We walked up to the church where there was a lot of activity. Filipinos, I assumed, were emerging from the church, dressed in their finest. Shrieking kids were running around, but there were no elderly people, reflecting the fact that these were contract workers and their families. Kamal went to look for the nurse who’d invited him while I watched people putting the final touches to the stalls of bring-and-buy foodstuffs set up in the churchyard. A hog roast was already being sliced, the aroma of which made my mouth water. I removed Aurora’s photo from my pocket and had a surreptitious look at it. I studied the people sitting behind the stalls. There was some English being spoken but also a language I didn’t recognise, with a sprinkling of English words thrown in. I realised that I was attracting a little attention since I was one of the few non-Filipinos on my own. It wasn’t unpleasant scrutiny, simply a sort of “I wonder who he is here with?” type of curiosity. Trying to find Aurora (assuming she was here) from a photocopy of an old passport was going to be difficult.
Kamal appeared at my elbow.
“Any luck?” he asked.
“It’s going to be impossible, based on the photocopy.”
“Maybe we should try a more direct approach.”
“What do you mean?” Before he could answer, a short, plump woman with black hair and large glasses appeared at his side. She smiled, friendly, as he introduced me. Her name was Dolores.
“George is looking for someone, a woman,” Kamal told her.
Dolores laughed. “A bride, perhaps? There are many women here looking for a husband.”
“No,” I said, thinking it best to intervene. I took out the photocopy and handed it to her, shooting Kamal a withering look for blindsiding me. Still smiling, she lifted her glasses to look at it, promptly losing the smile.
“What do you want with her?” she asked, suddenly wary.
Kamal made to speak but I put a hand on his arm.
“Her employer wants to speak to her. That’s all.”
“Are you the police?”
“No, he’s not the police, he’s a friend,” Kamal said.
“I’m a private investigator,” I said, taking out a business card and swapping it for the photocopy. “I just want to speak to Aurora.”
“You work for those horrible people?” Dolores asked. Her voice had risen an octave and a few people stopped to listen.
“Is she here?” I asked.
“What do you want with her?” Dolores said. “You know, she should go to the police and report them.” A small crowd had now gathered. I tugged at Kamal’s sleeve and nodded towards the churchyard gate.
“Please just give her my card. She can call me, just to talk.” We turned towards the exit but found ourselves blocked by a group of Filipino basketball players. They were hot and sweaty and must have walked up from the leisure centre down the road where they’d been playing. One of them, holding the basketball, pushed it against my chest. I put my hands on it so we were both holding it and took a step back to remove it from my chest. I didn’t push back, just held the ball there and held his gaze, smiling, simpleton-like. I could feel Kamal clenching beside me. Realising that we looked silly, both holding the ball mid-air, he snatched it away and tucked it under his arm. I stood with my hands beside my sides, trying to appear non-threatening.
“What do you guys want?” he asked, looking at me.
“Nothing. We’re just leaving.”
He spoke to Dolores in the same language I’d heard being spoken and she replied at length, the word “passport” thrown in.
“Tagalog,” Kamal said in my ear.
“What?”
“It’s what they’re speaking.” Basketball guy glared at Kamal then turned back to me.
“What’s your business with Aurora?” he asked.
“I just want to talk to her, that’s all.”
He gestured at Dolores. “She says you have Aurora’s passport.”
“I don’t. It’s just a photocopy.” I took it out and showed him.
“So you have the original?”
“No, her employer gave this to me.” The woman spoke to him and there was some back and forth. She was trying to convince him of something. He nodded to her and she disappeared.
“Let’s move, we’re making a scene here,” he said to me, his tone a little more conciliatory. He dismissed his mates and we walked over to the wall of the churchyard.
“Go mingle and let me do my job,” I told Kamal. “Before you start any more fires.”
He raised his hands, muttering, “OK. OK.”
As he wandered off I could see Dolores approaching with someone small enough to be a teenage girl in tow. I recognised the face – it was Aurora. Up close she looked older than her photo, and her dark hair was longer, but it was her, in a floral dress and nice shoes, dressed for church. A head shorter than me, she looked up at me guardedly as I offered my hand. She ignored it.
“They are here?” she asked in a high-pitched voice, looking warily to the road. She was worried, I could tell that much.
“Who?”
“Mr Bill and Mrs Kristina.”
“No, they don’t know I’m here.” She relaxed a little and spoke to Dolores and basketball guy in Tagalog. They nodded.
“I’ll be over there,” basketball guy said to me, in an I’ll-be-watching-you tone and made his way with Dolores towards the hog roast, bouncing his ball. Aurora gestured to a bench and we sat, watching the kids running around in circles together, temporarily free from adult control. She sat with her hands tucked between her thighs.
“They’re protective of you, I see,” I said to her.
She shook her head, not understanding.
“They look out for you.”
“Yes.”
“That’s good.”
She looked at me, surprised, and nodded. “They pay you to find me?”
“Yes. They’re worried,” I said, although I wasn’t sure to what extent.
“And if I don’t want them to find me?”
