The Vanishing Point

by McDermid, Val

  She remembered he had a child of his own. A daughter, a couple of years older than Jimmy Higgins. She imagined that made the abduction of a child the most powerful spur to action. ‘Whatever it takes,’ she said. ‘Let’s meet later and see what we got.’

  ‘Sure. Call me when you’re done with the interview.’

  God knew when that would be, she thought. Stephanie Harker’s story was complicated, and the woman seemed determined to share every detail. Probably talking about her history with the kid made her feel like she was doing something useful towards his rescue. Vivian couldn’t blame her for that, but the fact remained that she had a job to do where time generally played a significant role. As soon as her butt hit the seat again, she was back in interrogative mode. ‘So what about Scarlett’s family?’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ Stephanie protested. ‘What’s happening? That call? Was it about Jimmy? Have you any news?’ Her anxiety surfaced again, breaking through the careful containment she’d been building.

  Vivian stifled an impatient sigh. ‘No news. I was just briefing a colleague who’s following another line of inquiry.’

  ‘What line of inquiry? Has anyone come forward? Have they seen Jimmy?’ Stephanie’s eyes sparkled with tears and she rubbed them impatiently with the back of her hand.

  ‘Nothing like that. My colleague is going to review the CCTV, to see if we can establish the movements of the kidnapper ahead of the kidnap itself. And if we can find out where and how they left the airport precincts. There’s a lot of practical ground to cover. For example, the kidnapper must have produced either valid ID or a damn good fake to get a boarding pass and slip through security ahead of or alongside you guys.’

  Stephanie frowned, her emotions checked by the immediacy of seeing a practical problem. ‘Not necessarily,’ she said.

  Vivian was startled. ‘What do you mean? Security here is tight as a drum. You can’t talk your way past the TSA without the proper paperwork.’

  ‘If the kidnapper knew our schedule, he wouldn’t have had to follow us. There’s more than one way to get airside in this terminal,’ Stephanie insisted. ‘I noticed it last year when I came back from visiting a friend in Madison. It struck me because in the UK we’re really strict about segregating arrivals and departures. But here, if you arrive on a domestic flight, you’re just spilled out into the main concourse, so arriving passengers mix with the departing ones. The kidnapper could have flown in from anywhere served by this terminal then changed in the toilet.’

  She was on the money, Vivian thought. Why had she jumped to the wrong conclusion so quickly? Why had something they knew perfectly well not occurred to her or Abbott? The obvious answer was that their concerns were always with possible breaches of security from outside. Once you were inside, you were, by definition, secure. You’d been verified, screened and deemed acceptable. Why would there be any further cause for concern? But Stephanie Harker had looked at the system with the eyes of an outsider and she’d seen something they’d missed. Maybe the interview room was the place where this would be resolved after all. ‘I need to make a call,’ she said, pushing her chair back and dialling Abbott’s number on her way back out to the hallway. ‘We got sidetracked by the idea of somebody following the kid. We forgot about incoming passengers,’ she said as soon as he answered. ‘They come from all over the US and they walk straight out into the main concourse. You can’t tell who’s an arrival and who’s a departure. Our guy could have flown in from anywhere.’

  ‘Shit,’ Abbott said.

  ‘We’re going to have to backtrack the CCTV to see if we can figure out where the fuck he came from,’ Vivian said. ‘If he came off a flight, he could have been wearing anything. But he had to change somewhere. He must have used a bathroom, right?’

  Abbott sighed. ‘We need more bodies.’

  ‘Check with security in the camera room. This takes priority. A kid’s life could be on the line here. I’m going back in to the interview now.’

  ‘OK. Good call, Vivian.’

  When she sat down this time, Vivian eyed Stephanie with more respect. ‘It’s in hand,’ she said. ‘Thanks for that insight. Now, can we get back to Scarlett Higgins’ family? I’m wondering whether they might be behind all this. Were they not pissed that you ended up with the kid? And presumably the money too? I’m guessing Scarlett left her money to you? For Jimmy?’

