Benny peered cautiously into the pan."Does it look anything like this?"

I joined him at the rusty stove. The fish looked edible enough from a half-starved cat's point of view.

"It's about done."

"Already?"

"Fish is quick."

I played with the kitten while Benny lifted the steaming lumps of fish out of the pan on the blade of a butter knife. He left them by the sink to cool and knelt opposite me on the floor.

For the next few minutes we played a game which basically involved driving the kitten nuts. First Benny would gently nudge the cotton reel in my direction. The kitten would track it's slow progress with predatory attentiveness, eventually gathering itself for an attack. At the point when the kitten was just about to spring on the cotton reel - or sometimes when it had already begun its graceful, bouncy little leap - I would flick the reel back to Benny and we would double up at the kitten's startled reaction.

We were laughing at this when the door opened. The first thing we did was look up at each other with the same disconcerted expression. Later I thought we must have looked something like Abbot and Costello in one of those jokey horror films.

Two small, petrified faces turned to see Terry Catlin lurch half into the kitchen before halting abruptly, shocked, like a man who returns to find his home ransacked by robbers. At first he did nothing but stand there and glare at me with a kind of rabid, hateful confusion. One bony white hand clutched at the door frame as if a powerful wind was blowing against his body.

Most of his hair had gone since I last saw him about the village. I could clearly see patches of flaky skin and a bleached rash of strange white blotches on his skull, between which tufts of wiry ginger hair clung like moss on a rock.

"Who's this?"

The voice came from deep in his chest, the aggressive and petulant whine of a drunk carried on a slimy rattle of loose phlegm. His lips vibrated like two thick, meaty reeds as the air passed between them.

"It's Robert," Benny said quickly."Robert Dawson from the village."

The shrill tremor of panic in Benny's voice set my heart racing with fright. Until then - from the moment the ogre returned to his lair - I think I had stopped breathing.

Terry staggered into the kitchen, attempting to throw off his overcoat by flapping one arm and jerking his shoulder back. He continued to watch me distrustfully, his hateful, bloodshot eyes boring into mine.

The heavy overcoat slid to the floor with a hard thud. Terry gave it a puzzled glance, his wasted face screwing up with exaggerated concentration.

"-ickatup!" he barked. Something in his chest flapped and gurgled thickly."-kin' bottle in there!"

Terry turned his head slowly. His bloody gaze picked out his son with dull, bestial fury.

Later, when I attempted to play back the next dreamlike sequence of events, I became certain that Benny prompted me to my feet with an urgent tap on the elbow, but at the time I simply felt myself rising with Benny.

The warning of danger wasn't coming from my eyes but from a primitive store of vital chemicals and data held in the deepest recess of my subconscious. I felt sick with the certainty that this dog was about to attack.

A smooth rolling sound, curiously amplified, drew my attention to the filthy floorboards. The empty cotton reel wheeled across the floor, propelled no doubt by the inquisitive paw of Benny's kitten.

The spool struck a gap in the floorboards, rocked and faltered and rolled another few inches. The kitten chased after it with bright, untiring curiosity, moving in that funny imitation of a prancing horse.

Terry's eyes followed the kitten with snakish malevolence.

The kitten gave a dainty little leap and almost trapped the spool. Instead it knocked it closer to Terry Catlin's feet.

"I've told you, keep that-"

Terry's voice flooded with fuming intent. On the floor, the kitten had given the cotton reel another nudge and was happily trying to catch up with it again.

I saw exactly what was going to happen a second before Terry brought his boot down on the kitten's back, crushing its spine with a final, savage twist of his foot. All I could do was stare with numb, horrified inertia.

"Run!" Benny screamed.

I whipped my head around, startled by the volume of his voice as much as anything. Benny shot me a look that was all the blood and thunder of his father. I felt my legs go weak as a dark, swooning horror overwhelmed me.

"RUN!" he screamed again, shoving me hard enough to deaden my upper arm.

This time I ran.

***********************

The period that Benny spent in the hellish confines of those restraints didn't so much change him as change him back. The real change in Benny occurred during the summer.

We were all talking about the coming summer, the promise of drowsy weather and long evenings supping cool drinks outdoors, while little by little it was sneaking past the window. Drab, unsettled days, moody blue evenings of unseasonally chilly winds and all the rain the sky could throw at us. Most of that summer, like the changes in Benny Catlin, passed unnoticed.

FOUR

I was glad not to speak about the horror I witnessed at Benny's house. More than glad. It was a recurring relief I experienced every day that we didn't speak about it. The first time I saw him after that day was the worst. What could I say? Hi, Benny, how's your dead cat? Still dead, is it? And how's your mad dad anyway? Killed anything else, has he?

I buried it. As surely as we would later bury Lucky the Boxer dog, I covered it four fingers deep in stuff that grew at the surface of my thoughts. It was always there though, waiting to be discovered in all its rotting glory.

I was so loath to relive the experience - and so utterly out of my depth - that for a week or so I didn't even bother to look for Benny. He didn't come to the house and I didn't go to the woods.

It more than crossed my mind that he might be hanging from the back of the privy door again. I dreamed about it one night. I dreamed that I was chasing a cotton reel across a wooden floor teaming with oily black cockroaches. Benny was watching me from the wall, his arms pinned above his head by the restraining straps. He had shrunk and withered to a wrinkled bag of white chicken skin. His face was a pale blob, his mouth a capital O of silent torment. His eyes were dark red beads of reptilian cunning. His father's eyes.

I woke from that dream with a cry of alarm which brought my mother rushing into the bedroom. I had a vague sense of my father's concerned presence in the doorway as my mother hushed and soothed me back to sleep, innocently handing me over to a demon guardian.

I came across Benny in the woods. This time he found me, although it's fair to say that I was secretly hoping he might be here. More than a week had passed since his father broke his kitten's spine.

Benny was sitting high up in a tree, one arm looped casually around the trunk as if it was a friend's shoulder. He was well camouflaged by leaves and branches, so well hidden in fact that only his white socks made him visible from the rough track I was walking. A more casual walker - an adult - would have strolled past him obliviously, but kids like me had to be on their guard against ambush. The woods were full of bandits in the form of big kids and gipsy boys. The latter were partly mythical and consequently the prospect of being waylayed by them was infinitely more terrifying. Nobody had ever been dragged away to a gipsy camp, not personally, but everyone knew of someone who had. I was astute enough to have worked out that the stories concerning the gruesome fate you would likely encounter if you were unfortunate enough to be ambushed by gipsy boys were suspiciously influenced by books and films featuring white explorers who get captured by red indians and tribes of headhunting cannibals. But then it was best to err on the side of caution. Besides, I actually did know a kid who had been set upon by seven or eight gipsy boys and forced to eat a bird's nest.

I spotted the white socks and knew instantly that the white socks had spotted me. In fact I was disturbed by the certainty that those white socks had seen me coming a long way off and had merely been waiting, patient as a spider. I put something in my step - nothing too obvious, just a general toughness, an air of casual vigilance - and would have been more than content to pass by unchallenged.

And then came a soft whistle from the treetop. I halted, my face breaking into a grin. A thin branch shuddered up and down in salutation. I returned the wave and started towards the tree. Benny's face was gradually revealed to me through a mesh of leaves. He was smiling placidly.

"Watch the ships!" he called down, and I quickly scooped up a handful of small stones before clambering up the tree.

Battleship Bombers was a game of Benny's invention. The ships were carefully constructed from leaves and piles of small twigs. It took ages because you had to build them in a way that meant a passing beetle would knock them down if it came too close. The object of the game was to flatten them of course, but only by dropping small stones - bombs awaaaayyy! - from the top of a tree.

We didn't talk about his dead cat or his mad dad, and we wouldn't talk about anything like that until the summer began to fragment under the portentous rumble of approaching storms. By then Benny's season of change was almost complete, and it was too late for me to stop him.

*******************

Benny started coming over to my house again during the late snows of early March. The lure of hot meals and a fire to breath life back into his frozen feet was too strong for him to deny. We spent hours together as a family, playing card games and listening to the radio, but the thing Benny enjoyed most was sitting close to the fire (sometimes perilously close) with a book to read. During these times, I think, charmed by the gentle sounds of a burning fire, thrilled by some or other adventure novel, Benny came as close to finding peace as he would ever come.

"If he was a cat he'd be purring right now," my mother said one evening.

We all looked at Benny. He was reading Swallows and Amazons, his legs curled under him on the chair. The fire cast slow waves of deep orange light and shadow over his face, at the same time cloaking and revealing, bestowing qualities of mystery and wisdom and something like divinity. He looked like a very old man gazing back through his most precious memories.

I saw something in my mother's expression also. I saw that she loved Benny, loved him as any mother loved her son. This was no great revelation to me. It had been a difficult time for her of late, perhaps more difficult than I could ever appreciate. Benny's unexplained ( and still unexplained ) absence had caused her as much hurt as worry. Of course she had been worried. For all she knew he might have been dead, but I'm sure for her the worst of it was imagining that Benny had simply chosen to stop visiting.

Nor was I jealous of the attention and affection Benny got from my mother. I never went without. And besides, Benny's acceptance into the family straightened a crooked picture. I didn't find out about my dead brother Albert until many years later, when my own son was born and my mother held him in her arms and wept fresh tears for old grief. Albert died of cot death syndrome when he was four months old. I didn't know any of this at the time. I was born six years after Albert died, and I replaced his memory as surely as I replaced his position at my mother's breast. But I was always aware of a ghost in the house, the soulful aura of something gone. Without me knowing why, Benny's presence in the house seemed to bring about a natural balance and harmony.

It was about this time that Benny found the dog. Or perhaps the dog found Benny. One way or the other they certainly made an oddly compatible pair. Both were strays. Both knew how to look after himself, and both was badly in need of a special relationship he couldn't find in even the best of his own kind.

Lucky, as Benny named him, was a stray Boxer with a dicky back leg and teeth the colour of nicotine stains. At first he merely shadowed Benny as he went about his daily routine of collecting various titbits here and there. This is Benny I'm talking about now. The dog was just a furtive observer, a puzzled mutt peering out from behind a hedge or trotting a safe distance behind the small human whose behaviour intrigued it so.

When Benny stopped so would the dog. They would regard each other with a strange mixture of uneasiness and longing before one of them - usually Benny - broke away and carried on his business. If Benny tried to approach the dog it would shuffle backwards at the same rate of pace, as if they were connected by an invisible axle.

I don't know how Benny eventually managed to tame the stray dog and make it his own, but somehow he did. One day it was a scared mutt which had simply attached itself to the routine of another stray mutt, and the next day it was an obedient pet with a fervent sense of loyalty and an unusual fondness for carrots.

The mystery of how he managed to befriend the dog and overcome its fear and distrust of close human contact is part of Benny's overall enigma. There were certain elements of Benny's existence that nobody was ever meant to discover, and probably wouldn't no matter how well they thought they knew him. There was a part of the boy Benny Catlin that you couldn't know, only believe in.

Benny brought the dog into the shop only a few days after I had seen them staring at each other across the street like hesitant lovers. My father knelt down and gave it some kind of superficial veterinary examination, for which his reading glasses were essential. The dog groaned deeply and tried to hide behind Benny's legs like a toddler who fears the peculiar interest of a doctor.

Lucky wasn't particularly appealing in the face department. He had that perpetually startled and flustered expression characteristic of Boxer dogs, as if a roomful of people had exploded into laughter without letting him in on the joke.

My father's prognosis concluded along these lines: "It's not a puppy, Benny."

"It looks hungry," my mother said. She was standing behind the counter. She didn't dislike pet dogs exactly, but being a farmer's daughter she had been raised to believe that keeping an animal you didn't eat or employ was slightly eccentric.

"He's not that old," Benny said defensively. He reached down and thumped the dog's shoulder. Lucky gazed raptly up at his new master, the little gearstick tail jerking happily. He looked marginally more intelligent than a curious fish. "He could live for ages yet."

My father patted the dog's ribcage. The sound was hollow and woody. He smiled indulgently at Benny. You're wrong about that, son, the smile said. I won't argue with you, but you're wrong about that.

"Well he might just drop dead in the next ten minutes if we don't get him something to eat." My father took off his reading glasses and slipped them into his shirt pocket."Mother," he began importantly."Have we any tripe in the house?"

I wish this story could end right there, with absent smiles and the comforting message that while life is hard and sometimes unfair, occasionally nice things happen. But none of us stays in Walnut Grove for long. We just pass through it on our way to Shitville, like the people who pass through our village and think our lives quaint and uncomplicated.

Two months after we sat around the breakfast table, laughing as Benny's new friend devoured a meal of tripe and homemade biscuits with all the graceful etiquette his master had displayed on his first visit, the dog was dead.

Terry Catlin punched it to death. Not with three punches as the bet had stipulated - he punched it until it was dead.

The distinction doesn't seem important when you consider that the intent was to kill the dog anyway. But it was important to Benny. He kept repeating it over and over when I saw him the day after.

Over and over again. As if he couldn't believe it.

As if he wouldn't ever begin to forget.

********************

Down he went again, descending into the blackest depths of his suffering soul. When Terry imprisoned him in that stinking privy, and again when Terry stamped on his pet cat like it was some kind of insect, he had been there before. Only on those occasions - and God knows how many others there were before I knew him - he had plunged through a trapdoor, the victim of an ambush.

But this time he walked down the steps of his own free will like a pilgrim into hell. It was as if he needed something he could only find down there, a kind of unholy grail he had to drink from in order to bring about his revenge, and ultimately his own survival.

I don't believe he came back for a long, long time; perhaps not until Terry Catlin was dead and shaking hands with the devil.

But something came back, something that darkened the summer skies and brought thunder and doom into our lives.

Nobody suspected a thing. Benny made me swear never to tell a living soul that his father had killed the dog. Instead we said it just vanished, and nobody had any reason to doubt us. The dog was a stray - or had been a stray up until Benny teamed up with it - and the world was full of lost dogs.

"What if Peel tells someone?" I asked Benny a few days after we had buried Lucky in the woods. We were sitting side by side on the wooden gate that led to a field. Beyond that were more fields, a great undulating patchwork of crops seamed with hedgerows and ditches and drystone walls. Many years later, when my mother died and I returned to the village of my birth to see her safely on her way, I looked out from this very spot and saw the jagged grey outline of a town stretched across the horizon like some giant battleship anchored off-shore. But back then the only landmarks on the horizon were a church spire and a lonely cluster of rubble and rocks that was once a Norman fortress.

"Peel knows," I reminded Benny.

Peel was one of Terry Catlin's drinking buddies ( although a man like Terry needed neither excuse nor company to crack open a bottle ), and the moron who had instigated the bet. He was a drifter and occasional farm labourer, here one season, gone the next. His arrival in the district always coincided with a sudden and often spectacular increase in the theft of domestic chickens.

"Peel won't even remember," Benny said. "Besides, who's he going to tell, other drunks?" He looked down at his feet and smiled a little know-it-all smile I didn't care for.

"Somebody might find Lucky anyway. Some kids or something."

Benny raised his head. His dark eyes were wide and as focused as those of a hunting eagle, but for a second or two I could have sworn that he wasn't seeing me. I got the impression he was spooked, as if I had just reminded him of something he'd overlooked. I didn't know what that could be though ( and at the back of my mind, whispery and uncertain, was a compelling voice telling me I might not want to dig any deeper ). As things stood, we had buried a dead dog, which wasn't crime as far as I knew.

I could see Benny's reasons for not wanting people to know that his father had killed the dog, because they were the same reasons why he didn't go around bragging that his father crucified him to the toilet door once in a while. Shame, humiliation, fear of reprisal if his father discovered that his son had been airing their dirty laundry in public, and very probably the bigger fear that nobody would give a damn. All of this was understandable, and perfectly acceptable on my part, but for the life of me I couldn't understand why we had to keep Lucky's burial a secret.

Benny finally looked at me - looked at me differently, I mean, as if I was here and not made of smoke.

"It won't matter," he said."It's a dead dog. Doesn't mean anything."

"I don't-"

"Dead dogs tell no lies," he said cryptically. That unsettling little smile was back on his face."Nobody will ever know what happened to Lucky unless we tell them."

I just shook my head. I couldn't comprehend the point of this conversation.

"There's a dead dog in the woods, right?" Benny began. His voice was lower now, and if he had done it purposely to inject a dose of dramatic effect into his puzzling discourse, he had done it very well.

I nodded.

"Who killed the dog?"

I gazed at him blankly."Your dad. You said so."

Benny smiled kindly and shook his head."You don't know that. You're just a kid playing in the woods."

"Is this a game?" I whispered. I hoped it was a game. Some of Benny's games were irregular and intense, and where they began and ended was quite often unclear, like dreams or borders.

"So who killed the dog?"

"I don't know," I responded, and Benny sniggered with a sorcerer's glee.

"Exactly!" he said."Now, suppose the dog has a collar around its neck, and on this collar is a tag with a name and address engraved on it..."

I thought for a long time. I still wasn't getting much of this. All the time Benny watched over me with a kind of itchy delight.

"Say you're a copper then..."

A lever creaked and a little ball rolled neatly into an empty slot in my mind.

"Ah, then I'd go to the address on the tag."

Benny grinned and nodded."Then what?"

"Then...then I'd explain that I'd found their dog buried in the woods."

"Their dead dog."

"Right."

"Their murdered dog."

I looked at Benny. He was watching me keenly, wet lips, eyes sparkling, silently urging me to think.

I didn't want to think. I didn't want to play this game anymore. I felt like we had crossed a line into a place we ought not to be.

"I don't know," I managed to say.

"That's when the dog starts barking," Benny said. He leaned away slightly and studied me with that not-quite-playful smile."Every dog has its day, Rob. Even dead dogs."

*********************

You're thinking maybe I made that up. Maybe I'm the one spicing this tale with pinches of drama and atmosphere. I don't blame you for that. Young kids don't talk the way Benny did that day. But then Benny was no ordinary kid, and you don't yet know what he did.

All I know at this point is what I heard. Some of the strange and disturbing things Benny spoke about that summer still litter my mind like scattered bones, and when I put them all together again the whole is shocking enough to shatter an unprepared mind.

But perhaps the most poignant thing he said to me was on the day before the hot spell. This would have been August 24th. The sky was still the cold, washy grey colour of someone's dirty bathwater, as it had been for much of this strange summer, but there was a stillness in the air and a moist, earthy warmth that seemed to intensify by the hour.

Benny said he wanted to go and play in the woods but his mood wasn't up to fun and games. He was quiet and solemn, strangely lonely. I sensed a great sadness in him.

We stopped in a private place where a favourite tree stood among an adoring crowd of tall grass. I thought we were going to climb but Benny merely slumped against the trunk, his hands in his pockets. He looked tired, troubled.

"Benny?" I wanted to tell him that it was alright to unload whatever was weighing him down, that I was his friend and he could trust me, but I didn't know how. Even if I did I don't think he would have told me, at least not directly. Whatever burden Benny Catlin was carrying around was growing inside him like a monstrous tumour.

He looked at me then. His face was old and weary, but it was the look in his eyes that frightened me the most. They were the eyes of someone slipping under water for the last time. There was no panic there, no look of terror, only confusion and sadness and a dismal comprehension of things beyond the reach of those on the banks.

"Sometimes I feel like I've fallen asleep in a rowing boat and drifted out to sea," he said softly."And when I wake up I'm all alone and miles from anywhere."

Part Two

FIVE

It rained that night. It rained big time. There was no storm, no thunder and lightning, no gales, only the uninterrupted noise of rain drumming onto rooftops.

And it was hot, so hot I had to open my bedroom window despite the ceaseless, insufferable pounding of the rain outside. It went on all night, endless, unremitting torture, but I must have fallen asleep because I woke to silence and an amazing crimson sky. I lay in bed until I heard my father getting up to meet the man who delivered the morning papers.

A fat golden sun burned away the last of the cloud and by the time I wheeled my bike out of the shed and peddled off on my paper round it was hot enough to bring sweat to my forehead and underarms.

People were out of their houses already, strolling through the village in shirt sleeves and summer dresses, walking dogs, washing doorsteps and catching up with the garden. I noticed flowers for the first time. They had been there all along, I supposed, but something in the day had made their colours suddenly scream.

It should have been an optimistic time but the feeling that shadowed me throughout the morning was a nameless anxiety. The sense of urgency which had been quietly building inside me all summer was rapidly gaining momentum, snowballing towards an unknown climax.

It was a combination of things. Imagination, Benny's moods, whispered clues and riddles pointing ominously to an event of unequalled importance in the village. Shadows. Something here but not quite here. Something behind the sun.

By mid-morning the unexpected severity of the heat had driven most people back into their houses. A soporific quiet descended over the village. Those who remained outside had forsaken any kind of activity and were merely sitting in chairs or leaning against something or other, drowsy and baking but determined to make the most of what was on offer.

I decided to look for Benny but didn't take my bike. The soaring temperature had zapped most of my energy. I was feeling sleepy and lethargic as I trudged out of the village and onto Tennamons Lane. I sat on the grass verge with my back to a stone wall and watched the heat waves shimmer fiercely in the distance. A small blotch of shapeless colour distorted by the waves gradually revealed itself as a horse and cart, atop of which sat a man who was possibly asleep or dead. It was like watching something appear from a magic mirror.

It was the Shoeman, a species now extinct, I suspect. The Shoeman came about once every two weeks, his cart loaded with affordable shoes. Some people - kids mostly - said the shoeman was a grave robber who dug up dead bodies and removed their shoes.

Drugged by the heat, exhausted by the weight of the cart, the poor old horse moved with arthritic tenderness, the normally jaunty clip-clop rhythm of its hooves replaced by a slow, irregular sound like that of a failing heartbeat. I expected it to stop and keel over at any moment.

The Shoeman - whose name was Clarence Roebuck, a name you might recall if you have a memory for those who commit sexual offences against young children - gave me a dull, lingering gaze as he passed by. Any other day he would have stopped to ask if I would like to stroke his horse and feed it a humbug, which it was partial to, but today was just too hot for any kind of unnecessary movement. I had the strange notion that he wouldn't stop in the village today - or anywhere come to that. He would just keep moving with the grim propulsion of one who knows that vultures are gathering around him.

Getting up off the ground proved to be as much of an effort for me as dragging the shoe cart had seemed to the horse. I looked down the long lane and deep into those strange, shivering waves of heat. A thought came to me then, but it was every bit as elusive as the heat haze. I almost had an answer to the slow-burning mystery surrounding Benny Catlin this summer, but no sooner had I glimpsed it than it was gone again.

Hallucination.

I crossed the lane, climbed the stonewall on that side and tramped through a dazzling field of rape. I was the only living creature out in the open, it seemed, vulnerable prey to the sun's maddening energy. I knew very little about the symptoms and effects of heat stroke and heat exhaustion but I was instinctively aware of a watchful danger, an insidious menace lazily tracking my progress across the open fields like a snake in the grass.

By the time I reached the cool shade of the woods my forehead was hot and dry, my cheeks burning. I was parched and wished I had brought a bottle of pop with me, preferably lemonade or dandelion and burdock.

The back of my neck was searing. I put my hand there and felt alarmed by the fiery heat beneath my fingers. In my mind I saw strips of frazzled bacon in my mother's frying pan.

The woods were quiet and sombre and dark. The ubiquitous smell of ripe berry fruits was strong and unpleasant in the unmoving air. I had never entered the woods this way before. I always came by Monks Hole field, where two stone needles marked the beginning of the main pathway. Most people came into the woods that way ( it was called the Main Gate, although there was no gate ), and the extent of their exploration went little further than up the path and back again. Only kids and rabbit hunters deviated from the main path, and only a handful of those were familiar enough with Grumble Wood to say they hadn't found their way out again by accident. Benny was one. Benny knew the woods like a poacher. Better than that even - he knew the woods like an animal.

I was lost and beginning to fret a little. Part of that was down to a thumping headache and a swoony sort of tiredness, but part of it was because at the back of my mind I was scared I might never find my way out again. I remembered something Benny said to me when we buried Lucky in the bell pit.

You could keep something down here for as long as you wanted.

For a few minutes I was gripped by a childish terror of the unknown. I began to run, stumbling deeper into the woods, deeper into confusion and unfamiliarity, crazily convinced that something was coming after me. I was whimpering with dread and a kind of feverish longing to be home again.

Eventually, out of breath, a drum of pain booming inside my head, I stopped running and collapsed against the trunk of a tree, laughing with embarrassment and relief. There was no danger around me, no supernatural menace in these woods, but it still felt as though I had outrun one all the same. I decided not to tell Benny about this incident.

By some accident of fortune I managed to find my way onto the main path. I left the woods through the Main Gate and walked back to the village across Monks Hole field with my shirt rolled up around the back of my neck to protect the skin from any further damage.

If anything the day felt even hotter, as if the earth was being nudged closer and closer to the sun. It wasn't pop I craved now but water. Furthermore I knew it wasn't a mere request my body was making. I needed to re-hydrate myself quickly or risk becoming a raisin.

I lay my fingers against my flushed cheeks. The skin there felt dry and tight like the surface of a balloon. My headache was getting worse, and lurking just over my shoulder was that kind of dizzy sea sickness feeling you get when you have flu coming on.

Pipe Younger was sitting on the bench under the shade of the canopy over Lammy's fruit and veg shop, his hands resting on his thighs. Next to him was a tobacco tin, and next to that was the body of his giant poodle, Snap. Any minute now Pipe was going to ask me to grab hold of Snap's legs and stagger all the way back to the woods so we could bury it.

Snap lifted an eyelid and regarded me with glassy disinterest. So it wasn't dead after all, just sleeping like a dog.

Get a grip, I thought toughly. It's this damn heat, man, it's sending you delirious.

"You should have a shirt on," Pipe said as I approached. He didn't turn his head, which was covered by a huge floppy fishing hat."Only time a man leaves the house with no shirt on his back is when he's stepping out for a punch up."

I stared at his profile. His face was covered in trillions of tiny white lines like the creases in leather. I'd never seen him look so old, and yet so strong at the same time, like an ancient statue.

"Sit down," Pipe said, still gazing at a fixed point across the road."I'll tell you a story."

I handed Pipe his tobacco tin and squeezed onto the bench between him and the dog. The old man smelled strongly of sweat and cinnamon and tobacco and something you might rub on a sore joint, not unpleasant smells by any standards. The dog, on the other hand, just smelled.

"Snap's breed were trained to rout lions in the African bush," Pipe said conversationally, perhaps noticing the disdainful look I had passed the dog when I sat down."The Dutch police use them...though not for routing lions of course. There isn't much call for that in Holland."

"Where is everyone?"

The High Street was completely deserted except for the three of us on the bench and a cat staring rudely at us from the roof of an outside lavatory. I felt like a gunslinger in a wild west town waiting to meet his High Noon on the High Street.

And waiting was the right word, I thought, and this thought, absent and amusing as it was, prickled me with tiny needle-like edges.

I was waiting for something to happen, and I had been ever since Benny's father punched his dog to death. There was a dreadful inevitability in the stagnant summer air.

Pipe pursed his lips thoughtfully."Inside," he said at last."Sleeping, mostly. That's where we should be."

"Why aren't you?" I asked. It suddenly hurt my throat to talk. I ran my tongue over my lips and distinctly heard a light rasping sound.

"I'm enduring it," Pipe said."I might not see too many summers after this one."

The cat was still staring at us, and now I realised why Pipe was so fixed in his concentration. He was locked in a battle of wits with the cat, two stubborn old statues determined to make the other look away. The cat had to win. Staring pointlessly at things is what cats practised all the time.

"We had a big copper called Ginger in them days," Pipe said.

I stared at him oddly, thinking he must be having a senile episode, but then remembered that he had invited me to hear a story. I loved Pipe's stories, though some of them did stretch the imagination a bit. My favourite story was the one concerning Alfred Blenkinsop, the strongest man who ever lived in the village, and his rival from Derrington. According to Pipe, they settled the long-running debate about who was the strongest in a competition which climaxed with an unprecedented horse race across Brunton Moor - unprecedented in the respect that each man ran the race with a small horse on his shoulders.

"Ginger was a bastard," Pipe went on, speaking from the corner of his mouth as the stand-off with the cat reached a critical level of intensity."He volunteered for the firing squads during the Big War. Shooting people I mean, not standing in front of them."

I nodded absently.

"Anyway, this hapened after he fought that gipsy boxing champion. Did I ever tell you that one?"

"Uh?" I said groggily."No, don't think so."

"Aye, well, remind me not to," Pipe said. In the shadow of the wide-brimmed fishing hat, his lips curled into a private smile."Your dad'll have something to say if I tell you that one. It's not the fight, see, it's what they were fighting for. The prize. It's a good story but not for the squeamish."

I nodded again. I felt my eyes closing and pulled myself awake with groaning reluctance. I tried to focus on the cat but I wasn't convinced that it wouldn't hypnotise me to sleep.

"Ginger was boss in this village," Pipe said."If you felt like fighting in the Haymaker - as the Straw Man was called in them days - you had better feel up to fighting Ginger as well, because he was always the last man standing. So one day, during a hot spell that makes today seem like Christmas morning in Lapland, I nipped out of my house to buy some baccy from your dad's shop. It wasn't your dad in them days, mind. A fella called Cox owned it. His daughter, Rachael Cox, married a Jew tailor from Leeds. Isaac Zucker. We used to tease old Coxy by saying his daughter should have hyphenated her name."

Pipe nudged me conspiratorially. I was drifting into an uneasy sleep, seeing bright orange and yellow shapes shifting kaleidoscopically behind my eyelids. The nudge jolted me into a grumpy state of wakefulness.

"That way her name would have been Rachael Cox-Zucker.

I smiled appropriately. I knew that cock-sucker was rude and amusing but my involvement went no deeper than that. About eight years later, when Helen Garrelson, aka Helen the heifer, bobbed under the covers of the bed we were sharing with a foxy wink and an unnerving little smile, I amazed myself by thinking about old Pipe Younger.

"Where was I?"

"Ginger," I croaked. My throat really was sore by now. The mere act of swallowing made me grimace with discomfort.

"Oh aye, Ginger. Well, like I said, I nipped out of the house to buy some baccy from Cox's shop. I didn't bother to put a shirt on. It was the hottest day there's ever been, Robert, the hottest day ever, and I only expected to be out of the house for a minute or less. But Ginger spotted me from the kitchen window - that's the police house, right where Mike Bronson lives now - and came charging outside like a bull with a wasp's nest up its arse. He was dressed in his full uniform, tunic buttoned to the throat, helmet straight, truncheon out. His face was deep red and bloated like a big fat blood orange. He was making this mad gurgling sound in his throat, like he was just too enraged for words.

"I froze in my tracks, Robert, and that was the second mistake I made that morning. What I should have done is put a few logs on the old fire and sprinted back to my house. But I didn't. I just stood there with my eyes like saucers until Ginger was almost on top of me. I saw him swing his truncheon back. He was grinning at this point, I swear he was, grinning like a loony who gets a chance to stick one on the doctor. He knocked me on the head with his stick, and when I came round he was kneeling over me, his face in mine, that mad grin glued to his face like a banana. Most of his breakfast was still between his teeth.

"There, yer bastard!" he screamed in my face."That's before yer get any ideas!"

