out there. You might catch one, but then ten seemed to rush in to fill the vacuum and no one seemed able to fix that.
It was amazing how many deviants you could pack into one geographical area. Jackson had never forgotten being at a talk, a lifetime ago, given by a child protection officer. ‘Look around at any seaside beach in summer,’ she had said, ‘and there’ll be a hundred paedophiles enjoying themselves in their natural hunting-ground.’
It was a great view though, a panorama of the South Bay laid out before them. ‘Great view,’ Jackson said to Nathan, although he knew you had to be at least thirty before you could appreciate a good vista. And anyway Nathan was busy consulting the oracle of his iPhone.
Jackson spotted a parking space just as a Bassani’s ice-cream van began to make admirably stately progress along the Esplanade towards them. It was pink and the tune it was playing was ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’. The chimes sounded as though they were running down, making the music – if you could call it that – mournful rather than merry. Jackson had a vague memory of singing it to his daughter when she was little. He had never previously thought of it as a sad tune. If you go down to the woods today, you’d better go in disguise. Or threatening, even. He found it unnerving now, somehow.
There’d been something about those pink ice-cream vans, hadn’t there? It had been one of the ways they’d enticed the kids. Could you hypnotize children with ice-cream-van chimes? Jackson wondered. Beguile them like the Pied Piper and lead them away to some horrible fate? (Had he read that in a Stephen King novel?) Who ran Bassani’s now? Was it still in the family or was it just a name now?
How had Bassani and Carmody met each other? A council meeting, a black-tie charity event? They must have been delighted to discover they shared an appetite for the same fodder. It was a story that was depressingly familiar, a tale of girls – and boys – beguiled out of care homes and foster families or their own dysfunctional households. As council officials and respected charity supporters, Bassani and Carmody were in the perfect position to be welcomed into those places, they were invited in, for God’s sake, like vampires. They came bearing gifts – offering Christmas parties, outings to the countryside and the seaside, camping and caravan holidays – Carmody had owned caravan sites all along the East Coast. The kids were given free entrance to amusement arcades and funfairs. Ice-cream, sweets, cigarettes. Treats. Deprived kids liked treats.
There’d always been rumours of a third man. Not Savile, he’d had his own show, separate from Bassani and Carmody. The pair of them had been on the go for decades without being caught. There used to be a TV programme, The Good Old Days, a tribute to the defunct music hall. The old programmes were still – for some reason, God knows why – being rebroadcast on BBC4. (‘Post-irony,’ Julia said, a term that was mysterious to Jackson.) Bassani and Carmody had had their own show. The Bad Old Days.
Bassani and Carmody had run this coast once. It was funny how so many men were defined by their downfall. Caesar, Fred Goodwin, Trotsky, Harvey Weinstein, Hitler, Jimmy Savile. Women hardly ever. They didn’t fall down. They stood up.
‘Can I have an ice-cream?’ Nathan asked, the Pavlovian response to the chimes kicking in straight away.
‘Another ice-cream? What do you think?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’ve just had one, obviously.’
‘So?’
‘So,’ Jackson said, ‘you’re not getting another one.’ It was never enough. It was the dominant trait in Nathan’s friends too. It didn’t matter how much they were given, how much stuff they acquired, they were never satisfied. They had been bred to consume and one day there would be nothing left. Capitalism would have eaten itself, thereby fulfilling its raison d’être in an act of self-destruction, aided by the dopamine feedback loop – the snake swallowing its own tail.
Still, his son had his virtues, Jackson reminded himself. He was good with Dido, for example. Sympathetic to her ailments, always ready to brush her or feed her. He had known her since she was a puppy. Nathan had been a puppy himself, sweet and playful, but now Dido had left him far behind. It wouldn’t be long before her path ran out, and Jackson dreaded how Nathan would react to that. Julia would be worse, of course.