by Vince Vogel
“Looks like he’s awake,” Otis said.
“Well, when we stop,” Dorring said, “I’ll have to put him to sleep again.”
20
Detective Sergeant Bob Barker and his old partner John Hudson pulled into the camp. It was empty of people because they were all in the fields, working hard. Barker had contacted the Jordon’s Orchard that Otis Rawly worked at and spoken to a man named Lloyd. He told the detective that Otis had taken a week off work. He’d be at home.
As they bumbled past the caravans, the curtains in several parted and the faces of children peered out before dashing quickly away.
“Shouldn’t them kids be at school?” Barker said.
“Huh!” John scoffed as he sat smoking a cigarette with the window wound down. “Most of these kids don’t speak English. They’re dragged about by their parents from one place to the next. In the end, there’s not much point them going to a different school in a different country every other month.”
“It’s no life,” Barker mused aloud as he pulled up in front of Otis’ caravan.
They got out, Barker helping his old partner due to him struggling to raise himself from the car seat.
“The sun bother you?” Barker asked as they walked to the caravan.
“Come on, Bob,” John said irritably.
The two men stopped and faced each other.
“What?” Barker said.
“I get enough off Cath. Worrying all the time. I don’t want it off you as well.”
“Sorry, mate. I was only askin’.”
“Then don’t ask. Just leave me be. Deal?”
He stuck out a bony hand.
“All right,” Barker said, taking the hand. “Deal.”
They continued to the van. Whilst Barker knocked heavily at the door, John peered through the window. The nets were drawn, but he could still see that the van was empty inside.
“No one in,” he said, turning to Barker. “Try the door.”
Barker tried it and it opened. He stepped inside and was instantly greeted by the wild faces of the stuffed animals; all of them fiercely seeing him off.
“Check the cupboards,” John said as he came to the open door.
“What for?”
“See if he’s taken his things. He was livin’ with a bloke when I last went to see him. See if his stuff is here too.”
Barker checked all the drawers and cupboards. It was clear that things had been taken. There were spaces between the folded clothes. Clear indication that items had been removed.
“What are you doing?”
It was a woman’s voice. Barker glanced at the doorway and John turned around. A round woman with long, wavy gray hair was standing ten yards away.
Barker removed himself from the caravan and closed the door, so that the two men were standing opposite the old woman.
“I asked what you were doing?” she said, her hands on her hips and a stern look on her face.
“Hi there, Maria,” John said, stepping towards her.
“Who is he, John?” she asked.
“He’s a friend. We’re looking for Otis. You know where he is?”
“I don’t know.”
“When did you last see him?” Barker asked.
“I don’t know,” she repeated in the same disinterested voice.
“We need to speak to Otis,” John said. “It’s very urgent.”
“He don’t want to speak,” she said.
“You know when he’s back?”
“No.”
“What about Dorring?” John asked.
“Who?”
“Don’t play silly buggers, Maria,” John said. “If Otis has gone to London, he could be in serious trouble. He could get hurt.”
“Otis is a big boy. He can handle himself.”
“What about if he hurts someone, huh?” John said. “What if he hurts them and ends up in prison?”
“Then that is his choice,” she retorted, “and his choice alone.”
With that, the old woman turned on her heels and walked back to her own caravan, frowning at the children who peeked through the curtains, so that they quickly darted back from the pane.
“What did you mean when you said he was going to London?” Barker asked his old partner while they watched her go.
“I came to see him recently,” John replied.
“When?”
“The day you called me about finding her prints.”
“Why?”
John turned to his old partner. “He deserved to know,” the sick man said.
“We were gonna tell him now. There was no point telling him earlier.”
“He deserved to know,” John repeated.
“Now he’s gone off to London.”
“He may not of. We should see the wife first.”
21
They’d dumped Otis’ car the moment they’d gotten to London. Hidden it in woods on the outskirts of the sprawling city. Hidden it underneath bracknell. Dorring had then used fake documentation to rent them a new car. An old silver Vauxhall Vectra.
They sat in it now. Had been sitting in it most of the day since leaving the Belgravia. Parked on a street of five story apartment blocks. It was the address of Darren Crosby. He lived on the third floor. A balcony faced the street they sat on. Earlier, they’d seen a man come to it and smoke a cigarette. Tall, skinny with a shaved head. Dorring had called the number. The scrawny man on the balcony answered a phone before Dorring canceled the call. It was Darren Crosby.
“I still don’t see why we don’t go up there and get him,” Otis said.
“I told you. I want to see where he goes. If we go up there, he might simply clam up, give us nothing. But if we leave off, he might lead us to Jess.”
“What if she’s up there with him?”
“She isn’t with him, Otis. This isn’t how these things work.”
“You seem to know a fair bit about it.”
“I know how evil men work.”
