Lost River

She checked her watch. She was early yet. Not that they would mind her arriving a bit sooner than expected. They would probably be delighted. She could imagine them chuckling with excitement in the hall, fussing around her, patting her arm, ushering her into an armchair while the kettle boiled. But she wasn’t quite ready for that yet.

Beyond the underpass at Perry Barr, she turned into the One-Stop shopping centre and parked up. Inside the mall, she walked past Asda and Boots, and out into the bus station.

She had studied for her degree in Criminal Justice and Policing at UCE, the University of Central England, right here in Perry Barr. From the bus station, she had a good view of her old alma mater, though it had now been renamed Birmingham City University. She could see the Kenrick Library and the golden lion emblem high on the main building of the City North campus.

Instead of going back to her car, she crossed to the other side of the bus station and walked towards Perry Barr railway station, past a few shops that stood between here and the corner of Wellington Road – The Flavour of Love Caribbean takeaway, Nails2U, the Hand of God hair salon.

But there was no point in avoiding the call. She was caught up in the machine now, had voluntarily thrown herself into the mechanisms of the criminal justice system, and she had no escape.

‘Diane, are you well?’ said Murchison, answering her phone instantly, as if she had indeed been sitting at her desk waiting for it to ring.

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

‘I just wanted a few words with you, before our meeting this afternoon.’

‘You just wanted to make sure I was actually on my way, perhaps?’

‘No. I think you’ve made the commitment now. I’m sure you won’t change your mind. But if you do –’

‘I won’t,’ said Fry.

‘All right. Well, I know you might be feeling isolated and vulnerable at the moment. But don’t forget, you’re not alone in this. We’re all on your side. Any support you need is available, twenty-four hours a day. Anything you want to talk about is fine. Don’t hold it back. Call me, any time.’

‘Thank you. That’s very kind.’

‘Don’t worry, Diane. It’s my job.’

Fry winced, wondering if she had just received the hand-off, the subtle reminder that this wasn’t a personal relationship but a professional one. She supposed that counsellors, like psychiatrists, had to be wary of relationships with their clients, and draw firm boundaries. Some of the people Murchison dealt with must be very needy.

Below her, the yellow front end of a London Midland City train whirred into the Birmingham platform of the station.

‘There’s a lot of noise in the background,’ said Murchison. ‘Where are you?’

‘Perry Barr.’

Murchison was silent for a moment. Fry thought she had shocked her in some way. But Perry Barr wasn’t that bad, was it?

‘Diane, is there a particular reason you’re in Perry Barr?’

‘Yes, a personal one.’

She thought she could hear Murchison shuffling papers.

‘May I ask…?’

‘I’m visiting someone. Family.’

‘Oh. That would be…your foster parents?’

‘Well done.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘I know it’s all right. I don’t need your permission to visit them.’

‘No, no. Of course not.’

Tm just calling in for a cup of tea. So you can tell Gareth Blake I’m behaving myself.’

Murchison laughed. Fry thought she heard relief in her voice.

‘I’ll tell him. And we’ll see you later, yes?’

‘Of course. After I’ve checked into my hotel.’

Fry watched people hurrying down the concrete steps to the platform and getting on to the train. She thought about following them, getting on the train and riding past Aston, past Duddeston and right into New Street. As if she could ride by everything, without even a glance out of the window, and start all over again.

But she stood for too long at the top of the steps, and the train pulled out, the noise of its motor dying as an echo on the brick walls.

‘Diane,’ said Murchison finally, ‘everything will be all right.’

Fry ended the call, and looked around. Opposite her stood three tower blocks surviving from an early 1960s attempt at low-cost housing. A number 11 bus emerged from Wellington Road in a burst of exhaust fumes. A strong smell of burning rubber hung on the air from the plastics factory on Aston Lane.

She walked under the flyover and emerged on the Birchfield Road side. Kashmir Supermarkets and Haroun’s mobile phones. Money-transfer services and lettings agencies for student flats. Outside Amir Baz & Sons boxes of vegetables were stacked on the pavement. Fry stopped to look at some of the labels. Bullet Chilli. Surti Ravaiya.