I looked at Pipe. He and the cat were still staring grimly at each other, and had been throughout the story. I wondered what the cat made of Pipe.

"Did it hurt?"

"Can't remember," Pipe said."I'll tell you this though - I never went out of the house without a shirt again, not ever. Not even on the night it rained onions."

I blinked, not quite certain if I'd misheard."Onions?"

"Aye, onions. Big as grapefruits some of them. Everyone in the village came out to see it. Course, most of them are dead now. Not because of the onions, I might add, though some people did lean out too far and take one on the noggin. Just time. Time and wars. Anyway, I got dressed first, then I went to look at the onions. A bang on the head from time to time does wonders for your memory, Robert. Makes you remember your place in the world and other little things."

I sensed it was time for me to leave Pipe and the cat to their game. I stood up and rubbed a sore spot in the small of my back. Pipe was as as solid as a throne, while across the road the cat on the roof was fidgeting to get comfortable without taking its yellow eyes from the old man's unfailing gaze. It was going to die up there without shade. I decided that Pipe was the clever one of the two, being under the canopy and all. Unless the cat proved clever enough to give the whole thing up as a waste of time and energy, that was.

I was about to leave when it suddenly occurred to me that Pipe might know the answer to a question I'd been puzzling over for a long time.

"Pipe?"

The old man inclined his head a little.

"Did you know Benny's mother?"

He looked at me in surprise, a look that turned to annoyance when he realised what he had done. I glanced across the road and saw the cat's black tail slipping down behind the roof of the shed. I could imagine it would be laughing into its bowl of milk all night.

"Benny's mother?" Pipe said. He lifted the brim of his hat and studied me with frowning perplexity."Why would you want to know about Benny's mother?"

"I don't know." I shrugged."Just curious."

"Have you asked Benny?"

I made a face."Not really. Benny's..."

Pipe gave a troubled nod."Aye, Benny's that alright." He looked across the road, saw the cat was gone, and muttered,"Little bastard," under his breath.

"Did you know her?"

"Not well," Pipe said."Eleanor was a nice woman, but she was a lot like Benny. There were parts of her you just couldn't reach. She was friendly but distant. Like some cats."

I smiled absently and nodded."Benny's like that."

"Benny's nobody's boy," Pipe said. There was more of a shiver in his voice than sadness."I dare say things would have been different had Eleanor not died, but she did, and now Benny's got to look after himself. That can be a good thing for some boys - I knew a lad who raised himself and four younger brothers after his parents were killed by a whale."

"A whale?" I gasped."They were eaten by a whale?"

"Now I never said they were eaten by a whale," Pipe said, his voice leaning towards a warning."Don't go hearing things that aren't there, young Robert. I said they were killed by a whale."

My face screwed up in confusion."I don't get it."

"They were in a rowing boat on the river Humber when a dead Minke whale struck them. Pair of them drowned." Pipe shook his head and smiled. "Oddest thing, that."

The image that came to my head was of an elegantly dressed couple punting down the river on a peaceful summer's afternoon, while drifting towards them is the bloated black body of a dead whale, all thirty odd tons of it, crawling with crabs and stinking like holy hell. Surreal maybe, but also a pessimistic metaphor about the unforeseen disasters that stalk all your pleasant summer's afternoons. Truth is, you never know when a dead whale's going to sink your boat, not until the world turns upside down and there's half a gallon of water and a flipping fish in your belly.

And even when you know, even when you feel it coming up behind you, feel the water ruffling and the boat beginning to rock from side to side, you never quite turn around in time to paddle away from the danger. Take today for instance. Today there were waves of turbulence lapping thirstily at my boat, and the shadow of some nameless, dreadful thing floating up behind me, but I was powerless to stop it or even get out of the way. I would just have to wait and see if the current diverted this thing or brought it bearing down on me.

"But not so good for Benny," Pipe said, bringing me out of my thoughts."You know what happens to clothes when you leave them to soak too long?"

"What?"

"Well the water gets dirty, son," Pipe said simply."And then your clothes are soaking in filth." He picked up his tobacco tin from between his legs and scratched the lid slowly with his thumbnail."A boy like Benny - like yourself and any boy for that matter - needs to sit in a fast stream. He needs the rapid flow of changes all around him, constantly washing things away before they get a chance to cling on for good. He needs to feel mysterious little collisions and experience the terror of being washed away from time to time. Do you get what I'm saying, Robert?"

One of my father's sayings came back to me just then: never refuse help. His line of thinking was that allowing someone to help you, especially when you didn't need help, was every bit as generous as offering to help. And it was a sensible precaution to take, because there was bound to come a time when you really did need the help of the very person you'd told twenty odd times to bog off and mind their own business.

"Not really," I lied. It was half a lie, actually. I sort of understood what Pipe meant, but another of my father's sayings was that sort of understanding was likely to get you sort of crushed to death in some sort of factory machine.

"I'm talking about influences," Pipe explained."A youngster needs to be bombarded with them, good as well as bad, silly and sane. Sooner or later he'll grab onto certain things and let others float away downstream. Now I don't expect you to listen to everything I tell you, same as I don't expect you'll always take your father's advice or the advice of your teachers, but you will take bits from each of us and arrange it all to please yourself. Benny's had no outside influences, not for a long time. If you're that boy sitting in the fast stream, Benny Catlin's wallowing in a barrel of still water."

"He's got my mother," I said."And me."

Pipe gave a rough smile and popped the lid on his tobacco tin open."Aye, he's got you and your mother."

Pipe left something unsaid, something that hung in the air as thick and unstirred as the cloud of smoke from the cigarette he rolled and lit a moment after.

But that's not enough, he should have added. And even if it was, it's come too late.

The village was still eerily deserted. In all the time Pipe and I had been talking I hadn't noticed another living human being on the street. Then Fergus Butcher, who like some character from a very young children's book was indeed a butcher, came out of his shop and stared up at the sky. His eyes were almost closed and his hands moved absently up and down his apron.

"I could roast a leg o'lamb in this," he said gloomily. He lowered his head and looked quizzically at Pipe and me from beneath his natty white boater. There were bloodstains on his apron."What in God's name are you doing out here?"

"Roasting," Pipe said."Sold any meat today?"

Fergus raised his eyes again. The clear blue sky and searing sun seemed to hold him spellbound with wonder or fear.

"Not a sausage," he said."Pun intended."

"Why don't you close up for the day?"

"And do what?" Fergus asked softly, his head still tilted so far back that his hat was in danger of falling off."It's too hot to do anything and too hot to do nothing."

Pipe passed me a look that had me sniggering into my hands. This man is definitely not the sharpest tool in the box, the look declared.

"I haven't seen it like this since that day Ginger clocked you with his truncheon." Fergus looked at Pipe and grinned."Remember that, Pipe?"

"No," Pipe said flatly."And neither do you. If you were around, which I doubt, you weren't old enough to know the inside of a cow from what was inside your nappy."

Fergus was still grinning. The combination of grin and bloodstained apron flashed at me with sudden, bright horror. It wasn't Fergus I was thinking of, or seeing in fact, but Benny. An image of Benny splattered with someone's blood and grinning with insane triumph winked grotesquely at me.

"I was there," Fergus said smugly."Either that or I've heard the story so many times I'm beginning to believe it."

Pipe's top lip drew back in a seething, silent snarl. He had real teeth, small at the front like milk teeth and two long incisors; when he bared them he looked a lot like his dog.

"I can tell the lad another story if you like," Pipe said. He glanced coolly at the butcher."Shall I tell about that cricket match with Derrington, when somebody in the pavilion got his front teeth stuck in a bar of toffee?"

"Piss off," Fergus said, smiling crookedly."That wasn't funny."

Pipe passed me a sly wink. I was starting to drift off to sleep again, lulled by the blistering heat and the droning argument of the two men.

"There was this youngster in the pavilion," Pipe began,"He was chewing a bar of toffee and got his silly goofy pegs stuck like fence poles. People took it in turns to try and prise them out. Stopped the game, if I remember."

"Don't listen to him," Robert," Fergus said. I didn't bother to look at him but I discerned the humour in his voice. Pipe and Fergus bickered all the time but hardly ever meant it. In fact Pipe bickered with everyone.

"We had to take this lad over to my workshop," Pipe went on."He was bawling like a baby."

"Liar."

"Like a big goofy baby. Three grown men had to hold him down while I used a tenon saw to take four inches off the bar of toffee so that he could get his gob shut. Saliva did the rest in the end, if I remember."

Fergus chuckled. The sound penetrated my soupy head like demonic laughter echoing from the belly of an empty house.

Beside me the dog whined and kicked one of its back legs, rousing me out of my unquiet slumber. I glanced at the giant poodle. Its front paws twitched anxiously as it fought to escape whatever uneasy dreams dogs dream.

"Well, some of us have got work to do," Fergus said, and with that he went back inside his shop.

"Eleanor would have looked after Benny," Pipe said. He spoke as if Fergus had never been here, as if he had merely paused to light a cigarette. His voice was solemn too, remembering some distant tragedy."Benny wouldn't be running around half-wild if Eleanor hadn't...hadn't died."

"What happened to her?"

Pipe stared at the empty roof where his old adversary the cat had been a few minutes earlier. Now he did roll another cigarette and lit it with a loose match from the tin."I don't think this is a story for your ears, Robert."

"Why?" I sat up straight and looked pointedly at the old man's profile."I'm not a baby, Pipe."

Pipe Younger turned his head and gazed at me with the serenity of one who can neither be bribed nor blackmailed. He was a very old man, and had been a very old man for a very long time. I was suddenly certain that he knew as many secrets as he did stories, and just as certain of the fact that some of them would go to the grave with him if he so chose to take them.

"Some things are sacred," he said at last."They don't make funny anecdotes." He drew deeply on the cigarette, his eyes searching mine, searching my soul it seemed."But if you really want to know, and your reasons for wanting to know are the right ones - and I think they are - I'll tell you what happened to Eleanor Catlin.

"I said I didn't know her too well. That's true - but I did know her a long time. I knew her before she was born, in fact. Her mother was Celine Emerson, the actress. You've never heard of her, I expect. She was a stage actress and music hall star around the turn of the century. A lovely woman, very elegant but not at all snobbish. Her father was an army general but he wouldn't have much to do with her when she took to the stage."

Pipe leaned forward on his elbows and filled his cheeks with air. He tipped the brim of the hat back and mopped his brow delicately with two fingers. They came away wet enough to drip. He showed me and smiled grimly.

"Celine married George Lister on the day we all heard the Titanic had gone down. George was a jobbing carpenter who fancied himself as a bit of a song and dance man. He met Celine when they played on the same bill at the Grand Theatre in Leeds. They married soon after and moved back to George's house in the village."

Pipe searched his tobacco tin and managed to scrape up enough weed to roll another cigarette. I waited eagerly for him to continue, the heat's unbearable intensity and my exhaustion and sickness forgotten for the time being.

"George was a nice man alright but nobody quite understood what Celine saw in him. She was travelled, schooled, a rare woman for her time, Robert. A rare woman." The old man struck a match and held it upright. The burning flame was a near perfect teardrop shape, as still as a lit candle in a closed room. A halo of heat shimmered violently around it.

Pipe touched the tip of the flame to his cigarette and inhaled.

"You don't smoke do you, Robert?"

It was a casual inquiry, not the start of a lecture."No," I said."Never tried it."

Pipe nodded."I started smoking nearly seventy five years ago but I'm not telling you how old I was."

"Was Queen Victoria alive?"

"Alive?" Pipe barked out laughter on a cloud of smoke. The dog woke from his troubled slumber and looked dazedly at his master."Alive?" he repeated quietly, almost to himself."She was fucking chipper, Robert."

I laughed without knowing quite why. Pipe glanced at me and smiled."She'd not been dead that long when Eleanor Catlin was born, only her name was Eleanor Lister, and she came into the world on the night that her father was shipped off to the trenches. He got his first and last look at baby Eleanor that night, Robert, because Private George Lister never came home. Some say the old general had something to do with George being closer to the front than a Blackpool rock seller, but..." Pipe shrugged and sucked on his skinny cigarette."A lot of good men never came home. George was just one of them if you ask me."

"Did you fight in the First war, Pipe?" I asked.

Pipe looked at me from the corner of his eye, a faint smile on his face."I didn't get to be this age by running headlong into machine gun fire, Robert. No disrespect to the lads who did, but most of them are poppies now while I'm still here. That's the secret to being old. There's no mystery. It's just a matter of surviving."

The sound of Mike Bronson's spluttery old army Land Rover broke the day's strange quiet. It was still some way off but it had nothing to compete with. There were no other sounds in the air, no birds whistling, no kids screaming, no distant tractors.

We waited in silence, both of us watching the brow of the hill for Mike's Land Rover to come flying over. On this occasion he slowed down and came over the bump at a relatively sedate speed, but I had seen him land on two front wheels before now.

He roared up the High Street and drew to a noisy halt in the middle of the road. Sickly blue smoke chugged from the Land Rover's exhaust. Something was dripping from the engine block.

"Where the hell is everyone?" Mike asked dramatically. His Yorkshire accent had a phoney American lilt which he had picked up from the films. Mike loved everything American, films, sunglasses, music, women, cars. His cottage on the High Street, which doubled as the police station ( closed on Wednesday afternoons, and during test matches ), was a shrine to Americana. On the walls were real street signs and licence plates from places as obscure as Wisconsin, Wyoming, Utah, South Dakota and Oregon, and baseball pendants from all the famous teams, none of which I'd heard of. He also collected anything to do with the Coca Cola company, Zippo lighters, empty Jack Daniels and Wild Turkey bottles, suspiciously mint Wanted posters, lobby cards from movie theatres, stamps, postcards, maps, etc. There was even a photograph of Elliot Ness in the secure room in case the annual prisoner started to get ideas about who he was dealing with.

"Aliens took 'em," Pipe said. Pipe didn't like Mike. It wasn't simply that Mike chose to wear a battered leather flying jacket over his uniform shirt ( not today though - today his shirt was open to the third button, revealing an angry cheese-wedge of sunburned skin on his chest ), or that he never wore a helmet and looked more like a bored security guard than a policeman. These things wouldn't bother Pipe on their own. After all, Pipe was a man who recounted with humour and affection the time he was almost bludgeoned to death by one of Mike's predecessors. What bugged Pipe was that Mike had no respect in the village. People still respected the law of course, and the uniform which strived to uphold it, but Mike Bronson was a joke. Nobody was scared of him, not even kids, and Pipe once told me that fear of authority was a good thing.

I was never scared of my father, he said. But by Christ I feared his wrath.

"Aliens?" Mike asked, a puzzled smile on his face. Mike narrowed his eyes when he smiled - purposely, I think. He was a fairly handsome man according to what some of the women in the shop said about him when they thought I wasn't listening or didn't understand their code. He was tall and lean, quite unlike many of their beer-loving husbands. His eyes were emerald green and his dark curly hair and roguish grin gave him the look of a gipsy."Did you say aliens?"

Pipe didn't answer the question. Instead he asked a question of his own."Have you spoken to Lammy?"

"Ever?" Mike responded with lazy sarcasm.

Pipe was unfazed, his expression as smooth and blank as a pebble."Today. He's got a a problem with kids writing on the windows again."

Lammy sold fruit and veg - if it's fru-it, I do it, was his famous and oft heard motto. Recently a few of the kids from the village had taken to scrawling saucy limericks on his main display window. The limericks were always about fruit and some of the more imaginative things you could do with it. I didn't know who was responsible. Big kids, I guess. Nobody I knocked around with would bother to write a poem unless a teacher ordered them to.

Mike raised his sunglasses and peered intently at Lammy's window. Before lowering them again he fixed Pipe with a look of pitying concern - the sort of pitying concern you might show to an elderly relative whose faculties occasionally prove unreliable.

"There's nothing there now," Mike said in a careful, are-we-feeling-alright tone of voice.

"Well that's because Lammy's washed it off," Pipe said in a perfect reproduction of Mike's patronising emphasis."At six o'clock this morning, while you were still tucked up in beddy-byes with Cuddles the bear."

Mike smiled thinly."Then everyone's happy," he said. With that he put peddle to the metal and got the hell out of this stinking town, leaving a noxious phantom of smoke and fumes in his wake.

Norma and Ivy Frudd were going shopping. Both of them were armed with wicker baskets, which one would fill at Lammy's while the other covered Fergus Butcher's shop. Norma was wearing a blue flowery dress with short sleeves, and the same headscarf she wore to keep her hair in place on windy days was now protecting it from the heat of the sun. Her sister on the other hand was wearing a pair of men's work overalls rolled up at the ankles. Both were about thirty, I reckoned.

"Are they twins?" I asked."They don't look much alike."

Pipe smiled oddly."Twins? I don't even think they're sisters, Robert. And that's my last word on the subject."

We exchanged brief greetings with the Frudd sisters.

"Lovely!" Norma declared with a bright smile. Her eyes were sparkling, vivacious, making me think of a squirrel.

"Very pleasant," Ivy agreed with a more conservative smile. They split abruptly at the bench like fighter planes performing a choreographed manoeuvre, Ivy going left to the butcher, Norma right to the fruit and veg shop. Pipe and I were left staring at the empty space they once occupied.

I pulled the tee-shirt from around my neck and buried my face in it, then draped it over my head and put my elbows on my knees. My head sagged and bobbed like a spud on a spring.

"...sent for me the night George died and asked if I would build a crib for the baby. George had put the job off, see, and I was the only other carpenter she knew."

I heard Pipe's voice but it sounded distant and draggy. That wasn't down to to having a tee-shirt over my head - I was drifting off to sleep again.

"Celine looked so beautiful that night. So composed and dignified. You wouldn't have thought she was contemplating life with a new baby and no husband."

I pulled the tee-shirt from my head and stared dazedly at Pipe. The old man was a million miles from me.

"If I close my eyes I can still see her exactly as she was that day."

He took a deep breath, which he held in his lungs, and closed his eyes. Then he said something which made me realise what I had no business realising.

"She was never more real to me as she is right now," he said.

Unfamiliar emotions fluttered briefly inside my chest like ashes stirred by a breeze. The moment came and went, already a ghost to me, a dim recollection of something beautiful and moving.

Pipe looked at me suddenly, his face pinched with concern."Maybe you should go indoors, Robert."

"But I want to know what happened to Benny's mother."

"Go on, bugger off," Pipe said gently."Get a drink of water and lay down in the shade for a while. There'll be time enough later to finish the story."

I stood up and felt the world rock dangerously around me. I was only saved from fainting by the horrible feeling that my stiff, raw shoulders and back were splitting like a cut with scabbed edges being pulled apart. The pain made my eyes pop open in agonised surprise.

"Ooh," I said simply. It came out more like a response to an unexpected pleasure than an indication of the spasmodic pain ripping through my back.

Pipe chuckled as only one who doesn't share your pain can at these moments."You'd better ask your mother to sponge you down with cold water."

"Sounds great," I said dryly. In fact it sounded more uncomfortable than sunburn. I began walking gingerly back to my house. Each time my shoulder muscles rippled and creased a fresh wave of burning pain crackled across my skin. When I was at the open door of the shop Pipe called my name. I executed a stiff turn. The old man was pulling down the brim of his hat over his eyes.

"Send your father out with some baccy," he said, easing himself down on the bench as if getting ready to nap."Robert?"

I had to do the uncomfortable twist again, my arms jutting away from my sides as if I was carrying two full buckets of precious water.

"Sleep on your stomach," Pipe said.

I went indoors.

SIX

I slept a deep, feverish sleep filled with jumbled dreams and urgent warnings issued by hectic, whispery voices like reptilian tails swishing through parched leaves. In the last of them I was punting down a river in a giant wooden crib. My passenger was a beautiful lady who journeyed in sorrowful silence and remained frustratingly elusive. No matter which way I turned I saw no more than an outline of her white dress shimmering and rippling like brilliant light. She smelled of roses and tragedy.

Then Terry Catlin appeared. He was sailing towards us on a small raft made of what I first assumed to be logs but which turned out to be narrow cotton reels tied together with string. His head was bowed but his eyes were turned upward in their sockets, glaring at me with bright, ferocious cunning.

Suddenly, a whale reared out of the water behind Terry's raft. Its colour was the sickly whitish grey of death. Clinging to its flesh was a colony of strange albino crabs, their fierce little eyes shining with frenzied hunger.

I tried to warn Terry about the dead, bloated horror creeping up behind him but I found my scream blocked by an impossibly huge bar of toffee. It was as long and smooth as a planed floorboard, and my front teeth were planted in it to the gumline.

Agitated whispers hissed and rustled around my face. The whispers were anxious, upset, frightened. They tugged demandingly, pulling me away from the dream like desperate little hands.

The next thing I knew my mother was shaking me gently awake, speaking my name in a soft, insistent whisper.

"Robert! Robert! Come on, wake up!"

I opened my eyes and thought I was pressed against the belly of a whale pregnant with warm water. I experienced a moment of panic-stricken terror when my lungs refused to inflate, and then my mother rolled me onto my side, lifting my face out of the pillow.

"Come on, don't sleep now," she said, brushing back my sweat-soaked fringe with her hand."You won't sleep tonight if you sleep all day."

She left me to contemplate this baffling piece of mothers' paradoxical logic that said you had to avoid sleep in order to sleep. I rolled onto my back, forgetting that my bare skin had been cooked by the sun, and drew in a deep, shocked breath before easing onto my stomach again.

Earlier my mother had washed me down with cold water, and then dabbed my back with soothing pink calamine lotion which had now dried to the consistency of cake icing. It helped at first but now the pain was refreshed, lacerating my back like a whip.

I was still somewhere between dreams and reality, trapped in a hot, suffocating waiting room trying to sort out my luggage. I heard voices, muted, senseless muttering. Then a dull thumping sound which reverberated uncomfortably inside my aching head.

Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.

Not fast, and not slow either. It was more like the regular, measured thumping of -

My mother coming back up the stairs. I was up and on my feet just as the bedroom door opened and my mother peered around it with the wary scepticism of a teacher who is forced to concede that he who is without pea-shooter cannot fire a pea.

"Are you up?" she asked.

It was a pointless question but bringing this to her attention would have resulted in nothing except another localised burning sensation to worry about.

"Yes."

She eyed me critically for a moment or two.

"How's your back?"

"Better," I lied.

"Do you feel ill?"

"No." Again that was a lie. I felt terrible, just rotten all over. Standing in nothing but my baggy underpants under the doubting scrutiny of my mother wasn't helping things much.

"Right," she said."Come into the kitchen and I'll make you a sandwich. We're not having a meal tonight. Your father might have to go out soon." She left but then came back again almost immediately."Have you been with Anita Dobson today, Robert?"

To me the question was so completely unexpected that it could only be an accusation. My mother was exceptionally good at springing surprise accusations, carefully concealing them amongst innocuous questions before throwing the Big One in my face like a nasty firework. She would have made a fine prosecution lawyer.

"Me?" I said. This time my standard fallback response was given out of honest confusion.

"Yes, you," she said."I don't see another Robert in here. Do you?"

Another pointless question I left unchallenged.

"No."

My mother folded her arms across her chest."Well?"

"Er, no," I said, still baffled.

"Have you seen her at all?"

"Anita Dobson?"

"Yes!"

I shook my head lamely."No. Why?"

A look of concern touched her face; a distant, nagging trouble."Nothing. Her father wanted to know, that's all." The shadow of worry was slow to leave her eyes. Even when she smiled to show me that everything was alright I could still see a suspicion of reluctant tension.

"Mam?"

She hummed absently. Now her eyes were looking past me, drawn away once more by this persistent, magnetic uneasiness.

Maybe she caught it from me, I thought. I'd heard somewhere that moods could be infectious. One person's laughter has a domino effect on the people around him, bringing involuntary smiles to their faces if not cracking them up completely. So dark moods, depression and paranoia must also spread, creeping from mind to mind, snuffing out lights and planting negativity and vague, unlocatable anxieties like canisters which leak poisonous gas in slow, steady trickles.

"Has Benny been here today?"

"No, we haven't seen him all day," she said."Hurry up and get dressed. And wash - wash first. Ears and arms."

By the time I'd washed and dressed in trousers and a loose shirt a tea of sandwiches and pop was waiting for me on the kitchen table. The sandwiches were potted meat and cress. I wasn't the world's biggest fan of potted meat. These days they call it pate, and they usually list the ingredients on the label, but when Fergus Butcher was alive it was good old potted meat. I saw no reason to trust something which couldn't be accurately identified beyond the unspecific 'meat.'

"Eat up," my mother said."There's plenty of potted meat if you want more."

I nodded morosely and sat down to eat, mindful not to lean back in my chair. My father came in with the cash box just as I took my first bite of potted meat sandwich. When I saw him my mouth dropped open and the unchewed food plopped onto the tablecloth.

"Robert!" my mother gasped.

My father looked at me in astonishment, partly because I was staring at him as if he'd grown a bushy orange beard in my absence.

"Time," I explained feebly. I looked at the kitchen clock and felt a weird, sinking kind of dismay. It was ten minutes past five in the evening.

"What's wrong with him?" my father asked, puzzled. He put the cash box in the top cupboard and sat down in the chair opposite mine.

"I've been asleep for ages!"

"Knocked out more like," my mother tut-tutted as she deftly scooped the fallen chunk of sandwich from the table with a dishcloth. She shook the food into the kitchen bin and rinsed the dishcloth under the tap."I tried to wake you twice."

I was suddenly more disorientated than I had been when I first surfaced from deep sleep."What time did I come in?"

"Well don't you know?" My mother glanced over her shoulder, shaking her head in exasperation."Honestly, when I was your age we used to go fruit picking on summer's afternoons. We didn't spend nice days snoring away in stuffy bedrooms."

My father grinned at me as he lifted a heavy-looking wedge of potted meat sandwich to his mouth."I used to go frogging," he said."Used to put a hollow reed up-"

"Father," my mother said sternly.

My father and I shared the private smirk of two mischievous twelve year olds.

"And this is no time for jokes," my mother said as she sat down at the table with a small plate of sandwiches cut into delicate little triangles."Not with that-"

Both of them looked up in the same instant. An exchange of wordless dread and restless, fretful uncertainty passed between them in a quick glance. Then my father swallowed his food and smiled at me. Just as it had been with my mother in the bedroom, he wasn't quite good enough to mask his mood completely.

I felt there was something in the house with us, that our apprehension had given birth to a living energy. It was taking food from our table like a sly scavenger, growing bigger and stronger and more and more real.

A short time later, as my mother was clearing the table of bread crusts and the homemade blackberry log no one had felt like eating, there came a knock at the door.

**********************

Impatient, insistent, it was coming from the back door, the private entrance we only used once the shop was closed and locked up for the night. It opened into a narrow corridor which we called the storeroom, and it was usually packed with boxes of cigarettes and jars of sweets and other assorted items delivered on a weekly or even monthly basis.

We all froze; stupidly, part of me thought, because a knock at the back door was not an uncommon occurrence. In fact the opposite would have been an event, because a knock at the front door after five immediately betrayed the caller as a stranger. Everyone in the village knew we only used the back door in the evenings.

Yet the knocking had a strange, unsettling quality about it, a kind of hurried, declaratory importance. A rousing.

"I bet that's Harry Poonstone," my father said in a quiet, unconvincing voice."He was on about borrowing my shears to do his privets."

My mother gave him a brief, unhappy look as he got up from the table and left the kitchen. She retreated to the sink and busied herself with the washing up. After a few moments she stopped and half turned, her hip pressed against the sink, looking solemnly at the door.

It was very quiet in the kitchen. I knew my mother wasn't eavesdropping because there was nothing decipherable in the faint voices of whoever my father was talking to downstairs. It was a waiting moment but not in the cold, tingling climate of uncertainty. This silence was like a deeply respectful prelude, almost as heartfelt and reflective as the descending hush that befalls a gathering of mourners. It was a last moment to collect thoughts and prepare for the bad news at the door.

The voices remained at the foot of the stairs while my father returned. They grew louder briefly, almost perceptible, as my father opened the kitchen door, like the come-and-go sounds you get when you're trying to tune the wireless. I think I heard Pipe Younger downstairs, and possibly Alf Dobson.

My father smiled tightly at our expectant faces."Won't be long," he said."A few of the blokes are going for a walk, see what we can see."

My mother touched her throat lightly in her nervous way."Has she not-"

My father shook his head. Then he turned to me and studied my face with grave composure."Anita Dobson didn't come home-"

"Hasn't," my mother corrected in a shocked, pressing little voice."You mean she hasn't come home yet."

My father passed her a gentle, hopeless look. Oh you know, the look said. You know they never come home.

"Anita hasn't come home yet. She's been missing all day."

"But..." I knew what time it was but still I glanced at the clock with a sort of gasping optimism."It's not even six yet."

"She was due home at one o'clock this afternoon," my father said. He spoke with calm, final authority."Her mother was taking her into town to try on a bridesmaid dress. She was looking forward to it. She went out to pick blackberries with strict instructions to return home by one. That's the last anyone has seen of her."

"What happened?" I asked in a scared, whispery voice. I knew my father wasn't to know the answer to that question but I couldn't stop myself from asking it all the same. Maybe I was really asking him to speculate on what he thought might have happened.

"I don't know, son." He smiled but it was a bleak, cheerless gesture."She probably fell asleep in the sun."

"Do you think she's had an accident, like maybe she tripped up ( In the woods ) somewhere and knocked herself out?"

"Could be," my father said steadily."Could be a number of things. Could be that she met some friends and just lost track of the time, in which case she's going to discover what the flat side of her mother's hairbrush is for."

"We don't know anything yet." I looked at my mother. Her fingers were drumming softly against her throat."It's not fair on Anita or her parents for everyone to swap wild guesses."

"Your mother's right. The best thing we can do right now is go out and look for her."

"Can I come?"

My father shook his head."No, this is a job for the men, Robert. You stay-"

"Take him with you."

That was the first - and probably the last - time I ever heard my mother issue such a direct and unquestionable order to my father. It was all the more powerful and persuasive for the undramatic and absolute way in which it was delivered.

"Alright," my father said in a slightly dazed voice. The order had been accepted but from the way he was looking at her he still required an explanation.

"I want him to see what kind of worry a child can cause." She looked down at me with a strange mixture of love and sadness."Sometimes, when you go off playing with Benny, I don't know where you are. And then when you come back - late - I get upset and start shouting at you. You look at me just the way you're looking at me now, like I've just put pepper in the cake mix. You can't imagine what I've been thinking, Robert."

I felt suddenly tearful for no reason. Something was making her talk this way, and I suspected it had more to do with Benny than it did me or even Anita Dobson.

In that instant she looked straight through the disingenuous fabric of vague shrugs and evasiveness and into the dark room in my heart where my secret journal on Benny was stored. She knew I knew more than I was telling. She knew I was scared about something. I think she was even aware that my fears were possibly imagined and impossible to articulate, but she wanted to know them in any case. Not knowing was worse for her.

"Get your shoes on, Robert," my father said. I was relieved to hear his voice because it broke the spell my mother had put on me. I don't know what I would have told her if my father hadn't interrupted. It would have sounded senseless and silly if I had told her there was a dead whale floating this way, and there was something behind the sun. I would have sounded like a child whose frightened imagination draws shapes in the darkness, shapes with glittering eyes and snouts that wrinkle back to expose bright, gleaming teeth.

