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‘Then why …?’ started the receptionist.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Fortune. ‘I just needed to ask him something.’

  ‘Did you get an answer?’

  ‘No.’

  The receptionist nodded and seemed to consider something, before coming to a decision. ‘I shouldn’t say this, but …’ She stopped and looked around, making sure that nobody could hear what she was about to say. ‘A man came to see him, must have been three, four months ago? He said that if anybody came asking about Mr Burridge, to tell them to call him.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘I don’t know. He said he knew Mr Burridge from when he was younger.’

  ‘Did he have a name?’

  ‘Robert something. Hold on.’ She opened a drawer, rummaged around and came up with a card. ‘Here. He gave me this.’

  Fortune took it. A business card, raised black ink on cream stock. Robert Foster. A mobile number and an address. ‘He didn’t say anything else?’

  ‘No. But I told him I’d do it. Because of … the things he did. Mr Burridge.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Fortune. ‘I’ll call him. And Mr Burridge? I think my visit took a lot out of him.’

  ‘Okay.’ The receptionist nodded.

  Fortune turned and walked out of the building, back to his car, feeling a sense of panic. So little time, and Burridge was, if not dead, then certainly a dead end. What the hell was he going to do now?

  fifty-two

  THE FIRST THING FORTUNE SAW AS HE WALKED INTO ROBERT Foster’s front room was a lion, its mouth open in an outraged roar, furious to find itself in a decrepit bungalow in Essex. The lion was being morosely regarded by an owl, wings spread in mid-flight, claws raised in preparation to strike, mounted with its back to the wall. A generously antlered elk’s head was next to the owl, again mounted on the wall, as if it had accidentally charged through it and quickly accepted its situation as hopeless.

  Fortune had tried calling Foster’s number but there had been no answer. He had no time to waste, no time to wait, so he had driven to the address on the card. Foster lived in a brick bungalow in a poor neighbourhood of similarly abject homes, the streets they were built on made of huge pre-fab sheets of concrete, all of it sloppily constructed in the sixties to house the working poor. Judging by Foster’s front garden, he spent a lot more time stuffing animals than he did cutting back the tangles of encroaching brambles and holly. Fortune had pushed through the branches and barbs and found the front door open. He’d called out but received no answer so had walked in, past a Victorian case of mouldering birds of paradise, unconvincingly glued to branches. The front room had only contained animals, dead animals, their deaths done no honour by Foster’s clumsy craftsmanship.

  There was nothing to see there, so Fortune turned and walked along a corridor lined with papers and broken cases and boxes, to the kitchen. It was empty apart from Foster, who was slumped in a striped deckchair, his arms hanging over the sides, snoring loudly. There was an empty bottle of Scotch lying next to the deckchair, although given that there was an amber pool of liquid next to the bottle, it looked like Foster had given out before it had.

  Christ, thought Fortune, an ache in his body that seemed to be emanating from his bones, his eyes gritty from lack of sleep, his mouth a dirty oven. Couldn’t it ever be simple?

  He shook Foster’s shoulder but only got a moan in response. He considered giving him the same treatment he had given Burridge and pouring a jug of water over his head, but he needed Foster, needed his help and cooperation, so instead he dug around in the kitchen cupboards and came up with coffee and filters, to go with the antique percolator on the kitchen counter. As he made the coffee and waited for it to brew, he couldn’t help but wonder why a man like Robert Foster, a drunk and incompetent taxidermist, had ever bothered outlaying money on such an expensive business card. Marketing was marketing, but it would only ever get you so far.

  Foster was overweight and under-shaved, ginger stubble on his face, his too-short black Ramones T-shirt exposing a flaccid white belly. Fortune pinched the man’s nostrils and waited, then waited some more until Foster quivered in his chair and shook his head like a bull tossing its horns.

  ‘The hell are you?’ he said.

  ‘My name’s Fortune. I went to see Burridge.’

  This seemed to hit home, Foster’s eyes widening, though still unfocused. He struggled to sit up. ‘Burridge?’

  ‘And now I’m here.’

  ‘I can see that. Burridge. From St Basil’s?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You went to see Burridge.’ He said this to himself, then leant forward, his arms around his knees. Fortune felt a passing, yet strong, wave of sympathy for this sad and broken man. Foster looked up, rocked in his deckchair and stood unsteadily. He backed up and put a hand on the counter, taking a sneaky look at the empty bottle of Scotch on the floor. He grimaced in disappointment, and looked at Fortune. ‘Why are you in my house?’

