Dead North (Sam Williams Book 1)

by Joel Hames

  Good thing Gaddesdon hadn’t called Roarkes as well, I thought. Sam Williams questioning Carson, alone, and speeding off to Burnley still alone to dig up the past. Roarkes would have had a field day with that.

  Below the terse little message was an address. And below that an urgent plea. Pls call ASAP when you can, it read. I would, too. But not until I got where I was going.

  Still doing seventy, I typed in the new address and found myself guided straight back off the motorway. There were rows of terraced houses, shops, a supermarket, a cinema, a vast building site where signs emblazoned with random catchwords like “Regenerate” and “Future” sprouted like styrofoam boxes in a Friday night gutter. It might have been anywhere.

  It was Burnley.

  My phone guided me past the football ground and a handful of signs for a stately home. I’d slept all the way to Burnley that morning – I couldn’t believe it was still the same day we’d set off to find Brian Betterson – and on the way back I’d been staring at the numbers on my phone, talking to Roarkes, trying to work out where Betterson had gone, paying not the slightest bit of attention to what was outside the car. Betterson’s bit of Burnley had been what I’d expected, dirty, run-down and tense, hemmed in on all sides by bookies and nail bars. This bit, in contrast, was almost nice. The terraces were clean and the bins laid out in neat, ordered rows. The streetlamps were working. The people outside the pubs were standing and talking like normal people outside normal pubs. Maybe all that regeneration bullshit wasn’t total bullshit after all. I was, according to my phone, three hundred yards from the restaurant, or whatever was left of it. A barbers, another row of terraces, a Chinese takeaway. Two hundred yards. A set of traffic lights, a large primary school. One hundred yards. More terraces. A tiny, narrow playground, thrown in between the houses like an alleyway with ideas above its station. A field.

  That was it. I stopped the car. This was the address. Number 46.

  I’d stopped on the other side of the road, the odd numbers. Across from where I parked, behind a double yellow line so faded it was hardly there at all, was what should have been a burnt-out Italian restaurant, or whatever had been built on its remains. Instead, there was a big, empty patch of grass surrounded by barbed wire.

  There was nothing there.

  24: The Jar

  I HIT REDIAL, and when Gaddesdon answered I jumped in before he could speak.

  “There’s nothing here. Are you sure this is the address?”

  “Yes, sir. It adds up. Old phone book and the fire brigade logs. Both said 46.”

  “Shit,” I hissed.

  “There’s some news, sir. About the woman.”

  Hope flared. I waited.

  “Well, we haven’t actually found her.”

  Hoped died again.

  “But we’ve found the boy.”

  That was something. It was more than something, it was half of everything, and it might get us closer to the other half.

  “Where? Where was he?”

  “One of the other neighbours brought him in. There’s a police station in Clitheroe, she took him there.”

  Clitheroe was the nearest town to Bursington, which wasn’t saying much. It was still far enough away that your pizza would be cold by the time you made it home.

  “Why? How come she had him?”

  “It’s all a bit confusing, sir, but she said Sally had turned up banging on her door like a madwoman a little before eight, said she had to finish it, and she said finish what, and all she said was it’s on the web, and asked if the woman could look after the boy for her.”

  I tried to untangle it, the her and the she from Sally and the woman, flying around my head like bats. I tried to take refuge in the grammar and the syntax, and I failed, because I knew perfectly well what Gaddesdon had said, and I knew at least a little of what it meant, and what it meant was that it was my fault.

  “Sir?” said Gaddesdon.

  “Hang on,” I replied. I needed to clear my head. “No. Tell me again, what did Sally Carson say? Exactly, Gaddesdon.”

  “It’s here, sir. One moment. Oh yes. She said, I’ve got to finish it off. Then she said, It’s all out there on the web. And then she said Take Matthew – that’s the boy’s name, sir – I’ve got to sort it out before it’s too late. The neighbour couldn’t make head nor tail of it and neither can we, sir, but that’s basically it.”