And if she had frowned and told me not to be so foolish, I would have reminded her that Anita Dobson never came home this afternoon.

*******************

Pipe Younger was indeed one of the three men who had called on my father, though I had been mistaken about Alf Dobson being amongst them. The others were Ray Dixon and Brian Vest. Ray was a doleful shoe salesman who trailed the length and breath of the county because he couldn't drive and sold too few shoes to be able to afford a car in any case. He carried his samples around in a huge trunk, which he lugged from railway station to shoe shop, railway station to shoe shop. To look at his face, a small oval of unhappiness and disenchantment, you would have thought him a man burdened with a tortuous metier, a poet or a painter perhaps, trapped on a slow but inexorable treadmill he was powerless to stop or redirect. All this for shoes. Not even the love of shoes either, only their existence and a maddening curse that compelled him to provide the public with new and interesting variations for the rest of his days. Maybe that woeful, hopeless look in his eyes was because he knew deep down he was destined to inherit Clarence Roebuck's horse and cart and go down in history as the last of the Shoemen.

Ray was married to Lucy, who ran the Pathfinders group for little kids at the church hall. Lucy was energetic and hilariously forgetful and great fun to be around. I don't know where the two of them met or what sneeze of the gods brought them together but they seemed contented enough. I sometimes played conkers and marbles with their eldest boy, Mark, who was small and inoffensive like his father but as silly and effervescent as his mother. Their youngest, Wayne, was absent-minded and had a tendency to sulk for long periods.

The third man was Brian Vest, a slaughterman who looked like nothing else. Brian was always loud and cheerfully disgusting. I had a mild fear of earthy, extrovert men, especially those who looked like they could break a bull's neck as effortlessly as they could twist the lid off a beetroot jar, but I was never so timid around Brian. He wasn't exactly a friendly giant but he did possess this undeniable affinity with children. Mostly, it has to be said, because of his preoccupation with farts.

He let one off as we were walking over to the Dobson house. It ripped through the hot summer air like a knife through a piece of silk.

"Hell's bells!" he laughed, turning to grin proudly at me."Did you hear that, Robert?"

"Hear it?" Pipe muttered."He nearly fucking swallowed it."

Brian roared with laughter. A moment later, when the over-cooked, cabbagy smell had spread out a little, we all made a song and dance out of wafting it away and holding our noses. Brian was pleased as punch with our reaction.

"I don't know what I've been eating," he declared happily."Smells like a rat crawled up my arse and died."

My father passed me an uncomfortable smile. I smiled back to show that I wasn't embarrassed or ill at ease with these men. In truth I was feeling a bit over-awed, but at the same time I was feeling fiercely privileged and grown up. The last thing I wanted was for my father to spoil everything by asking the men to tone down their language for the boy.

The sun was still bright and hot. Any hopes that evening might bring a cooling wind of relief were fading.

We got to the Dobson house, which was located on that part of the High Street we called Cinder Road. Here the village gradually dwindled into the moor. Small clusters of houses became even smaller terraces of three and four, and finally a short string of scattered dwellings before the hills swelled up before your eyes. A narrow, twisty road could then take you all the way over to Derrington, with branch tracks leading to West Gelder, Dearlove and the quaintly named Precious. There were some isolated cottages and farm houses on the moor itself but whether the occupiers regarded themselves as coming from West Gelder or Elsewhere depended largely on which pub they drank in.

There was another small group of men standing quietly in Alf and Mary Dobson's front garden. Bill Peebles and Ted Cooke, the district Fives and Threes champions ( pairs ), rear gunner Albert Brown, who was tortured by the phantom roar of aeroplane engines and had to keep thumping the side of his head to clear the noise away, and Spider Lindus. The little I knew of Spider did not include his real name or the origins of his nickname. He was, by a good head and shoulders, the tallest man I have ever seen. His legs stretched all the way from his ankles to the middle of his chest, which in itself was a fair distance. And then there was this long, slim torso to see over. And after that a neck like a pipe cleaner. And after that, if your eyes could see so high, a weird, hammer-shaped head with fuzzy blond hair and bulging, inquisitive eyes. Given his appearance I thought that Giraffe would have been a more appropriate nickname. He was certainly giraffe-like in the gawky yet oddly graceful way he strolled around without the faintest inclination of the existence of life below the level of his waist.

The two groups met and exchanged greetings. The men talked in subdued tones about how hot it was, and whether it was due to change, until Alf and Mary came out of the house.

My father put his hand on my shoulder. I felt a kind of wretched, desperate tug of love in that small gesture. At the same time Alf Dobson was comforting his wife. She looked very pale. The only colour in her face was the two bruised shadows under her eyes.

"Come on, head up, our lass," Alf said with bumbling sincerity. He put his hands on her shoulders and gave her a funny little shake."What do you say, eh?"

Mary's face crumpled into a chewed toffee of hopeless grief. Alf knew, said he knew, and pulled her head onto his shoulder. She sobbed against Alf's shirt in little whooping hiccups.

"You just leave them lights on like I told you," Alf said in a gently encouraging voice."If she walks home on her own we don't want her thinking we've all gone out now, eh?"

Mary lifted her face. I could see tiny sparks of light in her tears."Alf," she said simply.

"I know, I know," Alf intoned."Make her some tea, eh? She'll be wanting a meal before you take her upstairs and tan her arse."

Mary uttered a brief, gurgling laugh and shook her head vehemently."I just want her back," she said in a tiny voice."I don't care where she's been, Alf-"

"I know, I know."

"I just want her home with me."

Alf knew, again he knew. He brushed the side of his wife's face with the back of his hand, an oddly delicate touch for a man who quarried limestone five long days of the week. Mary smiled with wan appreciation. She looked so young and afraid. I'd never thought of her as being a young woman. At twelve years old, anyone who didn't wear short trousers and slide down bannister rails was getting on a bit in my eyes. I think Mary Dobson was twenty nine, and Alf not much older. Today I would say they were children.

Alf joined us at the gate, leaving Mary a lonely figure at the open door.

"Is someone sitting with her?" Pipe asked."She ought not to be on her own, you know."

"Violet Briggs has been over," Alf said in a hoarse whisper. He hurriedly wiped something from his eyes, which none of us noticed, and coughed to clear his throat."She's gone home to settle the baby, then she's coming back with her sister."

Just then we were joined by Tim and Paul Dunnel, Irish brothers who lived a private existence up on one of the hill farms. Tim was the eldest, handsome, wise-eyes, dry sense of humour. Paul was also dark and handsome but his eyes had a kind of serene impishness that made you wonder if he had played a practical joke you weren't yet aware of. I liked both of them for different reasons. Paul because he was child-like and funny, Tim because he was polite yet mysterious and not without a touch of the Irish hero about him. They rarely came into the village but every so often they would ride to the pub on horseback and entertain everyone with their fiddle and flute renditions of Irish standards. My father always got me out of bed for these impromptu shows. Many o'night I spent jigging around the Straw Man in my flannel jammies and house robe.

"We heard about the child," Tim said after nodding a courteous greeting to the men."We thought you might need a hand bringing her home."

Alf smiled gratefully."Cheers, Tim. How did you know?"

"Maureen was talking to the Frudd sisters. They were just up at our place."

"Doing what?"

"Spreading the news," Tim said, and Alf nodded with weary acknowledgment."Have you told the bobby yet?"

There was a general chorus of disdainful muttering, summed up with a squeaky fart from Brian Vest.

"We'll leave Mike Bronson out of this for the time being," Pipe said."He hasn't got the sense God gave a spud, but you can bet he'll want to organise everything." He looked slowly around the group of faces, including mine, his seen-everything eyes narrow with caution."At the moment we've got a child who's late home by about five and half hours. In my experience that's long enough to worry but not nearly long enough for melodramatics."

"He might stick his nose in anyway," Tim said."Maureen told me..." He broke off and looked at Brian with faint disgust."Jesus, Brian." It almost came out Jaysus."What in God's name have you been eating, man?"

Brian lowered his red face and tittered under his breath, his bovine shoulders shaking and heaving.

"Go on," Pipe said, blinking as if gassed.

Tim shook his head at Brian and continued."Well, one of the sisters told Maureen that Mike knows about the child."

"Anita," Alf said in a patiently insistent tone."Her name's Anita."

Tim glanced at him with a slight smile of apology."Anita. Well Mike Bronson knows what's going on."

"Let him know," Pipe said curtly."Let him help if he wants to. But for the time being this isn't a police matter. Are we all agreed?"

There was muted agreement, though I suspected some of the men were harbouring doubts. My father for one. My father was a leave-it-to-the-proper-authorities type. I think Ray Dixon was another, and even Tim Dunnel didn't look completely convinced.

This rogue thought came from nowhere, like a dark insight, a snatch of code from one signaller to another.

"We'll split up into pairs," Pipe said. He took out his tobacco tin and began to roll a cigarette with fingers that were fat and yellow and perfectly steady. Everyone waited silently for him to finish the job and carry on with what he was saying. Another thought occurred to me then, this one more natural and considered than the other. It was that Pipe Younger was the real policeman in these parts. He didn't wear a uniform and he didn't carry a truncheon so far as I knew, but when he spoke people listened, and when he gave instructions people tended to obey them without too much hassle. What's more, there was never any fuss or trouble when Pipe Younger was around. His mere presence had a calming influence on those around him.

"Ray can go with Brian and look from Tennamons Lane up as far as Manny Magee's property. Don't go any further until I've spoken to Manny. Go along the footpath if you like but stay off the fields and don't go near the house."

Ray gave a woeful little sigh."He'll set the dogs loose if he sees us up there."

"No he won't, not if you're on a public right of way. Manny's a bastard but he isn't a mad bastard. Not yet." Pipe lit his cigarette, which was barely thicker than the match he used to get it going."Tim and Paul can ride around the moor for a bit. Might be a good idea to nip into Derrington and Winterstone while you've got the hosses out. Ask if anyone's seen her. Go into a few pubs." He thought for a moment and grinned crookedly at the brothers."Get off the hosses first though, lads."

"I've been into Derrington," Alf Dobson said with weary defeatism."And I've been up to Manny's place. " He paused. His whole face seemed to sag with dismay."She wasn't there."

"Well she might be there now."

Pipe then dispatched my father and Albert Brown to the north part of the woods, Bill Peebles and Ted Cooke to the south. All four men looked a bit lost already.

Pipe gazed at them with ploppy eyes and a limp jaw. In the slow, ponderous voice of an imbecile he said: "One lot go from the Main Gate to the picnic bench, while the other lot go the other way and meet them there. But don't have a fucking picnic."

There was a ripple of laughter. Only Paul Dunnel was frowning.

"We'll need more than four men to search those woods," he said."It's a big area, very dense."

"I know, Paul. I was here when half of those trees were saplings. It was big then."

Paul pressed on, but I saw something in Pipe's eyes urging him not to.

"There's all manner of ditches and hollows and places where..."

Paul's face flushed as the sudden, horrid realisation of what he was suggesting came home to him. At the same time Alf Dobson lowered his head.

"Oh, Christ, Alf, I didn't...I wasn't thinking."

"Finished?" Pipe asked quietly.

Paul nodded and opened his arms in a silent expression of innocence when his older brother gave him a look of reproach.

"Alf and Spider can go back and ask all of Anita's friends if they've seen her since this morning."

Alf lifted his head and looked at Pipe with a tired, irritable frown."Mary's done that, Pipe. She and me have been knocking on doors all afternoon."

"Did you go into town?" Pipe asked. He docked the end of his cigarette and put it back into the tin for later."Did you?"

For a few seconds Alf was stuck for words."Well, no. I didn't think she would have gone that far."

"It seems the most likely possibility to me. It's a nice day. Hot. lazy. The kind of day that makes you light-headed and a bit dreamy. She goes out to pick fruit but soon gets bored. Like kids do."

There was something going on here that made me think back to Pipe's battle of wits with the old cat earlier in the afternoon. Only this battle was nearly all one-sided. Pipe was breaking down Alf's frustrated resistance with nothing short of hypnosis. It was in that calm, steady gaze, in the smooth, lulling, believe-me tone of his voice.

"But the dress!" Alf said in a sinking, jaded little voice."She was supposed to be fitted for a dress! She wasn't to be even ten minutes late!"

"So she walks into town, maybe to visit a friend or just to wander around." Pipe carried on as if Alf had never spoken, all the time his eyes probing deeper and deeper. Alf was staring back at him like a mesmerised child. "She doesn't realise how much time has gone by. Then she panics, thinks maybe her mam and dad will go bonkers. So she doesn't come home at all. That's the best solution all round. Isn't that how she thinks, Alf?"

Alf nodded dumbly.

"She's probably walking home right now, fretting about the trouble she's in. I bet you'll even bump into her a couple of miles down Tennamons Lane. If not, she could still be in town."

Pipe turned his head and regarded his small audience, all of whom were bewildered and part way hypnotised themselves. Even I was not unaffected. I found my mind had drifted back to the dream in which a dead whale had been creeping up on Terry Catlin's raft.

Alf suddenly nodded briskly."Right, we best be off," he said, and the faintest of smiles crossed Pipe's wily old features.

"Best do," the old man said."We'll meet back here at ten." He turned back to Alf Dobson but the intensity was gone from his eyes."My mate Joe will give you a lift home. He lives on Dagger Lane, house next to the stadium. There's a Sherbets flag on the roof. You can't miss it. Just tell him Pipe sent you. Go about nine. Leave it any later and Joe would have gone to bed." He winked archly at Alf."He's an old man, you know."

I stayed with Pipe and the dog. I think my father had been a little put out that I hadn't asked to go along with him but he knew how much the old man fascinated me.

Our particular task on the search hadn't been properly explained. I don't think that was an accident either. Pipe watched the the others disperse with a dark look in his eyes. We heard the first faint voices calling Anita's name before he spoke.

"We're going to check out some places I know," he said."Not exactly secret places, but most of them are forgotten about." He whistled the dog, which was digging up Alf Dobson's herb garden with much vigour."Snap's got a nose for things. I didn't want him going with the others just yet."

I looked questioningly at the old man, at the same time shielding my eyes from the glare of the sun. He looked down at me with a kind of startling frankness. Pipe Younger was the most honest man I knew. He was the only adult in my life who didn't bother to patronise me.

"Hope is precious," he said. He raised his head and stared out across the land with the eyes of one who senses more than he sees. You couldn't see the woods from here but I knew he was looking all the same."Sometimes it's all you've got left to hold onto. A man who takes away that hope before he has to is a sadist, Robert. If you ever find out for sure that Jesus never existed, you keep it to yourself."

"Do you think she's dead, Pipe?"

"Aye," he said simply."I've seen it before, Robert."

SEVEN

I looked back at the Dobson house as Pipe and I started on our search. I saw Mary Dobson staring out of the window with soulful bewilderment. I don't think she noticed us.

"I had another Snap before this one," Pipe said as we veered off the road into a field, the dog racing ahead of us as if it knew where we were going."And four or five more before that one."

"All called Snap?"

"Aye."

"How come?"

"It stops me getting sentimental," the old man said."I've outlived more dogs and cats and rabbits and mice than I care to recall. I just name them all Snap, that way they never really leave me."

We came to a small hedge with a gate. Pipe opened it and waited until I was through before closing it again. Two horses in the next field tracked our progress with lazy curiosity.

"Why do they call him Spider?" I asked, suddenly remembering my earlier musing.

"Why do they call who Spider?"

"Sp-" I looked at Pipe and grinned.

"Oh him?" Pipe said innocently."Well, it's probably because he was born with eight legs."

I laughed, one single yelp of surprised laughter, but then I realised he was quite serious.

"Eight legs?" I cried, disbelief halting me in my tracks. Pipe carried on walking, his ancient legs taking impossibly brisk strides."He was born with eight legs?"

"Right enough," Pipe said when I had caught him up."He had the two he's got now - his walking legs - and six little legs down his sides." The old man patted his sides with the palms of his hands."Three on either side."

"Legs?"

"Aye...well, not proper legs. They were more like fleshy socks, little bags of boneless skin. Perfectly formed though."

"Pipe?" A creepy thought had just struck me."Has he still got them?"

Pipe howled with laughter. The dog whipped its head around and then quickly dismissed us with a disdainful snort. It bounded off to bother the horses.

"No, a doctor cut them off. Not much use for them, you see."

The sun was throwing long shadows into the fields from the elm trees in the hedgerows, but a lot of the fight had been drained out of it as evening drew close. The heat now seemed to have a different source. The air itself was thick and heavy with languid, syrupy warmth.

It wasn't much of a walk to the place where we ended up, at least not in terms of the distance from Alf Dobson's house, but I didn't think I would be able to find it again on my own. There were times when I began to suspect Pipe was deliberately leading me on a route I wouldn't be able to retrace. Sometimes I saw the same fields from different angles and convinced myself we were going around in a looping figure of eight.

"It looks like tigers," Pipe said. We had climbed a grassy hill and were now looking into a small wooded copse."See it, Robert?"

At first I saw only trees and hedges grown wild from neglect, and grass so tall it was folding in on itself. I concentrated my line of vision on a spot between two trees but all I could see was more overgrowth.

"Where are you looking?" Pipe asked, lowering his big frame so that his head was next to mine.

"There," I said, pointing."Between those trees."

He made a gesture with his hand, a sort of inward facing wave, as if he was telling a truck driver to keep coming.

"Pull your eyes back a bit," he said when I still hadn't got it."See now?"

I did see. I saw black stripes hiding in the undergrowth.

"Tigers," I said darkly. I traced the tiger's stripes with one eye closed and the other looking down the barrel of my finger. There was a second standing just a few feet away, this one much bigger than the first. I couldn't see its head of course, but then you never do see a tiger's head until it's about to kiss you on the lips. But I could see its stripes alright, the narrow bands of black partly camouflaged by the long grass.

"Is it a house?"

"Was a house," Pipe said."Not much left of it now."

Just the black iron fence, it seemed from here. In places it was obscured by grass and trees, in others it vanished completely.

Approaching the fence was a little bit like walking into the sea. I sank deeper and deeper with every step until the grass was way above my head. Even Pipe, who was bigger than a hat stand, was parting waves of dry grass with his hands before we reached the fence. The dog was way ahead of us, weaving its way through what it could not bound across.

"There used to be adders in these parts," Pipe said as we followed the line of the fence. I looked nervously down at my feet, which weren't there. Now that Pipe had mentioned it this did seem like an excellent place for adders to slither about unnoticed.

"Now?"

"No, not now," he said."I haven't seen a snake around here for more than fifty years. And even when there were snakes here you could go a whole lifetime and not even know they existed."

Walking was arduous. I felt like a flea journeying through a long-haired cat. The sweat was pouring off me in rivers, drowning those gnats and greenfly that flew into my face. My back and shoulders felt stiff and itchy and hot.

"Believe it or not, I've seen more lions than snakes around here," Pipe was saying. I passed him an exhausted glance and was partly dismayed to see how easily he brushed aside the tall grass and kept his knees working like pistons. He didn't even look tired. In fact he looked maddeningly boyish. I was the one who looked and felt like a weary old man."There was a farmer up where the Dunnels live. Edward Binker they called him. He kept about twelve lions in a sort of private zoo. Fed them on live sheep, so I heard. Anyway, one day they all got out. Imagine that, Robert. He opens the gate of the pen one day and every last lion has done a runner through a hole in the fence. Do you know what I'd have done?"

"Locked myself in the empty pen," I said. It came out as a wheezy, breathless muttering sound.

"I'd have blocked up that hole in the fence and then locked myself in the pen," Pipe said."But anyway, you can't really do that. Not with a dozen lions chasing your neighbours around. So a gang of us tooled up and went looking for them. We killed three of them but the rest we never found. They just stayed low until we gave up and forgot about them. There were sightings from time to time, and the odd sheep went missing...quite a few sheep, as it happens. And a calf. And a doberman dog once, but that could have wandered off on its own accord. But nobody to this day has ever found a dead lion. I don't know what happened to them. Snap would have found them, I bet. He was bred for chasing lions out of the African bush."

"When was this?" I asked. My legs were starting to ache with the effort of having to walk in that unnatural up-forward-down motion, the same way you would manoeuvre through a swamp. I had tried to move in a more natural way but it was impossible to make any progress. Pipe seemed completely unaffected.

"Oh, a long time ago. Before the war. The First War I mean."

"So they'll all be dead by now, will they?"

"Oh aye, should have thought so," Pipe mused."Unless they bred with each other, that is. If that's the case they'll still be around somewhere." Then without warning he cried,"Hold it!" and I nearly shot up high enough to see over the top of the grass.

We had reached a gateway, or the remains of one in any case. One stone pillar stood tall and proud, taller even than Pipe, while the other had toppled over and was now sinking into the ground.

"Gate's been taken," Pipe said with a curious wink."Fetched a few bob at the antique market, I reckon."

We crossed the threshold into the grounds of the erstwhile house. Here the signs of neglect and abandonment were just as they were on the other side of the fence - mutant grass, wild bushes, yews and conifers gone native - yet somehow the ravishes of time were happening more slowly on this side. It was still possible, with the right imagination, to see the ghost of a grand formal garden laying just beneath the surface of this forgotten place.

"It used to be nice in here," Pipe said pensively."More than nice actually. It was exquisite. Elegant." He swept a hand in front of him."The big house used to be just up top. There was a circular driveway for turning carriages. I expect it's still buried here somewhere."

I looked further ahead and noticed there were patches of land where the weeds were much shorter and an abundance of dandelions and buttercups grew. I pointed it out to Pipe.

"It's where the cellars were filled with rubble when the house was knocked down," he said."And the big kitchen. I don't know why the land still resists though. There must be a good layer of topsoil else nothing would grow at all."

Because the house is still dying, I thought. I found this notion filled me with a kind of grief. Something remained here, the proud residue of a spirit once beautiful and formidable enough to awe, but which was now dying. There was a touching sense of peaceful, dignified resistance about those little patches of weeds and wild flowers, but with it came a deep, sighing inevitability. It made me think about Alf Dobson and how he knew, he knew, but still insisted his wife leave the lights on in case Anita returned on her own.

"There was a croquet lawn and a tennis court round the back," Pipe said."And those yew trees there formed part of a promenade. It was walked by ladies who carried umbrellas when it wasn't even raining, dashing young country gentlemen out to steal a kiss from them, and some fat old trout in a big hat who made sure they didn't. Not just the old days, Robert, but old times." The old man shook his head sadly."All gone now. The sculptured hedges, the big house, the carriages and dalmatian dogs that used to run behind them...it's all past glory now."

"Who lived here?" I asked. I spoke in a sombre, respectful whisper, in honour of whatever dying spirit lingered here.

"A man named Charles Henry Fitzroy built the house back in the middle of the last century. Fitzroy was a mill owner who fancied himself as an adventurer. He struck it rich in the Colorado gold rush and married the daughter of a Boston land owner. They lived here until Fitzroy got the travel bug again and went off to Africa. He was killed there."

I raised my eyes to Pipe's."Did the cannibals get him?"

"Nah, he got drunk and fell overboard on a ferry going down Lake Malawi."

Pipe took me deep into the grounds of the house to where the remains of the stables were poking out of the earth like jagged edges of a smashed tooth. We sat down on a piece of wall and Pipe rolled a cigarette. The dog collapsed in the long grass, panting heavily. A mist of gnats flocked around our heads until the smoke from Pipe's cigarette dispersed the bulk of them. The sun was heading west and the sky was turning denim blue.

"Celine raised Benny's mother alone," Pipe said. It took a few moments for me to realise he was picking up the conversation we had begun on the bench earlier in the day."Nothing unusual about that, not for the times. Same as recent times, Robert. A lot of fathers lost, a lot of mothers left to bring up the children. But there was something about Celine that set her apart from the rest. She wasn't born for washing doorsteps and scrubbing nappies. She was a lady, a proper lady. But you would never know she was struggling unless you looked into her eyes, and then you saw pain and heartache like you've never seen before. She struggled, but she was proud and noble and determined to get on and make the best of things. She never remarried but there were plenty of men willing to give her and the baby a home."

"You?"

Pipe smiled shrewdly."I had my Betty, God rest her nagging soul."

That didn't answer my question but I didn't pursue the matter. The first thing I ever learned about Pipe Younger was that his stories and secrets had their time. They couldn't be summoned or requested, only received like winds.

"So Eleanor grew up an only child. I don't think she was lonely for that. People like Eleanor and Benny don't get lonely like you and me. It's their nature to be alone; they're solitary animals. They find mates from time to time but at the end of it all they prefer their own company. You and Benny are good friends, but when he's confused or hurt it's himself he'll run to. Do you see what I mean, Robert?"

I nodded, knowing exactly what Pipe meant.

"They retreat into themselves because that's where they feel secure and comfortable. It's the nature of the beast."

I felt the familiar elusive fear and urgency brush against me like the touch of warm, muscular fur on a blind man's face. Walking with Pipe and listening to his fantastic stories put it out of my mind from time to time, but it was always going to return. This wolf was circling me, making slow, prowling loops so that sometimes it was behind me or in the corner of my vision, but sooner or later it padded back into view.

Watch out for me, it's smouldering red eyes were saying to me now. The circle's getting smaller and smaller.

"Robert? Are you alright, lad? You look like someone's just stepped on your grave."

"I'm alright," I told Pipe. I urged him to continue the story, not simply because I needed to learn about Benny's mother but also because I wished to avoid any further probing. I was fearful of what I might reveal under the bare-bulb intensity of Pipe's hypnotic scrutiny.

"Terry Catlin was also growing up at this time. He and Eleanor were about the same age. Eleanor even helped out on the farm where Terry's father - Benny's grandfather - was the herdsman. Eleanor loved all animals."

"Like Benny," I said, really thinking aloud.

Pipe nodded."Like Benny. He takes after his mother alright. Quiet, solitary, moody."

"What was Terry like?" I asked.

"No different from any boy his age. He liked to fish, I remember that about him, but otherwise nothing stands out." The old man regarded me from the corner of his eye."He wasn't like he is today if that's what you're wondering. Most of that's down to drink. Not drinking the drink, Robert, but needing the drink. Needing something - drink, opium, money, a certain woman - will ruin a man. Want everything but need nothing, that's the way I've lived my life.

"Terry and Eleanor got married in the spring of nineteen thirty-four. I know it was thirty-four because Celine died a few weeks before the wedding."

I searched Pipe's face for some sign of emotion but saw nothing I could interpret as further proof that he had loved Benny's grandmother."How did she die?"

"She was up a ladder cleaning some shelves in her kitchen, slipped and banged her head on the floor. She was alright for a time. She even went shopping that same morning. I saw her in the butcher's and she told me all about it. She laughed and called herself a daft cow."

The old man fell silent. Again I could tell nothing from his expression, which was thoughtful but not particularly sad.

"Eleanor found her mother dead the next morning. Celine had gone to bed early complaining of a headache. She never woke up as far as I know."

"What was it?"

"Her brain bled," Pipe said."So Eleanor buried her mother and married Terry Catlin all in the same month. They moved into a place on Tim McDonald's property. Terry had taken over from his father by this time. The old man had a stroke and went to live in a nursing home near Whitby."

"Did you go to the wedding, Pipe?"

"Aye, I went. I made them a rocking horse as a wedding present." The old man noticed my puzzled smile and laughed gruffly."For their first kid, you daft frog."

I grinned, imagining the newly married couple whooping with delight as they tried out their new rocking horse for the first time. Yippee! Faster, Terry, faster! Ride 'em, cowboy!

"Turned out to be the wrong present as it happened," Pipe continued."Terry and Eleanor couldn't have children."

"But-"

"I never said they didn't have a child, Robert, only that they couldn't have a child. Just like I never said those other folks were eaten by a whale. You shouldn't listen to a word people don't say.

"It was no secret," he continued."Everyone in the village knew how much Eleanor yearned for a child. Now, men like you and me don't know dicky shit about women's things, Robert. We might say we know, and some of us may even think we know, but women are foreigners, and some of the stuff that goes on inside their heads and bodies is beyond the understanding of any man. Such as why a woman wants a baby so badly she'll do just about anything. You and me would simply get on with our lives, find something else to do like fix up an old motor car or spend some time on the allotment, but a woman can't do that. Don't ask me why because I'm a man, and men just spread the seed, Robert - women tend the garden.

"Eleanor Catlin's need was every bit as consuming, as destructive and downright dangerous as her husband's need for drink is today." Pipe's face softened a little."Though I guess we should have more sympathy for the lass than her shite of a husband."

"He was a shite back then?"

Pipe barked out a laugh. Snap's ears twitched in the long grass but the dog didn't bother to look up.

"Aye, he was a shite alright. There was lots he could have done to help, such as agreeing to see the adoption people for a start off, but he wouldn't have none of it."

"Why?"

"Because he was a bitter, selfish man, Robert. He blamed Eleanor for not giving him a child, and he made her life a misery for it."

"Was it Eleanor's fault?"

"Nobody's fault," the old man said."It's just the way some things are. I expect one day you'll be able to order your babies through the post, any shape, size and colour you want, just as if you were buying bulbs for your garden, but not today and not back then. You couldn't tell Terry that, and you couldn't explain it to Eleanor either. She wanted a child and nothing was going to stop her having one."

Pipe broke open his tobacco tin and scrounged up enough dry tobacco to roll a last cigarette.

"Did you forget to tell your old man I was out of baccy?"

"Oh..."

"No mind, son. I've got some cigars at home. A friend of mine won them from that eye-tie P.O.W in town, the gadge who has the ice-cream van."

"Your friend has an ice-cream van?"

Pipe winked."No, my friend's got a fourteen-inch cock, which is how come he won the cigars."

"How come?"

"Like a fucking racehorse," Pipe said, and we both laughed but only Pipe got the joke.

The old man lit his cigarette. Most of it was just paper and it burned down like the fuse on a bomb.

"Eleanor got very depressed," Pipe said, glancing forlornly at the parched stub of paper between his fingers."She let herself go, let the house go. She used to wander around the village like a confused old woman, not sure what she was doing there or why. She would also stand outside the gates of the primary school at home-time, watching all the little faces as they came rushing out. She'd get more and more agitated and upset as the kids filed passed her. When the last of them had gone home and the schoolyard was silent, she'd put her head down and wander away."

"Who was she looking for?" I asked.

Pipe shrugged."Her child, Robert, the child she didn't have."

Pipe was right, I didn't understand women and what was going on inside their heads, but I was moved all the same.

"She did get pregnant eventually," Pipe said."But she kept it secret."

"From the villagers?"

"Aye, and from Terry...and I think she kept it secret from herself. Don't ask me to explain that, Robert, because I can't. All I know is that Eleanor was very ill by the time she gave birth to Benny. She was ill enough to hide her bump with bandages and big dresses, ill enough to stumble into the woods one snowy night and drop her baby under a tree without a midwife or even a friend for miles. Then she climbed that same tree and hanged herself."

"What?" I said, shaken."She..."

