by Joseph Knox
She nodded. ‘We’ve always worked very closely together.’ My face didn’t change but when she looked up she said, ‘Strictly professional.’
‘Does Mr Blick have a partner?’ She shook her head. ‘Any close friends or family?’
‘He works extremely hard …’
‘You’re telling me there’s no one in his life who’d notice his absence?’
‘Anthony lives for this place, but that’s partly what this trip’s about. His health scare last year. He wanted to go and see some of the world before he felt too old …’ She sounded like she was trying to convince herself of something. She was worrying a thread at her sleeve.
‘Do you have his home address?’
‘What’s going on?’ she said, her eyes moving on to mine.
‘As far as we know, his phone’s run out of battery, but that’s no reason for us not to check up on things.’
We drove out to Anthony Blick’s Carrwood home, while Aneesa described it to me in glowing terms. The venue for the office’s annual Christmas party, where her boss curated an evening of fine wine and dining. Last year’s had been particularly grand, with Blick treating his employees to several expensive bottles and a catered, eight-course meal.
‘What does he make of the events at the Palace?’ I asked. Aneesa was silent for a moment. ‘You have told him?’
She stared straight ahead. ‘I emailed him about the break-in …’
‘But not about the body?’
‘He never replied,’ she said quietly. We both began turning scenarios over in our heads.
‘There’s something else I need to ask you,’ I said. ‘Do you remember a Geoff Short? Worked for Blick’s up until last year …’
‘Geoff, of course.’
‘How well do you know him?’
‘What are you asking? He was a colleague, a friend.’
‘So you didn’t know he was having an extra-marital affair with one of your clients?’ I chanced a look at her.
‘What? No …’ She connected my statement with what Natasha Reeve had told us, about discovering Freddie’s affair. ‘Oh my God. But Geoff’s married …’
‘His wife’s in the dark, and I said as long as it wasn’t relevant to the case she could stay that way. Do you know her?’
‘Only socially. I haven’t seen her in a long time, though. She was teaching out in America for most of last year.’
‘Apparently so.’
‘… You don’t think she sent those notes to Natasha?’
I shook my head. ‘I checked her out. She was definitely in Washington, teaching at the time, and the notes were hand-delivered. Obviously she could have had a surrogate, but it all starts to feel unwieldy.’ When I chanced another look at Aneesa she was frowning, turning over who else might be responsible, I thought.
The list of people connected to both Frederick Coyle and Geoff Short wasn’t a long one, and her name was on it. Freddie Coyle preferred men, but for all I knew she might have had a pre-existing affair with Short. She might even have sent the notes out of loyalty to Natasha, but that felt like a leap. From what I’d seen, Natasha Reeve treated Aneesa no more warmly than she treated me.
‘You don’t mind, do you?’ said Aneesa, breaking into my thoughts.
She was holding up a cigarette.
‘No, go ahead. The vaping didn’t work out, then?’
‘I don’t know where I left it – my mind’s all over the place.’
She lit up and took a drag. It was the first time she’d looked relaxed since I’d met her.
The house was a large, detached property with bay windows and a herringbone wood door. A long driveway wound through the garden, which was brilliant green under the sunlight, looking sharp and well loved, considering its owner was out of the country. There was a cream-coloured Lexus beside the house, and a messy handyman van next to that.
‘Is the car Anthony’s?’
Aneesa frowned. ‘I don’t think so.’
There were voices coming from the hallway, the sound of a portable radio and the smell of paint. I knocked lightly and pushed it open. A man on his knees with a paint roller looked up at me with a questioning face.
‘Hi, we’re looking for the owner …’
‘Mrs Hardy,’ he shouted over his shoulder.
A woman stuck her head round the corner and, seeing us, walked down the hallway.
‘Can I help?’ she said, leaning comfortably into the frame.
‘I’m Detective Constable Aidan Waits, we’re looking for Anthony Blick …’
‘Anthony Blick?’