  I couldn’t make perfect sense of it either, but one thing stood out clearer than the rest. “It’s all out there on the web.” I’d given the story to Mia Arazzi and told her to publish it, and she had. A minute later I’d realised something like this might happen, too, I’d warned Roarkes, I’d told him to get to Bursington before the news reports went out. But it was too late. I’d already leaked the story myself. I’d endangered Sally Carson and her son, and she’d realised it before I had.

  It was my fault. My fault she was in danger. My fault she’d disappeared.

  “Sir?”

  Gaddesdon wanted something. It no longer mattered. I had nothing, no leads, nothing at all. Just a patch of grass and mud surrounded by barbed wire. And a woman who was missing and might already be dead.

  “What?”

  “There’s something else, sir.”

  “Yes, Gaddesdon. I know. Serena isn’t happy. Wants her client treated with kid gloves, right?”

  “No, sir. I mean, yes, she does, she’s pissed off with you, but that’s not it. It’s the restaurant.”

  I waited.

  “There’s been a mistake, sir.”

  I could guess precisely who’d made that mistake.

  “The article, sir. Did you read it?”

  “What article, Gaddesdon?”

  He coughed.

  “Gaddesdon?”

  “Sorry sir.” He sounded like someone who really didn’t want to say what he had to. “The article about the fire.”

  “No, Gaddesdon. You showed me the memo you found. From the illiterate sergeant.”

  “Yes. Well, there was an article, and it said there’d been a fire, and they were all dead.”

  He stopped.

  “Yes?”

  “And it turned out they weren’t.”

  It was a dry night, but cool. Dry and cool didn’t explain the finger of ice suddenly pressing against my spine.

  “What do you mean, Gaddesdon?”

  “It wasn’t my fault, sir. It’s just, they went to press while the fire was still being put out and I suppose they didn’t check their information, they just asked someone at the scene. Anyway, there was a correction in the following week’s paper.”

  He paused, again.

  “Go on, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I’m sure it’s not important, sir.”

  The build-up he was giving this particular piece of information said otherwise. So did his tone of voice. I’d had enough of prompting him. I waited.

  “It’s just, the girl, sir. She didn’t die. She was taken to hospital suffering from smoke inhalation, and she was out again next day. Rest of them burned up, they could hardly ID the bodies, sir. But the girl was fine.”

  The sixteen year old. Something hovered just at the edge of my mind, an idea, but I couldn’t reach it. I was too tired. My arm was throbbing, suddenly, and my brain was stumbling slowly from one thought to another like a drunk man in a fog. Gaddesdon was still talking.

  “Thing is, it’s probably nothing, right, sir? I mean, this was all about the Corporation, wasn’t it? Fact they killed three people instead of four, it’s neither here nor there, is it?”

  Was it? Was he right? I was standing in the dark in front of a field. Was this whole thing another dead end?

  “I’ve taken photos of the two articles. I’ll send them to your phone now. Maybe you can get something out of it all.”

  “Thanks, Gaddesdon,” I said, still staring at the field. Without realising what I was doing, I’d started to walk around the perimeter, looking for a gap in the barbed wire fence. I didn’t know w
hat I’d do if I found one. It wasn’t like I expected to see anything useful in there.

  “I’ll leave you to it, sir. Let me know if you want me to come out there, though. I can give you a hand, if you want.”

  “No, Gaddesdon. You stay put. I’ll call you if I need you. Go to the pub or something. Just stay close to the station.”

  Thirty seconds later my phone beeped. Gaddesdon’s message. The articles. Difficult to make out, bad copies badly digitised in the first place, bad photos taken by Gaddesdon, a dirty, smudged screen I was trying to read them on.

  I’d walked from one end of the field to the other alongside the road. Houses either side, narrow strips of land between them and the wire. No gaps yet. My phone rang and I glanced down at the little notification above the article I was trying to read. Elizabeth bloody Maurier. Again. Her timing, as ever, impeccable. Fuck off, Elizabeth Maurier.