The front door to the apartment block opened. The tall, stringy figure of Crosby walked out and got into an olive green BMW. It was early evening by now and the sun was low over the city, its golden rays shining in all the windows and making them look as though they were plated in gold. The BMW moved off and Dorring started the engine of the Vectra.
“Let’s follow the rabbit down the hole,” he said as he put the car into gear and rolled it out of the parking spot onto the road.
They traveled across busy London streets, through bumbling rush hour traffic. Everyone in the city appeared to be on the move and they moved en masse like a giant herd. It was six o’clock in the evening. They were leaving their jobs. Setting off for home. All at once.
They slowly meandered through long streets of dilapidated buildings. Of closed down shops and lines of fried chicken diners and kebab shops. Rows of them, one after the other. Some right next to each other, so that you wondered how both businesses could pull in enough customers. How a place could drum up enough customers of fried foods.
Then there were the homeless who sat on top of sleeping bags in the doorways of closed down shops. Whole empty rooms through the frosted glass behind them.
“How do people end up like that?” Otis asked.
Dorring didn’t answer. He gathered the old man was musing loudly.
“I don’t get it,” Otis went on. “People talk about this city as if it’s the answer to everything. Like the streets are paved with gold. But all I see is streets paved with the bodies of the poor saps what ended up on them. This place look like a giant concrete machine to me. A giant machine what chews people up and spits ’em onto the pavement.”
“The city is an unforgiving place,” Dorring remarked.
“It’s hell on Earth. All them rich folks you see in other parts. Walking around like they own the world. They should be ashamed they don’t help these people.”
“We don’t help each other anymore, Otis. And we no longer feel shame. We feed on each other instea
d.”
The old man didn’t say anything to this. Instead, he sat gazing out the window at the rotten streets outside.
22
They arrived at the cottage and pulled up on the dirt track.
“Before we get out,” John said, “I need to warn you. She’s changed a lot since ten years ago.”
“What do you mean?” Barker asked.
“You’ll see.”
May let them into the house, smiling at John and knitting her brows at Barker.
“It’s okay, May,” John said. “He’s all right.”
This appeared to appease the woman. She led them into the dark innards of the cottage and to Molly’s room. When they entered the musty bedroom, Molly was sitting up in bed. She smiled when she saw John come in, but then went red and looked away when she saw Barker.
“You remember my partner Bob, don’t you, Molly?” John asked as he took a seat beside the bed.
She turned her eyes back to the detective and then narrowed them.
“Yeah,” she said after a while.
“Hi, Molly,” Barker said as he came to a stop at the foot of the bed.
He was stunned by her general appearance and only recognized the woman by her voice and her long, raven colored hair. Everything else was completely different. Ten years ago, she’d had a normal physique. Now it was like a different person. She’d expanded to something else. Mutated to something else. All through heartache. It had brought her to this bed and from here she had stayed, slowly eating herself to death.
“How’re you been?” she asked Barker.
“I’ve been good, Molly. Gone a bit grayer on top and a bit more frayed around the edges.”
“Age’ll do that,” she said. “Least you ain’t ended up like me.”
Barker had nothing to say to this. Instead, he grinned nervously.
“Where’s Otis, Molly?” John asked.
She turned to him sharply.
“Has he gone to London?” John asked her softly.
A terribly forlorn look slowly bent the features of her face and she nodded at him.
“What about the guy called Dorring?” he asked next.
Another nod.
“When?”
“Last night,” she said softly. “’Bout midnight.”
“Do you know what vehicle they’re driving, if any?”
“He took his car. The one he ain’t driv’ since… Since Jess went missin’.”
“Do you know where he’s gone exactly?”
“I don’t know.”
While they spoke, Barker looked about the room. He noticed something odd. There was a calendar on the wall. It was odd because it was a 2009 calendar stuck on June. It was currently August 2019. It was then that he realized something.
Jess Rawly had gone missing on June 14th 2009. Then he spotted a clock on the wall. It was wrong. An hour out. On the bedside cabinet was an alarm clock. The time was the same. An hour out. He already knew why.
Both clocks were stuck at eleven minutes past six. Back then, he’d personally gone over the statements they’d made. 6:11 p.m. The time Jess Rawly had been taken away in the white van. Her father, Otis Rawly, had checked it on his wristwatch when he’d rushed to a phone box and called the police.
Time had stopped for this woman. Time. Motion. Movement. It was like the whole world had stopped turning. And in the fragments of her existence, she had remained static within this bed, stagnating ever since her little girl had gone missing.
“Where’s Jess?” Molly suddenly put to them.
“We don’t know yet,” Barker said. “We’d like you to go on television.”
Molly began shaking her head.
“No,” she muttered. “I can’t.”
“But Jess is out there somewhere,” Barker insisted. “She’ll recognize you. Come back.”
“She won’t recognize me.”
There were tears in her eyes, trembling down the lengths of her eyelashes, dripping off the ends and splashing her cheeks.
