Part 7 (1/2)

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.