The Tooth Fairy Part 7

Incrimination 'I didn't do it!' Sam swore. He was close to tears. 'It wasn't us.'

'Because if I thought you had done it . . .' Nev Southall fingered his belt buckle to show Sam what to expect. Sat.u.r.day morning's ritual bacon, eggs and black pudding had been spoiled. The greasy odour of smoked rashers turned cold in the frying pan hung in the air.

'Bringing the police to the door!' Connie's voice was shrill.

'It wasn't us!' Sam repeated for the ninth or tenth time.

Meanwhile a similar scene was taking place at Terry's house. Moody Linda was was.h.i.+ng up at the kitchen sink while her mother and father gave her adopted cousin a grilling.

'I swear it wasn't us,' Terry said, saucer-eyed with innocence. 'I swear it.'

'Because I'd knock you through that b.l.o.o.d.y wall if you did.' Uncle Charlie wasn't fooling.

'I didn't! We didn't!'

Moody Linda, growing more beautiful by the day, turned from the was.h.i.+ng-up and stunned Terry by saying, 'It couldn't have been Terry, Clive or Sam, because all three of them were here with me that afternoon.'

Terry's Aunt Dot turned and looked at her with astonishment. 'Well, why didn't you say that? Why didn't you speak up when the police were here?'

The twice-played scene was ready to be repeated at the Rogers household. Betty answered the door to two book-end police detectives, both with darts-player physiques. 'Mornin',' one said cheerfully, bringing in the milk and newspapers. Eric had yesterday's Sporting Life spread across the breakfast table. He paused in the act of marking form with a ballpoint pen.

The two police officers accepted chairs at the kitchen table, but pa.s.sed up the offer of a mug of tea. 'Just had a brew at Mr and Mrs Southall's. Lovely cup, eh, Jim?'

'Lovely cup.'

Five minutes later Eric planted himself at the foot of the stairs and bawled up at Clive. 'Get dressed and get down here, NOW!'

Clive appeared, hair a-quiff, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He blinked at the two strangers staring at him and looked back at his father with a quizzical expression.

'You little sod!' Eric threatened a backhand.

Clive ducked. 'What? What?'

Betty, recognizing that Eric was likely to hang their son in the morning before trying him in the afternoon, intervened. 'Where were you Sunday afternoon? What were you doing?'

'Just dossing about,' Clive protested.

'Dossin' about? Dossin' about?' Certain of Clive's teenage expressions were guaranteed to pitch Eric into a frenzy, and this was one of them. 'I don't want to hear dossin' a-b.l.o.o.d.y-bout! I want to know where you were, who you were with and what you were doing. Now, I want an answer!'

Clive squinted at the two detectives. They were saying nothing. Both sat back on their chairs, heads tilted slightly to one side, looking at him from beneath eyebrows c.o.c.ked high and ready to disbelieve his every word. He struggled to remember. 'I was with Sam and Terry.'

'And?'

'We were just . . .' He was about to say 'dossing around' but he changed his mind. 'We were here. Then we were at Terry's. I don't remember . . . it was raining.'

'Did you go up the gymkhana field?'

'Not last Sunday, no. There was no gymkhana last Sunday.'

'No,' said Eric. 'And some little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds smashed the gymkhana hut to smithereens, didn't they? Smashed it all up. Broke all the equipment. Burned the jumps. Wrecked all the canteen crockery and poked out every single window in the place. Twenty-six windows.'

'Twenty-eight,' corrected one of the officers helpfully.

'It wasn't us!' shouted Clive.

'You were SEEN!' Eric jabbed a finger dangerously near Clive's face. 'Your names were given to the POLICE!'

'Who did? Who gave our names? It wasn't US! It wasn't!'

And so the scene which began at Sam's house and was repeated at Terry's was replicated exactly at Clive's. The policemen said almost nothing, surrendering it all to the boys' parents. Whether the boys had actually been spotted in flagrante in the act of vandalism or whether general inquiries had simply turned up their names was never clarified. Perhaps they had no hard evidence, or conceivably all they wanted to do was to scare the boys into yielding still further information. Whatever their strategy, they remained quiet spectators and then simply withdrew at an appropriate moment, in each case leaving the boys to a further hour on the parental griddle.

'The thing that gets me,' Terry said later as the three made their way together up to the pond, 'is that after a while I started to think that we had done it.'

'Me too.'

'And me.'

There was a long pause before Sam said, 'We didn't do it, did we?'

Terry and Clive stopped dead and looked at him. 'Don't be stupid. What do you mean?'

'Of course we didn't do it. Not unless you did it on your own.'

'No,' said Sam. 'What I meant was: is there a way we might have done it without knowing we did it?'

Terry walked on in disgust. 'Somebody look at his head.'

