‘You’re welcome,’ Jane said. ‘And, Inspector, I hope you find Lucy. She’s a very nice girl.’
‘We’ll do what we can, Miss Hart.’
I left the phone box and within five minutes I was standing outside the branch of Lloyd’s Bank which Lucy had drawn all her money out of. The last withdrawal had been yesterday, at ten minutes to midnight. The bank was on the High Street, at the junction, almost exactly where I would have been standing if I hadn’t had to abandon the idea of coming to Camden because Lucy’s sister Emma was following me. It was the second time I had come close to her, the second time I’d missed.
I took my wallet out of my pocket. While I was there I used the machine myself. I had no idea that two days later the real Ken Clay, warrant number WXC358769, would be getting in touch with my branch in order to find out just exactly where I’d been that day.
* * *
Sharon was at her parents’ for the weekend so I spent the evening sitting on a stool in the Old Ludensian, which is a bar and a restaurant at the bottom of St John Street, close to Smithfield. My friend Nicky owns the bar, but I’d probably go there if he didn’t, even though it is a little too close to the City for my liking. The food’s good, and the place manages to have a modern feel to it in spite of the absence of the usual chrome chairs and cement walls. It was another busy night in there, and I knew a few faces to say hello to.
I sat at the bar, ate a bowl of pasta and chatted intermittently with Carla, one of the waitresses, with whom I once had a brief thing, but with whom I have now reverted to minor scale flirting. I didn’t stay late, only about ten minutes after Nicky was collected by a very elegant black woman who was about three inches taller than him. We said we’d see each other properly soon. I chatted away to a few of the other regulars but I wasn’t really in the mood. I couldn’t help wishing Sharon was there with me. It was still only about tennish when I walked outside to my car.
I drove up St John Street, but I didn’t turn down Rosebery Avenue towards my flat. Instead I went down to King’s Cross, getting through the lights quite quickly, and then heading up towards Euston, where I took a left towards the Victorian training hospital that is attached to UCL. I showed my pass to the security guard, and steered the Mazda into the staff car park, stopping just outside the entrance I wanted. I left the car there and walked into the shadowy doorway of the blackened, red-brick annex, where I was waved into the building by an old man who had seen me several times before.
My brother Luke is normally housed in a quiet, leafy hospital about twenty miles north of the M25. For the last three months, however, he has been living here, at the training hospital, and will be staying for another three. The hospital asked my permission to have Luke there for training purposes, and so that they could perform some tests and a couple of simple, noninvasive experimental procedures on him. It didn’t take me long to agree. While I was sad that the nurses treating him would be different, and I valued their contribution highly, it would mean that I could visit him more often. When the hospital said that I could basically come and go whenever I pleased, I told them to go ahead and move him.
I didn’t stay long with Luke. I sat on a chair by his bed in the quiet ward and held onto his hand for a while, slowly stretching his fingers and wrists out of the pronounced contraction that was now their natural state. The ward he was in was much sparser than his usual home, with much more of a clinical feel. I was glad it was only temporary. I chatted away and of course he made no response of any kind. I told him about the invitation I had received. I told him I was going to go and take all the praise for him. I didn’t tell him about the argument Sharon and I had had. Instead, for some reason, I found myself telling him about the documentary I had seen, about polar bears on the TV. The big furry mama and her little rat, both buried beneath the snow, totally cut off from the world and totally caught up in each other until the snow began to melt. I told him how the mother taught the young cub how to rip baby seals to bits, and how cute the furry little thing looked when it did so.
Pretty soon I ran out of things to say. I kissed Luke’s cold grey forehead and left him there in the flat dull night-lighting of the still ward. The old man didn’t even look up from his paperback as I walked out.
* * *
At nine thirty next morning, Donna-Natalie Appleby was sitting exactly where she had been before, outside the Marks and Spencer on Camden High Street. This time I didn’t approach her though, and I even sat in a different cafe so that she wouldn’t see me if she stopped by for a cup of tea. I chose a classier affair a few doors down that I figured was out of her range.