She wouldn’t be the first person to say that. Often people don’t want to be found, and I deal with the situation as circumstances present. Sometimes all that is needed by those hiring me is reassurance that the person they are seeking is OK. Sometimes they want something more. Certainly I wouldn’t put anyone in a situation they didn’t want to be in, especially when women were running from men.
“Well, I have found you, so it’s a matter of what happens now.”
“What happens now?”
I contemplated the busy scene, especially the hog roast, which I could smell from where we were sitting.
“That’s up to us, you and me, to decide.” She took a long breath and let it out slowly. She still wasn’t sure she could trust me.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“George. George Kocharyan.” I produced another card and gave it to her.
“What she want, Mrs Kristina?”
“He wants his briefcase. I haven’t spoken to her yet.”
She didn’t look at me but studied the card, flipping it over in case it provided information regarding my intentions.
“What about the briefcase?” I asked. “He says it has medical notes in it.”
She shrugged.
“Why did you take it, Aurora?” She wrinkled her small nose. Basketball guy, clutching a hog-roast roll, nodded a question at her and she nodded at him. She turned to me for the first time.
“I can give it, but I want something.”
“This isn’t a negotiation, Aurora. You stole the briefcase.”
She flinched. “My passport,” she said.
“What about it? You mean you left it there?”
She sighed, perhaps with exasperation.
“Why not just go back and get it?”
“They have it. They keep it since I come here.”
“You mean they’ve kept it from you?”
She rolled her eyes as if I was stupid. A faint bell rang in my head regarding domestics
who’d been brought into the country. I would have to get Sandra to look into it.
“I thought passport was in briefcase,” she said.
“But it wasn’t?”
She shrugged. “Need numbers to open.” I assumed she meant a code. Did people still go around with locked briefcases? Maybe if they contained confidential patient information they did.
“You haven’t forced it open?” I made a motion of pulling something apart with my hands.
She looked shocked. “No. I don’t break it.” She wrung her hands together, her knuckles white. “So, you ask them for my passport?”
“I can ask them about it. I’m seeing them tomorrow afternoon. Mrs Galbraith is away until then.”
“She often away.”
“On business?”
She snorted. She stood up, straightening her dress. I stood up too but wish I hadn’t because I towered over her.
“If I take the briefcase back to Mr Galbraith, Aurora, I can ask for your passport.”
She shook her head vigorously, saying, “They give passport, I give case.” She held up my card. “I call you. After you talk with them.” I didn’t push it. I stuck out my hand and this time she took it, but without much enthusiasm. It was like shaking hands with a child. She disappeared into the crowd and Kamal appeared from the same direction clutching a half-eaten hog-roast roll. We went to find our bicycles as he stuffed his face.
“Sorry about messing that up,” he said, mouth full of pig. “But I got carried away with the excitement.”
“It’s not a game, Kamal, it’s my job.” He looked genuinely remorseful. “But, as it happens,” I conceded, grudgingly, “it turned out OK.” We unlocked our bikes.
“Dolores told me that Aurora came to Outpatients a few weeks ago,” Kamal said, as I struggled with the lock.
“What for?”
“I didn’t ask that, of course, but she did say that they’d had a brief chat. Then Aurora turned up at the clinic out of the blue this Monday saying Dolores was the only person in Cambridge who she could turn to. She said Aurora had walked all the way from Fulbourn.” As I cycled home I wondered how much truth Aurora was telling, and indeed how much Bill Galbraith was. People lie to me all the time. All the fucking time.
8
AFTER A DULL BUT NECESSARY MORNING OF PAPERWORK I picked up my car from Densley’s that afternoon. His bill, even after fifteen minutes of back and forth, was eye-watering, and ate into my small reserves. So as I headed out to Fulbourn I hoped that I could draw out the case a bit longer and not have this meeting be the end of it. That’s how you think when you’re self-employed.
Fulbourn is just a few minutes’ drive east of the city. I drove past Fulbourn Hospital, once a Victorian lunatic asylum, later a mental health facility. After a lot of its inhabitants had been released into the community, most of the grounds were turned into a business park and admin offices for the health authority. It’s true that places like that had their problems but one of their functions was to be somewhere people could seek refuge from a society that couldn’t cope with them – somewhere they could be themselves without judgement.
Once on the right road in Fulbourn I drove slowly and passed a pub, the Weasel and Stoat, with a garden busy with drinkers. A hundred yards beyond it I pulled up outside a black metal gate in a modern design on which was fixed a slate sign proclaiming it to be the entrance to The Willows. I turned around and drove to the pub where I parked in the car park. I walked back to the gate and a small camera eyed me from its perch above a metal keypad, buzzer and speaker grill. I pressed the buzzer. Beyond the gate I saw a short drive leading up towards a contemporary-looking house obscured by some large trees. Willows, I presumed. A crackly voice I recognised emerged from the metal grill.
