Hold Back the Night

by Hold Back the Night (retail) (epub)

  * * *

  I was waiting for Emma Bradley in the happily air-conditioned foyer of the family’s apartment complex in Chalk Farm at nine thirty. Personally, I could easily have slept much longer, about three days, but Emma had suggested the time; she always got up early, she said. I’d buzzed up and been told to wait at the desk, which I did, watching all the people coming to and fro, mainly fro. I was reminded of a very orderly, laid-back hotel, especially seeing as a lot of the residents had foreign, predominantly American, accents. I guessed that a lot of the apartments were owned by international companies, who put their overseas staff up there. I was shaken out of my hypothesis when Emma stepped out of the lift. I held a hand up to her and she walked towards me, her hair still wet from the shower.

  I followed Emma through to a covered atrium past the lifts, with comfortable sofas and pot plants surrounding a small pool overfilled with indolent, fantail goldfish. We sat, and Emma handed me the coffee she’d brought down for me, asking me if milk no sugar was OK. I said it was, and took a much needed hit.

  Emma wasn’t drinking anything. She sat very still, with her hands folded in the lap of the same cut-off shorts I’d watched her sleeping in. She wore a simple, baggy blue tee shirt, a pair of clean white trainers and, most noticeably of all, a look of real exhaustion. There were no lines or wrinkles on her clear skin, but nevertheless her young face looked old, as if the ghost of an ancient woman were living inside her skin, looking out through her heavy brown eyes.

  Before I’d managed to say anything to her, Emma asked me if I was making any progress tracking down her sister’s murderer. I smiled at the girl and put my coffee cup on a side table.

  ‘I’ve only just started,’ I said. ‘And as I told your father, it’ll probably be the police who do that. What I can do probably won’t mount up to much, and it might not even mount up to anything at all.’

  Emma nodded, seeming to accept what I’d said. She tucked her legs underneath her on the sofa. ‘But, you’re still looking for that boy?’

  ‘I am,’ I said. ‘That’s all I can do really. I might find him before the police do, but either way he’ll turn up.’

  ‘And he did it, didn’t he? It was him?’ She sounded desperate to be told that it was.

  ‘I don’t know, but it does seem most likely. He was there at the time and we do know he was living with your sister. The fact that he ran away does seem to indicate that he had some sort of involvement in something that wasn’t legal.’ Emma nodded again. ‘But we have to find him first,’ I said.

  ‘Right. But you’ll tell me, won’t you? The police won’t tell us anything.’

  ‘I will,’ I said.

  I’d put a suit on that morning in an effort to feel more together. I took a notebook out of my jacket pocket and asked Emma to run off the names of all Lucy’s friends that she could think of. I’d check these against the names Andy had collected, to see if there were any extra. I also got Emma to tell me the names of all the festivals Lucy had gone to, and all of the gigs she could remember. I asked her if she knew of any places in London Lucy had ever spoken of, clubs, bars and the like. Emma just remembered that Lucy really liked Camden, that they had both gone there a couple of times with their father. Then I asked her a question that had suddenly occurred to me.

  ‘You were looking for her, weren’t you?’ I said. ‘At Camden tube.’ She nodded, warily. ‘You told me that you wanted to speak to her, to tell her how sorry you were, how much you loved her.’ Her eyes flicked down. ‘You didn’t see her, did you, Emma?’

  Emma’s eyes flashed up to mine and her mouth opened. She looked horrified at what I’d said. Then she shook her head and pulled her knees up in front of her chest.

  I didn’t have anything else relevant left to ask. Instead I asked her how she was.

  ‘I’m OK.’

  I smiled. ‘You don’t have to tell me that,’ I said. ‘It can’t be true. It’s a horrible thing that has happened and you can’t deny that.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ Emma pushed out a long breath. ‘But you can’t be upset all the time. You have to pretend, don’t you?’

  ‘If it gets you through the day.’

  ‘Not the day,’ she said. ‘That’s easy. It’s the rest that I need to get through.’