  ‘I want to ask you about Burridge.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he ruined my son’s life. And now my son is trying to ruin mine.’

  It took Foster some time to absorb this, to sort out the inherent conflicts. ‘What, like some kind of revenge?’ he said eventually.

  Fortune shrugged. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘What’s he called? Your son?’

  ‘Emmerson. Hector Emmerson.’

  ‘Hector?’ Foster looked around, as if he’d just had a wallet stolen, then said, ‘Wait there,’ and walked carefully out of the kitchen, putting a hand on the counter to steady himself. Fortune watched him go, then looked around. There wasn’t a lot to see. Either Foster lived on takeaways, or he’d found a way to survive without eating.

  Foster came back with a large green plastic bottle that claimed to be weedkiller, but given that he was drinking out of it, Fortune suspected that it was part of the man’s Plan B. Foster stopped in the doorway and grinned.

  ‘Hector. Prince of Heck?’

  Fortune shrugged again. ‘Hector Emmerson.’

  ‘The boy genius.’ Foster laughed. ‘Mentally brilliant. Brilliantly mental.’

  ‘How’d you mean?’ said Fortune. He’d have loved to sit down, but there was only the deckchair. ‘You mind if we go into the other room? I can’t keep standing.’

  ‘Sure. Good idea.’ Foster waved his bottle of weedkiller. ‘Want a drink?’

  ‘I’m all right. Mind if I smoke?’ Fortune could hardly believe he’d even asked.

  Foster smiled. ‘Sure. Just don’t set fire to my lion. Thing’s worth four grand.’

  Fortune watched Foster tip more of the weedkiller, or whatever the bottle contained, down his throat. They were sitting on armchairs facing each other, and he had the feeling that Foster was only half with him, that he hadn’t properly surfaced from his deckchair.

  ‘Hector Emmerson,’ he said again. ‘Give me something.’

  Foster laughed. ‘Why’d you want to know?’

  ‘I told you. He’s my son.’

  He laughed again, this time harder, a genuine reaction of incredulity. ‘Your son? Jesus. I hope you don’t want to be proud of him.’

  ‘Not particularly,’ said Fortune. ‘Do you think you can tell me about him?’

  ‘Hector Emmerson,’ said Foster, and giggled. ‘Your son. He was the worst person at St Basil’s, if you don’t count the warders. Just, like, the worst. Serious.’ He paused, said quietly, ‘Or best.’

  ‘Worst how?’ said Fortune.

  ‘Clever.’ Foster waved his green bottle. ‘Amazing. Like, anything he said he would do, he did. Didn’t give a shit. Everyone else, terrified. Him?’ He lowered his head, shook it, spoke into his lap. ‘Didn’t give a shit.’

  ‘Give me an example?’

  Foster was quiet for some time, head down, and Fortune worried that he was asleep. But then he raised his head and said, ‘Like, he spent a week there. An entire week. And when he came out, he acted like it was nothing. Like
he’d been on holiday.’

  ‘Spent a week where?’

  Foster smiled, drank, said, ‘The Games Room.’

  Fortune frowned and wondered whether he was getting any sense at all out of the man. ‘The Games Room?’

  Foster nodded, then seemed to abruptly lose interest. His chin dropped, and Fortune hoped he hadn’t passed out.

  ‘What happened there? In the Games Room?’ he said.

  Foster put his green bottle carefully down on the carpet, then sat forward on his chair, his head hanging above his knees. He didn’t answer, and Fortune waited, then asked again, ‘What happened?’

  ‘They found you out,’ Foster said. ‘Worked you out. They got under your skin.’

  ‘You mean psychologically?’ said Fortune.

  Foster nodded at the floor, then looked up with a strange smile. ‘Or with knives. Whatever worked.’

  ‘What was it? The Games Room?’

  ‘What the hell do you think it was?’ said Foster, in drunken irritation. He reached down and knocked his hand against his bottle, nearly toppled it but caught it in time. This seemed to calm him, and he said, softly, ‘It was a room where they played their games.’

  ‘What kind of games?’