  There was a photograph beside the first article. The restaurant, or what was left of it, a smouldering husk in the morning light. It had taken nearly twelve hours to bring the fire under control.

  The second article was shorter and more formal, an apology and a correction, and usually that would have been where it all finished, but it had been a big mistake about a major tragedy, so space had been made for another photograph, and when I saw it I nearly dropped the phone.

  I pinched the screen to zoom in and get a better look at the image, but the definition was so poor all I got was a slightly bigger blur. It didn’t matter. I’d seen that photograph before.

  I reached into my back pocket and pulled them out, three photographs. Matthew, the son. The tourists, together with the man I thought must be Alejandro.

  And the family shot. The photo that had made no sense. Husband, wife, two children. A girl, early teens. A boy, a lot younger.

  I read the caption beside the newspaper article. The photograph had been taken in 1993, two years before the fire. Three of the people in that photograph had died in the fire. One hadn’t. The girl. Chiara Moretti.

  She’d been sixteen when the fire took her family, and twenty years had gone by. I glanced back at the photograph, at the mother, and the girl, and nodded to myself, because suddenly everything was falling into place.

  Twenty years. The teenager was tall and thin, angular, so awkward you could still see it in a creased and aging photograph. With a touch of colour in her face. Twenty years on, she was less lean, less angular, certainly less awkward. Dark-haired. Fine-featured. She still had the touch of colour in her face, but that had nothing whatsoever to do with South America. Visually, there wasn’t much to connect the teenager of twenty years ago with the woman of today.

  Except the mother.

  How stupid had I been? I’d had the photograph the whole time, there in the back pocket of a pair of trousers slung across a chair in a cold room in the First Quality Inn. I’d dug through my old files, in case I’d seen Sally Carson before, and I almost had. There in my room the whole time. Even while I was talking to the woman I’d known there was something out of place, and I’d jumped at pauses and odd little questions that didn’t mean a thing. I’d felt something ringing a bell, or jarring, I couldn’t figure out which. Turned out it was both. She rang a bell, and she jarred, all at the same time.

  Sally Carson, twenty years on, was almost the image of her mother. Just almost. Not quite, and that was the jar. Her family had been killed that night, murdered by the same men who’d gunned down Milton and Ahmet to get at her husband.

  Sally Carson wasn’t in danger. Sally Carson wasn’t Sally Carson at all, she was Chiara Moretti, and she wasn’t running away.

  Quite the reverse.

  She’d gone to finish it all off.

  25: Into the Darkness

  I WAS BACK in the car but I was damned if I knew where the hell I was going. Not here, that was all. Not a field. Restaurant, Carson had said, but that hadn’t been a where. It had been a why.

  Carson. It was starting to feel like I was spending more time in his hospital room than the First Quality Inn, but he was worth another try. And his room was more comfortable, anyway. I could call on the way.

  I turned the car around and started driving. Back towards the motorway, which would lead me to Manchester. Away from the field. In the twenty minutes I’d been there, walking around an empty rectangle of mud and grass and shouting at a phone, it had got colder and damper, and now there was no one else on the street. No people. No cars. Certainly no red Astra. The whole street, dead, as if it had died twenty years ago and nobody had ever come back to visit.

  I narrowly beat a red light and dialled Malhotra’s number as I shot past the football ground. This was where Brian Betterson had lost his phone, or so he’d said. Maybe it had been true. Thing was, he knew who’d taken it, and that knowledge had turned him from a shabby, strung-out chancer into a man with a secret so dangerous he’d left the country.

  I had the phone to my left ear, taking the roundabouts at speed with my right hand at the end of an arm that had stopped throbbing and now just felt numb, as if it had been trying to tell me something and given up waiting for me to get the message. Whatever it was, it could wait a little longer. Malhotra’s voice came down the line.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Sam.”

  “Oh good. I’m glad you called. I’m in the room with Carson. He won’t talk to me, though.”

  He’ll talk to me, I thought.

  “Is Serena there yet?”