‘I believe he owns the house …’
She was already shaking her head.
‘Excuse me,’ said Aneesa, incredulously. ‘I had Christmas dinner with him here …’
The woman looked between us with a smile. ‘And he sold it to me in January.’
6
According to the rest of his office, no one had been in contact with Anthony Blick since Aneesa, over a week ago, and no one had seen him since he left for his trip, six months before. I didn’t raise the fact that the timing coincided with the breakdown of Natasha and Freddie’s marriage, the vicious, anonymous notes, but it played on my mind.
By the time we got back to the firm it was last thing on a Friday afternoon, and the small team were already filing out for pre-weekend drinks. We went to the office. Trawled through Anthony Blick’s address book for a half-brother Aneesa vaguely remembered. When we got him on the phone he claimed they’d fallen out years before and not spoken since. Aneesa got up from the desk abruptly and started for her own office.
‘Facebook,’ she said. ‘He’s been all over it.’ She logged on to her own computer and sent several messages in quick succession, none of which were acknowledged or answered. We were both staring at the screen, at a loss, when it refreshed.
A new picture was posted to his account.
It was similar in style to the one Freddie Coyle had shown me when I’d first interviewed him. Similar in style to the one I’d seen when casually searching for Blick’s page the previous night. It was Anthony Blick, a large, red-faced man, with his shirt wide open, and his arm around a young Thai woman. Aneesa and I looked at each other in confusion, and I checked the time.
It was 6 p.m. exactly.
‘Scroll back,’ I said. ‘I want to see what time the others were posted.’
The previous picture, showing Blick with a street vendor, had been posted at 6 p.m. the day before. The one before that, showing Blick stood by a body of water, was posted at 6 p.m. the day before that. Blick at a restaurant: 6 p.m. Hotel lobby: 6 p.m. Roof terrace: 6 p.m.
‘Oh, fuck,’ Aneesa said. ‘They’re auto-posting.’
Aneesa had officially reported Anthony Blick missing, and I’d called Natasha Reeve and Freddie Coyle to tell them the news. I also wanted to know when each of them had spoken to him last. Both had supported his decision to take some time out in the wake of his health scare the previous year, and apparently neither had anything but email contact with him since.
My next job was to begin tracing his movements. Phone, bank and flight records. Mobile information was simplest. The rest would take time. As a precautionary measure, and with Aneesa’s consent, I asked SOCO to attempt the collection of DNA from Blick’s office. He’d seemingly walked out on his life with some level of premeditation, and I wondered if he was tied into the smiling man’s murder. The real revelation came when I viewed his mobile data.
Anthony Blick’s phone had never left the city.
Anthony Blick’s phone had been switched off since the day he’d been due to leave for Thailand.
I was trying to come to some kind of conclusion on this when my own phone started to vibrate.
It was Sian.
It had been a long day, and the last time we spoke she’d been angry with me. That wasn’t the real reason I hesitated, though. The photographs that Ricky found had kept me awake for hours after my last shift, then when I’d finally close
d the curtains on the morning sun, finally closed my eyes, someone buzzed for my flat. There was no one at the door when I went, cautiously, down the stairs, but someone continued to buzz it, at irregular intervals, until I gave up on sleep, showered, and left. Knowing that Bateman was the man behind my harassment only made things worse. He could have gone back to the bar. He could have shown Sian the pictures of me, and she could have come to the same conclusions Ricky had.
That I was using drugs again.
‘Beat me up as well?’ Ricky had said. ‘I told you, Sian tells me everything.’
I thought of the final night we’d spent together. We hadn’t talked about my newly emerging sleep troubles. The night terrors that left me exhausted by morning, and left her cautious around me, afraid, I thought. I’d started spending more time away, more nights, making poor excuses for why I couldn’t meet her at the end of a shift and why I couldn’t spend a day off in her company. After some weeks of this, she’d arrived on my doorstep one night with a bag of shopping and a smile. She’d kissed me on the cheek and walked inside like there was nothing wrong between us, and I got some idea of what I must mean to her. I remember standing in the doorway, watching her go inside, and getting some idea of what she meant to me. We fell back into our old routine that night, laughing about her regulars, worrying and wondering about mine. Finishing the bottle and then going to bed.