“Come in, Mr Kocharyan.” The gate started to slide open. I stepped through the widening gap and it immediately started to close behind me. I walked up the drive to see a flat, architect-designed house on two levels, the upper level jutting out over the first. There was more glass than wall. On the second floor I could see Bill Galbraith standing at a large window. He nodded and pointed beneath him to the front door. He then turned and disappeared. Two cars were parked under a carport, a silver Range Rover with personalised number plate, KR15 TIN, (Bill’s wife’s car presumably) and an orange Porsche 911 with the top down. It was an old model rather than new, and the leather inside was pleasingly cracked and worn, like the armchair I snoozed in when watching rich men play golf. I wasn’t much of a car guy but of the two cars on offer I could see myself sitting in the Porsche; I like to think I have the hair for a convertible.
Instead of swinging open, the wooden front door slid into the wall to reveal Galbraith standing in a very white entrance hall. He greeted me and I stepped onto a white marble floor. Everything was white. Teeth, walls, fittings. Like an operating theatre. He was even dressed in white linen trousers and matching shirt, the only colour a thin blue jumper hanging over his shoulders, the sleeves tied at his chest in a manner only seen in aspirational lifestyle magazines.
“Let’s go up,” he said. “The house is designed upside down to take advantage of the view.”
He wasn’t wrong. Upstairs, from the minimalist open-plan living area the size of a tennis court, the back of the house looked out over a large garden bordering a field which in turn gave onto a woodland area. The floor-to-ceiling glass gave the room a feeling of being exposed to the outside but without the messy inconvenience of nature spoiling things. It was cool, despite the afternoon warmth and windows that looked like they didn’t open. The kitchen and dining area was in one far corner separated by a granite worktop long enough to park the Range Rover behind. A glass table, complete with acrylic chairs, was set against this. In the seating area where we headed a whole wall was given over to a collection of vinyl records. A pair of large white curvaceous floor-standing speakers, sculptures in their own right, stood guard either side of an expensive-looking turntable and amplifiers. I made some noises about the view since he was expecting me to and we sat in squishy white leather armchairs where I could look out at it. He glanced outside and checked his watch.
“Is your wife going to join us?” I asked.
He shifted in his chair. “She’s out running at the moment. I was hoping to catch you first in case we could resolve things before bothering her with it.” He couldn’t help looking outside. I looked too and could see a runner on the horizon, a woman, judging by the bright purple gear.
“Well, I have made some progress,” I said. He turned back to me, looking hopeful.
“And?”
“I’ve found Aurora.” His attention on me was now a hundred per cent.
“So where is she?”
“She’s in Cambridge, you were right about that.”
“Where? Where in Cambridge?”
“I don’t know. But before we get into that there’s something we need to discuss.”
He looked at me distastefully. “Are you after more money?”
I counted backwards from ten. “I’d like to ask about her passport.” His pale face turned the colour of pickled beetroot.
“What? Did you talk to her?”
“Yes.”
“I thought I asked you not to.”
“I hadn’t planned to, but that’s how it happened. She approached me, actually.”
He looked outside again and I followed his gaze. The runner was now along the border of the woodland and field and heading towards us. Definitely a woman, with long dark hair. Galbraith looked anxious.
“Has she got the briefcase?”
“Yes. She says she thought her passport was in it.”
“Has she opened it?”
“She says not. It’s locked, according to her.”
“Did she say anything else?”
“No.”
He held out his arm as a gesture for me to rise and simultaneously looked outside, prompting me to do the same. The runner picked up speed as she approached the waist-high wo
oden fence at the boundary of the garden and hurdled it. She slowed up once in the garden. Her dark hair was tied back but was long enough that it swung from side to side as she ran. She was dressed in running shorts and top, bare-limbed, pale-skinned. As she approached she looked up, saw him and faltered. Galbraith raised his hand but she didn’t respond. I wasn’t sure if she’d seen me as I was seated. He turned to me and I stood up.
“Is that your wife? It would be useful to talk to her.” But he had me by the arm and was leading me quickly to the stairs. A door slammed somewhere as we descended.
“Bill?” She was at the bottom of the stairs, doing stretches. She saw me and stopped.
“I didn’t know we had company.”
“This is Mr Kocharyan,” he told her. Her expression told him this wasn’t quite enough information. “He’s an investigator,” he added, somewhat reluctantly, as we drew level with her. She shot him a look which I couldn’t interpret.
“I didn’t realise you were going ahead with that.” She still had a Russian accent. She appraised me without smiling and I reciprocated. After running most people look like they’ve been sitting for ten years in a sauna – but she didn’t: she looked like she’d been for a stroll. I could see the likeness from the picture Sandra had shown me, but she looked better now, more natural and settled into her face, less brashly pretty. Late forties, I guessed. Dark, long eyelashes leading to black wells for eyes in which the moon seemed to be reflected. Her face broke into a practised smile and she stuck out a hand to let it rest stickily in mine for a second. “I’m Kristina, Bill’s wife. Sorry, I’m a bit sweaty.”
Her teeth were perfect, too perfect, like his. I was made aware of my own dental shortcomings.
She placed a hand against the wall and pulled a foot up behind her to meet a well-formed buttock, studying me all the while.
“And Kocharyan, that’s Armenian?” I nodded. She turned to her husband. “So, you still insist on finding her. I say good riddance to the ungrateful bitch. I told you I don’t care about the pearls.”
The Runaway Maid Page 4