The Boy Become a Killer

Chapter 2

Obviously, I can list a modest bunch of realities. He's a 44-year-old independently employed developer, a one-man firm called Right Price Builders, doing unspecialized temp jobs around the neighborhood, dividers, and walls, supplanting entryways and windows, fixing broken clearing. I think he revealed to a few years prior that he'd constructed an augmentation on somebody's home. In any case, his character? Difficult to say. Calm, I assume. Private. Doesn't drink liquor. Quite a while back, he would go through hours in the rec center, weightlifting and working out, however, he no longer siphons iron. At a certain point, he rode an amazing bike – a Kawasaki. However, once more, not for quite a long time. Same with Shotokan karate. In his thirties, he was a sharp specialist and prepared routinely, yet he dropped combative techniques sometime in the past. I heard as of late that he loves taking photos. Something else, very little to discuss. He carries on a peaceful, good existence with his significant other Freya, who is expecting their first youngster in about a month. They've tried sincerely and purchased a semi-isolated, three-room house on a lovely private road.

Aside from that, I think minimal about him. I disclose to myself this is just regular. All things considered, I moved away from the space many years prior, while he has consistently lived here – essentially during those years when he was not in jail. We developed much more far off after I previously moved to Paris in 1996, and from that point forward we've seldom seen one another, not to mention mingled.

All things considered, we've never become really distracted. Continuously an approach birthday events and at Christmas, a boring visit for 10 minutes – never more, simply a registration – however enough to keep up with charitable bonds. In February 2000 I even called from Nepal to wish him glad birthday, which appears to be very reliable.

Or then again perhaps I was simply flaunting.

The last time I saw him – and Essex – was in 1996. It was the last Friday in August when I took this equivalent train, the day preceding the wedding. Alonzo and Freya were holding up in the vehicle left outside Grays station, standing by to drive me to the lodging where their visitors would remain. I thought about how correctly everything was arranged. How they jumped at the chance to have everything taken care of and pass on nothing to risk.

What's more, here I am, after five years, riding a similar train, once again into my past.

Our past.

I get off at Grays and leave to the vehicle left, where a dim Vauxhall is left confronting the edge divider. As I move into the rearward sitting arrangement, the two inhabitants go to confront me. Two regular clothes officials from the Major Investigation Team of Essex Police.

You made it, says DS Keith Davies with a tight grin.

He's happy I kept my statement. He didn't know I would.

He presents his associate, a female criminal investigator called Jo Antcliffe, and afterward, runs me through the drill again, rehashing nearly in exactly the same words what he'd said on the telephone a couple of days sooner.

This isn't tied in with denouncing anybody, he says. Truth be told, it's ideal on the off chance that you keep a receptive outlook, a calm mind. Try not to pass judgment on him. Disregard what you've gained from us about the case. Indeed, we have solid doubts, yet we could in any case not be right. So it's significant that you stay withdrew, apathetic. Allegations or forceful inquiries, any sort of a showdown would very likely be counterproductive, and maybe even lethal.

Does that mean – ?

He shrugs.

On the off chance that Alonzo has kidnapped Amelia, he says, there's as yet a possibility – even presently – that she may be alive, locked away someplace with food and water. That is the lone explanation he's temporarily free from jail. In the event that he chooses to go mind her, we'll be following, directly behind him, so we should not make him aware of the way that he's being watched.

My errand is basic: get Alonzo to discuss his life, his contemplations, and sentiments. Listen cautiously to his answers and notice his conduct, foster my own impressions. Be certain also any realities about his past that could just have been gained from the police. Subsequently, we'll pull together and go over everything, and they'll request my premonition.

You realize him just as anybody, perhaps better, says Keith Davies. You're his sibling. In the event that anybody can tell whether he's lying, it's presumably you.

We as a whole gander at one another and gesture. No one in the vehicle needs to express the words that linger palpably: it is currently more than about a month and a half since Amelia disappeared and now her chances are essentially nil. Be that as it may, we can't offer a voice to the incomprehensible, not yet. Until she is discovered, somehow, there is still an expectation.

I ask where we should get together when I'm done.

Head back here, says DS Davies, showing the train station.

Alright, I'll call you when I'm coming.

Try not to, he says. You will not see us, however, we'll watch.

We drive to Long Lane, not far from Alonzo and Freya’s house, and I get out to walk the last hundred yards or so. As I approach, a few minutes early, I notice the curtains drawn at every window, an oddly mournful look for late summer. I’m about 20 yards away when the front door opens. Alonzo emerges, swiftly locks and deadlocks the front door, and strides out to meet me before I can reach the front gate. It feels like a magic trick. He must have been watching, peering through a tiny gap in the curtains as I walked up to his house. He nods and grunts at the neighbour in the next garden but doesn’t introduce me.

We shake hands and greet each other in our curt, masculine way. The way we’ve grown accustomed to down the years.