"Hanged herself," Pipe finished quietly."The poor lass took her own life and almost killed her baby too. Benny would have frozen to death if he had been found a minute later than he was." He gazed up at the sky, now a deep, melancholy shade of blue without cloud or sun."Best get off, Robert."

"Was it you, Pipe?" I asked as we were walking away from the stables and away from Fitzroy House for the first and last time in my life."Did you find Benny?"

"No, not me," Pipe said."It was Terry Catlin who found them."

***********************

Until that day with Pipe, my village, the place where I was born and where I had lived ever since, was like a picture on a wall. I saw it every day, and I knew it intimately enough to close my eyes and visualise all but the smallest detail, but I had only ever seen it from a limited number of angles. Moreover I never even realised there were any more angles. I had always believed that if you turned the picture around you would have nothing to look at but the back of the canvas and some dried glue.

Pipe took me into the hills, where we looked down and saw a vulnerable huddle of chimney pots and faint lights that made me think of sheep massing together during a thunderstorm.

Here there was a stone barn too remote and isolated to serve any useful purpose. Pipe didn't know what it was for. It had always been here, he said, and so far as he knew it had never been anything but an empty barn. The hills were dotted with them, though most were used to store winter feed for the sheep. This barn, the barn where Pipe Younger had once carved his initials in the wall followed by the staggering, almost historical digits 1887, was dark and stuffy and smelled of mushrooms.

"The Dunnels own this," Pipe told me."They'll know its here of course but they won't ever think about it, I bet. Some things, like some people, are so faint they're virtually invisible. They just blend into the background. People are guided around them by instinct."

"I know it's here now," I said.

Pipe smiled wryly."Aye, but I bet you never come back, lad."

We walked some more. It seemed to me we were doing far more walking than looking.

The next place we went to was also in the hills. Again we stopped and looked down on the village, this time on a crooked arrangement of stone through which wound small roads and footpaths. I never realised how densely packed the village was, nor how winding some of its steep, cobbled streets were. The High Street was really nothing but the facade, as much a shop window as the windows of the shops along it. Behind the facade was the template of an ancient settlement, a stone-age village arranged in a tight, protective circle. In the very centre, glowing like a communal campfire, the lights of the pub were lit against the unfriendly forces of the night.

The place Pipe had brought me to was no more than a small crop of spindly trees growing in a deep crevice in the hillside. Pipe and I descended while Snap looked down on us with the expression of one who knows a pointless exercise when he sees one.

"This," Pipe said, jumping down the last two feet or so, leaving me to pick my way daintily to the bottom,"Is a place with no name. Once upon a time it was known as The Crag, but these days nobody calls it anything."

"What was it for?" I asked. I was more interested in the darkening sky than the motley crew of skeletal trees growing out of a ditch in the hill.

"Oh, what's anything for, Robert? It's just a place. Not even a place really, more like a feature."

We tread carefully along the length of the rocky crevice and climbed out the other side.

"It's nearly dark," Pipe said. There was an undercurrent of alarm in his voice."Best get off the hills pretty sharpish. Night rolls in like a fast tide out here."

He wasn't wrong. By the time we had walked back to the Dobson house the hills behind us were as black as lumps of coal.

***********************

There were more than half a dozen women in Mary Dobson's kitchen, though Mary wasn't one of them. Their expectant eyes waited for news.

"No sight," Pipe said."Any tea?"

"We're just making some fresh," Lucy Dixon said. She was standing by the stove beside my mother. On the sink a regiment of cups were lined up and waiting.

"The dog could do with a bowl of water," Pipe added. He eased his weight onto a chair with a small groan. I wondered if he was as tired as I was."Where's Mary?"

"Upstairs," my mother told him. She smiled faintly at me as if only just registering my arrival.

"Is she sleeping?"

"No. She's reading."

"Reading?" Pipe looked suddenly confused when Lucy Dixon put a tumbler of water on the table in front of him.

"I could put a drop of peppermint cordial in that," Lucy said brightly."Pep it up a bit."

"For the dog," Pipe said heavily."A bowl of water for the dog, Lucy."

"Oh," Lucy said, and giggled into her hand."Sorry, Pipe." She took the glass away and filled a pudding bowl with water. Snap danced around her feet, his tongue hanging limply from the corner of his mouth.

"She's sitting up in bed with a pile of Anita's school books. She's reading all the poems Anita wrote in school."

Pipe looked blankly at my mother and then nodded.

In the next hour all but two of the men returned with the same empty news. The teapot was kept busy as people dropped in on their way to the pub or because they didn't know what else to do with themselves. Finally, at a little past ten-fifteen, Tim and Paul Dunnel came into the kitchen. An overspill of anxious faces appeared at the doorway dividing the kitchen from the sitting room.

A unified sigh of disappointment greeted their news. The Dunnels had ridden across the moors to Derrington, Winterstone, Dearlove and Precious, stopping at every isolated farmhouse and cottage along the way. Everybody was concerned but nobody could offer anything but help. Anita was still missing.

"There's plenty of volunteers willing to kick off in the morning," Tim said. He looked around the room and shrugged helplessly."I told everyone to meet here at first light."

"First light?"

It was Alf Dobson. Until now he had been sitting at the table nursing a cup of strong tea with brandy in it, seemingly removed from the clutter of people and their strange, subdued conversation. Now he raised his head with a kind of alert surprise.

"Why first light?"

"Well, you know..." Tim groped for a delicate way of phrasing what he had to say."It's dark out there, Alf."

"All the more reason to keep on searching!" Alf's voice grew angry and upset. He looked wildly at Pipe."Tell me I'm not wrong, Pipe!"

"Alf, listen," Pipe began, but Alf wasn't listening.

"My baby girl's lost out there!" he cried in a tearful, disbelieving voice."She needs us! We can't all just go to bed and forget about her!"

Some people looked at the walls or looked at each other, in fact anywhere to avoid Alf Dobson's accusing, desperate eyes. Those who could bare to face him did so with deep, aching pity.

"Some of us can look through the night," Pipe said at last. Alf turned his head and looked at him silently, his eyes now full of confused, angry grief."The rest need to be fit and fine for tomorrow. People are tired now, and there's likely to be an accident if we all go trawling through the dark without getting ourselves organised."

"But..."

"Anita's fine," Pipe said soothingly."She's camped out before now hasn't she?"

Alf thought for a moment."Well, she has, but-"

"There you go," Pipe said in that same calm, reassuring voice."In the morning we'll get everyone together - and I mean everyone. Tim and Paul can round up the farmers. Mike Bronson can toddle off into town to drag the Old Bill out of the pub, and you can go fetch some of your mates from the quarry."

Alf sighed and nodded his head."I suppose you're right." He straightened his back all of a sudden. There was a determination about him that not even Pipe Younger would try to argue or hypnotise into a more yielding state."But if you think I'm going to sit in this kitchen all night you've got another thing coming."

"You can look all you want," Pipe said smoothly."Plenty of friends here to help you, Alf."

The people around him made encouraging noises. Alf smiled dimly. His eyes were filling up with water.

"The big search starts tomorrow," Pipe went on. The pitch of his voice had changed subtly; he was addressing everyone now."I'll call and see Mike Bronson tonight. If Anita doesn't come back in the night it will mean she's been missing long enough for a proper search to begin. An official search, I mean. In the meantime, Alf, there's something I want you to do."

Alf put the tips of his thumb and forefinger in the hollow of his eyes and laughed dryly."Don't tell me to get some sleep, Pipe. I won't sleep until Anita's home."

"I want you to find some pictures of Anita. Photographs. And have some of her clothes ready for when people show up tomorrow. Something from the wash-basket."

Alf lowered his hand and looked uncomprehendingly at Pipe."Why out of the wash basket?"

Pipe then did something which I had never seen one man do to another, and which I never thought I would see despite the rugged honesty that exists in the hearts of people whose lives are built amongst hills and stone. He reached over the table and squeezed Alf Dobson's hand.

"For the dogs, Alf," he said.

**********************

I walked home with my mother and father. For a treat I was allowed into the Straw Man, which landlord Giles 'Sharp' Needles had thoughtfully kept open for those who might need a drink or the simple company of friends.

My father had a small rum, my mother a glass of milk stout. I drank a glass of warm milk which Sharp made in the kitchen and brought to our table.

There were more than a dozen people drinking after hours. All the talk was about Anita Dobson. Everyone seemed too eager to offer optimism. They wondered where she was rather than what might have happened to her.

Aloud, that is. Their eyes though held something like failure and despair.

We didn't stay long in the pub. My father was game for another small rum but my mother nudged him out of his chair and back to the shop.

I was tucked into bed that night for the first time in as long as I could remember. My mother carried out the task with brisk, fretting insistence. It was still sort of nice.

She kissed me warmly on the forehead and watched me in the dark for a long, long time. When she went out I began to drift off to sleep almost immediately. Five minutes later I was jolted awake when she marched back into the room and closed the window with a forceful tug.

**************************

The night was hot and sultry but each time I woke and looked blearily at the closed window I felt a greater need drawing me back to sleep.

I tried to dream the answers to this strange summer's smouldering mystery. I couldn't. There were answers waiting for me down there - or maybe one last, terrifying conclusion - but they hid behind tall grass like tigers.

And each time I woke in the night, stifled, suffocating in the muggy heat of my bedroom, I tried to bring a little rationality to the situation.

Instead, what surfaced in my mind was the story of Little Red Riding Hood.

I tried to push the images away, insisting on a realistic, logical examination of the facts with frustrated persistence, but the images were all too real to dismiss.

All too possible.

Anita Dobson went to the woods to pick blackberries and never came back again. Perhaps she fell and was this very minute lying unconscious under a tree or in one of those deep pits, her little tin bucket upside down beside her, berries scattered on the ground.

Or perhaps she met a wolf and was lured deeper into the woods, where the berries were juicier and sweeter.

Then devoured.

EIGHT

I was awake and dressed before first light. My mother was making busy noises in the kitchen so I went downstairs and waited with my father for the man who delivered the Sunday papers. My father smoked a cigar. He smoked two cigars on Sundays, the first in the morning and the second after lunch.

It was a warm, peaceful dawn. The birds were just beginning to stir the silence with their twittery jazz, and a band of flame was growing in the eastern sky.

"Red sky at morning..."

"Shepherd's house is on fire," I finished, and we both smiled absently. They were the first words we had spoken since saying good morning some ten minutes earlier. We might not speak again for another ten minutes but neither of us was the type to search for meaningless conversation simply to fill the gaps. At least not in each other's company anyway. We were too alike, and one only spoke to oneself when one was crackers.

When the delivery man arrived my father informed him of Anita Dobson's disappearance. It was news the delivery man would impart at every stop on his route and over breakfast at the depot. The people he told would then tell others, and so and so on until the news was travelling round and round like electricity through a circuit.

Peter Molem and his spunky wife, Mavis, wandered into the shop as we were setting out the papers. Their arrival was no surprise as we had been listening to the rumble of their tractor for about five minutes. Mavis always drove the tractor, unless she had drunk too much, in which case Peter was given the honour of driving her home.

"Morning, lads," Mavis greeted. Being it a Sunday she was wearing her best overalls and headscarf.

"Morning," we all intoned, Peter included.

"I'm not talking to you, sheep's arse," Mavis told him. She spoke with a kind of exasperated affection."I was talking to the lads."

"I suppose you've heard about Anita?" my father said. He was never comfortable around Mavis and Peter. Give him one or the other and he was fine, but the pair of them together offended his slightly stuffy sense of propriety. Even his relationship with my mother, especially in public, was never completely free of formality.

"We heard," Mavis answered."Shame. Awful. I hope nothing's happened to the little twit."

My father's eyes widened. Mavis grinned guiltily.

"Well she is a twit. Isn't she a twit, Robert?"

It was my turn to wear the guilty grin. Anita was a twit as it happened. She came in the shop every pocket-money day to buy girls' comics and sweets. This in itself didn't make her a twit, but the fact that she could talk with breathless enthusiasm about ponies and ankle bracelets probably did. And when she wasn't talking about things like that she walked around in the kind of dreamy, blissful state of a girl who was thinking of things like ponies and ankle bracelets and endless summers of adventure with middle-class, goody-goody friends who rode bicycles and had picnic lunches. As a result she was always a bit lost and a bit late.

Suddenly this didn't seem so amusing. It brought home to me in distressingly clear fashion the fact that we weren't searching for a missing toy or even a child from another village. It was Anita we were looking for, silly Anita whose shins I once kicked hard for no other reason than cold-blooded curiosity ( it made her cry, as I suspected, but driven by a mixture of fear and guilt I followed her home from school making grovelling apologies until finally, at the gate, she agreed not to tell anyone what I had done. And how bad did the memory of her grubby, tearful face nodding up and down make me feel right then, do you think? ). It was the same silly Anita who was so absurdly proud of the silver ankle bracelet she got for her last birthday she refused to wear socks outside school, the same silly Anita who was going to be a bridesmaid and wouldn't stop yapping on about how pretty she would look in her new dress, and who, ridiculously, claimed that Cliff Richard was better than Elvis.

I knew her. She was, I guess, for all intents and purposes, a friend of mine. All at once I felt like crying for her.

"It's still not nice," my father was telling Mavis Molem."And I wouldn't let Alf Dobson hear you speak about his daughter that way."

"What?" Mavis looked insulted."Do you think I'm as daft as him or what?" She cocked a thumb in her husband's direction.

"All I'm saying-"

"Ah, shut up and put the kettle on," Mavis said. She picked up a newspaper and turned to the sports pages.

The four of us ate breakfast upstairs while my mother opened the shop. Half an hour later we were at Pipe Younger's house. My father carried an enormous bag of sandwiches which my mother had prepared in case anyone got hungry during the search.

Mavis pounded on Pipe's door with her fist. I heard something clatter to the floor and break inside the house. A moment later Pipe opened the door, his white shirt only half buttoned.

"What the bloody hell was that all about?" he seethed, glaring at Mavis."You made me jump a frigging mile!"

Mavis shrugged."I don't know. I thought you might be a bit deaf."

"A bit..."

"Well Peter's dad is," Mavis said, unflustered by Pipe's belligerent mood."The two of you are about the same age."

Pipe was too incredulous to be really angry."Peter's dad's got a wooden leg. Doesn't mean I've got one."

"Look, are you ready, Pipe?"

"I was ready!" Pipe leaned forward, his teeth bared. Mavis drew back a step."But now I've got to clean up a broken plate."

The door slammed shut. Mavis turned and looked at us with raised eyebrows."Charming," she said.

I rode to the Dobson house in the trailer of Mavis Molem's tractor. Peter Molem walked with my father and Pipe Younger, glad of some male company, I expect. The tractor wasn't particularly fast but we did reach the house a few minutes before the others. About twenty people were already waiting for us, mostly men. A few were holding stocky little terriers on leashes.

"Gosh, look at 'em all," I heard Mavis say to herself. It sounded a lot like she was only just beginning to appreciate the gravity of the situation.

It was light now. The sky was rosy pink and pastel blue with strands of wispy white cloud. I could see seven or eight figures making their way down from the hills, a couple of sheepdogs racing rings around them.

"Were all this lot here yesterday?" Mavis asked, speaking loudly above the put-put-put of the tractor's engine.

"Not all of them. Brian, Spider, Ray Dixon...a few others."

Mavis parked the tractor and climbed into the trailer as I jumped out.

I couldn't see Alf or Mary Dobson among the small crowd of people gathered outside the house, but the front door was open and there was movement inside. Lucy Dixon came out carrying a tray of teacups that was speedily picked clean by the hands of those nearest. As Lucy was heading back inside the petit figure of Sally Vest, farting Brian's unlikely wife, came out holding a tray similarly loaded with cups and pots of tea. I was reminded of the little figures on Swiss clocks.

"What's that for?"

The voice belonged to Wilf Harbuckle. Wilf's gang of teddy boys had terrorised the local Mecca until the night a bunch of farmers formed a gang of their own and made the dance floor run with greasy blood. Since then the famous fight had become something of a contemporary myth which grew a little more daring and gruesome with every telling. Personally, I was more inclined to believe the version in which a franetic scrap had erupted and ceased again before Pat Boone had finished singing Ain't That A Shame. Although I was convinced by the rumour that half the alleged farmers involved were really coppers in flat caps.

Wilf, dressed in black drainpipe trousers and a plain white shirt, was walking my way but didn't appear to be talking to me. I looked over my shoulder and saw Mavis climbing out of the tractor trailer. She was carrying a shotgun, the barrels broken over the crook of her elbow.

"Just in case," Mavis said.

Wilf stopped and peered interestedly at the shotgun."In case of what?"

"Just in case," Mavis repeated archly."Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it."

Wilf nodded approvingly. He glanced furtively over both shoulders and then patted his front pocket."I've got The Cobra with me...just in case."

The Cobra was Wilf's flick-knife. According to which version of the Wilf Harbuckle legend you believed, The Cobra had either been used to slice a tramline down the cheek of one of the fake farmers in the infamous Mecca battle, or was confiscated by Wilf's father when he caught Wilf carving his initials on the bottom of a dining chair. If the latter was true then Wilf had secretly liberated it from wherever his father had hidden it.

Or not, as the case may be, because I never actually saw The Cobra that day. Wilf may have had nothing but a hole in his pocket for all I knew. Even if he was carrying the knife, and was about to take it out to prove it, he quickly changed his mind when Pipe Younger arrived.

"Oi! Put that away!"

Everyone looked around, startled by the anger in Pipe's voice. Pipe was marching three paces ahead of my father and Peter Molem ( together with five others who had joined them along the way), his eyes fixed very firmly on Mavis.

Wilf took his chance to slide away unnoticed. I doubted he would draw attention to The Cobra - be it real or not - for some time to come.

Pipe looked madder than a chef. As old as he was, I doubted there was a man here who would dare to stand in his way. It would have been like trying to stop cattle.

"I said put that away, you stupid mare!" Pipe came to a halt a few feet from Mavis, who was staring at him with a flustered anger of her own.

"Don't you tell me what to do with-"

"Is that thing loaded?"

Mavis gave a withered sigh."Of course it isn't loaded, you stupid old pig. I know enough about guns not to put shells in one until I'm ready to shoot something."

"If you knew enough about guns, lady, you'd know not to carry one at all."

There was a mutter of agreement from some of the people who had drifted close to the row. Mavis looked around for support and tightened her defences when none was forthcoming.

"Look, Pipe, whether I carry a shotgun or not is none of your business."

"I think it is, young lady. I think it's my business because I'm making it my business."

Mavis let out an incredulous, high-pitched laugh."And who died and made you the lawman?"

"I'll make a deal with you," Pipe said in a casually threatening manner."You put that shotgun back where you got it from and I won't show all these fellas what I did to you that time I caught you nicking bonfire wood from my store when you was eleven."

There were plenty of sniggers from the men. I didn't know what Pipe was talking about put most of the people here did, none more so than Mavis. She glared at Pipe, her face flushed with sour, indignant rage.

"You-"

"Don't say I'm too old, lass," Pipe warned, again in an almost friendly yet menacing way."And don't say I wouldn't dare either, because you'll be wrong on both accounts."

Mavis made a noise in the back of her throat, a kind of strangled scream of sheer frustration.

"I hate you," she hissed. She pushed past the old man, daring to give him a slight nudge with her shoulder, and put the shotgun back in the trailer. Pipe was grinning behind her back. Most of the men who grinned back soon stopped when Mavis returned to the group, her face set into a mask of sulky anger.

"Now then," Pipe said, clapping his hands together. The clap gave him the immediate attention of everyone around him, like a teacher hushing a class of chattering kids."We're not going to do anything until the bobbies get here. So just make yourselves comfortable and be patient."

"Have you told the police then?" my father asked.

"Alf and me went to Mike's place late last night. He got the inspector out of bed."

Brian Vest, drinking tea from a pint mug, looked staggered."Mike and the inspector were-"

Mavis groaned and shook her head at Brian."He means he called him on the telephone, bad-arse."

"Oh, aye," Brian said, and gaffawed loudly."Course he did."

**********************

The police arrived about half an hour after Pipe had gone into the house to speak with Alf and Mary Dobson. The small convoy of three squad cars and a black maria was headed by Mike's Land Rover. The sight of them parading importantly up Cinder Road filled me with a dramatic sense of apprehension.

Everyone stopped talking. By now there was, at a guess, about sixty or so people gathered outside the Dobson house, not including those ( mostly women ) waiting inside.

I thought back to when I discovered the restraining straps hanging from the outhouse door at Benny's place, and the strange feelings of despair and loneliness which had overcome me when I finally discovered the holes in my safety net were big enough to slip through. Something similar was happening to the people here. They had lived through a great war - some of them, like Pipe, through more than one - but to most of them Hitler had never been much more than a fearsome cartoon character. Even those whose brothers and fathers and uncles had been killed in action accepted their loss with a kind of confused agreeableness. It was war, and everything was within the rules.

This was different. This was a dark omen, a sign that evil was among us. People look back and talk about how times have changed. That day we actually saw the hands of the clock move. It was the beginning of the end of an era. Nationally it was the Moors Murders that were responsible for a shift in attitudes, but in West Gelder the murder of a little girl whose name is remembered only in the prayers and nightmares of those who knew her changed things forever.

Three or four policemen got out of each car. The local inspector, a delicate man with penny glasses who looked like someone from the copper works wages office, got out of the car directly behind Mike's Land Rover, plonking a cap on top of his bald head as he closed the door. A big sergeant with a thick moustache emerged from the driver's side.

A constable opened the rear doors of the black maria, freeing another six policemen and their German shepherd dogs; the policemen looked friendly enough but the dogs were obviously keen to bite something.

The dogs caused a low rumble of uneasiness to spread through the small crowd of onlookers. This was more to do with what they represented than any fears they might have about being bitten.

The last person to climb out of the black maria was a female constable. She was well-built and starchy looking, the type of woman you could imagine at the safe end of a hyperdermic needle.

Those who had been inside the house were now coming out. Alf and Mary Dobson were possibly the last to emerge. They were holding hands; they looked somehow shrunken and fragile and not quite there, as if they were under a spell that diminished them with every hour their daughter remained missing.

Mike Bronson whispered something in the inspector's ear. The inspector looked directly at Alf and Mary.

"You need pointers for a search like this," Mavis Molem said from the side of her mouth."You need an animal that can sniff things out. Shepherds are all muscle and no brain."

The inspector went over to Alf and Mary. He shook hands with both, holding Mary's hand in his while he spoke some words of comfort. Mary smiled faintly but I got the impression that she wasn't really listening to him, only hearing the low, soothing tone of his voice without understanding the words. Again I was struck by her youth.

After speaking with the big sergeant, the inspector accompanied a small group which included the Dobsons, Mike Bronson and Pipe Younger back into the house. When they were inside, the door closed behind them, the sergeant called everyone to attention. He had one of those voices that come with the stripes, one where you could almost hear the words you 'orrible rabble at the end of every sentence.

"Right, listen up," he began. He clasped his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels, waiting for everyone to listen up, which they were doing anyway. His eyes roamed the group, picking out potential fidgeters and troublemakers and making sure they knew they were being watched."The inspector is currently speaking with Mr and Mrs Dobson. It's all routine police business and doesn't concern any of you until the inspector says so. If anyone has anything they wish to tell the inspector they can tell it to me first. The inspector is a very busy man."

Mavis leaned towards me and whispered,"He's busy inspecting things."

"Now then, we'll get things organised in due time, but for now I want everyone to stay as they are. You've all been very good, very patient, and the inspector would be grateful if you would all bare with us a while longer."

There was a lone mutter of dissent in the ranks. I caught the last three words only: ...doing that already.

The sergeant's head turned neatly to his left while his shoulders remained square. That was something else you could only do in a sergeant's uniform.

"Something on your mind, laddy?" he asked in the same tone of voice Pipe Younger had used to warn Mavis of the consequences of carrying a shotgun in public.

The laddy in question was Wilf Harbuckle, who suddenly looked less like an arrogant delinquent and more like a ten year old boy signalled out by the head teacher for doing something disgusting in assembly. And apparently there was nothing on his mind, because Wilf's lips remained shut.

"Stand easy then," the sergeant said, addressing the whole group again. He walked back to his colleagues whistling a tune I recognised as Ain't That A Shame.

***********************

Benny showed up just as the inspector gathered everyone together outside the front gate of the Dobson house. Alf was there but Mary remained inside with the women who had delegated themselves the responsibility of providing an endless supply of tea and sympathy. Needless to say Mavis Molem wasn't making tea for anyone.

"Everyone stand very still!" the inspector called above the chatter.

That's when I noticed Benny. He was the only figure moving, pushing his way through a crowd that was possibly more than a hundred strong, holding up his trousers with one hand while nudging bodies with the other. His hair was a mess and his face dirty and sunburnt.

I was grinning long before he reached me and thumped me a friendly greeting on the shoulder.

"Seen all the coppers?" he said excitedly."Man, I've never seen this many!"

I agreed enthusiastically."I know! It's like a film!"

"The inspector wants your lips to stand still as well, lads," a pleasantly menacing voice over my shoulder informed us. I glanced around and saw the big sergeant looming behind us, his moustache twitching. For the time being we said no more.

"One of my men is doing a head count," the inspector went on."Please don't confuse things by moving around. I just need a general idea of how many we are."

As he spoke I noticed one of the constables moving through the crowd, touching backs and shoulders as he counted them off. Behind him was another policeman who casually arranged those who had been counted into tight groups consisting of seven or eight people. The task was completed with extraordinary efficiency. The two policemen made the job seem as easy as counting a flock of passive sheep.

"A hundred and twelve!" the counting policeman called out.

He was wrong. Ignoring those who might join us at any time, we numbered a hundred and fourteen. I was certain that Benny and I hadn't been counted, and nor had we been herded into one of the small groups. We had either been missed or simply dismissed. It didn't matter to me. We were now free to wander wherever we chose, seeing without being seen, like spies.

"Ladies and gentlemen..." The inspector hesitated until he had the attention of everyone."We have a missing child. her name, as I'm sure you are all aware, is Anita Dobson. She is eleven years old, four-feet ten inches tall, fair skin, freckles, light brown hair tied in a pony tail. She is known to be wearing a sky-blue dress with a matching ribbon in her hair, black shoes with no socks, and..." He coughed and stalled briefly."...and white knickers but no vest. It is possible that she may have been carrying a small tin bucket of the kind used for collecting berries. These are some of the things we should be looking out for."

This statement was greeted with a ripple of edgy whispers. The inspector held up his hand for quiet.

"Alf and Mary Dobson are aware of the circumstances. Obviously we all want to find Anita alive and well, but she has been missing for more than eighteen hours. Therefore I would ask you not to overlook small details." The inspector took a deep breath, obviously searching for a clear yet sensitive way of putting his point across. His voice came back quieter, more solemn."What I mean is, we may well be looking for clues which may be of value in a less immediate sense, such as articles of clothing. It is vital that anything you may come across is left exactly where you find it. Inform one of the police officers but try to avoid disturbing the area.

"The moors are being covered by the members of the York Rambling Society. A bus is bringing them in later this morning. I've also informed the R.A.F., and if resources are available I hope to begin an air search at some point this afternoon."

Benny shot me a sly grin, which I returned. Grave though the circumstances were, the possibility of seeing Whirlwind helicopters flying over the village was an exciting distraction.

"The rest of us - that's everyone assembled here - will concentrate our efforts on the woods and surrounding fields. We will adopt the spread search method, using three ranks in order that every possible area of ground is covered meticulously. Try to remember the group you have been assigned to. Each group will have a group leader - a police officer - and it will be his job to co-ordinate with the other groups. Don't try to do his job for him. Don't wander off on your own, and don't drift into another group just because your mate happens to be in that one. We have divided the search area into sections, or Grids if you prefer. We know which is which and what is what, so you don't need to. All you have to do is stay in your groups. And you people with dogs of your own had better keep them on the leash if you don't want them eaten by police dogs."

It was time for the search to begin. We were sectioned into three large groups of roughly thirty five people, each group consisting of four of the smaller teams we had first been assigned to. The search as a whole was termed The Unit.

I say we but Benny and I weren't really part of it, at least not in an official sense.

"Nobody notices kids," Benny said. He didn't sound insulted by any means."We might as well be ghosts."

"Or spies," I said.

"That's why nobody saw Anita, you know. If she had been an adult it would have been different."

We attached ourselves to the group containing Pipe Younger and my father. We were the first line, and already beginning to move under the orders of the big sergeant. Nobody had told us exactly where we were going. We simply marched when told. I had a bizarre urge to sing out Hi-ho!

"What do you mean?" I asked.

Benny nodded at the body of the group, all adults, all people we knew.

"If Pipe Younger took a walk and never came back, everyone who saw him would remember. They'd say 'oh, yeah, I saw Pipe in the woods about three hours ago,' but if you and me did the same thing people would just think we'd turned invisible all of a sudden. There one minute," - he snapped his fingers - "Gone the next."

I wasn't sure I agreed with that. I mean, if you happened to be scrumping for instance, say from a tree you weren't supposed to touch, someone was bound to notice you.

"Not true," Benny said adamantly."They'd notice a kid climbing the tree, that's all. They'd shout-"

"I know your mam!" I squealed in the voice of a bitter old crone. Benny giggled madly, which set me off. As if proving my point - or Benny's point - a few heads turned and regarded us with absent disapproval.

"They wouldn't notice which kid was stealing their apples, I bet," Benny said, lowering his voice a little."Not unless they were really..."

"Bastards?"

Benny sniggered with flushing, guilty hilarity."Determined, I meant to say. Like the Frudd sisters. They'll sit at the window all day and night to stop anyone getting their hands on those big tomatoes they grow."

If anyone knew that it would be Benny of course. Benny didn't scrounge or find every meal he ate - he also stole like a cheeky sea gull.

"The Frudd sisters want to know who you are so they can report you to Mike Bronson, but most people don't see kids at all."

We reached Tennamons Lane. There was a few minutes of bustle and confusion while the sergeant and two other coppers tried to work out where to begin. One of them had an Ordinance Survey map but didn't appear to know how to read it. Eventually Pipe came to their rescue.

We were told to spread out in a straight line facing the fields, leaving a distance of about ten feet between you and the next man. Benny and I stood practically side by side.

"Gawd, look how far we go!" Benny gasped, leaning out to look up and down the ranks.

It was about four hundred feet, give or take a yard. Not a great distance by train but a long way to queue for your ticket.

The other group were coming up behind us. They looked like a rabble of militia compared to our disciplined rank.

The big sergeant issued a number of instruction, such as how fast to walk, where to keep your eyes, etc. It was all pretty basic common sense stuff but nobody pointed that out to him. Everyone was then issued with a whistle.

This seems amusing when you consider that practically everyone over the age of fifteen now carries a mobile phone and can chat to perverts on the other side of the world through their home computers, but when Anita Dobson went missing there were just two telephones in the village, one in the pub and one in the police station. Moreover the local force was small and poorly equipped, so I suppose we were lucky to have whistles.

Benny got a whistle. He just stuck out his hand as the policeman was dishing them out. I don't think the policeman even realised as he went along the line handing out whistles like a school monitor dishing pencils.

"They must have, like, millions of whistles," Benny noted."I mean, who'd expect that?"

"Expect what?"

"Who'd expect to find a hundred and twelve whistles right when you needed them?"