  Foster drank, closed his eyes and leant back in his chair. ‘Depended.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On what you were most afraid of.’ Foster was silent, and Fortune again wondered if he’d passed out, but then he said, ‘Me, I was scared of being hurt. Simple really. So that’s what they’d do. If you were scared of the dark, they’d lock you in it. One kid was scared of dogs, must have had a bad experience, whatever. They locked him in with the German Shepherds.’ He sighed, shook his head. ‘That kind of thing.’

  ‘Why?’ said Fortune.

  ‘Why? Because they were evil, totally evil, malicious, cruel, capricious, dreadful people. And because it was all part of the game.’ He stopped and thought. ‘We were. Part of the game. That’s what I realized. We were like, their toys. Their playthings.’

  Fortune didn’t know how to respond to this, lacked the emotional equipment. What could he offer this man, this damaged, ruined man? Godforsaken was the word that came into his mind, unannounced, surprising; not a word he would ordinarily think of. But it was right, it was the right word. Godforsaken. Foster was silent, his eyes blank, focused on nothing, nothing except the past and what had happened there, his godforsaken past. At last he said, more to himself than Fortune, ‘They’d toss a coin. That was the worst. At the beginning, always at the beginning. Heads, you got off lightly. Tails, you got the full treatment.’ He looked up and met Fortune’s eye, showing a brief moment of lucidity. ‘Whatever they had planned. It was like, and we actually believed this, it was like they were making it fair. Giving us a chance. But we didn’t win. We never won. Nobody won.’

  Fortune thought of the cruelty of it all, offering children false hope, the choice between bad and terrible. Heads, you lose. Tails, it’s worse. What would that do to a child, what effect would it have? He looked at Foster, prematurely old, drinking himself to death. He thought of his son, his twisted and precise anger. That’s what it would do.

  ‘What did they do to Hector Emmerson?’ he said. ‘What was he scared of?’

  Foster smiled at this and sat up, waving his bottle in Fortune’s direction. ‘Ah. Well, that was the thing. They never worked it out. Least that’s what we all thought. Turned out he wasn’t scared of anything. They beat him, tortured him, did, God, I can’t imagine. Never got to him.’

  ‘Did they …’ Fortune paused, in unknown territory, unused to dealing with such profound emotions, needing to show sensitivity. But Foster answered before he had to navigate through his sentence.

  ‘Sex? Yeah, all that. We did what they asked us. What else were we going to do?’

  ‘Who were they?’

  ‘The adults. The ones in charge at St Basil’s.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘No. No, not all of them. But those ones didn’t last, usually.’

  ‘How could this go on? Didn’t you say anything?’

  ‘Me?’ Foster shook his head slowly, dopily. ‘No. No chance. Kid called George, he tried it, they said he ran away.’ Now he nodded, down at his knees, thinking back. ‘Nobody thought he ran away. None of us. They took him to the Games Room, and we never saw him again.’ He laughed, a small noise, looking down at his dirty carpet. ‘I think he got tails.’

  ‘Did this happen to everybody? Did everybody go to the Games Room?’

  ‘Not everybody. Only the ones they didn’t like. Or did like. You know. In that way.’ Foster shrugged. ‘I don’t know. None of it made sense. We were just kids.’

  ‘Why did you go and see Burridge?’ said Fortune.

  ‘Why? To tell him he was an evil bastard,’ said Foster.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he looked at me like I was nothing, like I was hardly there. Looked at me and said he should have worked harder on me.’

  Fortune nodded, stood up. ‘You need coffee.’

  ‘All right with this,’ said Foster, hoisting up his bottle of weedkiller like it was a trophy, and the award for best actor goes to …

  ‘Put it down,’ said Fortune. ‘I’ll get coffee.’

  In the kitchen, he looked through cupboards until he found a mug. He opened the fridge in search of milk, but there was nothing in it except an open can of beans and a green piece of meat that could have been anything. There was something ineffably miserable about Foster’s house, its shabbiness presided over by dead animals, all dignity lost, torn out of them.

  Back in the living room, Foster was still drinking. Fortune took the bottle out of his hand and Foster didn’t complain, just watched Fortune stupidly. The bottle was almost empty of whatever the hell had been in it. Pretty soon Foster wasn’t going to be much use, regardless of how much coffee Fortune managed to get into him.

  ‘Where was the Games Room?’ said Fortune. ‘Was it in St Basil’s?’

  Foster belched softly, slumped back in his chair. ‘No. Don’t know.’

  ‘How’d you mean?’