Good to see you, I say.

Yeah, he says. How’d you get down here, take the train?

Of course.

You didn’t walk from the station? You should have called me to come and get you.

No, got a cab, but had him drop me off at the corner. You know, more discreet.

Oh, right, he says, eyeing me suspiciously.

Ten seconds in and I’m already lying. I suspect he knows, and wonder if I’ve already failed in my mission.

Let’s walk, he says.

We’re not going inside?

No, he says. Got to buy a pump filter from the hardware store around the corner. It’ll only take five minutes, then we can get something to eat.

At three o’clock in the afternoon?

Maybe just a coffee then.

On our way to the hardware store, I sneak sideways glances, trying to size him up, while we stumble through his generic questions – about my health, work, life in Paris – and my equally generic answers. I ask how he has been doing himself.

The street is empty but he glances around before replying.

We’ll talk about that later, he says. I don’t like to discuss anything in public.

This strikes me as paranoid, but then again I’m not the one suspected of abducting and maybe killing a 15-year-old girl. I’m not sure how I would react under those circumstances.

What about Freya? How is she?

She’s gone to stay with her mum and dad while all this is going on. Too much stress with the baby on the way.

He is unshaven and out of shape, his muscular torso running to flab. His face looks puffy, like someone who slept on the couch. His deep brown eyes, once gleaming and full of mischief, are smaller than I remember as if shrunken into his head. He wears a black T-shirt and battered dark blue jogging pants with a small hole in one thigh, a pair of scuffed trainers. Work clothes. Or maybe that’s what happens when your wife goes home to her parents, you end up looking dishevelled and exhausted. I wouldn’t know – at this point, I have never been married.

So I suppose the police have been to see you, he ventures in an airy, no-big-deal tone, not so much a question as a statement.

Yes.

And what did they have to say then?

Well, they said they had followed several leads but none of them had amounted to anything so far. And they said that so far, you are their main suspect.

Their only suspect, he mouths, with a look of exasperation, as we enter the hardware store.

When we get back to the house I’m expecting to be invited in, but instead, he suggests we go for a drive and get a bit of grub. We climb into the blue Transit van parked in his driveway.

Blue van, I mutter.

Of course, like everyone else who has been following the case, I know that one of the last witnesses to see Amelia alive, a fellow pupil at her school, had seen her climb into a blue van the morning she went missing. That sighting has been widely reported in the national news, so Alonzo must understand why I mentioned it. He doesn’t respond.

Once we get on the main road, I’m expecting him to open up – there are no prying neighbours now. But he volunteers nothing about Amelia, her disappearance, the investigation, his arrest and brief incarceration, his feelings on the matter. I find this odd. I know that he was close to Amelia and often spent time at her home. Still, recalling Keith Davies’s words and avoiding any rush to judgment, I ask how he has been coping. You know, with constantly being in the news, with being accused of this terrible crime. He sighs and shrugs.

I just want to get back to my life, he says. To make sure Freya is alright.

He repeats a phrase he’d used when we spoke on the phone back in June after he’d been arrested on suspicion of Amelia’s abduction, questioned, and released on bail.

This should be our time, he says. We should be together getting ready for the baby’s birth and what d’you call it, going to antenatal classes.

But he says nothing about injustice or media persecution, expresses none of the outrages I’d expect from someone wrongly accused. Instead, he stares straight ahead and talks almost nonstop about the flat Essex countryside, and how some company is developing that piece of land over there, and how that factory over there belongs to another company, and how that land on the right is where the new Eurostar train line will run, and how the traffic is usually much busier along this road at this time of day, and how you have to be on the lookout for hidden turns and cars that can pull out in front of you without warning.

I sit and say nothing. I want him to fill the silence.

Somehow our conversation turns to my childhood friend Andy Hollington, who at this point is living in Southend-on-Sea, the eastern terminus of the Fenchurch Street line.

So how is Andy?

Good, I say. He’s a student now. He enrolled at Southend Tech.

Oh yeah? Says Alonzo, with the hint of a smirk. When we were kids, the student was a synonym for dossier among local lads, who generally left school at 16 to work on building sites, or in the local asbestos factory, or maybe Ford Works in Dagenham if they were lucky.

Yeah, I say, studying photography.

I wait. No response.

Yeah, I add. He’s got a Nikon, a really nice camera.

He glances over at me, tight-lipped, but says nothing.

Alonzo is a keen amateur photographer. Normally I’d expect him to engage in conversation about cameras and photography. Instead, he turns his face to the side window as we take the roundabout. I tell him that Andy says he has his eye on an even better camera, one with a fancy zoom lens. Still nothing. Odd, because the police told me all about the cameras and photographic prints they found when they searched Alonzo’s house. The images are on his computer. The white business cards he’d had printed, advertising himself as a photographer.