  ‘Ha,’ Stephanie said. ‘I wish. They were pissed off at first. When they thought there was some money. But you couldn’t see them for dust once they realised Scarlett had left all her money to the charitable trust she set up after she discovered she had cancer. I got the kid. Not the money.’

  ‘Jimmy didn’t inherit? Surely she left you something to take care of him? Just to pay the bills.’

  Stephanie shook her head. ‘Not a bean.’ Her smile was wry. ‘That’s totally bizarre.’

  ‘Tell me about it. Her rationale is that she started out with nothing and that’s what spurred her on to make something of herself. She didn’t think throwing money at kids was good for them.’

  Vivian couldn’t decide whether she was impressed or appalled. ‘So her family really weren’t interested in the boy?’

  Stephanie sighed. ‘Her mother’s a drunk and her sister’s a junkie who’s already had one kid taken into care. Even if they’d known Jimmy – which they didn’t – no judge in his right mind was going to let them anywhere near him.’

  Vivian shook her head. ‘That doesn’t mean they didn’t want him. Blood’s thicker than water, after all.’

  ‘In the Higgins family, money’s thicker than water. And if there was no money in it for them, they couldn’t have cared less about Jimmy.’

  ‘How come you ended up with the boy? Are you trying to tell me the best friend she had in the world was her ghost writer?’ Vivian tried to keep the incredulity from her face as well as her voice, but it wasn’t easy. It was hard to imagine an emotional life so impoverished that the nearest thing you had to a bgf was the woman who’d been hired to portray you to the world in the most flattering light.

  Stephanie shrugged. ‘That’s one way of putting it. The other way would be that we fell into friendship five years ago when I wrote Scarlett’s first book. Neither of us expected it. But it happened and it persisted. There was a lot more to her than met the eye. I’m not proud of the fact that the woman I portrayed to the world was not the woman I knew, but for all sorts of reasons, most of them economic, that was what worked for both of us. And when she knew she was dying, I was the person she knew she could trust with her boy.’ Stephanie blinked away more tears. ‘Looks like she couldn’t have been more wrong.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Vivian said.

  Suddenly Stephanie snapped into anger. ‘Of course it was my bloody fault. He was in my care. And now he’s not. Scarlett trusted me. Jimmy trusted me. I’ve let everybody down. If anything happens to that boy, if he doesn’t come back to me alive and well . . . ’ The muscles in her face went slack as the prospect sank in.

  ‘We’ll find him,’ Vivian said, hating herself for the false hope. But she had to do what she could to keep Stephanie on her side. She had to keep teasing away at the details of their history in the hope she could find a reason for what had happened. ‘I accept what you’re saying about your friendship. Even though, frankly, it looks unlikely from where I’m sitting. But how was it that you got so close that she felt you were the one to entrust with Jimmy?

  10

  A ghost is a professional hypocrite. We’re constantly editing the person we’ve discovered into the person they want the world to see. We are the cosmetic surgeons of the image. We become experts in what should be left out. I generally ask clients if they would be comfortable with their mother or their child reading particular episodes that I consider to be prurient or predatory. And when I’m writing about sexual abuse, for example, I’m always conscious that there are creeps out there who look for this sort of memoir only because it turns them on. So I’m caref
ul not to include any explicit descriptions or much detail about the process of grooming children for sexual exploitation. I’m not in the business of writing a primer for paedophiles.

  Even with all the practice I’d had at creating a central fiction to form the spine of my ‘autobiographies’, Fishing for Gold turned out to be one of my more challenging enterprises. I think the issue was that Scarlett had given me a problem I’d never faced before. Usually, what I’m editing out is the material that paints the subject in a less than flattering light. For example, when I was ghosting a champion snooker player who had successfully battled cancer, the heart of the book was the strength he’d found in his loving marriage. It didn’t need any intervention from me for the player and his agent to be clear that they did not want the public to read about the prostitutes and the drugs that had been the reality of his backstage life.