  It felt good to focus on someone else’s problems. I asked Emma how her parents were and she had a lot more to say about them. I think that parents often forget that their children worry about them as well. Emma said that her father had gone very quiet and distant, and that her mother was trying to be the strong one.

  ‘But I know it’s all rubbish. She doesn’t sleep either, and unlike me she works all the time. She’s like a car that’s run out of petrol but just doesn’t stop. And you can’t tell her, you can’t say a word. She doesn’t listen. I can’t get anywhere near her.’

  ‘i’m sure your concern is a great help to her,’ I said. ‘I’m sure she can feel that.’

  Emma stood up and made to show me out, but I asked her if her mother was home. Emma said she was. We rode the lift together and I let Emma get ahead of me to announce my arrival. When she told me to come in, I followed her into the apartment, where her mother was sitting at her desk in the corner working on the computer that I’d noticed idle before. Mrs Bradley swivelled in her chair but didn’t get up. She did say hello, and she held her hand out, which I moved forward to shake.

  At that moment I saw Mr Bradley through the French window, sitting on the slab bench with his back resting between a gap in the profusion of roses. He was reading a newspaper. When he saw me he folded his paper hurriedly and got up.

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt,’ I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. ‘Please don’t get up. I’m afraid it isn’t anything much.’

  Mr Bradley was up now though and he came inside. His shoulders and arms still had a heavy cast to them and the hope that had rushed into his eyes on seeing me reverted to the look of resignation that was planted deep in his face. He asked me if he could get me anything.

  ‘No, no. I just wanted to ask Mrs Bradley if she had had time to mention to the woman in the post office that I’d be coming down? To Ravensey, to look through Lucy’s room?’

  I turned to the computer table, where Emma was standing by her mother, her mother’s hand in hers.

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs Bradley said. ‘Mrs Dearing. She wanted me to ask you when you’d be going.’

  ‘I’d planned on Thursday,’ I told her.

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Early afternoon, I think. If that’s OK?’

  ‘Of course. I might even be around to let you in myself. I can do a lot from here but there are some documents I need.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Well, I’ll see you there then.’

  I thanked Mrs Bradley and said goodbye to her husband, who immediately turned back to the roof garden with his paper. I walked to the door and Emma followed me. I said there was no need, but she insisted on accompanying me as far as the lift and pressing the button for me.

  ‘Thanks for coming round,’ she said, as we waited.

  ‘It’s nothing, I did need to speak to you.’

  ‘I know. But it was good. I mean, it’s good to have someone to talk to. I can’t talk to them.’ She looked back towards the flat. ‘And there’s no one else in London. And at home, they’re just so full of sympathy. I feel like a leper. Everyone knows. So, thank you for listening.’

  ‘It really is nothing,’ I said. ‘Any time you want.’

  The lift came and the door opened and I stepped in. Emma held her hand out, probably having seen her parents do the same and I leant forward to take it. We shook hands awkwardly and then I took my hand away, pushed the ground floor button. I smiled at Emma as the door closed.

  Downstairs I stood by the atrium and let out a yawn, which had been waiting inside my body like a racehorse that can see the paddock. I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands and thought for a second. I walked behind the reception desk towards the back do
or that leads out of the building to the car park. I got to the door and looked at the lock. It needed a key from the outside but not the inside. There was a latch right inside the mechanism, just by the bolt, and I clicked it down. Then I walked back into the foyer. I walked past the reception desk towards the front entrance but stopped when I heard a voice I recognized.

  ‘Mrs Bradley, please,’ the voice said. ‘Apartment 516.’

  ‘Are you expected?’ the receptionist asked.

  ‘I will be, when you tell her I’m here.’

  ‘And your name, sir.’

  ‘Clay.’

  ‘Right. And you have a first name I presume, or is it just Mr?’

  ‘It’s Chief Inspector, laddie. That’ll do.’