Barker turned to John. “You try and convince her,” he said, taking his phone from his pocket. “I need to put a call in. See if we can’t stop Otis before he does something stupid.”
“Try and find out who this Dorring fella is,” John said.
“Will do.”
And with that, Barker left the room and shut the door behind him. Taking up a position close to the cottage’s entrance, he got his phone out and dialed a number. In the background, he could hear Molly crying desperately. While waiting for someone to answer, he felt a terrible forlornness at the sound of the mother. In truth, he had been desperate to get out of that room. It made him feel terribly sad. The broken mother and his dying partner. They were a terribly depressing sight for Bob Barker. Molly had been beautiful when he’d first seen her ten years ago. Now she was something else. Alive, but ultimately dead. She had ruined herself through grief. As if she was slowly committing suicide. Many people did that. Didn’t do it in some sudden piece of violence that ended it quickly, but did it slowly by not committing to life. Instead, they committed themselves to anti-life. To drinking. To drugs. To an unhealthy existence. To eating badly. To smoking too much.
Maybe that was what John had done, Barker considered. He’d always been a morose person. Had never been happy.
“Sarge,” Detective Constable Harriet Green answered, taking his mind away from sad thoughts, “it’s good you called. I was about to phone you about that USB you got off Jaqueline Carter.”
“We’ll get to that,” he said. “First, I need you to do a few things for me. Okay?”
“Sure. Fire away.”
“I need an arrest warrant put out for one Otis Rawly.”
“Jess Rawly’s father?”
“The same. He’s in London. He may be about to do something stupid. Hell, he might already have. I need him picked up. There’s another man with him. All I got so far concerning a name is Dorring. I’ll try to get you more, as well as a description.”
“Did the mother tell you this?” Harriet Green asked.
“Yeah, she did. What about the USB Carter’s wife gave me?”
“It was full of videos. I just got through watching some of them.”
“You gonna tell me what types of videos?”
“Videos of Carter with young girls.”
“Anyone we recognize?”
“We’re going over missing persons now.”
“Any other men in them?”
“No. Just Carter. Looks like he enjoyed videotaping himself with them. Do you want me to email them to you?”
“No,” he said sharply. “I’ll leave that to you. I’m gonna head back to London now. See you soon.”
“Okay, Sarge. See you soon.”
23
They spent a good two hours following Darren Crosby about. During that time, he’d visited several houses and spent short amounts of time in each. As Dorring and Otis sat parked up the road watching, the old man would be eager to grab the fixer off the street and get information out of him the same way they’d gotten it out of Anderson.
“What if the next place he goes is where Jess is?” Dorring kept repeating, and this would shut him up.
As the sun got low and the streets basked in the vanilla glow of mid-summer, Crosby began driving east across the city, back in the direction of his home.
“He’s goin’ back,” Otis commented.
“Then we’ll get him at his place.”
But as it turned out, that wasn’t where Crosby was going. Instead, he entered an area of dilapidated warehouses, most of them boarded up, and for some time too by the look of the weeds that grew around the brick buildings. Probably ever since the 2008 crash.
“Where’s he takin’ us now?” Otis complained.
“I think he’s taking us to Jess, Otis.”
This concentrated the old man. He sat forward. Bess had been asleep on his lap, but the dog appeared to sense something afoot and awoke with a start. Like the old man, she positio
ned herself forward, so that she was leaning her paws on the dashboard, staring out the windscreen.
Crosby’s BMW led them down an avenue of warehouses. At the end was a large, one-story building with a flat roof. Faded lettering on a large sign on top of the roof proclaimed that it had once been Mathews and Son Paper Merchants. A tall fence around it was topped with razor wire and plastered all over its steel bars were signs saying things like Beware! Dogs! This private property is patrolled by men. Keep out!
Dorring parked at the beginning of the road and watched Crosby stop at the gate. The fixer honked his horn and a man came sauntering out of the building and opened it for him. The BMW then drove inside and the gate was shut behind it.
“You ready?” Dorring asked Otis.
“As ever,” the old man snarled, his bulging eyes concentrated on the gate.
24
They were passing over Tower Bridge when John awoke with a start. He was sitting in the passenger seat and for a moment, he gazed forward at the stone towers that loomed over them like giants standing on either side of the bridge with their arms interlocked over the top, like children participating in playground games where they hold their hands in an archway as others go underneath.
“You good?” Barker asked.
“Yeah. The meds make me tired.”
“Go back to sleep if you want. We’ve still got another half an hour.”
“Nah. I’m up now.”
With effort, John removed his head from the passenger side window, where it was leaning, and sat up in the seat.
“You know,” he said, “I ain’t been back here since I left.”
“I know,” Barker said. “You’ve not been over mine in five years.”
“Made me feel better, leaving. For a while anyway.”
They were silent as they passed underneath the brick archway of the bridge and continued into the city.
“I was dreamin’ about before,” John said.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. You know, I’ve always felt guilty about back then.”