  I’ve become an adept at treading the narrow line between providing just enough revelation to justify newspaper serialisation but not so much that the client becomes a pariah in their own life. And while it was true that what I was hiding about Scarlett would make her life uncomfortable, it wasn’t because the secrets were dirty and damaging. Apart from Joshu, who was her one blind spot, the truth about Scarlett was that she was smarter, shrewder and much more sensitive than any TV viewer or tabloid reader would have thought possible. I’d found it hard to believe myself at first, but I’d gradually had to accept the creeping suspicion that the Scarlett the world had been privy to was mostly as artificial a creation as Michael Jackson’s face.

  I couldn’t believe she’d got away with it for so long. It was on the seventh or eighth day of our interviews that I broached the subject. ‘You’re a lot smarter than you let on,’ I said.

  We were lounging on the leather sofas in the late afternoon. We’d been talking about the ill-fated second series, and Scarlett had clearly been bored by my insistence that we had to talk about the horrible thing she’d said to Danny Williams. ‘Look, it happened,’ she said, struggling upright and glaring at me. ‘You don’t need me to go through it all again. It’s there on YouTube for ever.’

  ‘YouTube doesn’t tell me what was going through your mind.’

  She looked away. ‘What do you want me to say? It was like I lost my mind? Like I totally didn’t know what I was saying?’ She pushed herself upright, impatient. ‘Look, I said something that I don’t even believe. I’d been out of sorts for days. All kinds of crap just came bubbling up. I know now it was because I was pregnant and my hormones were all over the place, but at the time, nobody was more gobsmacked than me at what came out of my mouth.’ She sniffed. ‘Will that do?’

  And that was when I broke all the rules and stepped across the line of tacit agreement between ghost and client. I’m not an investigative journalist. It’s not my job to challenge what my client tells me. Unless what they’re saying is completely at odds with all the known facts in the public domain, I’m supposed to swallow it whole. Sometimes I feel like a python confronted with a double-decker bus, but you’d be amazed what the punters will accept as gospel. On the rare occasions when I’ve had to point out very gently that my client’s version of events does not quite tally with what the rest of the world remembers, I’ve felt like I was skating on thin ice. The ghostwriting equivalent of ripping a hole in the space-time continuum. Because once you confront them with one lie, it’s hard to stop the whole thing unravelling.

  But with Scarlett, I couldn’t help myself. I’d grown to like her a lot over the three weeks we’d been talking. I generally manage to stay on good terms with the people I write about, but this time I suspected we might actually form a genuine friendship. If that was going to happen, we both needed to stop pretending. I’d never write the truth, obviously. I just needed to know it.

  So, ‘You’re a lot smarter than you let on,’ I said. ‘There was nothing spontaneous or hormonal about any of that, was there?’

  Scarlett’s slow smile said it all. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said, pointing to my little digital recorder.

  But I knew what she meant. I don’t like going off the record. It can put you into all sorts of awkward places. I remember the middle-aged man who had survived a childhood of hideous abuse at the hands of the Christian Brothers who asked me to turn off the tape, whereupon he confessed that his marriage was an empty shell and he was having a sexual relationship with their parish priest. The same parish priest who was leading a campaign to name and shame the members of his church who had sexually abused children. That was one of those times when I wished I had a time machine that would take me back to the place where I didn’t know that.

  So it was a big step of trust for me to turn off the machine. But sooner or later I was going to have to step outside the box if I was going to attempt to make proper friends with Scarlett.

  I turned it off.

  We both sat in silence for a moment, staring at the recorder. Then Scarlett cleared her throat. ‘You’re right. I planned it. I knew I was pregnant when I went back to Foutra. Plus I knew the second series was my chance to take myself to the next level. I figured I’d only get one chance to make a splash with the news about the baby, so I better go for broke.’ She gave me a sly look. ‘I think I did a pretty good job of it.’

  I laughed. ‘You hooked me. And I’m the best. That’s how good a job you did. Has it all been planned, Scarlett? From the off?’

  ‘Right from the off.’ She fell back against the sofa in an exaggerated pose of relief. ‘Steph, it’s bloody great to share it at last. I’ve had to keep my gob shut for so long, it’s been killing me.’