That night I dreamt of a family of four, driving out to a house in the middle of nowhere. I dreamt of a terrifying slender man and a woman with a wide-open throat.
I woke up to the sound of a gunshot.
When I did, I was at the foot of the bed. My head was in Sian’s lap and she was talking quietly, telling me it was OK. The room was a mess and my first thought was that an earthquake had hit the building. Then I saw the marks on my hands. Broken nails, cuts and bruises. I got up, unsteadily, and looked about. The curtains had been ripped off the wall, a lampshade had been smashed. There was a crack in the window.
I’d gone into the bathroom.
Watched my face warp and alter in the glass, and thought I was going to be sick. I opened the toilet, saw bloody tissues inside it and tried to think. Sian was straightening up when I went back into the bedroom. She smiled at me and I noticed that her hair was down.
She never wore her hair down.
What a time to start thinking like a detective. I asked about it and she tried to walk around me. When I took a step closer, she took a step back. I pinned her up against the wall and moved her hair while she fought me off. There was a large plaster on the side of her face, covering a cut or a bruise.
I took a step back. My ears were ringing. ‘Was that me?’
‘It’s OK …’
But I felt sick. I was walking out, getting dressed, going for the door.
‘Aid,’ she said. ‘Aidan—’
‘I want you gone when I get back.’
I’d said it without turning around.
I came, slowly, back to the present. The phone had almost vibrated off the table when I picked it up.
‘Aid,’ she said. ‘Aidan …’
‘Sian.’
‘He’s here again. That guy who was asking about you.’
7
My sister had a chubby face, intelligent, heart-wrenching blue eyes and a perpetual thinker’s frown. Some of my earliest memories are of warming my hands on her head, which always seemed to be hot with thought or feeling. Too hot with thought and feeling for a five-year-old girl, but I only realized later that she was a preoccupied, sickly child. Malnourished and so scared of our mother that it could make her physically sick. To me she was simply my sister and to me this was simply our life.
I learned more about her from the reactions of others. The children in new schools, laughing because she wore her brother’s hand-me-downs. Concerned adults, bending or crouching down to her height, quietly asking me how much sleep she got. The bags under her eyes looked like bruises. If questions persisted we’d stop going to school. We’d move house in the middle of the night, carrying our things in bin bags. Occasionally we stayed with friends, with friends of friends. Occasionally we stayed with strange, new men.
I was my mother’s son. A hiding place within myself and a born liar, immune to new people and desensitized to our surroundings. But Annie was a human being. A musical child capable of thought and feeling. Around the houses, the various flats and homes, she was always humming or tapping out anxieties. Singing lovely, sad little songs of her own invention. I see now that it was her acknowledgement of our environment, its undeniable cause and effect, that so incensed our mother. I was older and she’d grown used to me, my numbness. My ability to dissolve in and out of rooms or situations.
Annie, on the other hand, couldn’t hide her thoughts and feelings. She burned them out in fevers, turned them over all night in her head, until they were as plain to see as the frown on her face, the bags under her eyes. So our mother started to leave the room whenever Annie sang nervously to herself. She started to leave the house, locking us inside. Sometimes she’d be gone for an hour, sometimes she’d come back the next day, dancing through the front door all glass-eyed, still wearing her going-out clothes from the night before. This became normal, with the periods lengthening each time, until finally she didn’t come back. We were locked inside, and we ran out of food on the second day. On the third, when Annie was too tired even to sing or tap, I dialled 999, dizzy with hunger, knowing on some level that it would make things worse. I don’t remember who came for us or how they got inside. I remember being sent to a home with hard, damaged children for one week, before being released back into our mother’s care.