  ‘Never knew. Put a hood on us. Take us outside, put us in a car. Take us somewhere. Down.’ Foster’s eyes were closed and he nodded to himself, chin against his chest. ‘It was down.’ A pause, a long, long pause. Then, like a child muttering in its sleep, woken from a dream, ‘We went down stairs.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Maybe they did it to confuse you? Disorientate you? Drive around, then back to the orphanage?’

  Foster nodded, a tiny movement of his head. ‘Could have.’ He exhaled, long and hard, left another pause and then said, ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Anything else? What did it look like? The Games Room? Was it big, small?’

  Foster didn’t answer and Fortune thought he’d lost him again. He stood up, walked over to his chair. ‘Wake up, Robert. Please. You need to help me here. I need something else. Give me something else.’ He reached down and shook Foster by the shoulder, then shook him again, hard. ‘Please. Who else was there? Who else did these things? Give me a name.’ He took Foster’s chin and pulled his head around and up so that he was looking at Fortune. Foster’s eyes were half closed, vacant. ‘A name. You must have another name.’

  ‘Bagsy,’ said Foster. ‘It was Bagsy. Always Bagsy.’

  ‘Who’s Bagsy?’ said Fortune.

  Foster smiled, didn’t answer. He closed his eyes and Fortune gave his chin another tug, hard. ‘Who’s Bagsy?’ he said again.

  ‘Always there,’ said Foster, eyes still closed. He started singing, more to himself than anybody he imagined might be in the room with him. ‘Bagsy. Bagsy, we all ha-ate Bagsy. Bagsy, Bagsy, we all ha-ate …’ He trailed off and Fortune felt the weight of his chin in his hand, heavy and doughy.

  ‘Who is he?’ he asked desperately, but Foster’s eyes were closed, and when Fortune let go of his chin, he collapsed back into his armchair, o
ut cold.

  Fortune stood and looked around at the dismal animals. He’d have as much chance of getting something out of them as he would of rousing Foster. One day. He had one day left to find his daughter. He wouldn’t find her here. Where was the Games Room?

  fifty-three

  FORTUNE WAS TEN MINUTES AWAY FROM GLADES NURSING Home when his phone rang and he pulled over, killing the motor before answering. He didn’t want to be stopped for unsafe driving, not now.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Who am I speaking to?’

  It was a woman’s voice, a voice Fortune didn’t recognize. Careful, he thought. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘This is the idiot mum of the idiot who gave you my damn car,’ the woman said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Fortune. Poor Lee. ‘Yes. It’s true, I did take your car.’

  ‘So I want it back. Now.’

  ‘Did Lee tell you why I’ve got your car?’

  ‘He gave me some story.’

  ‘Did you hear about Charlie Jackson?’

  ‘Guy who got killed?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Fortune. ‘I killed him. And I told your son, I told him that I’d kill his mum, that I’d kill you, if he didn’t give me your car.’

  Lee’s mother didn’t answer, probably too shocked to speak.

  ‘He didn’t want to, he’s a brave kid. But he didn’t have a choice. He must really love you.’

  ‘You’re that man?’

  ‘I’m that man,’ said Fortune. ‘And I’ve got your car, and you’re not going to get it back.’ He paused, and added, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m going straight to the Old Bill,’ the woman said.

  ‘Do that,’ said Fortune. ‘Just go easy on Lee. You’ve got a good son there.’

  He didn’t necessarily believe that last statement, but he thought it was the least he could do, after all the trouble he’d put Lee through. Perhaps this would serve as some kind of lesson, a new start, although he doubted it. Oh well. He hit the red hang-up icon. He’d done his best.

  It was dark when Fortune arrived back at the nursing home, eight hours after he’d last been there, the reception a fluorescent-lit oasis in the middle of nowhere. There was a different receptionist than during the day, a bored-looking man who probably wasn’t expecting anyone to arrive this late. He glanced up when Fortune walked in out of the night, and put down a copy of the Racing Post. He was middle-aged and skinny, with silver stubble. He looked tired, tired and untrustworthy, with a gold hoop earring and a swallow tattoo on his arm. The kind of man who got the night shift, minimum wage, sit there until the sun comes up and don’t steal the medications, keep away from the diamorphine. Fortune smiled and prepared his story. He needed to speak to Burridge, there’d been some news, a family tragedy. That should do it. If, that was, Burridge was still alive.