Jaden shifted his hands from the table top to his lap and blinked lazily.

  ‘I didn’t do nothing,’ he said, staring straight ahead.

  ‘Did you know Dr Sullivan?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Dr Elizabeth Sullivan. The lady who’s been killed.’

  ‘I don’t know no Dr Sullivan.’

  ‘Dr Elizabeth Sullivan of 38 Dunloe Close, E2, found dead on Saturday morning, at her apartment. You don’t know her?’ Constance took out her phone. ‘It was in the papers. OK, not the top story and more local. Here’s a photo. Why don’t you take a look?’ She held her phone out to him. He turned his head, scanned the image and then he focused on Constance for the first time.

  ‘She told me her name was Liz. I didn’t know she was no doctor,’ he said. And, for a second, the mask of bravado slipped, his voice quivering as it tapered off. Constance allowed him to recover his composure before pressing on. Exposing him too soon would not help build his trust.

  ‘You knew her well?’ she continued.

  Jaden didn’t reply.

  ‘How did you get the cut over your eye?’

  Jaden shrugged.

  ‘All right. I’ll tell you what I know and you join in when you can. Two days ago, this lady, Dr Elizabeth Sullivan, was found dead at home, in bed. You live directly opposite at Montagu Court, flat 31. The police believed she had died in her sleep and that’s how it was first reported. Like I said, more local interest than national. Now they’re looking at it again, thinking she might have been killed and your fingerprints are inside her flat. That’s why you’re here. What were you doing in her flat?’

  Jaden shrugged again.

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘I just helped her with some shopping.’

  ‘You helped her with some shopping?’

  ‘Yeah.’ The bluster had returned, but that was all right. At least he was talking.

  ‘Did you know her?’ Constance asked.

  ‘To say hello to, that’s all. She had some shopping in the car. I was walking past. I asked if she wanted help.’

  ‘And you took the shopping into her apartment?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can you remember what was in the shopping?’

  ‘Nar. Just shopping. Tins and stuff.’

  ‘What supermarket was it from?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He looked at her again, this time for longer, his mouth closed tight to emphasise the finality of that response, his eyes challenging her to contradict him, goading her on. Constance chose, instead, to take a step to the side, rather than engage in full-on combat.

  ‘Was that the only time you’ve been in her apartment?’ she asked. Jaden registered the shift away from a full confrontation. His shoulders relaxed.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  ‘How long did you stay?’

  ‘I just dropped the shopping and that was it.’

  ‘You were there, what, one, two minutes?’

  ‘That’s it, yeah.’

  ‘But you didn’t know she was a doctor, a psychiatrist?’

  ‘Why would I know that? Why would I care?’

  ‘She might have told you.’

  ‘Nar.’

  ‘What did you do after you helped her with her shopping?’

  ‘I went home.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I was home all night.’

  ‘Can anyone confirm that?’

  ‘Yeah. Nathaniel can.’

  ‘He’s a friend of yours?’

  ‘We live together.’

  ‘Where can I find him?’

  ‘He’ll be at home.’

  Constance made a note. ‘What do you do for a living?’

  ‘I’m a gamer.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Gamer, gaming, online gaming. I have a live stream on Twitch and a YouTube channel.’

  ‘That’s what you do for work?’

  ‘Something wrong with that?’ Jaden uncrossed and then re-crossed his legs, the word ‘human’ now taking a solid stance on the floor and ‘race’ nodding agreeably at Constance.

  ‘How would I find you on Twitch?’ she said.

  ‘JD & Nath. Take a look. We have 120K followers. It’s totally legit. We did a live show that night. Lots of people tuned in. Maybe you want to talk to them all, too, to…corroborate my alibi.’

  Constance sat back. She was the one who had shifted her chair close to Jaden in the first place, to be friendly, to gain his confidence. That was one of her usual tactics, but it was having no noticeable impact on him. The story he was telling, whether it was true or not, was not recounted especially for her. The same words, the same gestures would have been churned out for anyone occupying her role.