  I stood by the door and watched Clay lumber slowly towards the lifts, swaying gently from side to side like an ocean liner in a light swell. It seemed that he was beginning to have the same idea I was.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I spent the rest of the day showing the boy’s picture round Camden, wearing a baseball hat in case George Curtis came by, but more to keep off the sun; it was hotter than ever, and muggy too, a smudge of haze putting the air out of focus. Camden looked strange without the bags of rubbish, which had all finally been removed from the kerbs and pavements. The place was emptier but it still had that tatty, tired feel to it. Even though the bins were now empty, Coke cans and polystyrene chip cartons still found their way onto the tarmac.

  None of the people I showed the photograph to had seen the boy. I left copies with several of the people I spoke to, which all had my number on the back, and told them that it would be worth calling me if they saw the boy. I dished out change to most of the people, figuring that it wouldn’t hurt to spread a little goodwill. I ate dinner in a Mexican place with a view of the street and spent the rest of the night standing outside various pubs with a pint in my hand, keeping my eyes open.

  And that’s basically what I did for the next three days. I got good at pinball in video arcades round Leicester Square, and drank a gallon of espresso outside cafes in Soho. I drove to Finsbury Park to see my friend Joe Nineteen, a former bus conductor who gets his mates on the network to keep their eyes open for me sometimes. He dished out some of his famous goat curry to me and we chatted for a while. I read the Evening Standard at bus stops in Hoxton, and Kilburn, and Brixton, and down by the Embankment, and handed out a lot of pictures at Liverpool Street, Waterloo, on the Strand and outside theatres, anywhere the homeless hang out in any numbers. I went to the squats that I knew of, the basements of tower blocks waiting to be pulled down, and I kicked aside used needles and used condoms and got told to get fucked by gangs of kids giving off as much suspicion and hostility as I’d felt at their age. I smelled a lot of stale piss and read a lot of graffiti, though nowhere did I see the words ‘Missing murder suspect woz ere’. I got up early in the mornings and went to bed late at night, spending the entire day wandering around, glad of the dull, routine nature of what I was doing, glad of the simple, effortless concentration it required.

  I didn’t speak to Sharon. I picked the phone up a few times but never managed to dial all of the number. It seemed that I had a lot of things to say to her, but that they were all of them too late. They’d only sound like I was making them up. I thought perhaps that she might phone, and I really didn’t know what I’d say if she did, but as she didn’t I was saved having to confront that particular dilemma.

  So, work. While I searched for the boy I tried to run various scenarios through my mind, of the different people I thought might have been involved in Lucy’s death. It was more to cut the boredom than anything else. The boy was involved, but how? Her family were involved, insomuch as the seeds of Lucy’s disappearance from home seemed to have been sowed amongst them, by a tough mother, an indulgent father and a brainy sister. But did it go any further? And Curtis, did he know the boy after all? Was it him who had killed Lucy, and set the lad up? And if so, how could I prove it? The answer was that I couldn’t, not while the boy was out there. So I just kept looking, with something at the back of my mind, which nagged at me, which mocked me for not noticing it. It was something off to the side like a member of the chorus who’s actually the biggest talent in the show, something I’d looked at, stared at even, but I hadn’t seen.

  Whatever it was, and however hard I scoured my mind it didn’t come to me. I couldn’t find the boy either and the time I spent looking for him was pretty dull. Only two things stood out. On the third morning Andy Gold caught me at home. He had some news.

  ‘Lee,’ he said, shouting above the usual incident room mayhem. ‘He’s sixteen and his name’s Lee Finch.’

  I jotted the name down. ‘How’d you find out?’

  ‘We got a call from a care home. Don’t you love it that they’re called that? They used to look after him, on the infrequent occasions that he hadn’t legged it from the place. Anyway, some of the beat boys have been doing the rounds and one of the staff pegged him from the photo you took. They sent one from their files, it’s the same kid.’

  ‘Where’s the home?’

