Thorn In My Side (2 page)

Knocking the
door shut with her hip, she put the coffee and the bun on the table
and sat down. 'Smiler…' She fell quiet for a moment as if choosing
her words. Taking a sip of coffee, she looked at Mike and sadly
shook her head. 'Smiler is the most damaged person I have ever met,
and trust me, we get some damn sad cases through these doors… He
was abused from early infancy. His alcoholic drug- addicted
mother...' She shrugged. 'That’s if you can call her a mother. I
certainly wouldn’t.'

Mike froze.
Doors slammed shut in his head as her voice droned on. He tuned
back in a few minutes later as she was saying, 'What she did to
that boy was unforgivable. He’s been sectioned more than once for
his own good. He either escapes or behaves for the recommended
period of time, then he’s back on the streets again selling himself
to feed his habit.'

Mike tutted.
'So where’s the mother now? Any other family?'

'No one. His
mother’s been dead seven years, an overdose. Smiler’s been on the
streets ever since… She... She…' The nurse shuddered, looked up
from her coffee, met Mike’s eyes and paused a moment before saying,
'She had been dead for weeks before anyone found her.'

Frowning, Mike
asked, 'So how old is he?'

'Seventeen.'

'Good God! So
the kid’s been on his own since he was ten years old?'

'He’s had
whatever becomes available. Half a dozen council homes, ran away
from them all. As for foster care…' She shrugged. 'There’s not many
out there with a heart big enough to take on the likes of Smiler,
especially when they see his face.' She shook her head sadly. 'It
sort of turns them off.'

Slowly Mike
nodded. He could well understand why.

She held her
hands up in a helpless gesture. 'The shame of it is, when he’s
stable he’s such a likeable kid, not a mean bone in his body. He’ll
do anything for you.'

'So you,
er...' Mike frowned. 'You said she’d been dead for weeks?'

'Sadly, yes. It
was summer, a hot spell. They were living in a caravan. It was the
smell that alerted people. I shudder to think what state she was
in. I was on holiday at the time.'

Grimacing at
the thought of a ten-year-old sharing a home with a dead body for
all those weeks, Mike went on, 'How the hell was it left so
long?'

'From what
I’ve been told, she never came out of the caravan from the day she
went in until the day she was carried out. Smiler wouldn’t open up
to anyone. From what we could gather he’d spent his days in the
library, and his nights on the street selling himself for
food.'

'Jesus
Christ!' Mike rapped the chair arm with his fingers, and the sister
could see the anger in his eyes.

Perhaps,
she thought, i
t’s a good thing the nasty old cow’s
already dead.

'So how’s he
managed to eat since then?'

Sighing, she
went on, 'The poor soul still begs. Not much else he can do, is
there? In the beginning, after his mother died, he used the only
way he knew to make money… He stopped selling himself when he was
about thirteen, after a pretty nasty character gave him a hell of a
beating. Someone found him in a dustbin, got him here just in time.
He’d been in the bin for over forty-eight hours. We patched him up,
a few broken ribs and a broken arm. It was the pneumonia that
nearly saw him off.' She shook her head, her eyes in the past
seeing Smiler’s broken and bruised body.

'Jesus,' Mike
muttered, more to himself than to the sister.

She nodded,
'Yes… You could actually see the footprints on his back and
chest.'

Mike’s voice
was rough when he asked, 'Anyone pay for it?'

Looking Mike in
the eye and understanding what he meant, she said, 'Not that I know
of.'

Inside Mike was
seething. Whenever he heard of abused kids, it made him want to
reach out and crush with his bare hands whatever depraved creature
-- he could never bring himself to call them human -- had
perpetuated the crime.

'OK…It’s
obvious why he’s nicknamed Smiler, so what’s his real name?'

She shrugged.
'No one really knows. The night he was rescued from the bin he was
hand-cuffed.' She paused for a moment, then said angrily, 'The
handcuffs were woven from a thorn bush.'

'What?'

'Yes, painful
indeed.' She bit her lip, and sighed before going on. 'The wounds
became infected. We reckon it was some sort of ritual that he’d
refused to go along with.'

