“You know,” complained Bruno’s voice as he connected the call and his face popped up in the camera view on Brookie’s laptop, “I really wish they’d change the Skype ring tone. It’s really beginning to hack me off.”
“Dun dun dun du-dun dun!” Brookie teased, pretending to adjust the microphone. “Bruno? Bruno? Can you hear me? Hey, Bruno!”
Bruno smiled tightly and raised his hand into the camera view to give Brookie the finger. “Don’t. I’ve had a f*cking awful day.”
Brookie sobered. “What’s wrong?”
The tight smile became a grimace. “I’m in pain, man. Remember how I could hardly move when I woke up?”
“I thought that was just because you’re weak from spending months in a coma.”
“Brook, I can still barely move.” Bruno waved an airy hand and the camera view jolted. The picture blurred before settling on an aerial view above Bruno, revealing him to be sprawled out on a bed. “Every time I try, it’s like I’m being stabbed. Apparently they screwed up that back operation after they cut me out of the car wreck. I’ve been in hospital all day and doctors have been throwing words like ‘herniated discs’ and ‘spinal fusions’ around. They say I need to have a microdi-something to set it right. Either way, it sounds pretty scary and if they f*cked it up last time I’m not totally sure I want another one.”
Brookie chewed his lip. “Er… in plain English, does that mean you need back surgery?”
“Yeah.” Bruno vanished from the camera to be replaced by a close-up of the orange duvet. Brookie guessed his friend had dropped the camera to the bed.
“Yeouch.” Brookie winced sympathetically. “That really sucks.”
“Heh.” There was a pause. “You know what else really sucks? Today would have been Mum’s birthday. Dad and I were talking about taking her to Italy as a present. She’d never been.” Bruno’s voice cracked. “Y’know, Brookie, sometimes I wish I was you. I wish I had just one sibling. Just one other person who was going through this with me.”
Brookie was about to say something when a choked sob sounded through the speakers.
“I feel like I’m fighting to stay alive, Brook. Why didn’t I die in the crash with them? Couldn’t one of them have survived? But then I feel horrible because it would be one and not both—”
“Bruno,” Brookie interrupted softly, but Bruno didn’t appear to hear him.
“—What’s left for me, anyway? You’re acting for me, my parents are gone, half a year of my life went by without me even conscious for it, fame and the media killed my friends, my back might never be the same again, Aunt Vivian goes to India for two months at the end of this week, so I can’t continue staying with her, I don’t want to live with my cousins in London because they hate me – you know, why am I still alive? Why—?”
“Bruno,” Brookie tried again. “Please. Don’t.”
“Sometimes I think I’d be better off dead,” Bruno sobbed. Brookie’s heart sank. It had been such a long time since he’d last seen the fog of depression on Bruno.
“Please don’t tell me to go see a shrink,” Bruno continued brokenly. “I’ve already been sent to one about the crash. I don’t want to go on the happy pills again. I just want life to go away.”
Don’t tell him to snap out of it. Don’t tell him to snap out of it, Brookie reminded himself. Cr*p, what do I say to him?
In the end, he opted for something neutral. “Why don’t you go and stay at my house?” he proposed. “That solves one problem. You won’t have to see the demonic little cousins.”
Bruno’s responding laugh was short and almost hysterical.
“I’m being serious. You’re like a brother to me. I would offer to have you here at school with me, but I think the fans would harass you. If you’re at my house, at least I know you’ll be well looked after and safe, and I’ll come and see you whenever I can.”
“But you’re not coming and seeing me now.”
Brookie was spared answering by a knock on the door. Rico poked his head around without waiting for an answer.
“I forgot to tell you earlier,” said the head of house, “but Frankie will be back late. He’s been mobbed by journalists.”
Brookie nodded to him to show he’d got the message and Rico disappeared again.
To his great surprise, Bruno lifted the camera to his face. While there were tear tracks down his cheeks and his eyes were red and his face blotchy, there was curiosity as well as depression stamped into his expression.
“What was that?” he asked, just about managing to control his voice.
“My roommate bumped into some journalists, apparently.” Sensing a potential distraction from Bruno’s gloomy mood, Brookie deliberately said no more and crossed his fingers. Please bait. Please bait.
Bruno did. “I don’t know who has it worse,” he said, and sniffed, “us or our friends when it comes to the media.”
“Oh, I know,” Brookie agreed. “I can’t walk out the door with a hair out of place, but my friends are hounded for every juicy little secret.”
Bruno sniffed again and wiped his eyes. “Your roommate’s the skinny little gay guy, isn’t he?”
“Er… in a manner of speaking, yeah.”
“I was reading something about him half an hour ago. Wait a second….”
A small crease appeared between Bruno’s eyebrows as his gaze transferred from the webcam to what Brookie assumed must be his computer screen. A few moments later, a link appeared in the Instant Chat. It led to a recent article in the Independent titled He Knew We Were Onto Him, and there was a photo of Frankie’s back as he sprinted across a road.