'Yeah,' said Clive, 'somebody look at his head.'

'So who did do it?' Sam wanted to know.

'Good question.'

'Shall we go to the gymkhana field and take a look?' Clive suggested.

'That's f.u.c.king stupid,' Terry spat. 'That's what they mean by returning to the scene of the crime.'

'But we're not!' Clive defended. 'That's exactly it. We didn't do it! So how can we be returning to the scene of the crime, since we weren't there in the first place?'

'I know that. You know that. We all know that. But they think we did it. So to them we'll be returning to the scene of the crime.'

'But that's the point! If you think like that, then you're playing their game. They want us to stay away, knowing we wouldn't return to the scene of the crime. It's like a double-bluff. Inside another double-bluff.'

'Oh, f.u.c.k off,' said Terry.

'You don't get it, do you?' Clive was puce in the face. 'We didn't do it, but we may as well have done. It's all about who decides what really happens. Or what happened. Even if something altogether different happened.'

'Oh, f.u.c.k off.'

'You f.u.c.k off.'

'No, you f.u.c.k off.'

'Why don't you both f.u.c.k off ?' said Sam.

'What I want to know,' Terry said, 'is who gave our names to the police?'

A horse rider, smart in white jodhpurs, tweed hacking jacket and peaked riding hat, approached on a skewbald mare. The rider advanced at a trot, pa.s.sing by with her nose in the air. The boys recognized her as the girl from the gymkhana field. Sam also identified her from the day they hid in the pavilion and from his dream. They watched her cross the road. She swung in her saddle to open a field gate and cantered across a b.u.t.tercup meadow towards the woods.

'Me too,' said Sam.

14.

Tenderfoots Connie, Betty and Terry's Aunt Dot put their heads together, as they had done over the matter of Sunday school some years ago, and came up with an idea. To be accurate, it was Moody Linda who came up with the idea when Aunt Dot privately expressed dismay over Terry's alleged delinquency. Although the charge of smas.h.i.+ng up the gymkhana pavilion had never been proved, the arrival at the door of the local police was incrimination enough.

'Our Terry's going off the rails. Off the rails.'

Moody Linda stood before her bedroom mirror, adjusting a pristine white lanyard. Her royal-blue skirt and blouse were starched and ironed to such crisp perfection that her patrol leader's badge and stripes were hardly necessary to signal authority. 'Scouts,' she said, tugging her beret at an efficient angle.

Dot placed her hands together. 'Hadn't thought of that. Wednesdays, isn't it? And you'd be there to keep an eye on them.'

Linda closed her eyes, shuddering at the thought of what she'd just done. Pride of the Coventry Forty-fifths, troop-leader and processional flag-bearer, Linda had made dizzying progress in her three years as a Guide. It was for her a private and perfect world, insulated from the tangles and disorders of the home front, a painstakingly regimented, well-drilled environment where neatly pressed uniforms and snow-white lanyards garnered respect, loyalty and appreciation.

There was only one minor flaw to a perfect evening spent in the sisterly company of the Forty-fifths, and that was the occasional childish behaviour of the Coventry Thirty-ninth Scout troop, who convened their meetings on the same evenings, and at the same school, and who considered it amusing to spend half the evening banging on the door or knocking on the windows before running away, so that there was never anyone there when you answered, and who, if you tried to ignore them altogether, would resort to more extreme methods of distraction, like lowering their trousers and pressing their bottoms against the gla.s.s window. It occurred to Linda, as she tugged at her beret, that she had possibly just recruited Terry, Sam and Clive into the ranks of her persecutors.

'No,' she said, fumbling with her silver whistle, 'on second thoughts, I don't think they'd like it.'

'I don't know,' said Dot. 'I think they'd get a lot out of it.'

Which is how Moody Linda, just turned sixteen and resplendent in her blue uniform, came to be walking seven paces ahead of three twelve-year-old boys mobbed up in a collection of second-hand Scout uniforms Connie had rummaged from the neighbourhood. Sam's shorts were too long; Clive's shorts were too short; and Terry's s.h.i.+rt could once have fitted the fattest Boy Scout in Coventry. Only a little pressure had had to be applied to get them to go along. Sam's instincts in particular had resisted, but now, as they stepped smartly to keep up with Linda's brisk stride, they paced out like three conscripts cheerfully resigned to circ.u.mstance.

Inside the school gates Linda did a military right-wheel, airily waving them away in the opposite direction. Across the playground they could see a small knot of Scouts gathered under the gymnasium wall. As they made to present themselves, their pace reduced the closer they got to the gym wall. What slowed them was the aggressive, contemptuous collective gaze of the six regular Scouts huddled there, older boys, all smoking cigarettes. The three pulled up at a distance of a few yards. Nothing was said. Clive scratched his sock-top. Terry pretended to tie up his shoelace. Sam folded his arms, and then quickly unfolded them.

