Chapter 38
The door was answered by an overweight woman in her forties, with an unwashed tangle of brown hair.
She was dressed in black leggings and a sprawling white crop top, and had an angry speckle of sunburn across the top of her chest. A cigarette in one hand, trailing smoke.
I imagined that was more or less a permanent fixture.
‘Mrs Johnson?’
‘Yeah.’
I smiled and held up my warrant card.
‘Detective Hicks. This is Detective Fellowes. We’re looking for your son, Carl. Is he home?’
Mrs Johnson slumped against the doorframe and folded her arms. Not so much a gesture of defiance as one of familiarity, perhaps even inevitability. ‘What’s he done now?’
It was a reasonable question. After we’d taken Billy Martin into protective custody, he’d given us Carl Johnson’s name as the boy at school who’d bragged about being present when a cat was killed on Swaine Hill.
Carl had only just turned thirteen, but was already well on his way in the world.
Where Billy seemed very much like a child still, Carl Johnson had lost any innocence a long time ago.
Underage drinking. An assault charge against another child at school. Truancy. Shoplifting.
But then, looking at the run-down area and the parental concern on display here, it wasn’t so surprising. It was like Billy’s bow and arrow in a way – you twang the string and that’s it: the arrow flies, its trajectory set.
I said, ‘Is he home?’
She bellowed over her shoulder. ‘Carl!’
‘I’ll take that as a yes.’ I put my card away. ‘Can we come in, please?’
‘What’s he done?’ she asked again, taking a drag on the cigarette. ‘Nothing would surprise me, to be honest. Absolutely nothing.’
‘If we can come in, we can discuss it,’ I said. ‘To be honest, we’re hoping he can help us. If he can, he might not be in any trouble at all.’
‘Huh. That’d be a first.’ She relaxed away from the doorframe. It seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. ‘Follow me. Carl!’
From upstairs: ‘What?’
‘Get your arse down here, you little shit. Now.’
Mrs Johnson was trudging ahead towards a doorway on the right, trailing smoke, but I gave Laura a look as I closed the front door behind us.
The stairs led straight up ahead from the front door.
Carl obviously wasn’t our man, but he was a streetwise kid who wouldn’t have much love for the police, and we needed to talk to him right now.
So without us even having to discuss it, Laura stayed by the door just in case the little shit decided to elope on us.
I followed Mrs Johnson into what turned out to be the living room: a small, dismal space with a worn carpet and a threadbare three-piece suite.
The curtains were open, but the weak light only emphasised the misty air; it felt like the windows in here hadn’t been open for a long time.
The room smelled strongly of the overflowing ashtray on the small coffee table and the stale, lingering aroma of old sweat.
A moment later, Carl sauntered in, shadowed by Laura.
As I’d suspected, he cut an entirely different figure to Billy Martin.
He was still clearly a kid beneath his cheap t-shirt and jeans, and the hair on his upper-lip was as thin as eyelashes, but he had an attitude way beyond his years.
He kicked at the carpet as he walked past, head down, not looking at me but with a sly little smile on his face.
‘Carl,’ I said. ‘Have a seat.’
‘Whatever.’ He could barely be bothered to form the word, and sighed as he slumped down, his body clenching at the last moment to hit the settee as hard as he could. ‘What do you want?’
‘Charming,’ Laura said. ‘Didn’t your mother teach you any manners?’
Although it wasn’t a genuine question, I glanced at Mrs Johnson anyway, and she shrugged. The gesture seemed to say that manners were something a little like a PlayStation 3, and not everyone could afford them.
‘What can I do?’ she said. ‘He runs riot. Breaks my heart. It’d be different if his bastard dad was still around.’
‘No it wouldn’t,’ Carl said.
‘Shut up. Button that smart mouth.’
He chuntered her words back at her: … Button that smart mouth.
‘Carl.’ I stood in front of him. ‘Let’s start again. We’re not here to cause you problems if we don’t have to. If we have to, we will. You get me?’
‘Like I said, what do you want?’ He folded his thin arms and looked over at the window with a sigh. ‘I’ve got places to be.’
‘Yeah, that’s the first thing that went through my head when I saw you: here’s a kid with places to be. Well, let’s make this quick then, shall we? You know a place called Swaine Hill? It’s also known colloquially as Killer Hill.’
He didn’t say anything.
‘Colloquially means that’s what some people call it.’
That got me a glare, at least. ‘Yeah, I know.’
‘And so – ?’
‘Yeah, I know it.’
‘Amazing. So, you go there, I take it?’
He shrugged.
‘You go there for the parties, right? Beer. Dope. Older kids hanging out because there’s nowhere better for them to go, and so on?’
‘I guess.’
‘It’s not a quiz, Carl. You don’t need to guess. Yes or no – you’ve been there or not?’
‘Yeah. Sometimes.’
‘Right. So – tell me about the cats.’
He looked at me and frowned.
‘The cats?’
I sighed. ‘Cats. Furry little things. People have them as pets. Most people don’t put them in cages and set fire to them though. Unlike you.’
Carl stared at me for a moment, confused then scared. He unfolded his arms.
‘What? I never –’
His mother exploded. ‘What the hell have you been doing now, boy? I swear on –’
‘Mrs Johnson.’ I swivelled on the spot and held out my hand. She was out of her chair, as though about to attack her son. ‘Just leave this to us for a minute, okay?’
‘I never did that! That wasn’t me!’
I turned back to see Carl was half out of his seat too.
‘Word around the school is that you did, Carl.’
‘Who said that? I fucking swear that –’
‘That’s what I’m hearing.’ I smiled benignly. ‘You should listen to your mother about that smart mouth. You start using it to brag and show off and you see what happens? People take you at your word. So blame yourself. Did you or did you not say that? Don’t guess this time.’