He had an interesting point.

"Might be left over from the war," I mused."I think they used them in air raids."

"They had sirens," Benny said doubtfully.

"Only in the towns. Not out here they didn't."

Benny nodded."Still...a hundred and twelve whistles is a lot of whistles."

Couldn't argue with that.

"Maybe a whistle factory got bombed."

We found this inexplicably hilarious. I was still laughing when I noticed a devilish glint in Benny's eye.

"I wonder what would happen if I blew it right now..."

I stopped laughing and glanced nervously at the big sergeant, who was inspecting the rank for slovenliness, his hands clasped behind his back.

"Don't you dare."

"It might not work," Benny insisted."I'll just test it-" He put the whistle to his lips and drew a breath. I grabbed his hand and pulled it away sharply, laughing in that terrified way of someone who feels the ice splintering beneath their feet.

"One blast on the whistle means stop where you are," the big sergeant told everyone. His voice carried without needing to be raised much."If you hear a single blast, it will be me or one of my colleagues ordering you all to stand still. Got that?"

"Yessar!" Benny snapped - in a whisper, naturally.

"Nobody else is to use the single-blast signal. We don't want to confuse things, do we now?"

More than a few people were already confused judging by the exchange of puzzled looks. Yesterday it had all been so straight forward. A girl was missing and a few fellas went out to look for her. Now there were signals and whistles and groups and sub-groups. It was all out of our hands.

"If you find something of interest, give three short sharp blasts of your whistle...one, two, three. Then pause for a few seconds, and repeat the sequence again until you have the attention of a police officer." The sergeant rocked on his heels, his watchful eyes roaming the rank."Remember, this is a whistle, not a French horn. I don't want to hear any budding Mozarts or songs from the hit parade."

Just for a moment the sergeant, whose name I never did find out, let his guard down. He said something that made me wonder, just for a moment, if he had a family and how all of this was affecting him.

"To be honest, lads, I'd rather not hear one bloody whistle going off."

************************

The search got under way. It was much different from the day before, when all we were looking out for was Anita's silly ponytail bobbing up and down as she made her way home. Now we were searching the fields and the undergrowth, rooting through every blade of grass and turning every rock.

The morning was hot and steaming. A whitish sun shone behind the cover of hazy cloud.

Hardly anyone was speaking. Benny and I had chatted at first, mostly about what was going on around us, but it was only when we fell silent, beginning to tire in the prickly heat, that we noticed how quiet the rest were.

Our group covered the entire length of a field, while the second group stretched across the next field. Group three were spread thinner behind us, covering both fields at the same time, scanning ground already searched to minimise the risk of missing a vital clue.

"Do you think we'll find her?" Benny asked me.

I shook my head gravely. Benny seemed affected by this.

"I wonder what it feels like," he said.

"What?"

"Dying. I wonder what dying feels like."

"It depends on how you die, I suppose."

We walked some more, heads down, my neck and back starting to ache. I hoped I didn't find anything. I didn't know what my reaction would be if I trod on the ribbon Anita had worn in her hair. I think part of me was still holding out for a satisfactory ending. Not a happy ending, because I wasn't stupid enough to think that Anita had been playing hide and seek for twenty hours, but something along the lines of a fading screen would do. I wanted someone to come along and say it was all over, and now we could go back to normal. Without Anita of course, but normal in every other sense.

"I was looking everywhere for you yesterday," I said after a while. This wasn't a spontaneous question. Naturally it was the first question on my mind when I saw him at the start of the search. I didn't ask straight away for two reason.

Firstly, I was so pleased to see him. Benny was my friend, and when he wasn't around I was lonely. Secondly, I was afraid that he might become defensive and feed more meat to the hungry paranoid suspicions that had tailed me throughout the long, hot day before.

I hoped desperately that this question was unimportant, but the longer he went without answering, the longer he avoided my eyes, the more frightened and hopeless I felt.

Eventually he did look at me. It was just for a second or two, with a small, flickering smile.

"I had to stay in," he said. He lowered his head and continued to walk, flat-footed, diligent, eyes scanning the ground at his feet.

"Stay in?" I said. I felt the knot inside me loosen a little.

Benny nodded."You know, my dad made me stay in."

"Why?"

He looked at me again. This time his eyes stayed with mine. In them I saw something crippled and wounded but still fighting, something scratching in the dust that would not die.

"He doesn't need a reason, Robert. He just does things. He didn't need to kill my cat and my dog but he did. There was this other time..."

Benny broke off and stared dejectedly at his feet. A moment later he was humming the song Chain Gang in a buzzy, discordant tone, and I knew for the time being I had lost him.

Like Benny, I retreated into my own thoughts.

************************

We were in the woods when he next spoke to me. The group had been told to stop and take a break. The line had become straggled and irregular in spite of everyone's good intentions. Furthermore it became apparent that we had inadvertently strayed into the area being searched by another group, and vice versa. As a result some of the inspector's Grids had been searched twice and others not at all.

A police constable came around with a bag of apples. I took one and bit a large chunk out of it. The apple itself was slightly sour but the moisture of the juices made my tastebuds scream out in pleasure. By the time I had taken a second bite Benny had gnawed his own apple down to the core. His teeth were still beavering away though, determined to strip every last edible sliver until there was nothing left but the pips and a finger-thick core.

"Do you want mine?" I said."Bit sour for me."

Benny took the apple from my hand and went to work on it, pausing once to grin his gratitude. When he finished he wiped the juice from his mouth with the back of his hand.

"I could plant this," he said, holding an apple core up to his face."And in so many years it would be a tree, just like all these trees here. You know, all these trees used to be pips and acorns and seeds. Once they could fit in the palm of your hand, and now you can sit in their branches. Then someone will come along one day and cut one down to make your coffin."

I was aware of that, yet I must have been blind to the wonder of it until Benny opened my eyes. It was a revelation, a truly spiritual thing for me. For an instant I saw the miracle, the great wheel turning in all its sorrow and joy, and I accepted a calm, unfearing possibility that God, as I knew him, might not exist; and instead that all of this used to be trees and would always be trees, growing and dying, strangling and sacrificing, reaching for the sun.

"You saw them, didn't you?"

I was jolted out of my thoughts. Benny was gazing at me.

"Saw what?"

"The straps," he said, closing his eyes briefly against the torment of some awful memory."The straps in the outhouse. You saw them."

I nodded. Benny smiled sadly and dropped the apple core to the ground. He raked leaves over it with the toe of his battered shoe.

"I knew you would. I knew it as soon as I sent you out there but it was too late by then."

"I didn't tell anyone. I didn't even tell my mother."

"I know," he said softly."We're mates."

Benny unfastened the buttons on his shirt sleeves and rolled them up to his elbow. Then he held his arms out to me, palms up.

Across each of his white wrists was a faint red band like a single strip of suntanned skin. Roughly in the centre of each was a small blue bruise where the buckles must have pinched the flesh.

"That's why you couldn't find me yesterday," he said, rolling down his sleeves to cover the marks."I was hanging around at my place."

***********************

I felt an enormous sense of relief sweep over me like bright sunlight. I wasn't simply smiling - I was beaming. Benny must have thought I was amused by his gallows humour and smiled back at me.

Around us people were rising to their feet, brushing debris from their trousers, crushing out cigarettes. The sergeant came along and pushed everyone into some semblance of the regimented line we had begun the search as.

"As you were!" he called out. Many people were hidden by trees and shrubs or were much lower down from the rest in the bottom of bell pits, which is why the sergeant was shouting, I guess."That means as you were before you stopped for a break, you fatheads!"

The search party moved forward, treading ponderously across the woodland carpet like slow-moving insects. The predominant sound was the snackling, crunching of feet breaking sticks like millions of tiny bones. Most people had picked up fallen branches with which to poke among the doc and nettles, while others were using their own crook-handled walking canes.

The inspector's advice had been taken a little too literally in my book. The search was advancing, all be it tenderly, but I had the feeling that some people had grown bored of the tedium and were simply going through the motions of searching. Others were searching so painstakingly they looked like people trying to read very tiny print. I had a vision of Anita standing right in front of us and the whole search party plodding straight past her because nobody had been told to look up now and again.

I froze as a panting German shepherd dog shaved the backs of my legs. The dog was dragging a policeman behind it.

I looked at Benny, who had also halted ( so had the three men to our immediate right and left ) and we shared a nervous grin. The police dog handlers had their own brief, which apparently included putting the shits up everyone from time to time. I had seen three or four so far, zig-zagging back and forth without any obvious direction in my mind. I suppose I may have even seen the same dog dragging the same man three or four times.

"They should use bloodhounds or spaniels for that," Benny noted as we walked on.

"That's what Mavis reckoned," I said."Well, she reckoned shepherds were useless in any case."

"Lucky was a good sniffer dog."

I nodded. We smiled at Lucky's memory.

"Hey!" I said, grabbing Benny's arm in sudden panic."What if someone finds him?"

"They won't," he said confidently."The dogs won't find him because the woods are full of dead animals. They'll have Anita's scent from somewhere."

"Clothes from the wash basket," I said, shivering a little."That's what Pipe told Alf to give to the police."

"Then that's the scent they're chasing."

"But what if one of us finds him?"

Benny hardly considered this possibility before dismissing it.

"They won't disturb him. I know it. Besides, everything that dies here goes back to the woods."

"What do you..." I suddenly saw what he meant and didn't bother to finish the question. At the same time I thought about what Pipe had told me last night. Was Benny's mother part of the woods now? She would have been buried in the church cemetery of course, but she had died in the woods all the same.

And Benny had been born here. I wondered if that was why he felt so safe and secure and at home in the woods.

"Benny, what happened to your mother?"

"She died when I was a baby," he said."Why?"

I shrugged."How did she die?"

"She just got poorly, my dad said."

Unless he was lying, which I didn't believe, he really didn't know that his mother had given birth to him under a tree and then hanged herself from one of its branches. This led me to wonder why he should feel the tug of the woods so strongly if it had nothing to do with the things he knew about his mother.

I didn't have to think too hard about that one. It was because Eleanor's ghost was here. Not some wailing, white-sheeted ghosty from a comic book, and not even the pale, shimmering figure from a victorian ghost story. What drew Benny here was a nameless yearning, a ghost in his heart.

This didn't make me afraid. Far from it. If something of Eleanor remained in these woods it was a residue of her warmth and love. It felt good to know that a mother's love could never end, that it was always there long after the physical bond between a mother and child had been broken.

"My dad used to talk about her a lot," Benny said in a quiet, pensive little voice."He wasn't always like he is now. When he first started getting drunk a lot he was sort of funny and sad. He would come home from the pub and wake me up. Then he'd sit on the end of my bed and tell me things."

"What sort of things?"

"Just stuff," Benny said with a vague shrug."Can't really remember now. I was only a kid."

"Did he tell you about your mother?"

Benny smiled absently and nodded."He told me she was beautiful. Sometimes he'd start crying for no reason. I think he missed her."

It wasn't quite the picture of Terry Catlin that Pipe Younger had painted. On the other hand, domestic violence and naked vulnerability often share the same closed door. Just as only Benny knew how insane and violent his father had become, so only he would know how lonely and terrified the man must have felt at times.

"Then he started getting nasty," Benny said. He spat the word nasty out of his mouth like a piece of bitter fruit."He started waking me up just to tease me. He said some rotten things about my mum, things that aren't true."

"Like what?"

Benny shot me a meek, embarrassed look."He called her a mad whore."

I don't know why I felt so shocked. It was not the worst thing a father could do compared with killing your pets and hanging you from the back of the toilet door for days on end. Sticks and stones may break my bones, and all that. I was still mortified all the same, perhaps because the worst name my father had ever called my mother was a silly head or a scatter brain or something like that, and then always in jest.

It was another cautionary reminder that Benny's life was too far removed from my own to even imagine what I would do in his situation. Or what I would do to get out of it.

********************

I had a question for Benny. I actually opened my mouth and was about to speak when three short, sharp blasts of a whistle stopped my breath and made my hair shoot up.

Benny nearly jumped out of his skin. He did a weird little jig, his arms jerking spasmodically, and looked at me with a comical expression of bug-eyed alarm.

The signal was repeated. It wasn't particularly loud but it was urgent and startling, especially in the muffled quiet of the deep woods.

"Wassat?" Benny yelped. He looked like a kid who had just shook hands with someone who was wearing one of those hilarious gadgets that give you an electric shock.

There was an equally dumbstruck reaction from the people around us. The line had wandered again - from the air it probably looked like some of the roads around here, or a sidewinder snake - and now they came crashing through the bushes from all directions.

"Come on!" Benny cried as Wilf Harbuckle went charging past us. We followed Wilf towards the sound of the whistle, which was now blasting away in a continues series of shrill, hysterical shrieks.

Behind us came the livid, booming voice of the police sergeant.

"Stand still! Stand still, you bastards!"

He tried blowing his own whistle, using the single sharp blast that was supposed to make everyone stop and await further instructions, but nobody took any notice. The woods, so quiet and sombre up to now, had suddenly exploded with noise. There were shouts, whistles, branches breaking, foliage being trampled. It would be exactly like this, I imagined, if we all lived in the woods and something big and hungry was hunting us down.

It wasn't just our own group who were bludgeoning their way to the source of the alarm. I could hear a distant commotion as those who made up the second group also caught the panic and came tearing through the woods to see what had been found.

Benny got in front of me. He seemed to be using that spooky instinct for the woods to pinpoint precisely where the whistle-blasts were coming from. To me it was all just noise and commotion. The sound of the whistle was bouncing through the trees and could have been coming from any direction.

Wilf Harbuckle stopped suddenly and looked wildly around. Benny streaked past him and disappeared into a clump of bushes. Wilf followed, parting branches that sprang back and clapped him in the face. I was a short way behind Wilf.

We emerged in a fairly clear part of the woods overlooking the little wooden footbridge that spanned a deep chasm. A few trees grew on the steeply sloping sides of the ditch, their tangled, twisted roots exposed like half-buried lengths of rope. A narrow pathway, little more than a groove in the hard, bare earth, ran vertically from one side of the bowl to the other, carved out during last year's craze for finding the most stupid place to ride your bike.

In the base of the chasm, Mavis Molem was staring into a bed of nettles, her whistle jutting from her mouth like a cigarette.

She had found something.

NINE

Benny was already trotting down to the bottom of the chasm, as sure on his feet as a cat pacing nonchalantly along a fence. Wilf peered uncertainly into the well before beginning his descent. He favoured the slow, careful approach, which put him flat on his arse.

"Agh! Agh git me kung!" I heard him scream as I cantered past, my arms out by my sides for balance. When I reached the bottom Benny was waiting to slow me down. We walked over and stood beside Mavis, who was still blowing on the whistle. She noticed us and winked.

Some of the others were by now picking their way down. A few of them slipped like Wilf, which made those behind think twice about following. I heard a surprised yell and turned to see Brian Vest rolling down the slope like a tumbleweed. His head skimmed the trunk of a tree before he managed to twist his body around and finish the last few yards on an invisible sledge.

It was a remarkable escape. Brian got to his feet and walked towards us, absently brushing the seat of his pants. His hair was dusty and full of leaves and twigs. His eyes had glued themselves open in an expression of horror and disbelief.

"Fuck me," he said, looking around with the dazed confusion of someone who wakes up in a different bed to the one they went to sleep in."Was that me?"

Mavis took the whistle from her mouth and shook her head at Brian."I always said you had a fat head, fat head."

A crowd had gathered around the edge of the chasm. Some people were still determined to reach the bottom despite Brian's accident. Three of them were coppers, the big sergeant and two constables.

"Don't touch anything!" the sergeant yelled."Get back from there, all of you! Go on, fuck off away!"

"What is it?" someone called from the top."Is it the wee lass, eh?"

"Yeah, what is it?" Wilf Harbuckle asked. He spat out a mixture of blood and spittle and leaned into the nettle bed to get a better look at Mavis's discovery. Mavis casually yanked him back by the collar.

"The man said don't touch, Elvis. Don't you listen?"

"What is it?" the voice from the top repeated. It was an old man's voice, shrieky and frustrated."I say, what is it?"

"It looks like a handkerchief," Wilf said, speaking not to the old man but to the dozen or so people crowding in on the nettle bed.

"Aye, a handkerchief with blood on it," Mavis said.

There were small gasps and dark mutterings from behind me. The group closed in on the nettle bed. The focus of attention was a crumpled white rag with red stains on it.

"That's blood," Brian Vest said grimly."I should know."

"What is it?" the shrieky old man demanded again.

"It's the lass's hanky!" a voice to my left relayed."It's got blood on it!"

Nobody corrected that particular inaccuracy. The rumour was already being whispered through the woods like a stirring wind. By the time it got back to Mary Dobson the white rag with unidentified red stains on it would be the body of her missing daughter.

"Get out of the way! Go on, piss off!"

It was the police sergeant pushing his way through to the front. Bodies bumped against me and almost threw me face-first into the nettle bed. I tugged Benny's arm and pulled him away just as the sergeant broke through. He glanced briefly at the white handkerchief before rounding on us. His face had what Pipe Younger sometimes called that smacked arse quality about it.

"Idiots!" he seethed. Everyone shuffled back as if physically pushed."Do you realise what you might have done?" The sergeant raised his head to make sure that all those surrounding the chasm didn't feel excluded from the bollocking."This might well be a crime scene! If it is, it's now a contaminated crime scene! Congratulations everyone, you are officially the most stupid turnip heads I have ever had the misfortune to come across!"

People's reactions were much like those of the kids in my school when the headmaster delivered a particularly abrasive mass scolding at morning assembly. There was a lot of uncomfortable shuffling and averting of eyes, a bit of nudging and the odd smirk or two. I wondered if people ever really change.

"These people are here to help," a voice suddenly spoke out. I looked up and saw Pipe Younger standing at the edge of the bowl. He was glaring down at the sergeant like an angry god."One of our children is missing. This is your job, but we've given up our work and families to help look for her. So don't you dare bad-mouth these people, flatfoot, because you couldn't get ten of your mates out of bed if it happened to be one of your children who didn't come home."

The sergeant looked cautiously at the defiant faces of the men bunched around Pipe Younger at the top of the slope. My father was there, my father the newsagent and custodian of minty rock and other sweet things, now a guardian of his community's honour. Fergus Butcher was with him, and Ray Dixon and the Dunnel brothers too. They were just farmers and shopkeepers sticking up for themselves but I couldn't imagine a more formidable bunch of men. I was proud of them, proud of my people and my home. Even then I knew that this image of my father and his friends would stay in my mind above all others.

The sergeant glanced uneasily at our group before taking a pair of spectacles from his shirt pocket and putting them on. If he had anything else to say about us he was saving it until he was back in the safety of the police canteen.

"Come on, move right back please," he said, ushering us back with his arms. He gestured over our heads for the other police officers to come through. We watched as one of them took a clear plastic bag, turned it inside out and plucked the handkerchief from the nettle bed. He gave it to the sergeant, who held it behind his back in what seemed like a churlish gesture.

"What is it?" someone yelled in a perfect imitation of the anonymous old man's shrieky impatience. Everyone laughed, even the two coppers who had come down the slope behind the sergeant.

"Belt up," the sergeant said to the nearest constable."Get this fucking hole sealed off." He turned a disdainful eye on the other young constable, who was no longer laughing."Get this over to the inspector, you."

As we were climbing out of the chasm the dogs were being led down.

***********************

The search was suspended while a thorough examination of the sight where the handkerchief had been discovered was carried out by police officers. Nobody was allowed to go near it. Instead we were ordered to sit well away and eat whatever lunch we had brought with us. Benny and I bagged a prime spot on a soft, mossy charcoal hearth.

My father fed us from the bag of sandwiches my mother had made before dawn. They contained potted meat but I was hungry enough to overlook this fact. Benny didn't even notice until two of the sandwiches had gone down. He was ravenous, which was understandable considering he had spent the whole of yesterday in the outhouse, probably without a scrap of food.

"How big do you think it is?" I asked him.

"How big do I think what is?"

"The woods, how big are the woods?"

Benny shrugged."Depends where you start and finish measuring from."

"From one end to the other."

He laughed mysteriously."You can't measure the woods like you can measure a table-top. The woods don't stand still. They've crept this way and that over the years, so the old woodsmen say."

"Do any of them ever say how big it is?"

"I heard one of the coppers say seven and a half square miles."

"Was he right?"

"Don't ask me," Benny said.

I decided it wasn't relative to anything. The woods were certainly big enough to get lost in, to hide in, and to hide things in. They were big enough to keep a lot of men searching for most of the day too, I reckoned, and that's all that mattered.

"Bigger than a town?"

"Depends what town," Benny said.

"Dehammer?"

"Where's Dehammer?"

"It's in de tool box!"

We snorted with laughter, our touching shoulders heaving together.

A short while later we picked up a rumour that a police detective from Scotland Yard was this very moment in the crevice searching for clues. The rumour was scoffed by some who doubted the Metropolitan police would be interested in a provincial case which was, as yet, still to be properly defined as a murder hunt. They also doubted the speed and reliability of the train bringing said detective up from London.

A little later a follow-up rumour suggested that Scotland Yard were linking Anita Dobson's disappearance with the murders of two schoolgirls in the London area. Some people changed their minds, others continued to pour scorn on the idea, while one or two wandered off to see if they could get a look at this famous detective for themselves. Inevitably they returned with fresh rumours.

Mary Dobson had positively identified the handkerchief as belonging to her daughter.

Mary Dobson had positively identified the handkerchief as being an old rag she had never set eyes on in her life.

Mary Dobson had collapsed and was on her way to hospital.

The handkerchief had someone's initials stitched on it.

The third group had been sent to the moor to assist the rambling people in the light of a new discovery.

The rumours continued to excite and baffle for the next hour or more. Idle hands with nothing to do but speculate.

"What do you think?" I asked Benny."Do you think it was Anita's hanky?"

Benny made a face and shook his head."I find stuff like that in the woods all the time." He looked at me with a dirty little grin on his face."I find loads of knickers."

"Knickers? Women's knickers?"

"No, pigs' knickers," he said, and we both sniggered hotly.

"Do you put them on?"

"Piss off," he laughed.

"I wonder how you lose your knickers in the woods," I mused. Benny raised his eyes in a knowing way, and I said,"Ah!" but things weren't much clearer.

"I'm surprised nobody's found anything else," Benny said."There should have been loads of false alarms when you think about it."

He was right. I'd seen dozens of casually discarded items this morning, ranging from sweet wrappers to a perfectly good pair of spectacles. I didn't blow the whistle on any of these items because firstly, Benny had the whistle in his pocket, and secondly I didn't want to be the one to upset the big sergeant. Like Benny said, there was a lot of stuff just lying around, most of it lost or thrown away in perfect innocence.

The inspector had evidently known what he was doing when he told people to look out for the clothes Anita had been wearing, otherwise the search would have halted at the discovery of every discarded fag end.

It was yet to be proved if Mavis had been right to alert the police about the bloody handkerchief. I had a feeling we would soon find out whether she was responsible for wasting everyone's time or turning the hunt for a missing girl into a full-scale murder inquiry.

*********************

"Why don't you run away from home?" I asked.

I don't know how we got back to the subject of Benny's father. It was probably something Benny said. Benny almost always instigated these conversation but then withdrew from them like someone backing away from a dangerous animal.

We had moved away from the charcoal hearth and were now slumped against the trunk of an oak, our legs stretched out in front of us. The day's sticky heat was thickening like a soup. Benny said there was a thunderstorm on the way. He said he could feel the lightning charging up the atmosphere.

"And go where?" he asked despondently. He rolled his head and gazed at me. I could see the weariness and futility in his eyes."They always bring you back."

"Couldn't you join the circus or something?"

He laughed, a dry, humourless sound."In a book I could. Life's not like a book or a film, Rob. Nobody ever comes to rescue you."

I thought of the time I first discovered those horrid straps in the outhouse and felt something of the despair I had felt on that occasion.

"I've thought of killing him," Benny said. His voice was calm, rational, cold, and he spoke in little more than a whisper."When he's drunk - really drunk - he can pass out for hours on end. Sometimes he sleeps for a night and a day. I stand over him, and I think how easy it would be to stuff a pillow in his face and hold it down until he wasn't breathing anymore. Other times, when he gets mad and does things to me, I just think about grabbing a knife and sticking it in his chest."

"Could you do that?"

He nodded soberly."I could, but who wants to spend the rest of his life in Borstal?" He looked up into the treetop, a faint smile bringing some warmth to his eyes.

Just then I thought of something my mother was fond of saying: It is the lifted face that feels the shining of the sun.

I didn't know where that quote came from but I understood its meaning well enough. It was about searching out the last ray of hope, about being in the midst of a darkest hour and still trusting the sun to always rise again.

And I knew what Benny was thinking right then as he gazed into one of his precious trees. He was thinking that one day of stolen freedom was still worth more than a lifetime away from his father if that meant going to prison.

"Couldn't you make it look like an accident?" I heard an edge of desperation in my voice. It upset me to think there was no way out for him.

"Don't worry about me," he said. He smiled at me with something like love and gratitude. At the same time his eyes held a distant glint of untold malevolence."Every dog has its day, Robert."

***********************

The delay lasted most of the morning. At noon our group was sent back to the village for lunch while the second group resumed the search of the woods. The third group were still out on the moors.

I didn't eat much. I was still full from the sandwiches my father had provided. Benny's appetite was unaffected by his mood, which was deep and withdrawn. He had two sandwiches and a large slab of stand pie. I accepted a tall glass of lemonade from Lucy Dixon and drank it on the grass verge just beyond the Dobson house.

I didn't want to be in that house. It reeked of something dark and ancient like dust from a tomb.

Benny brought his lunch outside and sat a few feet away from me on the grass. He hadn't spoken a single word since our conversation about his father, and from the way he tore into the sandwich and chewed in contemplative silence I didn't think he was about to start now.

I watched the comings and goings of the police. Mike Bronson didn't seem to be doing much other than leaning against the side of his Land Rover, surveying events from behind his American aviator shades. He was chatting with a man in a suit, whom I took to be the famous detective. His accent was local, from which I deduced that he wasn't a Scotland Yard detective.

Pipe Younger wandered over to say hello. I stood up and offered him the last swig of lemonade.

"No, not for me, son," he said."Me and your dad are going to sneak one in the pub while your mother's busy." The old man studied Benny's solitary figure with some concern."Have the two of you fallen out?"

"No. I think he's tired."

Pipe just nodded.

"Is that a detective?" I asked, pointing to the man standing with Mike.

"He's Detective Sergeant Locke."

"What's he doing?"

"Waiting," Pipe said.

We went back to the woods, having first retraced our steps through the fields. It was a little after two o'clock and the sky was growing dark and ominous. I heard the first faint rumble of thunder and turned to tell Benny that he had been right about there being a storm brewing.

I couldn't see him anywhere.

***********************

It was less than an hour later that we found Anita. The thunder was closer and the air felt hot and dry and dangerously alive. It was as if the wolf circling the edge of our world had finally decided to come inside.

This time there was no panic or commotion when the whistle was blown. Instead people stopped searching and looked towards the sound with a mixture of sorrow and dread. Then calmly they began to pick their way over, not talking, moving slowly but inexorably like people walking towards a foretold and inescapable destiny.

I joined them. The dark, boozy smell of ripe berries seemed to intensify with every step.

Anita had been stuffed into a hollow and covered with fern and doc leaves four fingers deep. A deathly white ankle complete with silver bracelet was clearly visible through the shroud of dark green leaves, a stunning and unforgettable image of naked horror that haunts me to this day.

One of the terrier men had found her. Four of them were standing a few feet away from her when I arrived; their stocky little dogs were staring fixedly at the spot where Anita's ankle poked through the leaves. One of the dogs was shaking with fear or excitement. The sound of the whistle had ceased. Urgency would not help Anita Dobson now.

I saw my father arrive with Pipe Younger. Like the others they just stopped and stared. Pipe took off his flat cap and held it in his hands like a man who sees a funeral procession go by.

Benny was nowhere in sight but people were arriving all the time, joining us in this shocked, silent vigil. He could have been among them and I probably wouldn't have noticed.

I began to sense a strangeness around me, something curling smoke-like through the sorrowful silence, something not of us. When I looked at my father and Pipe I knew they were feeling it too. Even the dogs were still and noiseless, hushed by the presence of an enigmatic energy. It felt like we were standing in the shadow of evil wings. All around us was the smell of summer fruits and death.

TEN

That evening there was a service for Anita at the church of St John. It was packed out. Everyone looked smart but exhausted.

I would have had no choice but to go even if I hadn't wanted to be there. My mother would not let me out of her sight. Nor was she the only one, because every child in the village was there that night, from babies upward, clustered in nervous little groups under the watchful eyes of their parents.

Alf Dobson read one of Anita's school poems and thanked everyone for their efforts in the search. He looked like a man who was fighting the effects of several strong sleeping tablets. He left to be with his wife while we sung Silent Night, Anita's favourite carol. We were accompanied not by the organ but the rollicking, satanic chorus of every summer storm you ever heard all rolled into one.

A few miles away, deep in Grumble wood, the police had erected a huge tent where Anita's body was found. Looking out of my bedroom window I thought I saw the eerie glow of their strong lamps shining out from the dark treetops like luminous mist, but the storm broke and lightning flashed and rain decorated my windows with a million silver baubles.

I went to bed but slept not at all.

********************

The exact cause of death was yet to be established, though preliminary findings suggested that little Anita Dobson had been beaten to death with the proverbial blunt instrument. I learned this bit of gossip from the Frudd sisters, who came into the shop early the next morning.

I was confined to base and under the strictest instructions not to venture beyond the front door, which put me right in the centre of the gossip and rumour that filtered in and out of our shop that week like so much stock.

The Frudd sisters shook their heads and closed their eyes and said things like poor lamb and God keep her soul, and then went on to describe in highly speculative detail how someone had smashed her head open. They also talked a lot about Alf and Mary and how all of this must be affecting them. Norma Frudd said that Mary Catlin had woken from a sedated sleep in a state of agitated shock. She flatly refused to believe that Anita was dead and wouldn't be coming home again. So Alf got one of the police officers to drive them to the mortuary, still in their night clothes, so Mary could sit with her daughter.

My mother cried when she heard this. I tried to picture Alf and Mary sitting in an icy room of harsh light and stainless steel, wearing their slippers and housecoats, singing lullabies to a sensitive arrangement of white sheets and a small, pallid face.

This final image of Anita upset me more than the thought of her suffering or her last, mortal terror. The images of violence came to me sporadically; they were stark, monochrome flashes of horror like nightmarish visions of a lunatic's slide show. They weren't real of course, just macabre fiction, but close enough to leave my heart beating with wild, frightened alarm.

But Anita's lifeless, ghastly white face, her closed eyes, her inanimate torso, this was the image I lingered on, the one I couldn't shake from my mind.

My father gave me plenty of jobs to help distract me from my brooding. I was sweeping up behind the counter when a policeman came into the shop, rain spilling from his helmet.

"I've just cleaned that," I said under my breath.

The policeman was part of a team conducting house to house inquiries. He told us that more than a hundred officers from all over the county had been drafted in to assist in the investigation. Many of them were knocking on doors in and around the village at this very moment in time.