Becoming more
angry the more he heard, Mike clenched his fists. For a moment he
stared at the floor. When he lifted his head, the sister went on.
'For administration reasons, because he was not expected to live,
the clown who was on duty that night gave Smiler the surname of
Thorn.'

'A bit
insensitive.'

She shrugged.
'Computers, they have to have a surname and a forename. That’s why
a lot of babies who are found in the winter get Winter for a
surname, and so on… But Smiler is all he’ll answer to. And trust
me, he doesn’t do a hell of a lot of smiling.'

Used to the
brutality of the depraved, it still never ceased to upset Mike when
he heard tales of such horror. He was about to ask more when the
door opened and a doctor looked round. Mike and the sister both
looked at him, the same question burning behind their eyes.

He smiled.
'He’s going to make it.' He turned his head to Mike. 'Well done --
you got him here just in time.'

Mike smiled his
relief. 'Oh, great.'

Smiling back,
the doctor nodded at the sister, and closed the door.

It was
Thursday, the last Thursday that Mike would be spending in London.
After nearly three months working undercover, tonight should see
everything finally sorted. The last meeting had been a pure waste
of time, along with the previous two. He felt like he was being led
down the garden path, big time.

Mike had found
out nothing he didn’t already know. For the last couple of years
the list of missing people, mostly teenagers, had grown out of all
proportion, and lately most of the missing seemed to be connected
to the A1 corridor from London to Berwick-on-Tweed.

In a typical
year, over two hundred thousand people go missing in the UK alone.
Quite a lot turn up, mostly teenagers, who have run off in a huff.
But lately the volume, and where they were missing from, had the
police totally perplexed. Not one teenager from the towns and
cities up the corridor had ever been seen again.

Mike smiled as
he hurried down the stairs, ten flights but damn good exercise. He
was thinking of the night six weeks ago when he’d kicked what he’d
first thought was a bunch of rags on his doorstep.

A few days
later, Smiler had turned up at the station. Since then Mike had
seen quite a lot of Smiler, enough to know he was going to miss him
when he went home.

Mike walked out
of the office, and Smiler was standing in his usual place, talking
to an old woman who regularly fed the birds on that spot. Even in
this heat she wore the red belted coat she was never without,
prompting most of the officers to nickname her Little Red Riding
Hood. A few half-hearted attempts to chase her over the years had
come to nothing and she was now a regular feature. She knew all of
the detectives by name, and, despite Mike telling her over and over
that he was not a Geordie, but had been born in Durham, she still
called him Geordie, insisting that
them strange folk up
north
all sounded the same.

'Hello, Nancy,'
Mike said as he approached them.

'Hello
yourself, Geordie… Nice day.' She threw a handful of seeds at the
birds around her feet.

'It sure is,
Nancy. Be seeing you.' He smiled when she nodded at him then, as if
dismissing him, turned and went on feeding the birds.

Winking at
Smiler, Mike moved closer to Nancy. Shoving a ten pound note into
her pocket, which he had to bend to do, he said quietly, 'For the
birds, love.'

'Thank you,
Durham lad,' she whispered back.

Mike laughed
loudly as he and Smiler went on their way.

Half an hour
later they were sat at a table in MacDonald’s, tucking into
cheeseburgers and fries. After spending most of the day in the
library, Smiler was sounding off about wars going back as far as
the thirtieth century BC. Mike was only half-listening, thinking
about tonight. He’d had enough anyhow with the daft idiot who was
part of the Laurel and Hardy duo in the office. He’d been spouting
off all day about reports due, reports overdue, reports not
finished.
God, the tit thinks
I’m a bloody
secretary.

Then, half a
dozen fries on their way to his mouth, Smiler suddenly froze.

'Choking?' Mike
asked, picking up Smiler’s drink to hand to him. 'Sip it.'

Slowly Smiler
shook his head before saying in a hushed voice, 'Don’t go.'

Puzzled, Mike
frowned. 'What?'

'Don’t go… The
meeting tonight… The car park… The high rise one… Don’t go… Please…
It’s a set up.'

'What the
hell?'

Smiler put his
head down.

Mike frowned
again.
No one outside of the office knows about
tonight’s
meeting, so how on earth…?
'What are you talking about,
Smiler?'