She collected us wordlessly and never spoke of it again.
When we returned home I saw where the door had been kicked in to get us out. Deprived of her coping mechanism for the outward expression of her daughter’s despair, our mother simply found a new one. And so my sister became accident-prone. At first, these accidents were minor. A fall, resulting in a bruise, a cut or scrape. Soon she started to really hurt herself. Broken fingers and toes. I didn’t realize for some time that our mother was responsible. When I did I became inseparable from my sister, temporarily solving one problem and unknowingly sowing the seeds for something worse. One day we came home from school to the smell of cigarettes.
One day Bateman arrived.
We never knew him by any other name, and at first his presence, his antipathy towards children, brought more stability into our lives. He didn’t want us around the house so we attended school more regularly. On weekends, if he was there, we’d be sent outside until it started to go dark. It was impossible to avoid him at all times, though. He was an enormous man with dirty, invasive eyes that could always see the worst things you were thinking, and he projected his anger at whatever happened to be in front of him. Sometimes that was our mother. Sometimes that was me. To his credit, he came to my sister last.
As Bateman segued from verbal to physical abuse, so I began to segue from reality into the rising. A haze of sunspots would wash in front of my eyes. My mouth would start to water and I’d lift out of my body. I’d drift up to the ceiling and ignore the six-foot-two man slapping, pushing down and hitting an eight-year-old boy. I’d watch my little sister instead, crouched down facing the wall with her hands over her ears. At first this was agreeable to Bateman, an uncomplaining human punchbag, but where my detachment from events had suited our mother, it didn’t truly suit him.
Bateman had no internal life.
Outside of cruelty he ceased to exist, and he became agitated when he couldn’t see the effect he was having on things. The rising, my passivity, became my only form of defence against him. So when he made lewd comments to my mother, I wasn’t there. When he verbally threatened me, I wasn’t there. When he physically assaulted me, I wasn’t there.
But one day he noticed my head turn, sharply, when he took a step towards my sister, and from there began his experiment in making me react. She was smaller than
me, small for her age, and I never saw him hit or sexually abuse her. He was more interested in fear, and in terrorizing Annie he got two for the price of one. My sudden, futile, pleading anger and my sister’s wide-eyed, thoughtful, comprehending terror. Sometimes he’d tell her how stupid or ugly she was. Sometimes he’d put cigarettes out on her arms and call her names. The constant smell of tobacco burning about his person just fed the perception that something smouldered inside him. A kind of fire, generated out of spite, kept alive by constant chain-smoking, and witnessed occasionally through his eyes.
With our fear secured we settled into a dysfunctional family unit, with Bateman at our head. He stayed with my mother because we represented new opportunities to a conman. He’d have me approach remote homes with sob stories. Telling them I was lost, training me to steal whatever I could see while I was inside. He had me crawl into people’s homes at night. Just to see if it was possible at first, graduating to theft and even home invasions, where I’d unlock the front door, let him in and sit down while I heard the elderly people he targeted plead with him not to hurt their partners. We sat outside chemists and department stores at 3 a.m. and then he’d feed my body through high windows or skylights. When it became useful for me to pick locks, he taught me that too.
The night he and my mother woke us, took us downstairs to a car we’d never seen before and drove us out to the middle of nowhere was the last time I saw him. Annie and I were taken into care and separated shortly afterwards. She was successfully placed with a new family, and after that I never saw her again, either.
Bateman had re-entered my life before, but until now only in the vivid nightmares that made me a lifelong insomniac. He was the archetype, the logical conclusion, of every bully and every abuser I’d ever met since. When I think of him now, I feel a limitless, cold hate. He’d been crippled by a gunshot and sent to prison for the rest of his life where, if my childhood wishes came true, he’d die shrivelled up like a cold scrotum. But, as Sutty always says, you can wish in one hand and shit in the other. Only one of them ever fills up.