At about eleven Donna stood up and gathered her things together. She scooped up the pile of change she had been given and dropped the cardboard cartoon onto a pile of refuse that was now twenty feet long and three bags high. The bags were beginning to merge into one another. I’d heard on the news that morning that the government was considering getting the army in, or else using young unemployed people on back-to-work schemes to clear it up. One thing they were apparently not considering was releasing more funds to the council to give the bin men a pay rise.
As it was a Saturday the tide had changed in Camden. Instead of sick-looking people moving in a straight line towards the tube, the pavements were awash with aimless souls spilling into the road, hardly caring about the crush of cars trying to move through Camden up to Hampstead and Belsize Park. I walked out onto the street, the crowds and the traffic stabbing my ears with their noise. I followed Natalie at a distance, stopping when she stopped, keeping about twenty feet, and a hundred people, behind her. There was no way she was going to see me, and even if she did, she wouldn’t have been able to tell I was following her. There were too many people. I’d just say hi, and smile; another Camden resident strolling around the market.
I was keeping an eye on Donna in the hope that she was a friend of Lucy’s. I had seen them together. If she was I might see her, if not, well, I would have been looking round Camden anyway. I followed her past more trash mounds, up to the Lock, where she bought some freshly squeezed orange juice from a stall, and then a foil tray of what looked like noodles from another. Every ten paces brought a different smell: Thai spice, sweat, frying onions, pizza, leather, petrol, smoke, incense, rubbish, perfume. I squeezed myself past Germans and Italians and French people and Scandinavians and ultra hip Japanese and Gap-clad Americans, tuning in and out of accents and languages like a Belgian radio ham. I couldn’t decide whether Camden Lock on a Saturday, with its clothes stalls and new age stands, its food stalls, junk stalls, art deco shops and Goth palaces, its general buzz, was a pretty cool place or actually hell on earth. I told myself it was cool, even though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually been there by choice. It was without doubt tatty and claustrophobic, but it was the kind of place I would have visited if I was in a foreign city. I could see people all around me appreciating it for its peculiar brand of Englishness, one that I definitely preferred to most of the other kinds.
Donna had doubled back on herself, and then stopped on the bridge to chat with a girl doing hair braids, probably the girl who did the ones she wore herself. I took the chance to get my own carton of juice, and I stood at the far end of the bridge sipping it. When Donna moved off I followed her and watched as she absent-mindedly reached out for a flier someone was passing out. I couldn’t see the someone, only a hand. I saw Donna smile, fold the flier and stick it in the back pocket of her jeans as she was about to move off. She stopped though, when the hand reached out and held on to her arm. Donna stood and chatted for a while. Then she did leave, walking with a little more purpose than her previous ambling, probably going back to her pitch.
I followed Donna but when I got level with the hand I had seen passing her the orange flier I stopped. I forgot all about her.
The hand reached out to me.
‘What’s this then?’ I asked.
‘York’s,’ the boy said. ‘Tonight. Only a tenner with this.’
<
br /> He lifted the flier up towards me. I didn’t take it yet.
‘Who’s playing?’
‘It says on there, mate. Pete Tong. Christian Vogel. Boy George.’
‘What about you, do you play?’
‘No mate.’ He shook the flier at me.
‘Just work there?’
‘Sort of. Do you want one of these?’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Only a tenner you say?’
‘Yeah, with that.’
‘I suppose you get in free. That why you do the fliering?’
‘Yeah, we don’t have to pay. Here you are, love.’
He pushed his arm past me, towards a girl who ignored him. He forgot about her instantly and pushed the flier on someone else. He avoided looking at me as he slid another from the pile in his left hand, and held it out to the side of me. I could tell that I was annoying the boy, standing close and right in front of him, but I wasn’t ready to leave just yet. I studied his face as his eyes darted out and round me. He didn’t have as many marks as I’d have thought he would. Just a plum for a left eye and a badly swollen lower lip. I also thought I saw a shadow on the side of his face, just beneath a flop of greasy hair.