  ‘Lambeth,’ he said. ‘Nicholas Court’s the name. They sent us a biog too.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The usual stuff. Taken from his mother, fostered, too unruly, five different homes. No real form though. The good thing is he’s never been outside London, so he probably won’t know of anywhere else to go. Other than that it doesn’t help much. He’s an elusive little bugger.’

  ‘You’re telling me. I haven’t come up with shit.’

  I drove down to Nicholas Court, which looked like a former workhouse, and was situated in the streets behind the Stockwell Road, in what is primarily a Portuguese area. I’d been to one of the restaurants there a few times for the bacalau. The home itself was sterile and basic, very much an institution with its wire mesh windows and hard fibre carpets. But the staff were friendly enough, and they told me what they could about Lee. He hadn’t been there for that long, and quite a few of the staff themselves were new, but Janet, the head of the place, remembered him well. She was a kind-looking woman in her fifties with very short, grey hair.

  ‘He was a cocky young boy,’ Janet told me, with a smile. ‘Very sure of himself. Not like most of the ones in here, who just pretend that they are. You got the impression that one day he might do very well, he might even be one of the ones you see being interviewed on TV in ten years’ time – if he stayed out of trouble. Something which, it seems, he hasn’t managed to do.’

  The home catered for twelve- to sixteen-year-olds, and Janet let me speak to some of the kids. They had more to say. I wrote down a list of the places they told me Lee hung out, and some names of people he hung out with. I got the impression that Lee was a popular kid, especially with the girls. They all teased each other about fancying him and one girl, who hadn’t said anything, was accused by the rest of sleeping with him.

  ‘I never,’ the girl said. ‘I never. You’re just jealous.’

  I asked the girl if she’d heard from Lee since he’d left, six months ago, but she said she hadn’t. She had no idea where he was.

  ’And I don’t care neither,’ she said. ‘Anyway, what’s he done? You and the filth, what you want him for?’

  ‘Maybe nothing,’ I said. ‘We just need to speak to him.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ the girl said. ‘You just need to speak to him.’

  I handed out my card, and the staff and kids all told me they’d give me a call if they either saw Lee, or thought of anything else I might want to know. I didn’t really hold out much hope.

  The other thing that stood out was the conversation I had later that same day, with one of the girls at King’s Cross, a tall girl who’d told me she was Italian but was probably one of the growing number of Albanians now working the street in London. She hadn’t seen,the boy I was looking for, she said, but she’d definitely seen Natalie. She’d watched her walking around in front of the station, only minutes before
she’d gone down to the underground, minutes before she’d jumped in front of a train. The girl had even spoken to her, asking if Natalie was OK. Natalie had been wandering around aimlessly, crying and talking to herself.

  ‘I read what happened to her,’ the hooker said to me. ‘Those drugs, it’s terrible.’

  I asked her to tell me what she remembered and the girl said that Natalie had been dropped off at King’s Cross, by a woman who gave her some money. The hooker thought the woman was her mother, but she didn’t fit the description of the woman I’d seen at the Whittington; she’d been small, the girl said, only in her late thirties, and it wasn’t a very expensive car that Natalie had got out of, though she couldn’t tell me what make it was, or the colour. Neither could she tell me what the woman looked like beyond her size.

  ‘I just know this girl was not happy. Her face, not happy. It make me feel bad. Maybe I should have talked to her more, help her, I don’t know…’

  ‘You didn’t know what she was going to do,’ I said. ‘How could you have?’

  The girl nodded and I gave her the rest of the pack of cigarettes that I’d bought to hand out. She lit one and I took the chance to see what an attractive girl she was, far too good-looking for the area, really. At that point the girl’s pimp came up. He’d obviously been watching us talking and he wanted to know whether I wanted to stop messing around, and fuck the girl, or not.

  ‘She good,’ the man said. ‘Believe me. She fuck you good.’

  The girl looked a little embarrassed but smiled at me. I thanked her for her time and left her there, walking up to a cafe on Judd Street.