He asked my mother and father if they had seen anything suspicious on the day Anita went missing. Had they seen anyone acting strangely? Had they seen a stranger? Had they seen Anita?

They hadn't seen a thing.

"What about you?" the policeman asked. By this time he was drinking sweet tea from one of the good cups. He had also pocketed the bar of chocolate my mother insisted he take for later."What's your name?"

"Robert," I said. The policeman bent low - so as not to intimidate me, I expect. I disliked him for that. Pipe Younger never bent down to speak to me, and I would be highly insulted if Brian Vest ever left the room to break wind.

"Did you see anything, Robert?"

"No, sir," I said.

"Anything at all?"

"No, sir."

"You didn't play with Anita that day?"

"I didn't play with her much," I said, offering an apologetic shrug."I talked to her sometimes, when she came in to buy comics and sweets, but not much.

"What about strangers? Did you see any strangers that day? Anyone who didn't belong in the village?"

I was about to say no but then something suddenly came back to me.

"I saw the shoeman," I said.

******************

The post mortem was carried out by Professor Michael Benson, a lecturer in forensic medicine, and Doctor John Cummins, a police pathologist. It concluded that Anita had sustained severe head injuries believed to have been inflicted by a heavy metal object, but that she had died as a result of choking on her own blood. She was struck at least eight times. The motive was not thought to be sexual.

The time of death was put somewhere between ten and three o'clock on the afternoon of August 25, which meant that Anita had been dead long before we began searching for her.

All of this was in the local paper. Intriguingly, the article went on to say that certain information regarding the inquiry was being held back from the public. I asked my father what that was all about.

"Well," he began awkwardly,"You shouldn't really be reading that."

"It's in the paper."

"Don't be cheeky."

I sulked until he relented.

"All it means is that the police have certain information which they are withholding from the public," he said.

I asked Pipe Younger when he came in for some tobacco. We spoke at the door while my father was chatting with Benny, who had dropped in to see if there was any food on the go.

"Suppose the monster who murdered Anita was wearing a red coat," Pipe said."Well, if he read in the paper that the police were searching for a man with a red coat, the first thing he would do is sling that coat in the bin or bury it under a compost heap. My guess is it has to do with the murder weapon."

"How do you mean?"

"Like I said, Robert, if the coppers knew that poor Anita had been donked on the head with a Chinese vase they would concentrate on looking for a man with a Chinese vase under his coat. Failing that they'd visit all the Chinese vase shops this side of China to find out who'd bought a Chinese vase in the last few years. All it takes is a little hard work and a process of elimination."

I was fascinated. Confused, but fascinated."Then what?"

"Then somebody gets a knock at the door, Robert. Somebody who probably thought they were in the clear. A suspect with no evidence against him until the coppers go back and check his collection of Chinese vases for blood and hair. That's when two and two make four instead seven and a half."

"That's amazing," I said.

"That's science, Robert."

I went back inside and pulled Benny over to one side on the pretext of looking at some comics. I told him Pipe's theory.

"Wow," he said softly."That's amazing."

"That's science, Benny."

"Unless..." Benny frowned, shook his head."Nothing."

"No, go on - unless what?"

He shrugged."Unless the killer just picked up an old wrench or something and then threw it away after he'd killed her."

I never thought of that.

Benny went home and said he would be back for tea. My mother spent the afternoon in the shop and wouldn't go upstairs to prepare the meal until he was safely inside. I had noticed an insidious atmosphere of fear and menace around the village, even though I had barely been outside the front door since Anita's body was discovered. But that was only natural. After all, there was a killer on the loose.

Benny remained in the shop with my father and I while my mother went off to make tea. When Mavis Molem came in for no other reason than to pick up the latest gossip, Benny chose that moment to draw me away from the counter.

"The coppers came to question my dad," he said in a loud whisper."They woke him up and he went spare!"

Now, what Benny meant was that the police had visited his father as part of their routine house-to-house inquires. All he had done is get a bit mixed up in his choice of phrase.

Mavis Molem seemed to forget this fact, or ignore it completely, and went away with the idea that Benny's father had been interviewed as more than a possible witness. That's the rumour that came back in any case, because by the following day Terry Catlin was a suspect in the murder of Anita Dobson.

ELEVEN

The Shoeman was eliminated as a suspect. Apparently he had collapsed of heat stroke on the day of the murder and was taken home by his horse, which had a pigeon-like instinct for finding its way back. Dozens of people saw him slumped over the reigns in a state of semi-consciousness. Some even waved.

The case of Clarence Roebuck, aka the Shoeman, is quite ironic in hindsight. Clarence was jailed in the mid-seventies for sex offences going back some forty years. He was released in the early nineties, a very feeble man, into a rest home for perverts and died there shortly after. However, he did not murder Anita Dobson.

Terry Catlin had yet to be eliminated from the inquiry, at least in the eyes of those who came into the shop. It was a weird experience to be there at the conception of a rumour and then to watch it grow. It was like planting a seed.

If I didn't know any better I would have said that Benny had deliberately planted a seed of suspicion.

*********************

I didn't go to Anita's funeral. I faked illness and spent the day in my room. My father closed the shop out of respect and both he and my mother attended. It was meant to be a quiet, family and friends affair, but the service was attended by most of the village as well as a number of police officers and a few local reporters.

There was no wake. Alf and Mary invited a few of their closest friends back home for a small tea but my mother and father declined. Instead a kind of unofficial wake was held at the shop, which had opened again.

I got dressed and told my mother I was feeling well enough to help out downstairs. What I really wanted was not to miss a snatch of the latest gossip.

When I came downstairs Brian Vest, Pipe Younger, my father, Tim Dunnel, and Peter and Mavis Molem were discussing Terry Catlin's possible involvement in Anita's murder. My arrival was greeted with a few nods and smiles. I wandered over to the magazines and pretended to read the latest Dandy.

"But what's his motive?" Brian argued."I can see that a man like Terry could do something like that, but why would he?"

"Why?" Pipe lit a cigarette. My father had placed a couple of ashtrays on the counter for this special occasion. I also noticed a half-full bottle of whiskey and several coffee cups."Just because."

"Well what sort of answer's that?" Brian scoffed. He put a dollop of whiskey into a coffee cup and took a sip. A moment later a soft, wheezing fart came out of the other end."Pardon me. Don't know what I've been eating."

"Shit," Mavis observed dryly.

Brian tittered into his cup."Can't help it, lass. It's the whiskey."

"I'm saying that motive is only important in detective novels," Pipe went on."In real life people often get killed for no reason."

That wasn't enough for them. They - we - needed a reason. To admit that Anita was slain because some lunatic could no longer control his mindless impulses was like facing death without a faith to comfort you.

"Maybe there was a motive," Tim said."We just might not be aware of it yet."

Nobody contradicted him. It was a fair compromise.

"Still," Brian began. He shifted his weight over to one leg. Mavis suddenly stabbed him in the chest with the end of a pencil she had been clicking against her top teeth, making him yelp with pain and surprise. Brian stared at her in wounded confusion while furiously rubbing the sore spot."What did you do that for?"

"For starters," Mavis said bluntly."Now what were you saying?"

Brian eyed her with narrow distrust before continuing."All I was saying is I still can't believe Terry Catlin would do something like that, motive or not."

"No, because Terry Catlin is a real friend to children isn't he?" Mavis said sarcastically."We can all see how well he treats his own son."

"He neglects him," Brian argued."That's not in dispute. But he doesn't...you know." He nodded sagaciously."You know."

"What?" Mavis prompted.

"He isn't funny," Brian blurted."He doesn't do funny stuff to the kid, that's all I'm saying."

"How do you know?"

Everyone looked in my direction. They were staring at me as if I had just materialised out of thin air.

No, that's not quite right. They were staring at me as if I was suddenly very important.

I closed the Dandy and put it back on the shelf. I just stood there and waited for someone to speak. In the end my father broke the silence."What do you mean, Robert?" he asked.

I had their undivided attention. What's more, they would have believed me. They were ready to believe me. I could have told them about Benny's dog and his cat, about the straps in the outhouse from which Terry once suspended his son for three weeks. I could have told them about Terry Catlin's eyes.

But if I talked now I might not stop talking until I'd told them about Benny's strange moods and the very real possibility of some wicked, vengeful monster existing within him.

And with that I might just have talked Terry Catlin off the hook.

A voice whispered, pleaded sinisterly not to spoil things now. It wasn't my voice even though it came from inside me.

It was Benny's voice.

I thought about Benny's desperate fight for survival, and how his father's arrest would release him from a life of unthinkable horror. Even if Terry hadn't murdered Anita Dobson, he was guilty of other things almost as bad, and therefore the books would surely balance.

What did they call that? Poetic justice?

Oh yes, things were working out ( to plan?) just fine for Benny.

************************

I was literally saved by the bell. In this case the bell above the shop door. Everyone turned to see who it was, and I wriggled off the hook. Maybe if it had been the Frudd sisters or Spider or someone else we knew, I might have been back under the microscope, but it was nobody we knew.

Two men came inside. The first was a tall man with an honest, everyday face and short black hair. He was vaguely familiar to me.

The second man was much shorter than his friend and a bit fat. He had a fresh, slightly shiny complexion like a balloon, a pleasant smile and striking blue eyes.

"Ooh, a party," he said with no trace of irony. He eyed the whiskey gleefully and gave his friend a nudge."Just what the doctor ordered, eh, sergeant?"

The tall man was Sergeant Locke. Now I remembered him talking to Mike Bronson on the day Anita's body was discovered.

"Can I help you, gentlemen?" my father inquired. His tone was polite but not particularly welcoming. I was surprised by this until I counted the number of policemen and reporters and outsiders with a morbid curiosity my father must have spoken to of late.

The short man rubbed his hands together in the brisk, enthusiastic manner of someone about to tuck into a hearty meal."By, it's colder than a grave digger's belly button out there," he said."I can't remember a summer like this one. Mind, it's practically winter now." He smiled broadly and waited without the slightest hint of embarrassment for my father to get the message. Instead it was Pipe Younger who spoke up.

"Can we offer you a drink, Mr..."

"Moody," the man said, offering Pipe a small, podgy hand to shake."Detective Chief Inspector Jordan Moody. And thankyou, I'd love a drink."

Pipe poured a slug of whiskey into a mug and gave it to the policeman, who sipped it with his eyes closed, a warm smile of simple delight on his face. He opened his eyes again, and just for a second or two he looked directly at me. It was no accident.

"Champion," he said."I like a drop or two." Then he held out the mug for Pipe to add the second. A mug was also passed the sergeant's way.

"So what do you want?" Mavis asked."Big development, is there?"

The senior policeman regarded her with surprise and amusement."By, lass, you don't mince your words."

"Nope," Mavis said."So what is it?"

"Nothing much. Just a routine visit." Moody took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. He offered first pick to his sergeant, who gave a curious sigh.

"It's your last one, boss," he said, reaching for his own cigarettes."Have one of mine."

"Oh, thanks, Chris," Moody said, and slipped the cigarette box back into his coat pocket with the speed and skill of a conjurer.

Pipe lit up, and so did Brian Vest. My father glanced nervously at the upstairs door before taking a cigar from the shelf.

"Smoking the stock," Moody chuckled."You'll not go short."

Again, just for a second or two, he trapped me in a quick, analytical glance, as if he was trying to get the measure of me.

"Was you at the funeral, Mr Moody?" Tim Dunnel asked. Tim was the only one without a drink. He wouldn't touch whiskey unless it was genuine Irish whiskey, or extremely cold out.

"I was," Moody answered."Kept my head down though. Mayo, right?"

Tim squinted."What?"

"Your accent. Would I be right in saying you're from Mayo?"

"No, I'm from Dublin," Tim said.

We all knew that was a lie. The Dunnel brothers hailed from a small town in County Mayo called Ballerina or Ballina or something like that. It was no secret; they sang about it often enough.

"Oh, wrong again," Moody said unfazed."Some detective I turned out to be." He laughed uproariously at this. Sergeant Locke smiled along indulgently. I wondered how many times he'd heard that particular belly-buster.

The rest of them exchanged bemused glances. Only Pipe Younger appeared to have reached the same instant conclusion about Moody as I had - that Moody was probably a lot smarter than he acted.

Just then my mother came down to carry out some inquiries of her own. She said nothing about the whiskey or my father's cigar but her eyes told me she wasn't happy about turning the shop into a saloon. My father sheepishly rested his cigar in the ashtray and nudged it further across the counter.

"Ah, the boss I presume?" Moody said, inclining his head courteously."Detective Chief Inspector Jordan Moody, madam."

"This is my wife, Alice Dawson," my father said. It was always my father's duty to introduce my mother.

"Charmed."

"Likewise." Moody raised his head and sniffed in the direction of the open door."Something smells nice. Roast chicken, is it?"

My mother softened at the compliment."Chicken, yes."

"Champion! Chicken is my all time favourite, isn't it, sergeant?"

"Yes, boss," Locke intoned.

Moody smiled pensively."Don't get much chance to eat it these days, not now I'm on my own. My wife made a lovely chicken before she died. Not immediately before she died, of course."

My poor mother was defenceless. Her main joy and burden in life was to feed those men who were too young or too incompetent to make themselves a descent meal from time to time."Well there's plenty if you'd like to stay for tea. I always get a big bird in for Benny."

"Champion!" Moody was genuinely delighted with the offer. Sergeant Locke looked privately amused.

"What about me?" Brian asked, sounding left out."I like chicken."

Mavis gave him a second hard poke with the pencil."She said a big bird, not a bleeding ostrich."

Brian snorted and absently rubbed his ribs."Mind, chicken gives me wind."

"Oh, now there's a surprise," Mavis said, rolling her eyes in a comical way.

"Do you make your own gravy?" Moody asked, reaching into his coat pocket.

"Of course," my mother answered, faintly insulted."The way my mother taught me."

"Champion." Moody took a plastic bag from his pocket, glanced at it briefly and slipped it back again."Do you list embroidery among your domestic talents, Mrs Dawson?"

"Embroidery?" My mother looked at the detective like he had just asked her to dance."You mean...embroidery?"

"Yes. You know, for instance, stitching the young lad's initials into his school clothes?"

"Well, a bit," she said, still confused."Not to any fancy standard, mind."

"This is about that hanky isn't it?" Mavis asked with her customary directness."That hanky I found in the woods?"

"You found the handkerchief?"

"Yep," Mavis said proudly."It was me."

"Good work," Moody said with sincerity."It could be important."

"Did it have blood on it?"

"Yes."

"I knew it!" Brian almost cheered."I knew it was blood the moment I set eyes on it!"

"Anita's blood?" Mavis asked.

Locke passed Moody a cautious glance. Moody just sipped at his whiskey, his sharp blue eyes fixed on Mavis."That's for me to know and you to find out," he said eventually."Besides, we've a lot of lines to follow at this stage. The handkerchief is merely one of them."

"Why did you ask me if I did embroidery, Mr Moody?" my mother asked.

Moody turned to her with that warm, avuncular smile."Just curious," he said."Do the initials E C mean anything to you, Mrs Dawson?"

It was Brian Vest who answered."My brother-in-law - Earnest Crab."

"Oh?" the detective studied Brian keenly."Is he local?"

"Nope. Lives in South Africa."

For this Brian received a third jab in the ribs from Mavis Molem's pencil.

"Let me look at that hanky," Pipe said suddenly.

Moody's head came around slowly. His eyes were bright and alert."You have an idea?"

"I might," Pipe said noncommittally."Let me look first."

Moody took the evidence bag from his pocket and handed it to Pipe. We all craned to get a better look.

"Don't take it out of the bag," Moody said."Even if you feel a sneeze coming on."

Pipe examined the item and then, intriguingly, gave it not to Moody but to my mother. She took it from him with puzzled and faintly scared hesitance.

"Recognise it, Alice?"

My mother nodded, her lower lip caught between her teeth."It belonged to Eleanor Catlin," she said. She looked at me with a kind of grave sympathy."It was Benny's mother's handkerchief, Robert."

********************

They were a wedding present from Minnie Reily, the woman who owned the cat which was so fond of glaring at Pipe Younger whenever he sat on the bench outside the shops. Minnie had presented Eleanor with ten monogrammed handkerchiefs and Terry Catlin a cheap tie from Woolworths. Everyone remembered because they were such unusual gifts to give a couple on their wedding day, more like Christmas gifts you might send through the post to nephews and nieces who lived in Aylsbury.

Moody stayed for tea but the handkerchief was not mentioned again because Benny also ate with us that evening. Moody talked instead about Huddersfield Town football club and Ray Bradbury stories. He ate a lot of chicken and took a leg for his supper, which he removed from the scene in a plastic evidence bag.

My father let Moody out of the back door. My mother was washing the dishes and it was Benny's turn to dry, so I crept as far down the stairs as my nerve would allow.

"There's a strange atmosphere in this village," Moody said darkly."Suspicion, fear, hostility."

"You can't blame people for that."

"No, and it isn't unusual either. But it can be dangerous, far more dangerous than any threat to the children. The killer has satisfied his urges for the time being. Now he goes through a cooling off period. Could last for years. In the immediate sense he's no longer a risk. I know that sounds like an incredibly dangerous assumption on my part, but I have a lot of experience in these matters. I think of our friend as being in hibernation at the moment."

"So you're saying we shouldn't guard our children?" my father said with disbelief.

"I'm not saying that at all. We should always guard our children, Mr Dawson. All I'm saying is that we also shouldn't neglect to guard our emotions at this time.

"This village is in a highly volatile state. One spark could set off an explosion. Now some people have already decided that Terry Catlin murdered Anita Dobson. Myself, I'm not convinced, not on the evidence of a handkerchief. First of all I want to speak to this Minnie Reily to verify that this handkerchief is indeed one of those she gave to Eleanor Catlin. After that I might want to speak to Terry and ask him a few questions."

"Is it Anita's blood?" my father asked.

I held my breath. Moody's voice came back in a quiet, conspiratorial whisper, as if he suspected my presence on the dark stairs.

"If that was all the evidence I had - or if it turns out to be all the evidence I can get - Terry Catlin will not go on trial for murdering Anita Dobson. But I'm a police officer, and whether this case gets solved or not I move on. You people have to live with him. From the feelings I have about this place I don't think it would be long before a more rudimentary form of justice was exacted."

"A lynch mob?"

"Yes, a lynch mob. That's why I'm going to see your constable tonight and have him guard Terry Catlin's house until tomorrow."

"And what happens tomorrow?"

"I'm going to arrest him," Moody said."If only for his own safety."

TWELVE

Moody was right on the button, because that very evening there was a disturbance in the Straw Man involving many of those who helped search for Anita. Terry Catlin's involvement in the murder was openly debated. There was little scope for a rational voice in the argument, especially as the night wore on and the alcohol consumption increased. Tempers grew mean and ugly and vengeful, and just before closing time a couple of the most vociferous voices began to incite the others into doing something about their anger.

My father was called out of bed to help calm the situation. He and Pipe Younger and a few other sensible heads attempted to undermine the mob's strength and momentum by craftily selecting its weakest, most malleable members to work on. To these men the situation and its possible consequences was hurriedly explained, and most either went home or joined the ranks of decent.

However subversion alone would not have saved Terry Catlin from a lynching. The mob's leaders were hellbent on seeing Terry pay for his crime. Had it not been for Mike Bronson and three police officers who had remained in the village after Anita's funeral the likely outcome would have made bigger news than the relatively routine killing of a little girl.

I heard the commotion in the streets from my bedroom window but didn't understand what was going on out there until my father returned and told my mother all about it in the kitchen. He spoke in the breathless, exhilarated voice of someone who has run a long way to impart fantastic news, which I suspect was down to adrenalin and the sheer relief at making it home in one piece. He told my mother that he had been very afraid - afraid the mob might actually kill him in order to get to their quarry. I could almost see my mother's reaction - mouth open, eyes wide and shocked and somewhat adoring. They went back to bed soon after and soon after that I heard the bed squeaking furiously.

**********************

I was woken by my mother, who gently shook me and kept on shaking me until I was sitting up and staring at her with fuzzy attention. She handed me a cup of tea and smoothed my messy hair down.

"Don't be long," she said. My eyes were crusty, my mind not quite here, but I sensed her concern and seriousness."Brush your teeth and have a wash. Do your ears. When you've done come into the sitting room."

The last time I'd been given tea in bed was shortly before I was told of my grandmother's death. I looked at the window. The curtains were drawn, and beyond it was still dark out. Without finishing the tea I went across to the bathroom, washed myself and brushed my teeth, then went to find my mother and father.

The kitchen was empty. I could hear low voices coming from the sitting room. Without knowing why I looked out of the little window and saw four dark coloured cars parked outside the shop. Three of them were occupied but only one fiendish orange face was visible as he lit a cigarette.

Moody and Locke were waiting for me in the sitting room. The chair across from them was conspicuously vacant.

"Morning, Robert," Moody said pleasantly."Did you sleep well?"

I looked at my mother and father, who were standing anxiously by the hearth. My mother smiled.

"Yes thankyou," I told Moody.

"Good, good. Sit down, Robert."

Again I sought my mother's reassurance. She smiled and nodded, so I sat down in the chair facing the two detectives.

Moody took out his cigarettes and looked at my mother."Is this alright?"

"Just this once," she said."I'll get you an ashtray."

She went into the kitchen and returned with a clean, unused ashtray. Moody regarded it sheepishly before resting it on his knee. He opened the cigarette box and offered it across to the sergeant.

"It's your last one," Locke recited."We'll smoke mine."

"Oh, cheers, Chris," Moody said. The two policemen lit up."You'll be used to getting up early, being a paper boy."

"Not this early," I said. The mantelpiece clock said it was twenty five minutes before five. It was a fine clock, a clock my grandfather had bought in Germany at the turn of the century, but part of me doubted its reliability. My father was often up at this time in the morning but I saw no reason for Moody and Locke to be out of bed before light.

And then I remembered the conversation he'd had with my father last night.

"You and Benny are good friends, Robert?"

"Yes, sir."

"Just like me and Lockey, eh?"

The sergeant rolled his eyes at me. I couldn't help smiling at that. There was probably much truth in his mock exasperation.

"Your mother and father say you're a clever lad, Robert. The sort of lad I don't have to treat like a baby. Is that right?"

My mother and father were both smiling proudly.

"Yes, sir," I said.

"So I can ask you some questions about Benny and his father, yes?"

I nodded guardedly.

"Champion." Moody crushed out his cigarette."Is he a happy boy, Robert?"

The question surprised me. I was expecting something less direct.

"Happy?"

"You know, is he-"

"I know," I said."No, Benny's not happy."

"Does he tell you why?"

"Sometimes."

"Tell me about him, Robert. Tell me all about Benny."

But I didn't. Instead I only told Moody as much as a person can tell without betraying a friend. I told him as much as a sane man might want to know.

I did not lie. I was merely prudent with the truth. I circumvented any specific questions from Moody and concentrated on painting a broader story of Benny's predicament, the story he could have gleaned from my mother or any number of people in the village, plus the occasional insight into Benny's character so as not to completely disappoint. If Moody was aware that what I was doing was deliberate he didn't let on.

"He has a pretty bad life then, your friend?" Moody said.

I nodded soberly. I could see the detective was moved by Benny's plight even without the bitter details. I wondered what he would think when he found out the truth for himself.

"Pretty bad," I echoed.

"What would you do to help him out, Robert?" Moody leaned forward a little."If Benny was in trouble, what would you do to help him out?"

"I don't know," I said. I was thrown and shaken by Moody's sudden interest in me."I don't understand." I looked helplessly at my mother. It was a cynical attempt to break eye contact with the shrewd and suspicious detective.

"He doesn't understand the question," my mother said shortly."I don't think I do either."

Moody sat back and smiled an apology."Pay no mind to me, Robert. I'm used to browbeating people. All I meant to ask, in my clumsy way, was if you would be prepared to set down some of the things you've told me today in a more official manner. In a statement, I mean."

"Now hold on a second," my father interjected."You said you wanted an informal chat with the lad. You never said anything about making a statement."

Moody completely ignored my father."Robert?"

"I think so," I said.

"Would you stand up in court and repeat that statement under oath? You know what under oath means?"

"It means you can't lie."

The detective nodded."That's right, Robert. It means you tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth." He leaned forward again, his lively blue eyes holding my gaze."Nothing but the truth, Robert."

"If my mother says I can," I said. Again it was an excuse to break contact and bring my mother into the conversation.

"I don't know," she said, shaking her head."Would it come to that?"

"Probably not," Moody said."Robert would only be called if the prosecution decided the case could only be won by assassinating Terry's character. It's always going to be an important factor but let's hope it isn't the critical one."

Now that Terry's name had been mentioned in the same sentence as the word prosecution, Moody turned back to me and told me frankly what he was about to do.

"We're going to arrest Terry Catlin, Robert. We're going to do it right this very minute, while he's still asleep and unable to resist. We want you to come with us."

***********************

I was there because Benny was considered to be unpredictable. He might run or fight or both, and Moody hoped that my presence would pacify him. He was also to come back with us and stay at our house until other arrangements were made.

Mike Bronson's Land Rover led the small procession of police vehicles to the McDonald farm. Every car stopped in the yard with its headlights facing the herdsman's cottage where Benny and his father lived. The front door was caught in a bright web of light, every crack and scratch and strip of peeling paint exposed.

One by one the drivers turned off their engines but left the lights on.

Christopher Locke was driving the car in which my mother and father and I sat stiffly in the back. It was cold and smoky inside. Moody was in the passenger seat, the collar of his overcoat turned up to meet the brim of his hat.

"I'm led to believe that Terry Catlin does not own a shotgun. Does anyone know different?"

"Not a legal one," my father said.

I thought I heard Moody grunt cynically."Thankyou."

Locke flashed the headlamps twice, a signal for everyone to get out. We had previously been instructed to remain inside the car. My mother was sitting to my left, her face pressed anxiously to the window, her shallow, rapid breath making patterns of fog on the glass. My father and I peered intently ahead.

Once the police were on the ground the sequence of events moved at an astonishingly rapid speed. I was expecting Moody to saunter up to the front door and announce his arrival with three sharp knocks. Terry Catlin would then appear at the front door, shielding his eyes from the glare of the lights. We're cops, Moody would drawl toughly as he flashed his badge in Terry's confused face, and we're taking you in.

None of that happened. Two uniformed policemen went to the back of the house while the rest, led by Locke, sprinted for the front door. Moody walked briskly behind them, his hands in his pockets. By the time he had reached his men Locke was already pounding on the door. Less than ten seconds later, giving Terry no time to react other than to wake up in a state of petrified alarm, one of the constables used a sledgehammer like a battering ram to burst open the lock.

The police charged inside the house, Moody following when everything was clear. We heard the commotion, muffled shouts, thumps, feet bashing wooden stairs, all the way back in the car. I wondered what Benny was making of all this. Something told me that he wouldn't be half as surprised to see the police as his father.

Lights dotted the house. At one grimy window, masked by a filthy net curtain, a cheesy yellow lamp shone. Shadows of men moved swiftly back and forth, and in what seemed like seconds Terry Catlin was being led out of the front door. He was fully dressed but Benny once told me that he often slept that way.

Two police officers held him by the arms outside the front door of his house, trapped in the spotlight like a reluctant performer. His hands were handcuffed behind his back. He looked completely bewildered and overwhelmed.

Moody came out of the house and spoke to Terry Catlin.

"What's he saying?" my mother snapped."Father, what's he saying?"

"You have the right to remain silent, I expect," my father answered.

I gave him a nudge."Open the window."

He frowned, briefly annoyed at not having thought of it himself, and wound down the side window.

Moody came over to the car, opened the passenger door and leaned inside."Benny's not in the house," he said, speaking to me."Where is he, Robert?"

Moody's voice conveyed fear and urgency. Of course it was bound to, I thought. Terry Catlin was a suspected child-murderer, and now his own child was missing.

"I don't know," I said. For a moment I couldn't think straight."He sometimes sleeps in the woods."

"In the woods?" Moody was astonished."In the woods you say?"

I nodded. I was about to reassure Moody that Benny would turn up sooner or later, that he always did, when suddenly I thought I knew where he would be.

"Look in the outhouse," I said.

Moody glanced behind him."The bog?"

He was gone, waving at one of the constables to follow him. Terry Catlin remained by the front door, staring with wild confusion at the small army of police officers milling around the yard. Every so often one or both of his knees would buckle, leaving the guards to catch him before he collapsed to the ground. So far he hadn't uttered a single audible word, and didn't until Benny was led from the outhouse by Moody and the other policeman, who had placed his own coat over Benny's naked body. His bare feet trod gingerly over the stony yard.

Benny peered timidly into the bright lamps focussed on his house. He looked like a small, nervous animal tipped out of a cage.

"Oh, Benny," my mother whispered in a breaking voice."Oh, Benny, Benny, Benny."

Then Terry Catlin spoke for the first and only time. It was, in fact, the last time I ever heard his voice.

"I didn't do that!" he shrieked, lunging at his son and almost taking the two guards by surprise before he was caught and held fast. His ugly, wasted face was twisted into an expression of indignant anger."I did not do that!"

Benny cringed with terror and pushed back against his guardian police officer, who was quick to see the potential danger and immediately dragged Benny behind him. He was older than his colleagues, perhaps in his early forties like my father.

"Touch him and I'll rip your fucking head off!" he screamed. Terry tried to lunge forward again, bucking and writhing against the restraining force of the two policemen holding him under the arms.

"Come on!" the older policeman goaded."Come on, yer bastard!"

Moody jabbed a finger at Terry Catlin."Get him in the car!" he bellowed. He then rounded on the older policeman and held up a warning finger. It was enough to see that Benny was ushered into our car without further delay or incident.

********************

"I'm sorry about that," Moody said from the front seat. I don't know who he was speaking to exactly but he sounded sorry all the same."We got a bit unprofessional for a moment. Let things slip a bit."

The car containing Terry Catlin and two of the other squad cars had returned to the police station in town. We were on our way home.

"Benny?" Moody turned his head and looked anxiously into the back."Benny?"

"What?" Benny murmured. He was sitting on my mother's lap like a baby, his head pressed against her bosom, the policeman's overcoat wrapped around him like a blanket. He was dazed but coherent.

"Have you been in there all night?" Moody asked gently."Did he leave you in those straps all night, son?"

Benny's head moved up and down. Moody's just shook from side to side.

"It's lucky we came," Locke said.

Benny's eyes met mine. He was smiling serenely. Like the cat that got the canary.

"Yes it was," he said.

THIRTEEN

Terry Catlin's trial began on November 25th at Leeds crown court. Up until then he was remanded in Armley gaol, Leeds. During all that time Benny expressed no wish to see or correspond with his father, and so far as I know Terry wrote not a single letter to his son from his prison cell.

Mr Harrison Blenkinsop, prosecuting, opened the trial with a speech to the jury designed to portray Terry Catlin as evil incarnate. He used the words 'every mother's worst nightmare' in what the defence later rebuffed as the most inflammatory and cynically emotive opening statement the court had ever witnessed. In contrast, the small defence team led by Colin Sanderson presented their client as a pathetic shambles of a man who could no more murder a child than he could get out of bed in the morning. They would show, Mr Sanderson promised, that Terry Catlin was the second victim in this harrowing case, a victim of an over-zealous police force under pressure to catch a killer. Any killer.