’You get many girls at this place then?’ I said, making him catch my eye. He stopped what he was doing and looked at me, sizing me up. A knowing smile split his broken lips.
‘Yes, mate, I get plenty of girls at this place.’
‘I might see you there then,’ I said.
‘It’s a big place.’
‘Pretty easy to score down there, is it? Or should I sort myself out first do you reckon?’
‘Don’t ask me, mate, never touch the stuff.’
‘Of course not,’ I said.
Then I finished my juice and dropped my carton in the road. All the bins had been full days ago. I put the flier in my bag.
I walked all round Camden but didn’t find Lucy. Donna was at her pitch again. I sat in another cafe, opposite the bridge, and stayed there until about seven. I had a sandwich and a couple of coffees and the waitress didn’t bother me. I thought that Lucy might come by, possibly to relieve the boy. The flier he’d given me was the same as I’d found in the doorway of the M&S, after I’d seen Lucy there with Donna. Fliering for clubs seemed like the sort of thing Lucy would have got into. It would be a lot easier to get her picture taken here, rather than trying to find her in the dark amongst a crowd of sweaty teenagers. But she didn’t appear. When the boy left I paid my bill and went to find my bike. I wheeled it up to the tube, intending to speak to Olly again.
But where Olly had been standing there stood a lean, athletic-looking girl, with a worried expression. She was leaning back against the tiled wall, impatiently squeezing her hands together, looking round in all directions. For a second I was annoyed; had she followed me again? But no, not on my bike. It was her mother. Yesterday I’d made her mother think that Lucy might be in Camden and she’d mentioned it to Emma, who had come to look. I didn’t blame her, it’s what I would have done myself.
I nearly stopped to speak to Emma but I thought better of it. Instead, I rode past, but once I was out of sight I stopped at the nearest phone box and called Mrs Bradley. I left a message to the effect that her daughter Emma was outside Camden tube station looking for her sister, and that perhaps Mrs Bradley might want to drive past there by accident and maybe notice her. It wasn’t the kind of thing that I usually did, and Olly would no doubt have disapproved, but Emma hadn’t run away, she hadn’t actively made the decision to leave her family. She was just a rather naïve and worried young girl willing to believe anything. There are people who can smell vulnerability from a hundred yards, even somewhere as commonplace and busy as Camden High Street on a sunny Saturday evening.
Emma might have been planning to stand out there all night for all I knew. She stood out like a lily in a cesspool.
I got back on my bike. I pushed my way into the traffic and weaved up through the lights. Donna-Natalie was grinning up at shoppers and passers-by. A hot filthy breeze ran through my tee shirt as I cycled home.
Chapter Eight
I was feeling annoyed as I struggled with my bike through the street door to my flat, frustrated and annoyed at not finding Lucy. I didn’t know why. I often went months before spotting someone I was after. I suppose it was because I’d been close, even seen her, and had then missed her by chance, and would now have to stay up all night. I also felt the urgency of her family, and there was one other reason. I’d been paid in advance, something I never feel comfortable with. I don’t like feeling obligated to people, and I wanted to discharge my obligation as soon as possible. I don’t like people who say things like ‘as long as you’re doing everything you can’. I wasn’t doing everything I could. I could have skipped meals and got up at six a.m., I could have posted pictures of Lucy all over London. No one ever does everything they can.
I’d left before the mail arrived that morning, and there was one letter addressed to me sitting in the box on the floor of the small hallway. I spent a second or two pointlessly wondering what it was, and then I took it upstairs, opened it, and pulled out a largish, well-printed invitation card.
Dear Mr Rucker, You are invited by Faber and Faber to attend the launch of our Poet’s 2000 series at 7 p.m. on 15 September 1999 at The Century, 32 Lisle St NW6 The new young poets in the series are: James Walsh, John Harding, Jennifer Sales, Monica Hartson, William Bowen, Annette Charles, Jeff Jones and Luke Rucker Yours sincerely Josephine Smilie, Editorial Director, Poetry. RSVP
At the bottom of the card were eight small photographs, one of which was the shot of Luke, sitting on an upturned boat, which was also in a frame on my desk. The launch was Faber’s new concept; to sell poetry like art, grouping together a bunch of young writers in a form of private view. All of the poets looked suitably attractive, or at the least fashionably pierced and menacing. Sharon had been told that this was a very important part of the publishing process these days, and had been asked for the best photograph of Luke that she possessed.