  Now she wished she had remained more distant, asserted some authority. That might have worked better, might have paved the way for Jaden to confide later on, when it finally dawned on him that he needed her help. It was like those mothers who constantly told their kids they were their ‘best friend’. Didn’t they realise that was not what kids needed from a parent?

  ‘How did you get the cut above your eye?’ Constance asked again, trying to harden her tone.

  ‘I cut myself shaving,’ he said.

  ‘Would you like me to tell any family you’re here?’

  Jaden shook his head. ‘No one to tell, thanks. Just Nath. And he knows where I’m at.’

  ***

  ‘You haven’t got anything on him,’ Constance tapped on the window of Dawson’s office. He was sitting staring at the screen of his PC. He beckoned her in.

  ‘What was that you said? He’s ready to sign a full confession?’

  Constance sat down and scrutinised Dawson. In the artificial light of his room, his skin had taken on a sallow hue.

  ‘Hardly,’ she replied. ‘He lives locally. He helped her with some shopping, end of.’

  ‘He has a record.’

  ‘Possession, I’ve seen. It’s nothing.’

  ‘We’ve got neighbours saying there are lots of young people hanging around the flat. He’s probably been dealing.’

  ‘Probably? You know that means nothing, either. He’s a celebrity, that’s why kids hang around him.’

  ‘A celebrity?’

  ‘YouTube. Twitch. He has lots of followers.’

  ‘Blimey, he’s pulled one over on you, all right. In how long? Twenty minutes.’ Dawson stretched his arms up above his head, exposing two dark patches beneath his arms. Constance looked away. ‘There was also a caution for theft. Did he mention that one?’ he said.

  Constance was silent.

  ‘And did you ask him whether he carried the shopping into her bedroom?’ Dawson tried again.

  ‘What?’

  Dawson smiled and lowered his arms and, for the first time that day, he resembled the Dawson she knew.

  ‘Dr Elizabeth Sullivan, found dead in bed, bag stolen; money, keys, mobile phone. Your client was seen with her, chatting, going into her flat. No shopping was mentioned. And his fingerprints were everywhere, including in her bedroom…all over her bedroom. I think you need another word with Mr YouTube Celebrity Jaden Dodds,’ he said. ‘And once the post-mortem is complete, I think we’ll all be sitting down together for a nice group chat.’

  3

  Thomas Sullivan sat in his room, his window open, the last scrap of a cigarette hanging from his fingers. Normally, they wouldn’t let him smoke; no one was allowed – not even teachers – but they were hardly going to argue today, two days after his mother’s death.

  He took a final puff and then stubbed the cigarette out on his history book. It left a brown hollow in the cover and gave him a momentary pang at his unnecessary act of vandalism. Then he sank his finger into the dip and allowed it to rest there. He looked across to the two beds, one neatly made, the other a testament to his disrupted night, its covers flung back, exposing his flamingo-patterned pyjama bottoms.

  The pristine bed belonged to David, his best friend, but David had been evicted, temporarily, on the basis that Tom might want his own space for a few days. He shook his head. They really hadn’t a clue. Granted, they probably didn’t have a dedicated ‘how to deal with traumatised orphans’ policy, but he would have expected some common sense. Anyone with an ounce of empathy would not have left him alone for hours on end.

  As he turned away, he caught a fleeting glimpse of his mother’s face, smiling at him in that wistful way of hers. Sometimes, he wondered if it was regret for all the things she’d lost; a husband, those early milestones of his, her youth. Catching her in one of those moments, he’d asked her once, ‘Why do you look so sad?’ But she had shaken her head and held him close. ‘I’m not sad,’ she’d whispered, her fingers tangled through his hair, pressing his face against her neck. ‘I’m never sad. Not when you’re here.’

  Tom reached for the cigarette packet; only two left. It hardly mattered. There’d be more if he wanted them. You could get most things you wanted, most of the time, and no one would deny him now, in his hour of need.

  ‘Pleased to see you’re awake and up. How are you today?’