He glared at me. Folded his arms again.
‘No.’
‘But you were there when it happened?’ I said. ‘Sit back down again, by the way.’
He sat back down again. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Who cares anyway? It was only a cat.’
‘I imagine the cat cared. And I care. I like cats. Detective Fellowes?’
‘I like cats too,’ Laura said.
‘So there’s two of us who care, and we’re both police, and it happens to be a crime. So it matters quite a lot. You didn’t do it, is what you’re telling us. Who did, then? Because it did happen, didn’t it?’
Carl was silent. At the corners of his jaw, muscles were bunching and pulsing. His face was like a fist.
‘Carl?’
‘Yes. It did happen. It wasn’t me.’
‘But you were there.’
He nodded, looking more miserable now.
‘Tell us then. When did it happen?’
‘It was one night last summer,’ he said.
As he began to explain, it became obvious almost immediately that the incident he was describing was not one of those ‘Jimmy’ had recorded online.
Aside from anything else, the animal killing shot outside had taken place in daylight, whereas the incident Carl was describing for us had been at night.
He told us what we already knew – that groups of teenagers gathered at the top of Swaine Hill on a night-time for all the usual types of teenage misbehaviour: drinking, smoking, partying.
It was mostly older kids there, he said, but they didn’t seem to mind him and a handful of his mates showing up from time to time.
I imagined the older kids liked having them around – someone to look up to them – but was less sure what Mrs Johnson thought she was doing allowing a young child out alone at that fucking hour.
Carl said, ‘It was one of the older guys who brought the cat.’
‘Name?’ Laura was writing all of this down in her notebook.
‘I don’t know.’ He looked between us, slightly imploringly now. ‘Seriously. He wasn’t from our school. And anyway, it was him that brought it, but not him who did it.’
‘Age?’ Laura persisted.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then guess.’
‘A few years older. Sixteen, seventeen. But like I said, it wasn’t him that did it.’
‘So who did? What happened?’
‘He sold it.’
‘Brought a cat along and sold it?’
‘I think his family couldn’t care for it. Their own had just had a litter or something, so he was basically just getting rid of them wherever he could. I think this other guy had agreed to take it off his hands. He could have got it for free, but insisted on paying for it.’
‘You don’t know the guy’s name either?’ I said.
Carl shook his head. ‘Never seen him there before. He must have been friends with one of the other kids, but he was older than the rest. Probably in his twenties.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So he bought the cat. And then what happened?’
‘Well, it was in a cage. This wire cage, you know – like a carrying case, but all open. And everyone was laughing about it at first, ’cos it was scared to death. There was all the noise, and we had a fire too. We always had a fire. So it was pretty funny at first.’
‘Pretty funny,’ I said. ‘Yeah, it sounds it. And then?’
‘And then the guy put the cage down and took out a knitting needle. And everyone sort of went … quiet.’
‘Not pretty funny anymore?’
Carl shook his head.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the rest, but I asked it anyway, because I had to.
‘And?’
‘People thought he was just messing around at first. But … he wasn’t.’
Carl told us the guy stabbed the kitten repeatedly through the holes in the mesh, softly at first, as though just playing with it, and then more seriously. The whole time, with this animal hissing and spitting and screeching, the guy was just crouched by the side of the cage, prodding at it.
Carl looked utterly miserable now. No longer half as cocky as he’d been when he’d walked in here. Somewhere inside him, it seemed, there was a kid after all. Not that you had to be a kid to feel sickened by what he was telling us.
I shook my head. ‘And nobody tried to stop him?’
‘Sort of. But he was a bit older, like I said – he just shrugged them off as though he wasn’t interested. And for some reason that worked. I think everyone was a bit … it was weird to see it happening in front of you.’
‘Yeah, it would be.’
‘A few of the girls were freaked out. A few of the guys too. I mean, I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. But people just walked away and left him to it. He wasn’t … well, it was like he was in a world of his own by then.’
Carl took a deep breath.
‘After a while, he just got bored. There was some lighter-fluid they’d brought to start the fire, so he used that and burned the thing up. The smell was fucking awful. It took ages to die.’
He fell silent for a few seconds, and I just stared down at him. Beside me, I could sense that Laura was looking off to one side.
Carl said, ‘He just stood there afterwards. Grinning. He was grinning at us, like he expected a round of applause or something. But by then everyone was just ignoring him. I don’t think anyone knew what to do.’
I knew what I wanted to do with him.
‘You’d never seen him there before?’
Carl shook his head.
‘And never since?’
‘I never went back – I didn’t want to see him again. And I think a lot of other people didn’t go back either. I don’t know if anyone goes there anymore. But people heard about it at school, just ’cos it was so shocking, you know? And so I was just like, “yeah, I was there”.’
I stared down at him. He looked like he was going to cry.
‘It wasn’t me. It wasn’t!’
‘All right.’ I sighed. ‘All right. What we’re going to need are the names of everyone you were there with. Your friends. If you didn’t hear who this guy was, maybe they had better ears than you.’
‘Okay.’
He started to reel off a bunch of names.
Laura wrote them down while I thought it over.
As horrible as the story was, it moved us another step closer to finding this guy – assuming it was our guy.
But it had to be. He’d practised with his animals and, for reasons I still couldn’t fathom – apparently not the normal, basement ones – he’d then moved on to human beings.
This was a break. As awful as it was, there was hope here, because some existing connection had taken him to the hill that night.
Somebody would know someone who knew him, and that was about as solid a lead as we’d had so far.
‘Jimmy,’ Carl said suddenly.
Beside me, Laura’s pen froze.
‘What?’ I said.
Carl nodded brightly. ‘That was his name. I remember now. That was what somebody called him.’ He looked pleased with himself. ‘Jimmy.’