  And out it poured. The strange, twisted plan of a woman who had no prospects, no qualifications and no obvious escape from a dead-end life she adamantly did not want. ‘I remember when Big Brother started. I was way too young to get on it, but I could see how something like that might be the way out for somebody like me. Somebody with a totally shit life.’

  ‘And a brain,’ I said. ‘That’s what made you different, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, I think so,’ she said. ‘I was never any good at school, mostly because they wrote me off before I even got my feet under the table. But I reckoned if I could get on one of those shows, I could play a good enough part to make something of myself. I studied them like it was maths or history or summat. I could have gone on Mastermind with reality TV shows as my specialist subject.’ She chuckled. ‘Mind, the general knowledge would have been a bit of a disaster.’

  She’d auditioned three times before she finally got her slot on Goldfish Bowl. ‘I had to keep dumbing down.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘You would not believe how fucking dim most of the people who get on these shows are. They haven’t got a clue. No wonder the TV companies love shows like Goldfish Bowl. They can exploit the living daylights out of the contestants and the poor sods don’t even notice.’

  ‘So it was all a con job?’

  ‘Start to finish. Remember that night on the first series when I got drunk and danced naked on the table?’

  I shuddered. It had been unforgettable, for all the wrong reasons. ‘Oh, yes.’

  Scarlett rocked with laughter. ‘I know, it’s excruciating to watch. But it didn’t half grab the headlines. I wasn’t drunk at all, you know. I made it look like I was drinking a lot more than I did. And I was totally stone-cold sober. I played them all for suckers, Steph. And look at me now. I’ve got my own house and money in the bank. You’re going to make me a bestseller. And my baby’s going to have a daddy.’

  ‘What about Joshu? Is he part of the game?’

  She looked outraged. ‘Of course not. I wouldn’t be that cruel. I wouldn’t play with somebody’s emotions like that. I love Joshu, and he loves me.’

  I wasn’t entirely sure about the second half of that sentence. Especially if Joshu ever realised that the woman in his life was about seven times smarter than him. ‘As long as you’re happy, that’s what counts. But I have to congratulate you, Scarlett. You’ve done a terrific job
. When I was just another punter, I had no idea that you were anything other than a nice-but-dim bimbo.’

  Scarlett scooted forward to high-five me. ‘Props to you, Steph. You’re the only one who’s ever worked it out. All the hacks, the TV producers, the business people that make my brands – they think I’m thick so they patronise the arse off me then funnel everything through Georgie. And bless him, Georgie’s like most people. He made up his mind about me before he even met me. He thinks he knows my limits and he plays to them. He never actually looks at me or listens to me. He only pays attention to the surface. It’s one of the reasons why I chose him. That and his reputation for being honest. Let’s face it, if you’re supposed to be thick, you need to be bloody sure you pick an agent who’s going to take care of you and not rip you off.’

  I had to admit she’d made a good job of it. ‘Don’t you get fed up, though? Always pretending?’

  ‘I do sometimes. Being pregnant’s done me a big favour. I was getting knackered with having to be out on the lash three or four nights a week. But now I’m supposed to set a good example and stop at home. Early nights, no smoking or drinking. Because you know there’s a whole world of media out there who would give their right arms to catch me being a shit mum-to-be. You’ve no idea what it’s like. Every time I leave the house, they’re on my tail. I go to the supermarket, they’re snapping my groceries. I go to lunch and talk to the parking attendant, they’re all over him, asking what I said. I have no fucking privacy unless I’m in here, behind these walls. They’re all waiting for me to end up on my arse outside some nightclub six months pregnant. And that’s not a headline I could come back from. So I have to pull the tragedy face for poor Joshu and tell him I can’t come and watch him doing his pumping rideouts all over town.’

  ‘“Pumping rideouts?”’

  She snorted. ‘DJ wankspeak for a set. He takes it all seriously, bless him. He’s got a little studio out the back, he spends days in there putting stuff together in the right sequence. He’s doing really well, you know. He’s starting to get some top gigs.’