“Wait a second,” Brookie said, scanning the date and time of posting again. “This was only posted just over half an hour ago – how do you know about this?”
“I follow Mallory Kirby on Twitter. She usually writes really interesting stuff.” There was a pause. “Is your roommate really a serial killer? He looks a bit too weedy to me.”
“Hang on.” Brookie scanned the article. “‘Imagine… three bodies… suspect… already suspect student… witness overheard him say he attended Darkwood before he killed the girl… bus stop… ran as soon as he saw the press…’. Jesus. What the… what the actual f*ck—?”
“The way I read the article,” said Bruno, “Frankie was in town. Frankie killed three girls. Frankie told one of them he went to Darkwood before he killed her. Frankie was overheard by a witness. Frankie then went to catch the bus home, saw tons of journalists, freaked, and ran for his life because he thought they already knew he’d killed those girls.”
“I’m not totally sure if—”
Three memories came to mind.
“The Frankie on the phone wasn’t the Frankie I know in school. The Frankie I met in town wasn’t either of them, either. I don’t know how to explain it. All I can say is I’m getting bloody creeped out, and the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced it was him I saw climbing over that wall by the dead body, and I don’t think he remembers it.”
“You haven’t done something wrong, have you?” Slight hesitation. Frankie shook his head.
“Frankie will be back late. He’s been mobbed by journalists.”
Why on earth would Frankie have been so afraid of the police if he hadn’t done something wrong?
“Oh, Christ.” Brookie scrabbled for his phone.
“Brookie, your face doesn’t look healthy. It’s grey.”
“I’ll ring you in an hour,” Brookie told Bruno. “If I don’t, exactly an hour from now, give it five minutes and then ring the police and tell them to track my phone to wherever I am. I’ll leave a note on my desk explaining stuff in more detail just in case anything happens to me.”
“Uh… no comprendo what you plan to do…?”
“I’ll explain later. Just remember: no call in an hour, ring the police.” Seizing his coat, Brookie quickly ended the Skype call and shut his laptop down. Then he scribbled out a note explaining what he thought was going on, taped it to his laptop lid, and tapped out a quick text to Rico asking him to make sure Carson didn’t lock the front door the boarding house so he could go out for a late-night stroll while there were no fans around to mob him. But even as he bolted down the stairs and ran for the school gates, ringing a taxi as he went, he couldn’t believe that he’d actually come to having to use the tracking system he’d set on Frankie’s phone.
It was twenty past ten before Brookie found himself within range of Frankie’s phone. To his surprise, the tracking system was signalling somewhere a couple of towns over from where Frankie had been seen by the press, and Brookie was beginning to feel that something didn’t quite add up.
Then again, he reminded himself as he followed the crude map that his smart phone was showing him, not much about Frankie added up. He was a weedy little guy who resorted to tricks and pranks, and yet he could well be a serial killer. He had ME and yet Piers swore that the kid was one of the fastest sprinters in the school. He acted tough – was tough, even – and yet succumbed to panic attacks and often cried himself to sleep, or woke up at unholy hours of the morning screaming, or having sleepwalked over to the other side of the room.
Taking a right onto the final street down to the quayside, Brookie glanced down at his phone to see that the tracking software was taking him as close as it could pinpoint the phone to be. He didn’t know to within what radius of Frankie’s phone that might be, and he wasn’t totally sure how comfortable he would be about ringing Frankie’s phone to flush him out. There was always a possibility that Frankie might turn violent and run away, or Brookie might not be close enough to hear Frankie’s phone ringing, even when the place seemed largely deserted. There was also the rather unnerving fact that Frankie’s phone hadn’t moved locations since Brookie had begun his search for the boy. The best-case scenario was that Frankie was still with his phone, staying in the same place, but that didn’t necessarily mean that the boy would be amenable to company. The worst-case scenario was that Frankie had cast the phone away, in which case Brookie had no idea what he was going to do or how to find the boy, but he suspected it might well involve a full-scale police search.
The first thing that struck Brookie as he finally arrived on the quayside was how unnaturally quiet it was. Boasting a broad sidewalk next to the river, it was the kind of place that he would have expected to be busy after dark, with drunks if nobody else.
But no, just silence. Dead… silence. Smashed glass and small debris suggested that the lack of lighting was because the street lamps in the immediate area had been vandalised. Brookie came to a halt in the middle of the sidewalk and peered up and down it. There was genuinely nobody in sight.
A crow squawked at the unwelcome company and took flight, leaving the half-trainer it had been molesting on the ground.
Baffled and disturbed, Brookie approached the railings closer to the river. Under different circumstances, he might have considered the place pretty nice, but it was just too eerily quiet. He leant on the railings, at a loss. Frankie was nowhere in sight. He might actually have to ring him, and he didn’t know how the boy would take that. Frankie didn’t even know that Brookie had his number.