Now she felt lost. Nothing seemed to be recognizable. The street signs still pointed to UCE, but there was no point in following them. When you got there, you would find it had ceased to exist. Its name had been consigned to history.

The disappearance of so many landmarks gave her a strange sense of dislocation. Birmingham had been changing behind her back while she’d been away. This was no longer the place that she’d known. The Brum she saw around her was a different city from the one that she’d left. It was as if someone had broken into her previous life when she wasn’t looking and tried to wipe out her memories with a wrecking ball and a bulldozer.

But then, it was probably true the other way round. She wasn’t the same person who’d left Birmingham, either.

The Bowskills were the family she’d lived with the longest. She’d spent years in the back bedroom of their red-brick detached house in Warley. She’d been there when Angie ran away and disappeared. And she’d stayed with the Bowskills after her sister had gone. She’d needed them more than ever when she no longer had Angie to cling to.

And those times in Warley had been happy, in a way. Fry clearly remembered window shopping with her friends at Merry Hill, touring the Birmingham clubs, and drinking lager while she listened to the boys talking about West Bromwich Albion. Jim and Alice Bowskill had done their best, and she would forever be grateful to them. There had always been that hole in her life, though. Always.

There had been other homes, of course. Some of them she remembered quite well. She particularly recalled a spell with a foster family who’d run a small-scale plant nursery in Halesowen, and another placement near the canal in Primrose Hill, where the house always seemed to be full of children. But those families were further back in her past, too far upstream to re-visit.

Jim and Alice Bowskill now lived in a semi-detached house with a vague hint of half-timbering, located on the Birchfield side of Perry Barr, the close-packed streets in a triangle bounded by Birchfield Road and Aston Lane. As she drove towards it along Normandy Road, Fry had a good view of the Trinity Road stand at Villa Park, reminding her that Aston was only a stone’s throw from this part of Perry Barr. Here, everyone was a Villa fan.

There seemed to be home improvements going on everywhere in these streets. She saw an old armchair standing by the side of the road, bags of garden rubbish lined up at the kerb.

Most of these houses had been built at a time when the people who lived in them weren’t expected to own cars. So there were very few garages and hardly any off-street parking. It took her a few minutes to find somewhere to leave her Audi.

Jim Bowskill was wearing his Harrington jacket. Well, surely not the original Harrington – the one she always remembered seeing him in. It would have been worn out by now. But he was a man who had never been without a Harrington. He once told her he’d started wearing one as a mod in the 1960s, and just found that he never grew out of them. When he reached his mid fifties, he’d thought for a while about having a change. But then he’d seen Thierry Henry wearing one in the Renault adverts, and that was it. The current Harrington was a classic tan colour, with the Fraser tartan lining and elasticated cuffs. Seeing it made Fry feel an intense burst of affection for him. It was probably just nostalgia – a vague memory of hugging a coat just like that.

He was a lot greyer than she remembered him. Slightly stooped now, too.

‘Hello, love. It’s good to see you. We haven’t seen much of you since you left to go to Derbyshire. Having a good time away from us, I suppose?’

He said it teasingly, but Fry felt sure there was more than a hint of genuine reproach. She immediately felt guilty. She thought of all the reasons she’d given herself over the past few years for not keeping in touch with her foster parents, and all of them seemed petty and contrived. Fry supposed she’d only been trying to justify her reluctance to herself. But she shouldn’t have made Jim and Alice the victims of her self-justification.

‘No, I’m sorry. I’ve been so busy.’

‘We understand.’

Fry knew from the tone of his voice that he saw the lie, and forgave her. And that just made her feel even more guilty.

Jim Bowskill had been sorting out his blue recycling box for the weekly refuse collection.

‘How do you like it here?’ asked Fry.

‘Oh, it suits me. The house isn’t too big, so it’s easy to maintain. And there are lots of shops. We didn’t have the One-Stop shopping centre when you were here before, did we?’

‘Yes, Dad. It’s been there for fifteen years.’

He nodded. ‘And there are plenty of bus routes, if I need to go anywhere. So, all in all, it’s very handy.’

The Bowskills moved from Warley to Perry Barr some time after she left home to live on her own. She wasn’t sure why – though Alice’s family was originally from this part of North Birmingham, so maybe it was another case of nostalgia, a woman drawn back to the past by those lingering memories.

