His shoulders slumped. ‘Just walkin’ around. We all met up at the park, even Spence turned up. If it was that bad, he’d have gone ’ome, wouldn’t he?’
‘Did you see this man on the corner of George Street or while you were at the park?’
The boy stared at the photo with his mouth open. ‘Yeah, and I remembered seeing him. Tilly messaged me the photo the papers had printed and said he was the man they found in the coffin and it clicked.’
‘What clicked, Logan?’ Gina felt her feet urging to tap under the table as the tension of what he might say got real.
‘Am I in trouble for not callin’ in when I saw his picture on Facebook? I didn’t call because we ran away from you and I didn’t want to get into trouble.’
‘We just want to know what you saw. This man was murdered and whoever did this is dangerous. We need your help, that’s all.’
He leaned back and smirked. ‘You’re not trying to trick me or nothin’?’
‘No, this isn’t a trick. What clicked?’
‘Flamin’ hell. I’m not normally such a dick but the others were calling him names when he ran past so I joined in. It’s not cool to stand out but I don’t expect you to understand. We’ve seen him a few times. We call him baldy and tramp, normally. We badgered him until he gave us a few cigarettes. I just think he wanted us to do one.’ Gina felt the tension forming in her neck. Logan was a regular bully, but at the moment she needed him to keep talking. ‘I’ve been an idiot.’
‘It’s not too late to make amends for the things you’ve done and grow up a little.’
His cheeks were rosier now and he had more of a boyish look about him. He looked more like fifteen, not his eighteen years. ‘I can’t make amends with him, he’s dead.’
‘That one, no, but anyone else you’ve hurt, there’s no time like the present to start being nicer.’
He nodded. Maybe some people could change. She genuinely hoped that Logan could. He was still so young and she didn’t want him to become a regular face at the station. She didn’t want him to turn into a Terry. She could see that there was still hope.
‘So you called him names. Can you tell me anything else? Did you see anyone following him?’
He shook his head.
‘Just going slightly off on a tangent, do you and your friends hang around at the graveyard?’ There was still a chance that the person outside the vicarage was nothing more than a childish prank, designed to scare the vicar.
‘No, I don’t personally. Me an’ my mates mostly hang around on the football field in the park. I remember playing dare with my friends at the graveyard, but that was when we were kids.’
Gina felt a smile forming behind her stern exterior. ‘When you were kids.’
‘You know, about fourteen, fifteen. We told scary stories about people being buried alive and their ghosts rising at Halloween.’ He paused for a moment. ‘That sounds bad with what happened. They were just stories – I think. Anyway, after we’d shit ourselves out, we’d normally run away after one of us pretended to see a ghost. That sort of stuff.’
‘Going back to Monday, can you tell us anything else?’
‘There is somethin’.’
‘Okay.’ Jacob glanced at Gina.
‘Can I have some Coke or a Fanta in a minute?’
Gina nodded.
‘He stays at this horrid place just off Beckett Street we call the tramp house, that’s where some of the homeless gather and bed down. It’s just a house that is fallin’ apart and ’asn’t been touched for a couple of years. We go there for laughs and we saw him arguing with a woman.’
‘Did you see her?’
‘No, we scarpered before she came out.’
‘What were they arguing about?’
‘She said he had ruined everything and to shut up. That was all I heard. Can I have that Coke now?’
‘PC Smith will be here in a moment, I’ll send it in with him. Thank you.’