'There’s a
woman, a big woman with red hair, wearing a red dress and red
shoes.'

'And?'

'She’s there…
It’s dangerous.'

Mike sighed.
'So where the hell is all of this coming from?'

Smiler lifted
his head, looked Mike in the eye. 'You know I see things,' he
answered in a quiet voice. 'I know you don’t believe in what you
call mumbo jumbo, Mike, but you should keep an open mind.
Actually…' Smiler suddenly stopped talking and began counting his
fingers as he looked furtively around.

Mike’s heart
sank, remembering what the doctor had said when he’d had a few
words with him about Smiler. Quietly Mike asked, 'Smiler, have you
been taking your medication?'

Smiler stopped
counting for a moment, stared at Mike as if he was a stranger, then
said, 'What?'

Mike felt a
chill run down his spine. In total contrast to the warmth of the
day, he shivered. The sun streaming in through the windows only
made it more surreal as he repeated, 'I said, have you been taking
your medication?'

'You know I
have.'

'Look Smiler, I
haven’t got time for mumbo jumbo.' Mike held his hands up. 'OK… But
you know as well as I do where it’s coming from, don’t you?'

'You think it's
drugs.' Smiler said slowly, and barely above a whisper.

Exasperated,
Mike’s voice rose as he snapped, 'What the hell else could it
be?'

'I’ve told you,
I haven’t done them since we met. I promised and I’ve kept it.'

Mike sighed
and, as if he hadn’t heard what Smiler had just said, went on, 'You
promised you would keep away from that shit. You know it fucks you
up.' Mike slapped his palm on the table. 'For God’s sake, Smiler,
don’t you ever want to get better? Do something with your life
instead of wasting it? Smiler, I still don’t think you realise what
you’re capable of. You have the intelligence to do just about
anything you want. You know this for a fact, you’re the smartest
kid I ever met… You’re certainly intelligent enough to know that
much more of that shit will leave you with no way back… at all…
ever.'

'I’ve said I
haven’t touched it.' Smiler’s voice was growing louder with every
word until finally he was shouting. 'But you don’t believe me, do
you?'

Mike didn’t
have to say anything. His face held the absolute disbelief and
disappointment he felt. Smiler had shown a marked improvement
lately, but now it looked like they were heading back to square
one.

'Where did you
get it?' Mike demanded, vowing silently to personally rip the
throat out of whichever dirty fucking creep of a pathetic arsehole
dealer had coaxed Smiler back onto drugs.

Smiler glared
back at him, the silence between them lengthening. Then suddenly,
as if an explosion had gone off in his head, he jumped up,
shouting. 'Should have known you were no better than the rest! Why
would you be, eh?' There were tears in his eyes as he went on.
'Here, keep your fucking food.' He threw the half-eaten
cheeseburger at Mike, and swiped everything else onto the floor
before turning and running out of the restaurant. At the door he
looked back and, glaring at Mike, yelled, 'You’ll be sorry… I hate
you… Bastard, that’s all you are, just like the rest of them… I
should have known… I should have known. I hate you… I fucking hate
you. Tosser. Just like the rest.'

'Shit.'
Ignoring the curious glances from the people around, Mike wiped the
tomato sauce off his shirt, dropped the napkin on the table, kicked
the remains of their meal to one side in case anyone slipped on the
mess, then quickly headed after Smiler.

Outside, he
looked first up then quickly down the street. Not a sign of him.
The pavements were crowded, people hurrying past each other in a
frantic effort to catch the tube, grab a taxi or find their car and
get out of the city. He hurried along to the corner, pushing past
the tide of people. Still no sign of him.

'Where the
hell...?' He sighed. He hadn’t really expected to see him. Smiler
was small enough to totally disappear in any crowd.

Tutting, he
turned back. The last thing he’d meant was to hurt the kid’s
feelings.
Christ, people have been doing that more or less
since the poor sod was born.

'And now I’ve
gone and put me big fat foot right in it. Shit!' he muttered,
receiving an odd look from an old lady who picked up her pace and
hurried past him.

Feeling lousy,
Mike headed towards the car park.
I should have
listened.

Should have
trusted Smiler instead of condemning him right off, damn it.