In a way, this part of Perry Barr had come full circle. When the indigenous white community had first started selling their houses, the Indians had moved in. As the Indians became more prosperous, they’d moved on to other areas, and Pakistanis had come in. When the Pakistanis sold their houses, the Bengalis had replaced them. And now here was Jim Bowskill, living in his double-fronted semi off Canterbury Road, explaining that it was easy to maintain and handy for the shops, and close to a bus route, if he needed it. And it was in the heart of Perry Barr’s Bengali area.

Fry knew better than to talk about the Asian community round here. If you looked for an Asian community, you wouldn’t find it. Instead you’d see a whole series of Asian communities – Pakistanis, Bengalis, Hindus. And even within the nationalities, the complexities of caste and locality were impossible for an outsider to sort out. In some parts of the country, there were entire populations who had come from a handful of villages in one small region of Pakistan. The more you learned, the more you realized how undiscriminating the very word Asian was. It was a pretty big continent, after all. And she knew that no one around here would readily call themselves Asian. It was an outsider’s term.

And everyone knew there was a pecking order among the different ethnic groups. The cycle that had played itself out in Perry Barr over the years was repeated in other parts of Birmingham. Newly arrived immigrants lived in the poorest streets, until they could to move on to better areas and bigger houses. These days, the leafy avenues of Solihull were full of Hindu millionaires.

Once an Asian parent had explained it to her:

‘In the old days, we thought we would come here, send some money back and eventually go home. But the new generation don’t see it that way. A lot of people don’t consider this the host country any more, they consider it their home.’

‘But sometimes the old country is home, too, isn’t it?’

He smiled. ‘Yes. Sometimes when people say “home” you have to ask which home they’re talking about.’

Alice Bowskill looked frail. She wasn’t that old, really. But time hadn’t been kind to her. Nor had the years spent worrying over other people’s children.

Fry hugged her.

‘Mum.’

Jim smiled at them both, delighted to see them together.

‘Do you still support West Brom, Diane?’ he said.

‘Me?’ said Fry. ‘I never did, not really.’

‘It was just because the boys did,’ said Alice with a sly grin. Fry almost felt like blushing.

‘Not the Blues, surely?’ said Jim, missing the significance of his wife’s comment.

Of course, Jim Bowskill was another Villa fan. She wondered if that was part of the reason for the Bowskills moving to Perry Bar, so close to Villa Park? There were pubs round here where a Blue Nose would be torn apart at first sight.

But she wasn’t a Birmingham City fan. She wasn’t actually from Birmingham. She wondered how long it would be before some Brummie looked at her sideways and uttered the immortal phrase: ‘A yam-yam, ain’t you?’

There was no point in trying to deny it. People in these parts were acutely sensitive to the differences in accent that marked you out as Black Country. In a way, she was as much of a foreigner in Brum as she was back in Derbyshire. ‘Not from round here’ might as well be permanently tattoo’d on her forehead.

The Black Country was the name given to the urban sprawl west of the city of Birmingham. It encompassed old industrial towns like Wolverhampton, West Bromwich, Dudley, Sandwell and Walsall. And many smaller communities, too – like Warley, where Fry had lived with her foster parents, and which was nothing but a string of housing estates tucked between Birmingham and the M5 motorway.

In some ways, those small Black Country communities were far worse than the estates of inner city Birmingham. Some of them were completely cut off, isolated by the collapse of the manufacturing industries from the affluence evident in the new apartment blocks, the new Bull Ring shopping centre, stacked to the roof with consumer goods and designer labels. It was in places like West Bromwich, rather than Birmingham itself, that the BNP were getting a foothold. It was there they found the disaffected white working classes, desperate to find a voice.

Jim sighed. ‘Moved allegiance altogether, I suppose. It’s Derby County, then. Tragic’

‘Dad, I don’t even like football.’

There weren’t many people like Jim and Alice, who would be willing to take on other people’s children, especially when many of those children were deeply troubled and disruptive. It took a lot of dedication and commitment. A lot of love.