A faint sound, something like a doorbell, came from below. Startled at the sudden break in silence, Brookie looked down. Considering it was unlikely there were any doorbells out in the open, it was more likely to be a phone ring tone.
A wooden platform – a makeshift jetty? he wondered – was floating on the low tide of the river just below and a little to the left of the railings. The first thing that caught his eye was the light from what had to be the screen of a phone as it continued to ring like a doorbell. The second was the body sprawled face down on the platform.
Without a second thought, Brookie climbed the railings and jumped down onto the wooden platform. It rocked for several seconds, and he crouched until it steadied. The phone fell silent. Brookie picked it up, briefly registered the thirty-five new texts and twenty-three missed calls that it was displaying on the screen, and tucked it into his pocket along with his own phone and then reached for the body.
The person’s hand was cold and clammy, and as he rolled them over, Brookie realised that their clothes were absolutely soaking. But before he could get any further, the doorbell ringtone started up again. Absently feeling for a pulse in the person’s neck, Brookie dug the phone out of his pocket and picked up.
“Oh, thank God,” exclaimed the person at the other end. The voice was trembling with emotion, and Brookie would have rated it as belonging to a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old, given the way that it cracked as though it was on the cusp of breaking. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours—”
“Sorry,” said Brookie, “but I’m not the owner of this phone.”
“You mean, Fran… I mean, Frankie—” The young boy sounded terrified. “Oh God, oh God, oh God….”
Ditto, ditto, ditto, Brookie thought, staring down at the person with him on the platform.
“Calm down,” Brookie said, as much for his own benefit as for the boy’s. I don’t understand…. “Frankie’s not dead. I’ve got a pulse, and I think I’ve got breath, but he’s unconscious and cold and his clothes are soaking.”
“Oh, God,” repeated the boy in a whimper.
“I’m going to ring an ambulance,” Brookie told him. “I’ll get Frankie to call you when he’s awake, okay? Um… I mean, I’ll need to tell him who it is, but….”
“Freddie,” said the boy, relief creeping into his tone. “I’m Freddie. I told him not to come.”
Okay, now I’m totally confused. Brookie frowned. What the hell happened?
“Right.” Brookie hesitated. “Well, I don’t suppose there’s really any more to be said. Frankie’ll ring you when he’s awake. Bye for now.”
“Bye.” Freddie hung up. Brookie tucked the phone back into his pocket and surveyed the limp boy before him. I think I should get him up to the sidewalk so it’s easier to load him into the ambulance. He scooped Frankie up into his arms, trying not to shudder at the contact of damp clothes, and then realised that it was impractical to try carrying him when he was going to have to use both hands to climb.
Agh. Think, Brookie, think! He put Frankie back on the platform again and carefully arranged him in the recovery position. I’m going to have to ring an ambulance first.
He reached for his pocket again, but something dark on his hand made him pause. He held it up, squinting. That wasn’t there before….
Liquid glistened darkly around his fingers, and on impulse, he sniffed at it.
Blood…. He froze. His right hand had been under Frankie’s knees when he picked him up.
Crouching down beside Frankie, he carefully inspected the backs of the boy’s knees. One was fine to all appearances, still clad every inch in jeans, but the other was a dark mess. Brookie could just about see that the jeans material on the back of the knee was ripped all the way across, and the dark bloodstain had spread most of the way down the boy’s calf.
“Ambulance,” Brookie reminded himself.
In the end, he climbed back up onto the sidewalk to wait for the ambulance, which didn’t take all that long to arrive. A few minutes later, the paramedics had loaded Frankie onto a stretcher and determined that his life probably wasn’t in immediate danger, but he was still in need of a visit to hospital. Something nasty appeared to have sliced across the back of Frankie’s knee, either a knife or – as one of the paramedics pointed out, due to some gang incident earlier that evening – possibly a gun, and he was probably in shock and hypothermic.
“Are you not coming with us, then?” one of the paramedics asked as Brookie handed her Frankie’s phone and some money for Frankie to take a taxi back to school.
“No, I need to get back.” Brookie peered over her shoulder, trying to catch another glimpse of Frankie as he was attached to various bits of machinery in the ambulance and draped in a warm blanket. “Is he going to be okay?”
The paramedic shot him a queer look. “Mr Denvers, did you… did you just ask me if he’s going to be okay?”
Brookie cocked his head on one side, puzzled. “Well, yeah… isn’t that a normal thing to ask? I’m kind of worried about him. He’s a friend of mine.”
The paramedic’s eyes narrowed. “Not a particularly close friend of yours, I take it.”
Brookie shifted from foot to foot, but he could never actually remember what he said next as the paramedic dropped a bombshell.
“No, he is not going to be in the least bit okay. He….”
Brookie shook himself, trying to register the paramedic’s next sentence, but it refused to go in.
He was still trying to take it in when the ambulance sped away, lights flashing and sirens on full volume.