  If Mr Jenkins had knocked, Tom hadn’t heard him. But then all sounds were muffled to him, as if he was hearing underwater or through dodgy headphones, the rise and fall of familiar voices all siphoned into a monotone of sameness.

  ‘Will you come down for breakfast?’ Mr Jenkins enquired.

  Tom wondered if his headmaster really was relieved to see him alive and dressed, or if he would have preferred to find the room empty; Tom run away to join the circus or splattered on the ground immediately below his second-floor window. Maybe that was the real reason he had declared Tom should be left alone; to allow him to do ‘the honourable thing’, so as not to be a burden to anyone.

  That made Tom think of the poem they had studied in English on Friday, before he heard the news, about Liz, his mother, before his world turned upside down and inside out and topsy-turvy. ‘Kamikaze’ it was called, all about a Japanese man in the 1940s, who had so loved life, that he had aborted his wartime suicide mission, only to return to shame and ostracism. Mr Docherty had asked Tom to read it aloud to the class. The last line, the one where the man wonders whether his heroic soldier’s death would, ultimately, have been preferable to his ‘dishonourable’, miserable life – that had caught in Tom’s throat.

  If Mr Docherty had noticed, he hadn’t said, the class had continued with their analysis and comment: simile, metaphor, alliteration. Mr Docherty had told them that the word ‘kamikaze’ translated as ‘divine wind’, that, in the thirteenth century, Japan had been saved from invasion by a typhoon and that its soldiers engaging in their gruesome assignments, in more recent times, had claimed the romantic title. David had piped up then, said he thought it was ironic, that ‘wind’ was usually associated with life, not death. Stephen Wilson, sitting behind him, disagreed. ‘Wind’, he said, ‘often brought destruction’ and whipped up fire too. Mr Docherty, pleased with the lively discussion, added that wind often moved at great speed; ‘Ride like the wind’, ‘fly like the wind’.

  All Tom could think then, was that it was easy for these boys, his friends, his companions to talk glibly; to speak, with apparent inside knowledge, about the quality of the returning soldier’s life, to shake their heads and sanctimoniously judge him: ‘deserter’, ‘double-crosser’, ‘traitor’ even. Tom understood everything about the Japanese man, that he’d gazed down at the shimmering sea, reflected on the life he loved and vowed to cling on to it for as long as he humanly could. For his family and community to fail to understand that, to place so little value on his life and the meaning it gave them, to reject him – that was the real disgrace.

  But today, this morning, this minute, he was no longer sure of the feelings which had swelled inside him on Friday. Perhaps he had been too idealistic, perhaps there could be honour in death, especially when the alternative was a truly empty life.

  ‘If you’re not feeling up to it, I can get David to bring something up for you. Would you like that better?’ Mr Jenkins said.

  Tom dug at the hole in the cover of his book, pressing his thumb into the groove and gouging at the fleshy paper beneath with his nail.

  ‘I’ll ask him to do that, anyway; keep your strength up. Then, maybe after breakfast, you’ll come down. We could have a walk. Fresh air is always welcome.’ Mr Jenkins wrinkled his nose. Evidently the smell of Tom’s cigarette, lingering in the air, prompted his invitation. ‘Is there anything I can get you in the meantime?’ he offered.

  Tom heard Mr Jenkins clearly this time and a shiver travelled through his body from his head to his toes. He had dreamed of those words on Jenkins’ lips, but had never thought he would hear them in real life. Every cloud has a silver lining, so they said.

  He turned towards the jittery man and their eyes met for the first time. Tom thought Jenkins appeared genuinely concerned. Whether it was for Tom or for himself he couldn’t tell. So it would be good to ask for something, wouldn’t it? He’d read a bit of psychology and wasn’t that right? That you should take people up on offers of help; it made them feel good about themselves. If you just said no thanks or I’m fine, as so many stoic people did, then the person offering felt deflated. He should do this for Mr Jenkins, as well as for himself.

  ‘I’d like my laptop please,’ he said. ‘Not the spare one, my laptop.’

  Mr Jenkins hesitated a moment, then he nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ll get David to bring it up to you, with your breakfast.’