She wondered about some of the other foster children who’d passed through the Bowskills’ lives. There must have been many of them. She supposed that most of them kept in touch better than she ever had. It had been too easy for her to forget the debt she owed them. She’d been too quick to put everything behind her when she moved from the West Midlands, cast the good aside with the bad when she started a new life in Derbyshire.

Fry remembered the Bowskills reluctantly producing her birth certificate when she needed to register at college. They themselves had obtained it from her social worker, by special request. Only her mother’s name had been on the certificate, the space to record the father left blank. It seemed her parents had never married, so the surname she carried was her mother’s, not that of an adoptee.

Then she thought about the one child the Bowskills had adopted. Perhaps tired of saying goodbye to those they’d cared for over the years, they had fought to keep one particular boy, a few years younger than Fry. He was called Vincent, a quiet boy born to an Irish mother and a Jamaican father. He had been with Jim and Alice after Fry had left to set up home on her own and pursue her career in the police. The Bowskills’ last commitment, the one final object of their love.

The children’s charity Barnardos had said recently that there was too much focus on trying to ‘fix’ families, when it would often be in the best interests of the children to put them up for adoption straight away when there was a problem. And by ‘straight away’ they meant at birth. Parents who’d failed to care properly for older children would not be allowed to bring up younger ones. It seemed to Fry that there was a definite logic in the argument.

And yet, Vincent Bowskill had made the wrong friends, been attracted to a way of life the Bowskills deplored. Something had still gone wrong, despite their best efforts. Despite what the experts said, could there be some genetic influence that would always flow in the blood? Blood, they said, was thicker than water.

Or maybe it was because there was no easy way for a boy like Vince to fit into a society that liked to put everyone in a category.

Fry knew that mixed-race people were an elephant in the room – the fastest-growing ethnic minority in Britain, more numerous than black Caribbean or black African. Yet it was only in the 2001 census that they were given an ethnic category of their own. They were obvious to anybody living in a large British city, yet invisible at a political level. In multiculturalism Britain, the fact that more and more people were having children across racial divides was an inconvenient truth. It didn’t fit with the concept of neat communities of black, white or Asian.

And that could be a problem for boys like Vincent Bowskill. These days, black and white kids tended not to call each other racial names. But the mixed-race kids got it from both sides. Many of them were fated to spend their entire lives searching for an identity.

‘So how is Vince?’ she said, as Jim sat down with her.

‘Oh, you know – fine.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, to be honest, he’s always been a bit of a worry to us. But he does his best. He’s a good lad, at heart.’

‘He isn’t involved with a gang, is he?’

‘No, no. Well, we don’t think so.’

Fry realized Jim Bowskill might find it difficult to tell what sort of circles his adopted son moved in. When Vincent came here to visit, he wouldn’t be displaying his gang tattoos and waving a gun around. He’d be well behaved, polite.

And maybe…just maybe, he’d actually turned his life around and moved on. It was possible to do that.

‘Should I look him up while I’m here?’

‘Vince?’ Jim looked doubtful. ‘Oh, you don’t have to, Diane. But –’

‘I’ll see if I have time.’

‘All right.’

She knew she had to broach the one subject they hadn’t touched on, the one the Bowskills were shying away from.

‘You know why I’m here in Birmingham, don’t you?’ she said.

‘Yes, you told us. The case.’

‘You’ll let us know how it goes, won’t you?’ said Alice.

‘Don’t stay out of touch, Diane.’

She sounded even frailer than she looked. Fry hoped Alice wasn’t worrying herself too much about something she couldn’t do anything about.

Fry looked out of the bay window into the street. All the people passing were Bengalis. She hadn’t seen a white face all the time she’d been here.

‘Dad,’ she said, ‘what’s Surti Ravaiya?’

‘Oh, it’s a type of Indian eggplant. You serve it stuffed.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Why? Are you developing an interest in cooking?’

‘No.’

Jim Bowskill looked at her oddly. ‘You know, you haven’t changed, Diane.’

She turned back to the room. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I remember you when you were a teenager. You were always a very distant girl – so self-contained. It was hard for anyone to get you to open up. No matter how hard we tried, Alice and me, we never really understood what you were thinking, or feeling. You’re the same now. You’re still that teenage girl.’

