2 Reminders
But Danny’s sleep was both brief and disturbed. He rolled from side to side, tangling himself in the sheets. He dreamed of the prison, his father smiling and laughing. As if everything was okay.
He woke.
It was dark, only a little after midnight. Images from the dream merged with memories from the day: his father acting as if everything was normal.
How dare he?
Nothing would ever be normal again. Nothing had been, since that awful night.
~
Danny kept a scrapbook.
Or rather... not a real scrapbook, as such. Nothing as formal as that. It was just an envelope really. An envelope filled with the past.
He swung his legs out of bed and paused to calm his nerves.
He kept the envelope filled with the past to remind himself. Not that he was ever likely to forget what had happened and what it was like.
He reached out and turned on his bedside lamp. He turned and dropped to his knees on the floor, then hitched the duvet up out of his way and reached beneath the bed. There was a low cardboard box. He slid the box out and it was there: a brown A4 envelope, the address scribbled out with black marker pen.
He took it and sat on the bed, his back against the wall.
Inside, there were yellowed press cuttings, family photographs, a small spiral-bound notepad. He emptied the envelope and lay its contents out on the bed by his side.
He opened the notepad and flicked through it. Only a few pages had been used, the rest left blank. A social worker had urged the eleven-year-old Danny Smith to write down his feelings and draw things. She had said it would help.
The handwriting was big, the lettering carefully sloping in classroom italic. The date was double-underlined, followed by a colon and a dash.
10th October 2001:- School. 10/10 in Maths. Mr Peters says Dad will plea giulty when they ask him next week. He says thats the best thing. Mum is being strong. Oma is organising us. Since Great Aunt Eva past away Oma has taken over everything. She’s very good at it. Next door is being kind. Everything is AOK, considering.
Beneath that entry, filling up the rest of the page, there was a drawing of Danny and Val and Oma, all holding hands under a tree that was shedding its red and gold leaves. All were smiling. Val had her free hand on her tummy, swollen with what was to be Josh.
Danny hadn’t been stupid, even back then.
They had wanted him to write down things he would never say to them in person. They had wanted him to draw things that may have exposed the pain and confusion that filled his head every minute of the day, and every minute of every dark, dark night.
They had wanted him to expose the workings of his mind. To open himself up to them.
But he wouldn’t do that.
He didn’t trust them and he hadn’t asked for their help. The social workers, the so-called friends who would just as likely end up selling their inside stories of the Slaughter Family to the papers. The psychiatrist, Dr Jessop, who had understood better than most.
Danny had written what they wanted to read. He had written what might just shut them up.
He hadn’t written what it was like to start at high school shortly before your father is due to be tried for a multiple murder. You go there, and there are people and faces you know from junior school, but most you’ve never seen before because they’ve come from loads of different schools, and some of your friends from junior school have gone to another high school altogether.
So most of the people there were strangers, but everyone knew Danny.
Word got around quickly.
They looked, they pointed, they talked in hushed tones so that he only heard enough to know they were talking about him, about his father.
Worse were the ones who looked and then immediately looked away again. Faces pale, turning from him, eyes averted.
As if he might be a chip off the old family block.
As if they didn’t want him to notice them, just in case...
The neighbours had never been kind to them, despite what Danny told the social workers in his diary. One side, the Walkers, never said a word. Old Mr Sabbatini on the other side was worse. He took to confronting Danny’s mother whenever he saw her, asking in his soft but persistent voice when she would be leaving as she and her kind were a blight on house prices.
None of this went into Danny’s spiral-bound notepad, of course. Give them what they want, but don’t give them anything of yourself. Lock everything up inside your head. Keep it all in check. That was the way to get through.
He closed the notebook. On the front cover, in the same neat hand, was written Daniel Smith aged 11 12.
Photographs.
There was a picture of Danny aged seven or eight, with his father. They were sitting side by side on the swings in the local park, back when they had lived in Loughton. Both had that family look: the dark eyes, the dark hair, the slightly crooked smile, higher on the left than on the right.
Another showed them in a large group on the sea-front at Brighton, the pier behind them. Danny stood with his mother and Oma. Great Aunt Eva was there, tall for an old lady, whereas Oma was shorter and frail from her long-standing illness. Eva had been Danny’s favourite grown-up, since she had arrived from Germany. She had taken to Danny straight away, and had a wicked sense of humour – much as Oma had developed when she had recovered from her illness.
There were the great uncles, too: Christian and Dieter. They were there with their wives and there were maybe a dozen more faces in the photograph which belonged to cousins whose names Danny had barely known even then. There hadn’t been a word from Christian and Dieter since the trouble, much to Oma’s distress. Just when the family should have pulled together, her brothers had abandoned them, disowning them and all their problems.
There was Chris Waller, too, a birdwatching friend of Danny’s father, who stood out from the crowd with his coppery hair and the binoculars around his neck. Danny remembered that the two of them had slipped away shortly after his father had taken this picture: along the coast to Rye to look for a Pacific Golden Plover which had been spotted that morning.
Another photograph: Danny, about ten years old, dark hair all over the place so that he looked as if he’d been dragged through a hedge.
Up against his chest, Danny was holding a pistol. He remembered its weight in his hands. He remembered holding it up to aim two-handed, trying to line up the sight at the end of the slender muzzle with the notch at the back. The words Krieghoff Suhl were engraved on the back of the pistol. It was a second world war Luftwaffe Luger, carried by German aircrews.
“It is perfectly safe,” Great Aunt Eva had assured them all. “They built them to last forever. But a little dirt, a little muck in the... how do you say? Mechanismus, the mechanism. My little lifesaver has been stuck up for many years. Is little more than a toy now. Here, let me take a photograph of you, Daniel. There! Like a stormtrooper!”
The Luger’s mechanism may have been jammed for years, but all it had needed, in the end, was cleaning...
He came to the newspaper cuttings.
BIRD RAGE KILLER SHOULD BE STRUNG UP, yelled one headline in white letters set against a black banner. COLD AND CALCULATED - THE MIND OF A KILLER, said another. ACCOUNTANT STALKED VICTIMS IN CRIME OF PASSION.
An accountant arrested by police investigating five north London killings was remanded in custody by magistrates yesterday.
Anthony Smith, 40, of Loughton, north London, was charged with five counts of murder in connection with the deaths, all of which occurred on the night of 18 April. Magistrates remanded Smith in custody until 25 April, when he is due to appear at the Old Bailey for a preliminary hearing.
Smith, nephew of one of the victims, Eva Hoeness, and friend of another, Christopher Waller, was driven to court in a people carrier with blacked-out windows, escorted by three police cars. He was covered in a blanket as he was led into the court building.
During the 10-minute hearing he spoke only to give his name and address...
Danny stopped reading it. He knew the words of every one of these reports off by heart.
He looked at the pictures instead. This one showed two worried-looking men, each with an arm around a figure hunched low beneath a blanket. A more distant shot showed them at the centre of a small crowd – some of the onlookers hostile, more merely curious.
Another story included a grainy version of the big group picture at Brighton, blown-up and tightly-cropped to show Chris Waller and Great Aunt Eva, the other two faces in the picture blacked out.
Danny took the cuttings, the photographs and the notebook and arranged them in a neat pile which he then slid into the brown envelope.
He placed the envelope by his side and sat for long minutes, calm and still.
He kept all this to remind himself of how it had been. He kept it to help him stay alert to the dangers, to remember why it was that he must never lose control.
He kept it to help remember just why it was that nothing could ever be normal again.