He has a sudden flashback to how her face lit up, completely losing its haunted look, when she talked about ice.
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Delilah crumples the crisp packet. ‘Ever hear of anyone called Shane?’
It isn’t Felicity. The woman by the rose arch is younger, not unattractive, but with a long face and hooked nose.
He shakes his head. Shane? No. For the most part, the rough sleepers come and go and rarely confide their real names. Many of them are running from something, real or imaginary, and dread being traced. ‘Doesn’t ring a bell but I have been out of circulation for a while. Why?’
‘He’s a person of interest.’
‘You’ll have to give me more than that. Is this about the Bella Barnes murder?’
Delilah sighs and it’s as good as an answer. ‘We’ve got nothing, Joe. No suspects, no witnesses, bugger-all physical evidence.’
She has already told him this. Twice.
‘It was the car park by the Grand Arcade, wasn’t it?’ Joe thinks about the huge, central car park. Security around it is normally pretty tight, but Bella had been small and good at hiding.
‘And she decided to kip down in a corner where CCTV doesn’t reach,’ Delilah grumbles.
‘They do that for a reason,’ Joe says. ‘So where does Shane fit in?’
‘There’s CCTV over the vehicular entrance to the car park and the cameras picked up the figure of a male leaving it around the time we think young Bella was killed. The sweatshirt he’s wearing is distinctive and one or two of the other street people we’ve spoken to think it could be someone called Shane. Trouble is, no one knows anything about him. He appears from time to time, acts a bit creepy. No one likes him. And then he vanishes.’
‘Got a picture?’
His mother reaches into her bag and pulls out a slim cardboard file. She opens it to show a poor-quality still shot from CCTV footage. Joe recognises the car park, the entrance lane, and the few yards of street. Walking towards the camera, but with his face down, his hood up and shoulders hunched is the tall, slim figure of an adolescent male. His sweatshirt is dark but there is a white logo and lettering that Joe can’t quite make out.
‘Estimated height is five ten,’ Delilah says, ‘and we’ve had gait experts look at the footage. You know the theory that everyone’s way of walking is as distinctive as their fingerprint? Load of bollocks if you ask me, but this guy talked about length of stride, movement of the pelvis, the way the shoulders are carried. The speed of his movement suggests someone young or at least someone very fit.’
‘It’s not much to go on,’ Joe agrees.
‘Bella had no enemies,’ Delilah says. ‘You knew her, you don’t need me to tell you she was a nice kid. No one had a bad word to say about her. It wasn’t about Bella, it was about the man who killed her. It could happen again, Joe. I really need to find this Shane.’
23
Shane
There is an hour, after the nightclubs have closed and before the first dawn deliveries arrive, when Cambridge falls silent. The clocks chime two thirty and, as if by general agreement, a hush descends. Those already asleep sink a little deeper; those who are not either drift away at last, or fall into a state that is so close to sleep as to be indistinguishable from it. The cats slink guiltily home and the dogs stop barking. Maybe these two are connected. The wind takes a breath and then a breather. Even the river seems to slow its course and at the punt docks, the bumping of wood and creaking of ropes stops.
This is Shane’s time.
His trainers make no sound as he slips around Jesus College. The porters are snoozing and they don’t hear him pass. The two constables in the patrolling police car don’t notice that the shadow in the corner of Magdalene Street Bridge wasn’t there the last time they passed, and they will not drive this way again tonight.
Shane makes his way around Cambridge and he counts as he goes. The sixteen-year-old who left home last year because all the money he begged and stole was taken from him by his drug-addict mother. The soldier who served in the Falklands Conflict, and who still does, most nights, in his dreams. The woman from the Middle East and the child she hides from social services, because she knows she will lose him. The woman whom the fairies stole from her mother and father fifty years ago when she was a baby and who has been looking for them ever since. ‘Are you my daddy?’ she says to Shane, when she wakes and sees him watching her.
He flees when this happens. Shane is a watcher. He does not like to be seen.
Some of the people Shane looks for hide in plain sight, stretched out on park benches or slumped in doorways. Some hover where people buy food, because as they leave the supermarkets, people’s wallets and purses are always to hand. Most though, are very good at becoming invisible. The women in particular slip away into the darkest of places where few can find them. The old lady with the green coat and the shopping trolley has become particularly hard to find of late. She’s developed a nervous habit of huddling down in corners, even in the daytime. This saddens Shane, because when he first got to know her, the old lady was fearless.
Since the young girl was murdered in the car park, though, the old lady and the rest of the homeless stay on the move, crossing the city during the day to bed down somewhere new each night. Sometimes they vanish for days, even weeks on end. Sometimes they never come back. Those who are seen sleeping rough on the streets of Cambridge are the iceberg’s tip. There are so many more.
They are the unseen. They are his people.
24
Felicity
It’s not safe, Felicity. It’s not safe. He’s coming.
Felicity starts awake, fists clenched. Instead of black eyes, staring into her own, she sees the hazy outline of her bedroom ceiling, and yet the sense of being watched feels as real, as immediate, as it did just now in the dream. She lies still, skin tingling, knowing she isn’t alone.
And yet the presence is invisible, or has fled, faster than she could open her eyes. A dream then? Or an actual voice, dragging her from sleep?
The room isn’t dark. Enough light comes in from outside for her to make out the edge of the double bed, the empty fireplace, the dressing table, the upright chair. There are shadows, of course, and places that she can’t see. She breathes in, deeply but silently, like a terrified animal searching for an alien scent. Is she imagining the hint of cigarette smoke hanging in the air?
Her right hand shoots out and finds the switch on the bedside light. Only then does she thoroughly check her room. A glance at the clock tells her it is close to four o’clock in the morning and it will be getting light soon. Beyond the curtains only a small square of garden separates her bedroom from the vast stretch of land that is Midsummer Common. Anyone can walk over the common, at any time of night or day. Anyone can step over the tiny railing that edges her property and walk right up to the bedroom window. The voice she heard could have come from directly outside.
She runs from the room, padding barefoot along the hallway and up the stairs. Her sitting room on the first floor, directly above her bedroom, has two sash windows and she never draws the curtains in summer. She approaches cautiously, conscious of the vast, concealing darkness outside. Streetlights illuminate the first few yards of the common but beyond that, there is nothing but emptiness.