  And just like that, Mr Jenkins was gone, obligation fulfilled, back to the day job of presiding over meals and assemblies and, no doubt, endless planning meetings. They said he used to teach, that he’d been a pretty good teacher. Geography was his subject or was it maths? Tom couldn’t remember.

  He pulled another cigarette from the box and held it to his lips, hunting around for his lighter. None of it really mattered now: geography, maths, any subjects he’d been forced to study these past eleven years. None of them any use to you. Who needed to know the names for all the different ways the Earth’s plates moved? Either you were at the other side of the world, in which case it was a total irrelevance. Or, you were there at the epicentre, and you would get the hell out, rather than be occupied with the appropriate terminology for what was happening hundreds of miles below your feet.

  And maths? Who needed a graph to show how an object was accelerating as it fell to Earth? If it was large, like a meteor, surely what was important was that it would make a great big hole and you’d better get out of its way. If it was small, then you were probably OK.

  Locating the lighter in his desk drawer, he lit the cigarette and drew its smoke deep into his lungs. He visualised the cloudy vapour rolling through his body like tumbleweed, unfurling its fronds like a fern in time-lapse, extending deep inside him. He coughed once, deliberately, to close his internal passageways, before the fog reached the pain which consumed him and sought to salve it.

  He exhaled and flicked his ash onto his desktop and remembered what Mr Jenkins had just promised him. A frisson of excitement sparked his fingertips. Soon he would be out of here and this tired little room, this stale environment would be a distant memory. He, ‘Sully’, was going places. If David would just hurry up and bring him his laptop, then the fun could begin.

  4

  ‘You wanted to see me?’ Luke Smith tapped at Eric Daniels’ office window and hovered on the threshold. Eric waved him in and pointed at the chair opposite his desk, shifting his own chair away from his laptop and his four extra-large screens to face Luke. He smiled, but only with his teeth. Then he picked up one of the miniatures which adorned his desk and stared at it, before replacing it exactly where it had been.

  ‘Do you remember when you joined us here at Valiant, eight months ago, I made you sit through a film with key messages?’ Eric said, his eyebrows rising and falling as he spoke.

  ‘I remember, yes.’ Luke sat himself down and shifted his weight from side to side. It sounded like his newest design idea might not have hit the spot.

  ‘And there were some real “no nos”, do you recall? Things you absolutely must not do, in a Valiant game. Do you remember that?’ Eric’s index finger poked at the model again. Luke noticed it was the earliest iteration of Major Valiant, their namesake and champion of Valiant’s first successful online game. He’d changed since then, but Eric often talked about the need to keep sight of their ‘humble beginnings’.

  ‘No nos,’ he tested the words on the inside of his head. ‘No nos’, ‘mangos’, ‘yoyos’. Was Eric trying to patronise him? ‘Yeah, sure I remember.’ Perspiration broke out on Luke’s top lip. He didn’t want to look at the all-conquering Major Valiant. Instead, he focused on the Bruce Lee poster behind Eric’s head. Bruce Lee? Who had a poster of Bruce Lee on their wall these days?

  ‘Can you tell me what any of those were, those “no nos”, those bridges you mustn’t cross, commandments you mustn’t break, on pain of death?’

  Luke’s throat was dry. He’d been warned that Eric could be like this, pushy, aggressive, dictatorial, but he had thought the others were pulling his leg. He hadn’t seen signs of it himself, before now. And he did recall the introductory film, but not verbatim. ‘No nos’, ‘avocados’, ‘peccadillos’.

  ‘Hm… No padding,’ he said.

  ‘Absolutely. No padding. That’s right. Why not?’ Luke focused on Eric now, his anxiety levels still rising. Eric was half out of his seat, his eyes large, one arm waving in Luke’s face.

  ‘Players lose interest in aimless tasks,’ Luke said.

  ‘Yes. Players like clear objectives. If we only have five minutes of purposeful play, we can’t set them a forty-hour game. What else?’

  ‘No repetition.’

  ‘Why not?’