Pipe Younger and a few others attended the first day of the trial and reported back to a rapt audience in the Straw Man a full hour ahead of the late edition of the evening paper.

"So what happened?" Brian Vest asked after Pipe had opened the floor to questions. Brian had his hand in the air like a schoolboy. That was the rule, otherwise everyone would start shouting at once.

It was perhaps the most surreal occasion I'd ever been party to. Seventy or more people packed into the pub. Pipe, Mavis Molem and Tim Dunnel sat in captain's chairs facing the attentive audience in what was obviously supposed to be a recreation of a television studio debate. Minnie Reily, who had embroidered the infamous bloody handkerchief, was also there but didn't utter a word because she was a material witness for the prosecution and didn't want to compromise the trial.

"What happened?" Pipe gazed incredulously at Brian, who was standing near the back of the room due to his size and the range of smells he could produce."I've just spent twenty minutes telling you what happened."

"Idiot," Mavis sniffed.

Brian was perplexed."But what happened?"

"Nothing," Pipe said, exasperated."Today was the opening day. That's when both sides set out the basis of their case."

"So when do they find him guilty?"

Pipe shook his head incredulously."I don't know, Brian. When the time comes the jury retire to discuss the case and hopefully reach a majority verdict."

Brian grunted."Hu! I don't know why they don't just sodding hang the twat and save everyone the bother."

This statement met with a spontaneous round of applause. Pipe looked briefly despairing.

"Next question," he said.

A number of hands went up. Sharp Needles, the landlord of the Man, was standing between the panel and the audience, acting like a kind of host. Many, many years later, when I first saw Robert Kilroy Silk in action, I laughed so hard my wife had to slap me on the back to stop me choking.

"Yes, you in the front," Sharp said, pointing at Ray Dixon. Ray looked startled and turned to look behind him.

"You, Ray!"

"Well why didn't you say so," Ray said, sounding wounded."I thought you was talking to someone else."

Sharp drew in a long, weary breath. "I'm talking to you, Ray. Do you have a question?"

Ray fidgeted unhappily."I've forgotten what I was going to say now."

Knowing Ray he probably would have asked a relevant question, such as what we were going to do if it was proved that Terry Catlin did not murder Anita Dobson. Would we welcome him back with open arms and beg his forgiveness? I didn't think so somehow. Whatever the outcome of the trial, Terry's goose was well and truly cooked.

*******************

About the only person who took no interest in the trial was Benny himself. From the morning of his father's arrest he had cocooned himself in a protective fabric of denial and sheer bloody-minded disregard. It was an attitude encouraged by my parents. Talk of Terry Catlin and Anita Dobson was banned from the house. No newspapers were allowed upstairs, and the radio was switched off when the news came on. The only person who actively encouraged Benny to speak about his father was Jordan Moody.

The detective visited our house on a number of occasions, several of them ending in a free meal and a bag of leftovers. He returned time and time again with the same solitary cigarette, which was always politely declined by Sergeant Locke or anyone else who happened to be in the house.

Moody, who now insisted we call him Jordan, seemed at great pains to understand Benny. He struck me as a troubled man, a man whose life had reached a strange state of suspension. He didn't seem to be able to move on until he had cracked Benny's enigma.

I watched Moody try and fail to reach Benny on numerous occasions. Sometimes he would come in a mood of grim determination and interview Benny like a suspect, while at other times he came as the jolly uncle and attempted to bribe and cajole and ultimately trick his way into Benny's complex psyche.

Benny saw through every disguise, every act. Even when Moody was being himself and painfully honest in his failure to win Benny's trust, Benny simply shut down and refused to speak. Moody would then retreat, depressed and disheartened, only to return a few days later to repeat the process again.

I could have told him he was wasting his time. Indeed I did, but oddly he appeared not to hear me. I feared he was becoming obsessed.

Benny's state of denial presented me with no problems. I was happy and grateful to be no longer drawn into his intensely dark introspection. Instead we became like two ordinary boys. For the first time in our friendship we squabbled over radio programmes and comics and whose turn it was to wash and dry the dishes. And we discovered that once the need for a unique bond of trust and loyalty was removed from our lives we had very little in common.

Benny had made a remarkable leap in such a short space of time. He was no longer a frightened, desperate individual who fought for survival on a daily basis. He no longer needed to steal or beg for food. His clothes were always clean. He washed every day and slept in a proper bed. For the first time in his life he was an ordinary boy with nothing to fear and everything to look forward to.

Day by day he was changing. If I could have looked inside his head I'm sure I would have seen the past being erased right before my eyes, like watching words being gobbled from a computer screen by a deleting cursor.

And he was forgetting things too. Once I asked him if he remembered where Lucky was buried. For a couple of seconds he gazed at me with utter incomprehension, as if he didn't have the faintest idea what I was talking about. I saw his lips move, and I'm convinced that he was about to open his mouth and ask me who the hell Lucky was.

"In the big pit," he said at last. He didn't sound as though he was absolutely certain, and I know that if I had asked him to take me there he would have struggled to find his way. He hadn't been near the woods since Anita's body was found.

We had reached a new stage in our friendship. Sadly it was an end stage. I could see a day, in the not too distant future, when we would be more like brothers who live in the same house but have different friends and rarely speak to one another except to argue or pick fault.

I could have fought to save our friendship, to preserve the inextricable bond. I could have tried harder to reach him just like Moody did, but what would have been the point of that? Benny wanted to leave. I could see it in his eyes. I reminded him too much of the past.

So I let him go.

*****************

On days two and three of the trial the prosecuting council took the jury through the events of August 25th, beginning with Anita leaving the house and ending with her murder in the woods. The first witness was then called. Professor Michael Benson, lecturer in forensic medicine, took the stand.

The weight of forensic evidence against Terry Catlin took everyone by surprise. Back home we had been led to believe that the blood-soaked handkerchief baring Eleanor Catlin's initials was the only piece of hard evidence that Moody and his team had been able to acquire, but that believe was shattered by Michael Benson, who insofar as these things go, was responsible for damning Terry Catlin beyond salvation.

Hairs found on Anita's clothing matched hair samples taken from the defendant.

Hairs discovered on a shirt belonging to Terry Catlin matched samples of hair taken from the victim.

A forged iron garden spade measuring forty-one inches in length, ten inches across the width of the blade, and weighing thirteen pounds, was found under a sheet in an outbuilding behind Terry Catlin's house. Tests proved conclusively that this was the weapon which had been used to bludgeon Anita Dobson to death ( traces of blood and hair were discovered on it, and soil and rust samples taken from Anita's skull were consistent with samples from the spade ).

A pair of white cotton briefs identified as those worn by Anita at the time of her disappearance were discovered in a drawer in Terry Catlin's bedroom.

Shoes and clothing removed from the defendant's house were found to have traces of blood on them, the type matching that of the victim. Some fibres from this clothing were located on the deceased.

Finally, seven handkerchiefs baring the initials EC were found in a writing bureau in an upstairs room of Terry Catlin's house. They were identified as being part of the batch given to Terry's late wife as a wedding present some years before. The handkerchief discovered close to the murder sight, verified by a witness as being part of that wedding gift, bore traces of Anita Catlin's blood.

**********************8

Pipe Younger told a packed Straw Man that Terry Catlin looked like a man who was listening to the executioner testing the trapdoor in the adjoining cell. Later, in a quiet moment with my father and I, he said that Terry Catlin had actually absorbed the evidence against him like a man being told what he does in his sleep.

"He didn't have a clue," Pipe said in a disconcerted tone."I don't know what goes on inside his head. Maybe when he killed that child he was someone else, like he's got a split personality or something. But I'll tell you this-" He leaned over the table and lowered his voice."Terry truly believed he was hearing that stuff for the first time. Do you know why I'm so certain of that?"

We shook our heads. My father reached for his rum, his eyes never leaving Pipe's. I mirrored him with the glass of dandelion and burdock sitting on the table in front of me.

"Because Terry Catlin's expression was no different from anyone else in that court room, except the blokes in wigs who obviously knew what was coming. He was shocked, Eric." The old man nodded for emphasis."He was truly shocked."

The third day of the trial was taken up by the defence, who lamely tried to argue that Terry Catlin had been incapacitated through alcohol on the day of the murder and just didn't know how the evidence against him had come to be in his house. The lack of an eye-witness to place Terry at the scene of the crime seemed to be the ace in their pack.

Later an independent forensic examiner was called to shoot some holes in the state's evidence. He turned out to be vague and evasive and it was generally agreed that he had done Terry Catlin few favours. He argued against the validity of the blood-soaked handkerchief as evidence on the basis that Anita Dobson and Terry Catlin shared the same blood group - type-O, common to more than forty-seven percent of the population - but could offer no explanation for the remaining forensic evidence other than to call into questioning the competence of those who made the original tests.

Terry Catlin was not called to the stand by either side.

On the fifth day of the trial the jury heard both closing arguments before retiring to consider its verdict.

*********************

Not so long ago I remember watching television coverage of the trial of a young British nanny accused of killing a baby in her charge. The trial was taking place in America, which of course meant the whole drama was beamed live into the homes of millions of people. I didn't see the trial itself - to be frank the case bored me silly and the theatrical court shinannigans made a mockery of the justice system - but I did take an interest in how the case was being received back in Britain, particularly in the defendant's home village.

The young nanny's friends and family assembled in the local pub to view the conclusion of the trial on big-screen television. This itself was filmed and turned into a kind of bizarre subplot. A lot of people shook their heads and wondered what the country was coming to. What they seemed to overlook was the fact that nothing unusual was happening. A group of concerned people had gathered to hear the outcome of an important trial, just as groups of people had waited outside courts for centuries past ( interestingly, these same people kept their gobs firmly shut when giant screens were erected in public parks to show live coverage of a princess's funeral ). All that had changed was the technology involved in relaying the news.

When the jury retired to consider its verdict in the case of Regina vs Catlin the telephone behind the bar of the Straw Man public house started to ring. All talking stopped instantly.

"Shut up!" Sharp Needles ordered pointlessly."Phone's ringing!"

He picked up the receiver. I looked around the packed bar. Benny wasn't here of course but practically everyone else was. Even the shop keepers had closed up with the rumour that a conclusion was only hours away.

"Right, thankyou," Sharp said, and slowly set the receiver back in its cradle."Ladies and gentlemen..." Nobody groaned or heckled but a few people sighed heavily. Sharp was determined to savour his moment of power, to keep us on edge for just that little bit longer."As you know, Pipe Younger is at this very moment at the courts. He has just informed me that the jury has now retired to consider its verdict."

People drifted back into conversations which the telephone call had interrupted. I walked around the bar and chatted to some people, accepting offers of pop and nuts or the odd surreptitious sip from a pint of mild. There was a strange sense of mass distraction, as if everyone was trying to carry on a normal routine while desperately puzzling over some niggling worry. Discomposure was another symptom of growing tension. Men wandered around with their pints, chatting to mates or watching a domino game with a kind of struggling concentration. A few of the women had brought their knitting with them ( not Mavis Molem - Mavis had started up a poker game in the snug ) and were demonstrating their own personal technique to others. The common factor was that nobody seemed to be doing one thing for very long. Even I had grown tired of grazing the tables and tried instead to read one of my father's western books.

An hour went by. I had long since abandoned the sheriff of Windy Gulf to the cut-throat Carlton gang and was now engaged in a game of chequers with Spider. As if being distracted by the trial wasn't bad enough I was also faced with the added distraction of Spider's extra legs. I couldn't stop thinking about them all through the game.

"I'm off to the bar," he said."Want some pop?"

"Aye, go on," I sighed. I was all popped out but it was something to do with my hands.

Spider got up from his chair and went to the bar. Now that he was gone I had an unobstructed view of the window overlooking the street. Through it I saw Benny sitting on the curb with his head down, chasing something along the gutter with a twig. He was completely alone in a deserted street, just like the sheriff of Windy Gulf as he waited for the Carlton boys to ride into town. I thought about banging on the window and waving but not about joining him outside. In the end I decided he might misunderstand the gesture and think I was teasing him.

Spider came back from the bar with the drinks. Sitting down was a performance for him because the length of his legs ( his walking legs ) presented a serious risk of upsetting at least one table and several stools. Then someone came in from the snug, where the card and domino games were in progress, and yelled,"Spider, you're up!" and he had to go through the whole delicate performance in reverse.

I suspect that not even Spider with his great loping stride made it halfway across the bar before the telephone rang again.

*******************

"The jury's back in," Sharp said as he put down the telephone. There was a tremble in his voice. Now the real waiting would begin.

Half an hour went by and still no word from Pipe. The pub was suddenly much less animated than before, as if nobody dared to move in case they missed the vital moment when the final verdict was announced. I stared at Benny through the window, half listening to the murmured conversations behind me, absently wondering if he had heard the telephone ring.

"...not very long..."

"...over an hour. That can't be..."

"...hang him and have..."

"...poor child rest in..."

Something was troubling me. Not the trial now, something else. It was important but I couldn't prise it up from my subconscious. The more I tried the more agitated I felt.

Leave it, I told myself. Just let it come out when it wants to come out.

But that wasn't the right thing to do. This was something I just had to remember.

And what will you do when you do finally remember? a voice inside me spoke up. The voice sounded both inciting and extremely concerned at the same time. Like two voices posing the same question.

What will you do? the voice asked again. Will you stand up and scream at everyone to listen?

"It's that important," I whispered to myself.

And it was too, I just knew it. There was a vital piece of this puzzle which had yet to see the light. Everyone had missed it except for me, and now I couldn't remember it.

Because you don't want to, the twin voices said. Just let it go, Rob, let-"

The telephone...

I jumped up in my seat, my heart wriggling and fighting inside my chest like a hooked fish, and spun round so quickly the empty stool next to me toppled onto its seat with all four legs sticking in the air.

"Oh, hell," Sharp Needles said softly. He looked miserable and frightened all of a sudden."Oh, bloody hell." He reached for the phone. Listened.

People were standing absolutely still, eyes riveted to the telephone. It was as if Sharp Needles was about to snip the wires of a bomb.

"...yes, yes," Sharp was saying."Alright. I understand. Thankyou, Pipe."

He hung up. When he turned back to us there were tears streaming down his cheeks and a smile of bitter triumph on his face.

"GUILTY!" he roared, and the place just erupted in cheers.

I was swept along with the euphoria, both emotionally and literally lifted up and carried along. People were dancing and crying and laughing and cheering. I'd been told all about the end of the war and imagined no greater celebration would ever take place in West Gelder. Until now that is.

My hair was ruffled into a state of shocking disarray. Dizzy, exhilarated, I staggered back to my chair in order to catch my breath. There I looked out of the window and saw Benny Catlin standing in the middle of the street with his head tilted back and his arms reaching up to the sun.

FOURTEEN

And in the middle of the night, as Terry Catlin was counting the seconds until the hangman came to measure his neck, and Benny was snoring lightly under the blankets in the bed beside mine, it came back to me.

I woke screaming, but the scream was tearing uncontrollably through my mind like a possessed toy or a devilish wind, whipping up dust as it sped through chambers and cycloned in the corners. All I could do was lay there with my teeth biting hard into my lower lip. If I let this scream go now I would bring the house down.

Worse - I would bring the whole precariously balanced structure of our society crashing to the ground.

I had to bite down and ride it out as if I was in agony. Soon the agony subsided to mortal pain, and finally to a dull, throbbing ache that whispered ominously about wet days and how we would often meet again.

Like a wound that never properly heals, like shrapnel moving inexorably through sensitive tissue, this scream would always be with me. It would be my permanent scar, my ugly reminder of a shameful war.

Benny was awake.

I listened to the soft sounds of the house creaking and settling like a boat.

He was no longer snoring. I could feel his awareness.

It was just a coincidence, one of those spooky episodes you can never explain, like when you pick up the phone and before you've dialled a single number the very person you wanted to speak to is saying hello, or when you whistle a song and moments later it comes on the radio.

Or perhaps it has something to do with unconscious thoughts roaming freely through the cosmos like ghosts, occasionally entwining with others in some secret ritual that results in a transient collision of ideas.

Did he know what I was thinking? Had my scream, my terror and dread, somehow transcended my body and found him?

I thought of Poe's Tell-Tale Heart beating urgently under the floorboards.

Like mine was now...

I waited for Benny to rise from beneath the covers and stare at me with eyes that reflected the moonlight like bright silver coins.

He stirred suddenly, firing a bolt of electrifying panic through my body. I stiffened and clutched at the covers laying over the lower half of my face.

...he knows...he knows...he knows...

My heart was going to betray me. I tried holding my breath but it kept on sounding its hollow, treacherous beat.

...he knows...he knows...he knows...

Only when I was certain that Benny was sleeping again - when I recognised the natural pattern of his breathing - did my thoughts return to this:

If Benny was shackled in the outhouse on the day of Anita's murder, how did he know she had been killed? Who told him?

And if Benny had spent the entire day hanging from the back of the privy door, how come he was sunburnt the day after?

FIFTEEN

Terry Catlin was due to hang at Armley gaol on December 21st, 1957, but two days before the scheduled execution the Home Secretary unexpectedly granted a reprieve. The sentence was later commuted to one of life imprisonment.

Nobody knows why. Then, as now, the Home Secretary was not obliged to explain the reasons behind his decision.

The news struck me with bitter irony. The Home Secretary was as far removed from my world as the heroes and villains in the comics I read. He was a man of great power and influence, but he was also a man who wouldn't get a drink in the village pub if Sharp Needles didn't like the look of him.

The Home Secretary didn't know Terry Catlin personally. He wasn't there when Terry stamped on a kitten and broke its back, or when Terry punched his son's dog until its jaw snapped and its eyes burst in their sockets. He knew the monster but he never knew the man. The man was worse.

And yet with a simple stroke of a pen the Home Secretary did what I could not find the courage to do.

I knew that Terry Catlin was innocent of the crime he had been sentenced for, but I just could not bring myself to speak out. Maybe it was down to loyalty or fear or both, but I kept my silence until it no longer mattered.

Perhaps I kept the secret because if Terry had walked from prison an exonerated man it would have been an injustice every bit as terrible as the one that put him behind bars in the first place. I refused to be responsible for that. I simply refused.

But natural order has a way of restoring itself. The Home Secretary struck the perfect balance when he commuted Terry's death sentence. It was a most agreeable solution.

But a killer remained at large. For that I was responsible and will always be responsible. I cannot change the past. The one thing I console myself with is the certainty that he will not kill again.

The need is quite gone.

*********************

During his time with us Benny was regularly visited by a woman from the local authority. I guess she was a social worker but she never introduced herself as such. She introduced herself as Val, a large, friendly woman who smelled faintly of vanilla. Val had a soft, compassionate face and a soothing, tell-me-all tone of voice that I found both compelling and sleep-inducing. She visited Benny on the day the news that his father was not to hang came through. After spending more than an hour alone with him she called my mother and father and I together and told us that Benny had expressed the desire to leave.

My mother was confused and hurt but said she understood. For a few weeks there was talk of the whole family relocating to another part of the country, but the saddest thing of all for my mother was the realisation that Benny needed to be away from us as much as he needed to be away from the village.

A couple from Dorset came to visit Benny just after Christmas. They were called Tom and Helen Carstairs. Tom was a doctor and Helen bred fancy cats on the smallholding they owned. Benny liked them instantly. It was nothing to do with the gifts they brought or the subtle signs of prosperity, it was something only they would know. It reminded me of the time when Benny made friends with the old Boxer dog. I think it was the same kind of mutual longing that brought them together.

Tom and Helen stayed for three days. A few weeks after Benny went to stay with them in Dorset. My mother cried all night.

In the early spring, when the stony face of our village was softened and coloured by a wealth of wild daffodils, Benny left us for good.

We said goodbye in my room. A quick handshake, no eye contact, and he hurried away with his little suitcase bumping against his knees. A few moments later he walked slowly back into the room and gazed around with an intense, almost painful kind of concentration, as if he was determined not to forget a single model aeroplane, a single adventure book, a single seashell.

Then he looked at me, his face crumpling up as the tears came, and he thrust a small piece of paper into my hand before rushing out of the door.

I glanced at the paper. There were tears in my eyes now but I couldn't help smiling.

Written on the paper in Benny's bottom-of-the-class handwriting was a single word:

Thankyou.

That was all he wrote. I didn't see or hear from him again for more than forty years.

Part Three

TUGGING THE BONE

SIXTEEN

Our lives went on without him.

In the autumn of 1959 I transferred to a new school on the advice of my former head teacher. During the previous term I had developed a keen interest in writing fiction, much of which I did outside of school and was not part of the curriculum. As a natural result of this zest for writing my grammar and diction improved dramatically, much to the delight of my English masters. At the same time my reading and appreciation of books was also developing rapidly, and I discovered that some of the subjects which had hitherto been esoteric to me suddenly opened up their secrets. Mathematics was still a no-go zone, but my knowledge of history, geography and the sciences grew without me even realising it. You could say I was an accidental scholar.

I stayed on at school and passed A-levels in English language, English literature, and History. My father displayed the certificates in the shop window for the whole village to see. He said he was proud of me because I was destined to become the first professional person in my family. I would go to work in a motor car instead of queuing at the bus stop with the other Joes, and when they were clocking in and putting on their brown overalls, I would be in my office giving dictation to my attractive and rather busty secretary. Or something like that. It was assumed, in any case, that I would have a career as opposed to a job.

I went to university largely because I didn't want to disappoint my parents. I met dozens of others who were there for the same reason, and together we made plans to form a commune in India and open a coffee shop where radical poets could perform their work to intense young people in polar neck sweaters who smoked pipes. We all wanted to write the Great English Novel and live like Bohemians.

In 1966 I moved into a house with three other guys and two chicks. We stayed up late and had long, pointless discussions about things I can't even get my head around these days. The pot was plenty and there was always Dylan, the Beatles and the Animals on the record player.

If I was making plans to do anything with my life at this time I can't recall what those plans were. I certainly didn't want to become a teacher ( although I had miserably resigned myself to one day slipping on a corduroy jacket with leather elbow pads and calling everyone by their surname ) and my writing was quietly and unceremoniously shelved after a spiky girl in my off-campus writing group called my stories jejune and inane.

I briefly considered a career in the Civil Service. Although I was discouraged from sitting the Foreign Service entrance exam ( I wasn't bright enough and went to the wrong school anyway) one of my tutors offered to put my name forward as a potential recruit for MI5, but the Security Service at that time was seeking students whose grasp of complex social and political philosophies would lend themselves naturally to top jobs with the large unions and other subversive organisations. The ability to speak Russian was also an advantage, as was a law degree or a background in finance and a host of other qualifications I wasn't going to get. There was little room for future English masters and failed hippy novelists.

Instead I decided to do nothing. Once I had my degree I planned to buy a van, paint it groovy colours, and tour the country for a year. I went so far as replying to an advertisement on the university notice board from a disillusioned student with a similar yearning. I was expecting someone with a beard and a sheepskin coat but the advertiser turned out to be the same spiky bitch who rubbished my stories in front of the whole writing group.

Her name was Janis, and she both frightened and excited me with her explosive views on women's rights and the place of the individual in a couples-only society. In private, however, she proved to be kind and funny and just as ordinary as the rest of us, full of daft dreams and childish insecurities. We fell in love very quickly - in about a week, all told - and lived happily ever after.

Shortly after meeting my future wife, one of the chicks I lived with, a shy, serious history student who played Jimmy Johnson and John Lee Hooker records in her room and bothered absolutely no one, went to the theatre alone one evening and never came home.

Her name was Maxine Clay. Her mutilated body was discovered in a canal the next morning by the ubiquitous man walking his dog. Everyone was upset by the tragedy, by the senseless, motiveless killing of such a quiet, inoffensive girl, but only Janis saw how deeply and profoundly disturbing it was to me.

"I think you've seen something like this before," she said to me one night. We were drinking wine and listening to one of my old Fats Domino records."Have you?"

"No," I lied.

They never caught the man who murdered Maxine Clay, student of history and blues fan. Apart from stirring up the nightmare I had largely left behind in West Gelder, her death awakened in me a sense of outrage and injustice that set me off towards the only career I could ever really follow.

I became a policeman.

**********************

My parents greeted the news of my decision with a sort of bewildered approval. I knew in a way that I had disappointed them. Their hopes for me were high and stemmed from a hard life of constant struggle. They didn't want me to endure the same hardships they had endured all their lives, the endless monotony of a routine job, the grind, the ever present spectre of ruin. They wanted me to wear a suit and keep my hands clean at work, and to retire with a cracking pension and lungs that didn't cough out asbestos dust. At the same time they were immensely proud that I was to become one of Her Majesty's Constables, and they attended my graduation from police college and placed the photograph of me in my uniform alongside my A-level certificates and my English degree in the shop window.

I became a beat constable on the streets of Leeds at the age of twenty-two. I told none of my colleagues I was a graduate in case it led to division or suspicion. At my interview the Deputy Chief Constable had been keen to point out the opportunities open to graduate entrees. It was made clear to me that I was considered management potential, and should therefore avoid becoming a detective.

But I came to the police force for that very reason, and after two years on the beat I joined the CID. Under the wing of a tough, diligent Scot named Jack Parsons, I quickly immersed myself in the world of the investigator and rose to the rank of Detective Inspector before my thirty-fifth birthday.

Janis and I were married by then and expecting our first child. In the same week that my son Jack was born a seven year old girl called Mary Frosterman was abducted from a small seaside town on the east coast of Scotland and found strangled to death the next day. I telephoned the detective in charge of the inquiry and asked if there were any leads. He seemed more than a little surprised at my interest but told me the investigation was running into brick wall after brick wall. He was saddened and bitterly angry that a small child in a yellow dress could be lured into a vehicle in broad daylight on a busy promenade and nobody saw a thing.

Sleep hadn't come easy to me ever since the night I woke up with the truth about Anita Dobson's murder screaming inside me, but after the killing of Mary Frosterman I routinely began to wake at two or three in the morning with the dour certainty that I would not sleep again that night. Sometimes I would get out of bed and try to do some paperwork, a scotch or two to help settle me down at my desk, but not even an increasing appetite for booze could dull the persistent, nettling sense of impotence I felt in my day to day life.

Yes I caught criminals - a great many thieves and robbers and fraudsters and occasionally I was instrumental in the apprehension and conviction of a killer - but there were so many of them, so many of them still out there. At night all that despair and guilt came knocking at my door. I learned quickly that it couldn't be ordered away on a whim. The best I could do I could do was to sit down with a drink and watch it watching me with the cold, impassive suspicion of a cat.

One night, when I was a chief inspector and a borderline alcoholic, I was sitting at my desk in the middle of the night when the telephone rang. My first thought was to ignore it. I had drunk too much to drive, and the last thing I needed was some po-faced young constable asking me to blow into his breathalyser the moment I arrived at work.

Ah, but I could never ignore the telephone, especially when it rang in the middle of the night. A call at home in the quiet hours often meant a serious crime had been committed, and where there were serious crimes there had to be serious criminals. To ignore the phone was to let one go, and my millstone was to catch them all, each and every one of them, to atone for the past.

I picked up the phone and spoke my name. Nothing answered me but silence. The house was still, utterly asleep, and as I sat there with a scotch in one hand, the telephone in the other, I felt myself falling with slow, magical unreality all the way back to the night that Terry Catlin was found guilty of murdering Anita Dobson. I landed in the bed of my childhood self, feeling Benny's awareness in the silence of the night. I knew it was him on the other end of the line even though he hung up without speaking. Why he chose to call me at all I don't know. Maybe he, like me, was haunted.

Five years after the murder of Mary Frosterman, when my son Jack was in his first term at 'big school' and my two year old twins, Charlotte and Emily were systematically destroying the house from the inside out, a ten year old girl went missing whilst delivering newspapers in a Nottinghamshire village. Her bicycle was found abandoned on a lonely pathway close to some woods but her body wasn't discovered for three months. She floated up from the bottom of the Trent the morning after I was promoted to superintendent. By the time I made chief superintendent at the age of forty another two children had been killed, and a decision to link the inquiries was made.

*************************

In 1985 I was formally asked if I would consider heading the operational end of a joint investigation into the murders of four children and the attempted abduction of three more. Naturally I accepted.

On the day I began to clear my desk in preparation for this important new task, one of my officers knocked on the door of my office and told me I had a visitor.

"Who is it?" I asked. I thought it might be someone from the press trying to blag their way in without an appointment.

"An old man and his son," the officer said. He looked bemused and curious."Moody, he said his name was. Jordan Moody."

Mostly the past never leaves you, even when you're trying to forget. It's always there in snatches of songs you hear on the radio, in the elusive perfumes of strangers you bump into on trains, in tricks of the light and in moments of inexplicable sadness. But sometimes you can turn a corner and meet the past coming from the opposite direction. That's what happened when Jordan Moody's name was mentioned. I felt like I had physically bumped into the man.

When Moody came in I thought my officer must have it wrong. It wasn't his son he had brought along with him but his father, a tidy old man with the same warm smile and intelligent blue eyes. But of course twenty eight years had gone by, and Moody, who was probably in his late forties when I last saw him, was now an old man. I touched my face self-consciously, thinking distantly how nothing quite disturbs us more than a reminder of passing time.

"Young Dawson," Moody said with a grin. He stretched across the desk to shake my hand. I noted with sadness how Moody's son absently steadied the old man by lightly placing a hand against the small of his back. It was the kind of unconsciously protective thing I did with my children all the time. What goes around comes around, I thought."This is my eldest lad, Stuart."

I shook hands with Moody's son and asked them to sit down. Moody settled at once into a leather chair but Stuart remained standing.

"Alright if I smoke?" Moody asked, pulling a Regal cigarette box from his jacket pocket. I put an ashtray on the desk in front of him. He opened the packet and offered it to his son."Fag, Stu?"

"It's your last one, dad," Stuart said in a familiar tone of weary indulgence."I'll leave you mine."

"Champion," Moody cackled. Stuart gave him a packet of cigarettes, then he wished me good day and left the two of us alone.

Moody looked at me for a long moment, smiling distantly, his eyes narrow with private amusement."I asked him to leave," he said at last."He doesn't know why I'm here. He thinks you're the son of an old colleague. He's not suspicious. Old people get nostalgic, you know."

"So why are you here?" I asked. I took my own cigarettes out of the drawer and lit one. I had been smoking ever since I stopped drinking. Swapped one vice for another, you might say, but the current of the two was infinitely more acceptable to my family. Dad could go into the garden for a cigarette but he acted like a drunken arsehole all over the house.

"How are your parents?" Moody asked, ignoring my question.

"My mother's fine," I said. She still runs the shop in West Gelder, though she has help these days. My father died of cancer about a year ago."

"Ah, I'm sorry," Moody sighed."I know what that's like."

He didn't elucidate but suddenly I could see it in his eyes. Moody was dying.

"He went peacefully at the end," I told him."I wasn't there but my mother said it was very moving, almost something to treasure."