  “No,” she replied, and I sensed a hint of relief. Serena wasn’t going to be delighted that there was yet another person in the room with her client and no lawyer there to defend him. Not that he actually needed defending any more. Or not from the police, anyway. Serena wouldn’t be long, though. Not after the message she’d got from Gaddesdon.

  “Pass him the phone. I’ve got something I want to say to him.”

  I heard footsteps, and rustling, and breath, but no voice. Carson was back in quiet mode.

  “I know who Sally is,” I said.

  Another breath. No words.

  “I know why she’s disappeared, too. She’s not running away at all, Thomas. She’s running right at them, isn’t she?”

  Still just the breath, ragged, uneven, like a man who’d run further than he was used to and was waiting for the rest of his body to catch up.

  “So what do you call each other when you’re alone? Is it Thomas and Sally? Or Frank and Chiara?”

  Finally he spoke, the words breathed out in a weary, desperate sigh.

  “Where’s Matthew?” he asked.

  “Matthew’s safe,” I said. “The police have got him.”

  “I never meant… neither of us ever… it wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  A long sigh, again. The sound of a key turning. A lock clicking open.

  “You’re right. I’m Frank Grissom. I was Frank Grissom. I did some nasty things, back then. But I was a kid. And I never killed anyone, I swear it. By the time I was twenty I’d had enough, but I couldn’t leave. You know what they did to people who wanted to leave?”

  It was a rhetorical question. I replied with a question of my own.

  “So what happened?”

  “Chiara. She was a couple of years younger than me and her dad had this Italian restaurant where we used to meet.”

  “So he was part of it?”

  “Christ no. He was just the poor bastard whose business got picked. There was nothing he could do about it. Chiara used to take orders and serve drinks and I couldn’t help noticing her. She was something else.”

  “What happened?”

  “Her dad. Luca. He’d had enough, too, but he wasn’t smart enough to keep it to himself. I was seeing Chiara by then, and she told me, I said to him don’t be stupid, just play along, but he wasn’t having any of it. Said he was going to go to the police.”

  “He did go to the police.”

  Another sigh. “I know. And someone there
must have seen him come in, some snitch, or some bent cop must have spilled the beans.”

  “Did you know what was going to happen?”

  “Of course not. I’d have got them out if I’d known. I didn’t hear a thing about it till next day when I went round to see Chiara.”

  And that was enough, for Grissom. Getting out might have been risky, but sticking around didn’t exactly guarantee a long and healthy life. He got out, changed his name, fled to another continent. But he kept in touch with Chiara, who’d gone to live with an aunt in Italy. Four years, they waited. Four years, and then Chiara Moretti became Sally Grieves, went backpacking in Argentina all by herself, and fell in love with a handsome young man she met in the wilds of Patagonia.

  “I never wanted to come back. It was Chiara.”

  “Why?”

  “Because for her it was still home. And I thought, after all this time—”

  I cut him off. I knew where he was going.

  “You thought it would be safe, didn’t you? You thought they’d have forgotten about you by now.”

  “I did. I was wrong.”

  “And when they found you, they were – what? They weren’t even going to do you the courtesy of killing you themselves? You had to do it, right? You had to do it to yourself, or they’d go after your family.”

  A pause, a long, laboured breath, then, “Yes.”

  “So now she’s gone after them.”

  “I think so.”

  “Where, Frank? Where’s Chiara?”

  There was what sounded like a stifled sob, then, “I don’t know. I’d tell you if I did.”

  I wanted to believe him, but frustration was starting to creep in, frustration at the way every tiny detail had to be prised out of him like a pearl from an oyster shell.

  “How can you not know?” I asked, half-spoken, half-growled. If he noticed the change in my tone, he didn’t seem to care.

  “Because back then there were only a few places we used. The restaurant, a room in the back of a warehouse, someone’s flat. They’re all gone, now. The restaurant burned down, the warehouse is an office and the flat’s part of the college. Burnley. That’s all I know. It’ll be somewhere near Burnley.”