'What do you f.u.c.king want?' said the biggest of the gang, a boy with cropped hair and eyes narrowed to a porcine squint. His huge, meaty legs strained the seams of his short khaki trousers. The grey-pink skin of his thighs looked chafed and raw. Sam s.h.i.+fted his weight from one leg to the other.

'Yeah, what do you f.u.c.king want?' said a tall, thin boy with shockingly bad teeth, stubbing out a cigarette on the heel of his shoe.

'f.u.c.k off,' said the first Scout.

'Yeah, f.u.c.k off,' said his lieutenant.

Terry, Sam and Clive did exactly as instructed. Turning uneasily, they made agonizingly slow progress back across the playground. Still feeling six pairs of eyes burning into their backs, it was a long, long walk.

They hovered nervously at the school gates for five minutes or so and were about to leave when a grown man, in full Scouting uniform, sped through the gates on a bicycle. Applying his brakes, he skidded to a halt. 'New boys? You the three new boys?'

The question carved them an island. They swam to it, gathering round the bicycle. The man lifted a hairy leg over the cross-bar, wheeling the bicycle back across the playground. The boys followed, covering old ground to find that the smoking scouts had vanished. The man had a toothbrush moustache and a florid complexion, plus a way of smiling which involved baring his clenched teeth. He introduced himself as Skip. He chatted amiably, learning their names immediately.

Wheeling his bike through a back entrance to the school, Skip led them down a corridor and opened a door to a cla.s.sroom where almost thirty Scouts were busy unpacking boxes and unloading equipment. He pushed his bike into the cla.s.sroom, leaning it against the chalk-dusted blackboard rail. Then he turned to press an industrial-sized forefinger flat against the centre of Clive's forehead. 'Falcon,' he whispered, with mystical intensity. Slowly withdrawing his finger to leave a white mark on the flushed skin of Clive's brow, he let the finger float towards Sam's forehead. 'Eagle.' Terry was the last to be anointed. 'Merlin.'

Skip bared his teeth before propelling first Sam, then Terry and finally Clive into different corners of the room, where small cl.u.s.ters of Scouts were still busy with a ritual of unpacking a battered suitcase, checking off the equipment therein and restoring it to its original position. Sam's group turned from their task and looked at him with a mixture of pity and contempt. Sam found himself face to face with the brawny, cropped, fat-faced boy they'd encountered under the gym wall.

'What do you want?'

'Eagle,' spluttered Sam. 'Eagle.'

The boy's lip curled, miraculously ammonite-like. 'f.u.c.k.'

Skip sauntered over. 'Show him the ropes now, Tooley. Be a good mother.'

The boy's sneer disappeared. With an alacrity quite alarming, he jumped up and offered his Scoutleader, and then Sam, a winning smile. 'I'm Tooley. Eagle PL. Best patrol in the troop. Welcome aboard.'

'That's the stuff,' Skip said, baring his teeth before wheeling away to facilitate similar introductions elsewhere.

After he'd gone, Sam was pushed into a chair and given a short piece of rope to hold. Then he was ignored for three quarters of an hour. When the equipment was packed back into its box, someone s.n.a.t.c.hed the rope out of his hands and stowed it. Skip came round and inspected the box that had been unpacked, checked and packed again.

'All correct?'

'Yes, Skip.'

The next section of the evening comprised games. Skip stood on a chair with a whistle shouting, 'Port,' 'Starboard,' 'Freeze,' 'Thaw' and one or two other commands. Scouts charged back and forth in tumult. Sam, like Clive and Terry, tried to imitate what the others were doing, but without really grasping the rules they were all eliminated early. They stood around for twenty minutes until a winner was declared; whereupon the game was repeated, all three again making an early exit.

The third slice of the evening was set aside for Badge Work. This involved free a.s.sociation with other patrols while Skip and his a.s.sistant leader were kept busy testing people in various arcane skills. Suddenly Sam found himself roughly bundled against the wall and lifted clean off his feet by Tooley. He was covered by his friend Lance, the boy with the appalling teeth, who stood close but with his back to them, keeping watch for Skip. 'Those other two new boys. Friends of yours?'

'Yes.'

Tooley let him down, pretending to dust off his s.h.i.+rt. 'Eagles chin Merlins, Falcons and Owls, don't we, Lance?'

'Yep. Chin 'em hard.'

'You're going to start with your pals.'

'What?'

Tooley put his ugly face very close. Sam could smell tobacco on his breath. 'Never ''what'' me, right? Never ''what'' me. Yes, Tooley. No, Tooley. But never ''what''. Right?'

'Yes, Tooley.'