"Death's a mysterious old girl," Moody said."We fear death all our lives, then at the end we embrace her. It's almost like denying God until you see the Pearly Gates about to close. Maybe that's exactly what happens, Robert. Maybe they see something right at the end, something that makes all the pain worthwhile."

"I hope so."

He nodded, smiling that warm, beguiling smile. It suited him even better now that he was old and weatherbeaten.

"This is a bit posh," he said, looking around my office."I had a converted broom cupboard for an office in my day. About the only conversion work they did was taking the brooms out. Mind, I was never a chief super."

"It has its perks."

He looked at me coyly."Smug bastard," he said. I laughed.

"Can I get you some coffee?"

"No, not for me."

"It's no trouble."

"I bet it isn't," he said archly."Bet you've got a little WPC running your errands, eh? Nice is she?" He cupped both hands under a pair of imaginary breasts - enormous breasts, in fact."Nice?"

"You can't do that these days. I have a civilian secretary. She makes coffee if I ask nice."

Moody deliberated for a few moments."Oh, go on then," he said."And a Rich Tea, if you've got one."

We chatted about changes in the Force until my secretary came in with a tray of coffee and biscuits. As I poured and added the milk and sugar, Moody stole three biscuits and secreted them in his jacket pocket.

"Champion," Moody gushed as he dunked a biscuit into his coffee and chomped it down with shameless satisfaction. I waited, sipping my own coffee and smoking a second cigarette, until he was ready to talk. I used the time to bring my nerves under control and prepare myself. I had to keep reminding myself that I was now the senior police officer and Moody was just another civilian. What goes around comes around again.

Moody set his cup down on the desk and lit one of his son's cigarettes."Bad business, these child killings," he said.

So that was it. That was what had prompted him to come. I wondered how many of us there were, how many people feeling the sting of an old wound every time the news reported that another child had failed to come home.

"Are you in charge?"

"No, the Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester is co-ordinating the investigation. I'm just heading the troops at the sharp end."

"Big inquiry, yes?"

"Massive. Possibly as big as the Ripper inquiry if..."

"If he strikes again?"

I nodded."Yes, if he strikes again."

"Did you ask for this job, Robert?"

"No. I was offered it. I could have refused."

"Do you think so?" Moody asked quietly."Because I don't think you could have refused this case, Robert. I've been reading about you in the press. They call you things like 'high-flying cop' and 'top sleuth', but I know what really drives you, Robert Dawson."

For a moment our eyes met. I saw beyond the alertness and intelligence and saw in Jordan Moody the desperation and torment of a great unanswered question.

I broke eye contact and crushed my cigarette in the ashtray. Immediately I lit another.

"I had lunch with Michael Benson," Moody said."Do you know who I'm talking about?"

"He carried out the post mortem on Anita Dobson," I said. I didn't need to search my memory for the name.

Moody nodded."This is not recently, you understand. Michael's been dead a long time. I had lunch with him the day after the post mortem. I was there for the...you know, when he operated on the little lass. It was my responsibility as SIO. But I took him out to lunch because I wanted his opinion rather than his report. Kind of off the record, you see."

I wanted the phone to ring or for someone to knock on the door and demand my attention. Hardly a minute went by in my normal day to day routine without an interruption of some kind. Now, as if everyone had mysteriously vanished as the past unfolded itself around us, the whole building felt eerily deserted.

"Anita received eight blows, Robert. The first and heaviest of the blows caused a hairline fracture just about here-" Moody rubbed a spot on the back of his head midway down the parietal lobe."Now, if you hit someone from behind, you want them to go down, correct? I mean, if you put all your strength into the first blow and chummy just turns around and looks at you daft, you've got a problem. Do you agree with me, Robert?"

I nodded guardedly.

"First blow - BLAM!" Moody brought his fist crashing down on the desk, making the coffee cups judder in their saucers and causing my heart to jump. His eyes were as bright and keen as those of a discovering child."Always the hardest blow, Robert. The killer blow. It's the one you steal yourself for isn't it? You put all your strength and momentum, all your loathing and terror into that first blow. Don't you think it's strange that a man like Terry Catlin, a deranged psychopath in the clutches of an undeniable impulse, could hit a small child on the head with a garden spade and cause such relatively minor damage?"

"I don't know," I said."I've seen a lot of unusual things over the years. Nothing surprises me anymore."

"Bit odd though, eh?"

"Yes," I conceded."I would expect the injury to be more severe."

"The other blows didn't even break her skull," Moody said."From the depth of the wounds, and the degree of damage inflicted, it was easy to number them in the order they were delivered. Blow number three hit her square in the face. We think she turned over, either in a conscious effort to fend off the blows or entirely involuntarily. Her nose was shattered and she swallowed a lot of blood. That's what killed her, Robert. Not the-"

"Stop, just-"

"- Blows to her head but a combination of trauma and blood loss resulting-"

"Wait, please I need-"

"Resulting in shock and asphyxiation," Moody finished."Can I get you a glass of water, Robert?"

I was shaking. My hands were actually shaking. I had to sit there and watch Moody struggle out of the chair and pour me a glass of water from the jug on the windowsill. Little by little my control returned, but I could not stop my heart from pounding an old chant...

...he knows...he knows...he knows...

Moody sat down and studied me concernedly."Eight blows from a garden spade should have crushed that girl's skull out of all recognition. The first blow was fairly hard - not the sort of bang on the head you'd like your kids to take if they tumbled over in the playground - but not immediately fatal. The next seven blows were progressively lighter, Robert, as if the killer was losing puff. Do you see what I'm driving at? The killer was a weak individual with virtually no stamina. By the last blow, which smacked her on the ear, he could barely lift that spade." Moody leaned forward, determined not let me off the hook now. I sensed he had waited a long, long time for this."He could barely lift it the first time, Robert. That's one reason why the blow was light. Do you know the second?"

"The arc of descent," I said quietly.

Moody smiled grimly and nodded his head."Not a big enough swing, lad. And that spade didn't come down on the top of her head like it would if you or me were doing the job, it came down here-" He chopped at the spot on the back of his head again."Suggesting what, Robert?"

"That she moved as the blow fell. She could have moved at the crucial moment."

"Or the killer was very small, detective."

I shook my head and lit another cigarette. Moody was watching me with owlish attention."Shall we re-enact it, Robert? Get one of your men to stand with his back to you, about two feet away, and you hit him on the head with something you can barely lift above your shoulders. If he's the same size as yourself, or taller, I know where the hammer will fall. I'll bet my last cigarette on it, detective. But you play the same game with a ten year old child and it's like looking down on a football from a hot air balloon.

"The person who killed Anita Dobson almost threw that spade at her the first time. It was virtually falling out of his hands as he brought it down. He was very weak, Robert, very...very small and quite frail."

"All this is in the post mortem report?" I asked. I was suddenly remembering when we buried Lucky in the woods, and how I had dug the shallow hole because Benny was too weak to do it himself.

And that spade. God, had I used the same spade that...

"Not all of it," Moody said."The medical details are there but the conclusion was drawn over steak pie and chips."

"And what was your conclusion, Jordan?"

Moody's eyes glittered mischievously."What's yours, Detective Chief Superintendent Dawson? If all this happened yesterday, what would you be telling your officers this morning?"

I couldn't lie to the man outright. He knew exactly what conclusion I would draw in a hypothetical case. I was a detective now, not a twelve year old paper lad. Besides, I learned a long time ago that the most convincing lies are those which come closest to the truth.

"I would conclude that the killer was possibly a child. Or a dwarf."

A smile crossed Moody's face."All dwarves were out of town, Robert. So you've eliminated the impossible; that means the remainder, however improbable-"

"Must be the truth," I finished. I poured another glass of water and lit a cigarette. The air was starting to look blue in here."But I wouldn't pursue that line of inquiry exclusively. There's always a margin for error."

"Very wise, very wise."

"So how come you never followed it up?"

Moody blinked."Excuse me?"

"If you knew the killer of Anita Dobson was a child, how come you never followed that line of inquiry?"

"I did, Robert," Moody said. He let his head fall for a moment, then raised his crisp, youthful blue eyes to mine."I'm here, am I not?"

My intercom buzzed at that moment. I picked up the telephone and spoke to Andrea, my secretary. She informed me that the Chief Constable was waiting to see me. There would be a handshake and a hearty good luck but the boss was secretly hoping I would fall flat on my face over the child-killer investigation. He knew, like I knew, that a good result on this case would put me on the top floor with the ACPO boot boys. From there it was only a matter of time before a flyer like me took his legs away and claimed the big chair. So he thought anyway. So his driver had told Andrea.

I put the phone down. Moody was deep in thought. Suddenly he looked tired and very old.

"Just tell me the truth, Robert. That's all I came for."

"I can't."

He looked at me helplessly."Twenty eight years, Robert. This has been on my mind for twenty eight years. I couldn't break that boy then and I can't break him now. Why did he kill her? What in God's name made him do something like that?"

"I don't know that he did, Jordan."

"You asked me why I didn't follow up what the post mortem suggested. Well, I started to, Robert, I really did. But it was a long time ago, before video nasties and muggers young enough to be in primary school. It was a different age. Not an innocent one but a naive one. I would have been crucified if I had started a manhunt for a child, no matter how strong my hunch was. The press, my bosses, the people in West Gelder..." He shook his head sadly."I would have been finished. So I hedged my bets and kept my mind and the inquiry open to other possibilities. Then what do you know, along comes a suspect. And I heard the rumours, Robert - this man was in the frame from the outset."

I thought about how Benny had cleverly planted the suggestion that his father was a suspect by making sure Mavis Molem overheard him telling me his father had been questioned. Not interviewed as part of the mass elimination process, but questioned. The difference was a subtle one, perhaps so subtle as to be meaningless to someone who wasn't caught up in the intrigue of rumour and suspicion. It was however a crucial difference - crucial to the masterplan in any case.

"I had a suspect with no alibi. Once he was arrested and further tests made I then had a suspect with a damning weight of forensic evidence against him." Moody shrugged."I had my man didn't I? The pressure was off. It was as if all that stuff was just put there for me to find." He took a cigarette from the box and rolled it gently between his thumb and forefinger."Just put there for me to find, Robert."

"I have to go," I said."The boss wants to see me."

Moody nodded without looking up. I sensed his hope of finding out the truth slipping away."I didn't suspect Benny until after I'd arrested his father. I saw how small and frail the boy was, and I also saw what an awful, awful life he had been living. Not many things in the job moved me after so long, Robert, but that boy's life brought me to tears."

Moody looked up suddenly, alert, sharp, like a snake with a taste of warm blood on its tongue.

"I started thinking about what a person might do to free himself from that kind of hopeless situation. And I put that together with the evidence and all at once I was a very frightened man. Because here was this delicate child, this tiny, runt of a child, Robert, and he was perhaps the most cunning, most devious, and probably the most ingenious killer I had ever squared up to.

"I said to him one time - this was at your house, when we were alone. I said, Benny, you can't hide the truth forever, son. And he looked me straight in the eyes and did this -" Moody held his right hand up, sidewards on, his thumb tucked in behind his other fingers."What does that mean, Robert?"

"Four fingers deep," I said."It means the truth is just under the surface, like something buried in the woods. It's right there under your feet but you'll never find it."

Moody gazed at me with a kind of puzzled anguish."I had nothing on the boy and everything on the father. I had to go with the evidence. Even Terry Catlin's defence team made nothing of the FME's inference that Anita may have been murdered by someone weak and small. The evidence against him was simply overwhelming."

"You did the right thing. Justice was served, Jordan. Draw a line now."

Moody made a sound of repressed frustration."But it wasn't!" He took a deep breath and looked at me. He was lost and haunted and I wanted so much to help him but I couldn't even help myself."Do you know what comes back to me at night, Robert? It's not that poor child lying dead in the woods, and it's not even the look of horrified surprise on Terry Catlin's face when the evidence against him was detailed. It's the thought of Benny Catlin pulling hairs from his father's comb and secreting them on a dead body in the woods. It's the thought of Benny dipping his mother's handkerchief in Anita's blood and leaving it where it might be found. It's the thought of Benny fastening himself into those straps on the nights that Terry didn't put him there himself. He had to make it all look perfect for when the police came to arrest his father. Terry shouted something, Robert. Do you remember what it was?"

I nodded silently.

"I did not do that. Terry said: I did not do that. I thought he was talking about killing Anita, but a few years ago I woke up in the middle of the night with a chill down my back. Terry was talking about locking Benny in the straps wasn't he? That's what he was really saying. He didn't put Benny in the straps the night before his arrest. It's not the execution of the crime that chills me, Robert, it's the planning. The murder of Anita Dobson was the most cold-blooded crime I have ever investigated, and I failed to bring the killer to justice."

I rose from my chair. I really did have to go. Moody sighed and followed my lead. I wondered if he was regretting ever coming here. I had given him no answers. All I had done is further compound the mystery for him.

"Wait," I said as he was leaving. I scooped the last few Rich Tea biscuits from the plate and slipped them into his hand. His eyes were warm but he did not smile."What would you do, Jordan? If you had one last chance to save yourself, what would you do?"

"I wouldn't kill anyone," he said. He didn't look me in the eye.

"Then you're a better man than I."

Jordan Moody died the following year. I hope he was right about the dying seeing something at the end, and I hope that something is all the truths a person has been seeking. I couldn't give him the peace he yearned for. I hope he has found it since.

*********************

I got my child killer two years after I joined the investigation. Peter Hardisty was a van driver from Stockwell, London, who took advantage of his travelling occupation to molest and rape and finally slaughter at least five children in various parts of the country. He was eventually trapped by a single petrol receipt issued at a garage just yards from the spot where one of the young girls was abducted. We raided his home and found obscene photographs of himself and dozens of young children, boys as well as girls, only half of whom were ever traced alive.

It is my suspicion that Peter Hardisty, fat, scruffy, smelly and bearded, killed at least fifteen children in Britain, France and Germany before he was eventually apprehended. Even then we had evidence enough to charge him with only one murder, that of nine year old Jennifer Myers, abducted and strangled and dumped in the canal near Skipton. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and will never be freed.

That's all I'm going to say about Peter Hardisty. If you want to know more about the case you should read the book by Superintendent Paul Rush, one of my deputies on the case. I was asked to write the book myself but I declined. You see, for me it wasn't over. It just wasn't over yet.

**************************

The inquiry almost killed me. I came out of it a minor media celebrity, and with more commendations and medals than I could carry, but I also finished the investigation with some worrying health problems. I was getting pains in my chest and headaches like I can't begin to tell you. Most of my hair fell out and never grew back. More worryingly, I found myself taking long drives that would always end in some lonely spot far away from the road, where nobody could see me. The vibrations around these places was always the same, deeply lonely and aching with tragedy.

The Samaritan called them suicide spots. Places people go to die. I didn't fully realise how close I had come to ending my own life until I found myself crying on the telephone to the Samaritans. Even then, anonymous, perhaps only a drive away from death, I couldn't tell them why.

One thing was clear. I could not live through another exhausting investigation like the last one. It was Janis who finally made me see sense. She forced me to stand naked in front of the full-length mirror in our bedroom and take a good long look at myself. I felt ridiculous and faintly ashamed until she stripped off and joined me.

And here we still are, I thought. Not kids anymore, not hippy students dreaming about trekking to India and changing the world along the way. We were just two middle-aged people now, Janet and John in cardigans and sensible shoes. Or not, in this case.

"Your tits are a bit saggy," I noted.

She nudged me."So are yours."

"Not too bad though," I said."Not for forty three."

"I wonder what we'll look like when we're really old," she mused.

I kissed her on the cheek. I sure as hell was determined to find out.

********************

I applied for and was accepted on the Senior Command Course at Bramshill police college. From there it was a short step and a massive leap to Assistant Chief Constable. Two years later we moved to Cornwall so that I could take up a post as the Deputy Chief Constable there. Two years after that I was back in West Yorkshire as the Chief of police.

I lasted only three years in the job. I wasn't a bad Chief Constable - and I certainly wasn't a failure - but the nature of the job was changing and I just didn't have the necessary political inclination to be fully accepted beyond the confines of the Police Service.

In June of 1995 I was called down to London to discuss my future with senior officials from the Inspectorate and the Home Office. I thought I would be asked to resign - and I was, but not in the way that I expected.

It was put to me that my skills as an investigator and negotiator could be better served outside the administrative realms of Police Headquarters. There was a vacancy, it was said, inside the Security Service, for a very senior person with an intimate knowledge of criminal detection. Someone was needed to co-ordinate and oversee joint investigations between various domestic law enforcement agencies, including Special Branch, the Security Service, GCHQ, Customs and Excise, and the police force at large. It was a Civil Service position to be titled Special Operations Liaison Officer, and the grade would be equivalent to that of Chief Constable.

So I joined MI5 after all.

Predictably my new colleagues nicknamed me Solo, the acronym of my title. It proved to be a very challenging and rewarding job. Despite the workload and the added contention of having to adapt to a new and often esoteric code of formalities, I relished the challenge and the chance of a new beginning.

But I still didn't rest too well at nights. Now I had another ghost to live with. It was Jordan Moody's bewildered and anguished face floating up behind my eyes, his voice whispering to me:

The only difference now was that I was no longer looking to atone for my part in the crime. I just wanted to understand as a man what I had understood as a boy.

A week ago, I knew the chance had finally come when my wife telephoned me at work.

"Come home, Robert," she said simply."Your mother's died."

SEVENTEEN

This place has always retained the power to devastate me. My visits home have been as infrequent as possible. In my youth this was seen as the typical reaction of a boy from a small village who allows himself to be seduced and beguiled by the bright lights of a big city. People assumed I'd developed a kind of snobbish contempt for a place with no football team and a police station that closed on Wednesday afternoons. Then later, when my career began to take off, it was just work that was keeping me away. Nobody knew that going back to West Gelder was for me like going back in time. It was - and I suppose it will always be - like tugging at the bone and disturbing what is buried four fingers deep beneath my feet.

At first I really did develop a mild contempt for West Gelder. The news my parents brought with them on their visits to my shared-house touched me like news of war and political change in some distant banana republic. Mavis Molem slipped under the wheel of a moving tractor and lost a leg; Spider had moved to London and married a famous pop singer; Ray Dixon bought a shoe shop; Mike Bronson was chinned by Wilf Harbuckle in an argument about loud music; Brian Vest was seeing a doctor about his wind problem...and on and on it went, each fresh drama or tragedy seeming more trivial and irrelevant than the last. I was sorry about Mavis - though she made a full recovery and continued to work the farm with her long-suffering husband Peter - but didn't I have more important things to concern myself with?

Even the changes in my parents' lives had little affect or impression on my own. There was never any need for me to take an active interest because they were always there for the special occasions in my life. They were there for my graduation ceremonies and at my wedding, awkward and proud in their clean but old fashioned clothes and brand new hats. They came to the hospital to hold my babies, and they came to stay with us so that Janis didn't go raving mad and knife someone in Safeway. They were always there, and I took it for granted that they would always be always there.

It wasn't until my father's death that I was made to see how much they meant to me. He was diagnosed with stomach cancer in June 1984, and two months later he took an overdose of painkillers and died in my mother's arms. I was at work when I heard the news and my first thought was a wholly selfish one. I thought, they never die when you're loving them, only when you're ignoring them. But when I stopped being angry and shocked and started to really miss him and our long, comfortable silences together, I blamed only myself. It was the old story about not realising what you've got until it's gone, but being an old story doesn't make it any less true. It doesn't make it hurt any less.

My mother was utterly lost without him. In a very short space of time she changed from an upright woman of determined character into a confused and very lonely old lady. We tried as best we could to make her feel less isolated and forgotten and more like a cherished and respected member of the family, but living so far apart made things harder than they should have been.

We invited her to stay over at least once a month. Either Janis or myself would collect her from West Gelder and drive her back to the house. She baked bread and buns in our designer kitchen and told the kids stories about what their father was like as a boy. She seemed to enjoy herself but the distant anxiety never left her eyes. She was permanently homesick, but homesick for the past and the man she loved with unfailing loyalty and her own special kind of private, dignified passion.

She was forced to sell the shop after a minor fall turned into a protracted hip problem. I paid for a new one - a hip that is, not a shop - but she was never quite the same again. She moved out of the building and rented Pipe Younger's old cottage from his granddaughter ( Pipe complained of feeling ill one day in 1968 and went for a walk to clear the buzz from his head. He was never seen again. I like to think he went some place to die, like elephants are supposed to do. The possibility of a storytellers' graveyard is one I like to believe in ). I also paid for a live-in helper, a young girl from the village called Paula Vest, whose grandfather was still unable to attend even the most informal of functions without causing considerable embarrassment among the guests.

My mother died suddenly from heart failure at the age of eighty four. She left behind a son aged fifty-five. I was too old to have my shoelaces done up for me, too old to be clipped around the ear and sent off to bed, too old to be spoken to in that soft and secret language a mother speaks to her child, but I wanted those things on the night she died. I cried and cried for my mother. It wasn't about Benny or the past or even about feeling guilty for not loving her as fiercely as she deserved, it was simply and horribly about wanting my mother. It makes me weep now to even think about it. She loves me still and I can't tell her how much that means to me. It never goes away. She never goes away.

********************

We went back yesterday for the funeral. We drove under a scowling umbrella of rainclouds that seemed to track our progress north with the ominous, watchful patience of vultures.

Janis had made all the arrangements, making two overnight trips without me because I couldn't bare to do it myself. I guess I just sort of sat down and allowed everyone else to take control. At times I felt like a man who understands that he has been involved in a serious accident, that his brain is slightly damaged and his body needs to rest, but can't recall what he was like before the accident and can't understand why life without him continues to move so quickly and efficiently. I didn't begin to emerge from this strange, semi-dazed state until the night before the funeral. That's when Janis gave me the tin.

It was an old Jacobs family assortment tin, probably dating from before the war. I sat clutching it on my lap for a long time, as long as an hour, wondering whether I should open it or bury it with her. In the end I opened it and breathed in the dusty smell of antique paper.

The first thing I saw were her spare spectacles. Every little thing, I thought as my chest began to tighten. Every little thing is going to break my heart. I put them carefully to one side and started to sort through the tightly packed file of Co-Op insurance papers, birth certificates, books of Green Shield stamps, ration books, school swimming certificates, creased, yellowing photographs with corners missing, television licences ( my father bought a set in 1966, for you know what ), the guest list from their wedding reception...

Is this all that's left? I thought with a kind of howling dismay. Do we all finish up as nothing more than a few official papers and a handful of sentimental things in a biscuit tin?

I nearly stopped there. Suddenly I felt like I was snooping. More than that, I felt like I was diminishing the importance of these things, depreciating their true value by failing to look beyond the obvious. I could almost hear her in my mind, see her gazing at me with a look of stern disapproval laced with disappointment.

It may surprise you to know, Robert Dawson, that your father and I had a life before you were born, and we continued to have a life once you'd left home. We did not magically come alive when you walked into the kitchen for a meal.

And my father, mellow, reasonable, articulate:

"Okay folks," I said out loud, smiling to myself as I wiped my eyes.

I flicked through the rest of my mother's stuff, knowing now that there was a pattern here, a significance which was never meant for me to understand or appreciate, only respect.

And at the back of the tin, held together by an elastic band, I found Benny's letters.

********************

We arrived in West Gelder an hour before the service. I stayed in the car while my wife went to speak with our children. Jack and the twins had driven up with Mark, my protection officer from the job. My status inside MI5 demands that I am accompanied everywhere by at least one permanently armed bodyguard. Mark's a nice lad, not much older than Jack, but a bit of a cold fish, as most of them tend to be.

Jack's twenty, tall, good-looking, and studying to be a pharmacist. His girlfriend is French and alarmingly mature and attractive. He's writing a novel but he doesn't know I know. He plays a mean lead guitar in a blues band. I haven't dared discuss this with his mother yet, but I think that's what he'll decide to do with the rest of his life.

The twins are seventeen, coquettish, melodramatic ( we have nicknamed them Davis and Crawford ), wonderfully wild and thoughtful girls. Both want to become vets at the moment.

I watched through the rearview mirror, smiling absently, as Janis spoke to the kids through the open rear window of Mark's anonymous but racy Volvo. Sometimes I feel a strange sense of guilt and shame for having lumbered her with three children and pretty much ruining her way of life. The thing about Janis was that she never knew what she wanted to be. Moreover, she was happy not knowing what she wanted to do with her life. For her there never was a dream or vocation, only the nameless yearning and the possibility of a lifetime of adventure in pursuit of it. Then me and my big flat feet come along and blunder through her sandcastles. I think a secret part of her must hate me a little, the way you secretely hate your father for being bald and poor or your mother for those wrinkles and lines you're destined to inherit. Janis would never admit to such a thing but I know I'm right. What's more, ever since the twins began to talk about going away to university I've noticed a change in her. She's searching herself for something, and I think it's courage. Janis has a plan and for once me and the kids don't figure in it. But it's her turn now, and if I try to hold her back it really will be shame on me.

After a few minutes I realised that they weren't talking amongst themselves for any old reason. They were giving me time to gather my thoughts, collect myself.

The bundle of letters was in the glove box. I took it out and slipped off the elastic band. I had no intention of reading them - they were sacred. My mother missed Benny Catlin with all her heart, but she never spoke of him around me. I sometimes think she felt guilty for loving him like a son, and sometimes I think she knew more about the summer of 1957 than she let on.

I knew they kept in touch in the early days but I had no idea that the bond between them had never been broken. The most recent of the letters was dated just a few days before she died. It had a Maidstone postmark on it but that's all the investigating I was prepared to do. It wasn't the letters I wanted now but the scrap of folded paper slotted into the middle of the bundle.

I opened it and read the single word written there in the big, crooked letters of a child's hand.

Thankyou.

My throat closed up and my eyes started to water.

"You're welcome, Benny," I whispered.

EIGHTEEN

We walked the short distance from Pipe's old cottage to St John's church, Janis holding my hand, my children a few paces behind us, and my bodyguard a few paces behind them. I didn't recognise the shops now. The buildings were the same but the names above them had changed, and somehow that made all the difference. In the window of my old bedroom above the shop was a small picture of the Manic Street Preachers. In the front window, where my parents had proudly displayed my honours, was a National Lottery poster.

"He called them all Snap," I said."Stopped him getting sentimental."

Janis squeezed my hand and gave me a puzzled little smile."Who called what what?"

"Pipe," I said."He gave each of his pets the same name. He said it was to stop him getting sentimental but I think that was the only lie he ever told me. I think he called them all Snap because he couldn't let them go."

My wife pulled me closer and I threw my arm around her shoulders.

The sound of an electric motor whining protestingly drew my attention to the road. A massive old man with a backside like a beanbag was overtaking us on one of those buzzy little invalid carriages. He let off noisily as he pulled ahead.

"'Scuse me!" he called, his voice breaking into a snigger."Don't know what I've been eating!"

"Do you know him?" Janis asked. She was staring at me oddly because I was grinning from ear to ear.

"His name's Snap," I said, and laughed to myself."It's best to remember them all like that."

My mother would have loved the service. I chose the hymns she enjoyed to sing the most, Morning Has Broken and We Plough The Fields and Scatter, regardless of how inappropriate they might seem. I knew a postman who insisted the vicar play Return To Sender over the loudspeaker as his coffin was being carried from the church. Most of the congregation were horrified but his wife was crying and giggling at the same time. It was one of those biscuit tin moments, a piece of someone's secret soul you could either roll with or ignore completely just so long as you respected it.

I delivered the eulogy myself. All of what I said about Alice Dawson, wife and mother, is written down on a sheet of paper which I now keep in a biscuit tin. It's for me to know and you to find out.

**************

The service comes back to me in hazy fragments like drunken memories. I suppose I was intoxicated throughout, the normal functions of my brain altered and confused by the sheer potency of the emotions I was feeling. The formalities of the service are mostly lost to me. They happened, and some dim recollection of them exists in a deep part of me, but stronger and clearer than the various rites of the ceremony are the residue of feelings, the grief, the overwhelming sense of loss and love, the sadness. And the hope. Always hope. She taught me that the lifted face feels the shining of the sun, and Benny proved she was right. I remember leaving the church with a kind of embryonic optimism beginning to form in my heart. And looking at my children gave me the truly wondrous sensation that she was not lost at all. The missing never really leave. How can they leave when so much of them shines inside you, and is the very best of what you are?

I was shaking hands outside the church, accepting murmured condolences, absolving people, when suddenly Benny was standing right in front of me, his hand in mine.

In my dreams, and in my nightmares, he was always a twelve year old ragamuffin with skinny arms and legs and shoes that were falling off his feet. Now I was looking at a well-dressed fifty-five year old man with a few too many good Christmas dinners behind him, thin, grey-blond hair receding at the front and the kind of rounded happy face a child might draw. Only his eyes gave him away. Dark, cryptic, smouldering with mystery and the memory of some unforgettable horror.

Standing close to his shoulder was a raven-haired girl I thought I should recognise. She looked about the same age as my son, although there was something aloof and faintly dangerous in her cool sensuality and chocolate coloured eyes that made her seem much more mature. She could only be Benny's daughter.

"I'm sorry for your loss," Benny said. Again I felt weirdly confused as to why he didn't have that small, woeful voice I remembered so well.

"And I for yours," I told him. He smiled at me then. There were times when I convinced myself that he was Terry Catlin's boy, a cruel, brooding psychopath void of compassion and empathy, but that smile was enough to bury that fear forever. He wasn't Terry Catlin's boy. He was my mother's son.

"This is Eleanor," he said."She's my daughter."

"I know," I told him."She's beautiful."

I sensed we were being observed with a kind of uncomfortable curiosity. I still hadn't let go of Benny's hand. There were so many questions to ask, but as the moments went by I understood - finally understood - that the time for asking had long since past. Indeed it was the past. I felt no sense of shame or guilt, no anger, no compulsion to confess my part in the murder of Anita Dobson nor to denounce Benny for his. There was no crime, only the ruthless necessity of survival. Benny did what he did because he wanted to survive, and I kept my silence because he needed a friend more than he needed a bath, as my mother once said.

What it comes down to is that survival writes its own rules. If you want to stay alive, if you want to shake hands forty three years later, you will do whatever is necessary. It's not right or wrong, it's just the nature of the beast.

I let go of his hand."I'll see you later, Benny."

He winked and leaned up close to my ear."Not if I see you first," he said.

He smiled as he turned away from me but I think he meant what he said.

*******************

I don't like to think of them as gravediggers. I like to call them gardeners. After everyone had left the cemetery, including my family, the gardeners appeared cautiously from their discreet cover behind the brambles. I took some flowers from my mother's graveside and arranged them on my father's garden. Then I picked a second bunch of my mother's flowers and wandered away, leaving the gardeners to their work.

I put the flowers - lovely, sunny yellow flowers - on Anita Dobson's grave. I stood up straight and breathed the clean, misty dampness into my lungs.

A time to remember and a time to forget, I thought.

I knew so many people here. My parents. Anita Dobson. Mavis and Peter Molem, Mike Bronson. There's even a memorial stone which simply reads PIPE YOUNGER - STORYTELLER.

One person I know is not remembered here, either in spirit or body. Terry Catlin became ill in prison and eventually died of pneumonia in 1964. Nobody I've spoken to knows where he is buried.

THE END