‘I’m sorry, Dad. I don’t know what to say.’

‘Do you remember that friend you had at school? Janet Dyson. Your best friend, she was.’

Fry shook her head. ‘Janet…?’

‘Dyson. Pretty girl, with long dark hair. Her father ran the taxi firm.’

‘I don’t remember her.’

‘You must do,’ said Jim. ‘She was your best friend. You used to walk out of school holding hands sometimes. It was very sweet.’

‘How old was I?’

‘Eight or nine.’

‘It’s too long ago, Dad.’

‘I can’t believe you’ve forgotten. We remember everything about you.’

‘Well, you must have kept a photograph album. She’ll be in there, this girl. I bet you’ve been getting it out to remind yourselves before I arrived.’

‘No, no.’ He tapped his temple. ‘It’s all up here. All we have are our memories. They’re what make us the people we are.’

Fry was puzzled. ‘Why are you bringing this girl up now?’

‘Janet Dyson? Well, we wondered why you fell out with her. You suddenly stopped being best friends with her, and we never found out why. You wouldn’t tell us. We thought, well…now that so much time has passed, we thought you might tell us what happened.’

‘Dad, I have no idea.’

He sighed. ‘Still the same Diane.’

‘Dad, honestly – I have no idea. I can’t remember what happened. It can’t have been anything very important, can it?’

‘If you say so, love.’

After a while, Fry looked at her watch and decided it was time to prise herself away. Refusing all offers of more tea, she got up to leave, then hesitated in the doorway.

‘So…is there a photograph album?’

‘Well, I think so,’ said Jim. ‘Do you want to see it?’

She thought for a moment, mentally recoiled as she imagined the album’s contents. Happy, laughing snaps of herself and Angie, skinny teenagers in jeans and puffa jackets. Sunburned on holidays in Weston-super-Mare, dressed up in their best frocks for some cousin’s wedding.

‘Another time, Dad,’ she said.

On the corner of Trinity Road stood a masjid, a community mosque. This was the one that had originally been named the Saddam Hussein Mosque, after the Iraqi leader donated two million pounds to build it. During the first Gulf War, the masjid had been fire-bombed, and excrement wrapped in pages of the Koran had been pushed through the letter box during prayers. So elders had decided to change the name, and now it was simply Jame Masjid, the main mosque.

Just behind it, Fry could see the little parade of shops where Burger Bar Boys in a Ford Mondeo had sprayed bullets from two MAC-10 machine pistols, killing Letisha Shakespeare and Charlene Ellis as they left a New Year party, and putting the city firmly in the headlines.

She supposed it was natural for her to worry about Jim and Alice Bowskill living in this area. Everyone worried about their parents. For a moment, she wondered if she ought to check whether they were registered with the Birchfield Dental Practice or the Churchill Medical Centre, if they used the post office here, or the one in Perry Barr. But it didn’t really matter.

Fry turned on to Trinity Road and headed towards Aston. In the few hundred yards drive between the Jame Masjid and Villa Park, she passed the Ozzy Osbourne birthplace. The mosque, football, and heavy metal. Well, that came as close to summing up Birmingham as anything she could think of.

7

On his way back from the Nields, Cooper called at the Ashbourne section station on Compton. He spotted the blue lamp over its door right next to the Wheel Inn.

Seeing the Wheel reminded Cooper that he’d once had a memorable duty in Ashbourne, many moons ago, when he was drafted in to help police the world’s oldest, largest, longest and maddest football game. Several thousand people turned up every year for Ashbourne’s Royal Shrovetide Football – and that was just the players.

From an objective point of view, the event was basically a moving brawl, which seethed backwards and forwards through the streets of the town, across fields, and even along the bed of the river. The game lasted for two days, with goals three miles apart on opposite sides of the town. If you visited Ashbourne on those days, you had to be careful where you parked your car. Of course, the pubs remained open all day, all the shops and banks boarded up their windows, and some closed completely, making the town look as though major civil unrest was taking place. Which, from a policing point of view, it was. There had been intermittent attempts to ban the game because of its violent nature. But it had been going on for a thousand years now. So that was that.