I took the card and left it by the phone. Then I dialled Sharon’s number.
‘Hello.’
‘Oh,’ I said, surprised. ‘Sharon. I didn’t think you’d be home.’
‘Then why did you phone?’ Her laugh was the ‘I don’t understand’ kind.
‘I…was just going to leave you a message. I thought you were going to Hampshire.’
‘I came back,’ she said, ‘I’ve got a ton of work.’
‘Oh, right.’ I said. ‘How are your folks?’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘They’re fine.’
‘How’s Mick’s canoe coming on?’
‘What?’
‘The canoe he’s building? In the garage?’
‘Oh, God, I don’t know, I didn’t ask. Well?’
‘Well what?’
She laughed again. ‘What message were you going to leave, Billy?’
‘Oh.’
I looked at the card by the side of the phone. ‘Nothing much, just welcome back, how about dinner tomorrow night?’
‘Well, I’ll see if I’m finished. I should be. Thanks. I’ll call you tomorrow.’
‘OK,’ I said, ‘but not too early.’
‘Oh,’ Sharon said, ‘so Nicky’s taking you out to one of his glamorous dens of iniquity tonight, is he?’
‘I wish,’ I said.
I made another call, and then got my things together. I spent a couple of hours in the gym, ducking the howitzer shells my friend Mountain Pete was trying to land on my head, peppering him with mortar shots in his ribs. I spent an hour on various of the machines, and pretended not to notice when Sal disappeared into her office with a couple of serious-looking types in soft leather jackets, who left quickly and anonymously ten minutes later, without taking any sort of interest in the hustle and bustle of the gym. I didn’t think they were there to sign up, although both of them could have done with losing a few pounds. What they were there for was anyone’s guess; an
yone’s guess, that is, but mine. Sal’s business interests extend a lot further than the gym she runs, but my interest in her extends just as far as the bag and the ropes and not one inch further. The fact that she is widely thought to have carried on her husband’s business, shortly after his death four years ago, has nothing whatsoever to do with me.
I took a long shower and then drove back up to the Falcon on the Farringdon Road, just by the Guardian building. The workout had helped dissipate some of the shapeless frustration I’d been feeling, but because I couldn’t actually pin that frustration down to anything, it started to come back to me. The place was rammed, and the guy to my left kept blowing smoke in my face because his girlfriend had complained about him blowing it at her. I would have turned my back on him completely if it weren’t for the guy on my right, who couldn’t quite decide which of his two topics of conversation was the more enthralling, his new Suzuki Renegade, or the landmine he’d nearly trodden on in Bosnia, so he switched between the two, with occasional diversions to the loft space he was thinking about in Shoreditch. His clipped nasal voice barked out at several decibels above the necessary, and I could tell that it wasn’t just me who was wondering hopefully if there were any landmines lying around the streets of East 1. I was reminded of something a journalist friend of Nicky’s had once told me: foreign correspondents are usually the wankers the editor couldn’t stand having around the office.
While I sat there failing to blank my heroic friend out, I had strange, odd thoughts, which I told myself were just stupidity, and paranoia. The product of several years without spending one single day in which at least one person wouldn’t try to lie to me. I pushed the thought aside along with the last third of my steak sandwich, and at eleven I walked out to the car. I drove to Camley Street, halfway between Camden and King’s Cross. I didn’t know the exact address of the place I was going but I didn’t bother looking it up. It wasn’t the sort of place you could drive past and miss. In the car I pushed my Leonard Cohen tape into the machine but took it out again when I heard the song that was playing. It was the one about the storm of golden hair on the pillow, and eyes full of sorrow, and distance. I didn’t really want to hear it right then.
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