Choose Your Parents Wisely (Joe Grabarz Book 2)

by Tom Trott

  In the corridors I passed a couple of staff who nodded to me and gave barely audible ‘Hi’s. The lanyard was working well; to teachers I was some office worker or PE coach, and to office workers I was some teacher or PE coach. What I was to PE coaches I couldn’t say.

  There were no children anywhere to be seen. I assumed today was that odd day after the kids finish when there are meetings and goodbyes and work to be done, when everybody is trying to judge how early is too early to leave. It amused me to think that all of us might be private detectives or journalists, wandering the halls, eavesdropping on each other; the school itself might be entirely deserted.

  The staffroom was empty too. One whole wall was covered in pigeon holes and I used the time to search for any names I recognised, any yet undrawn connections between the school and the rest of the Tothovas’ lives. There weren’t any. After that I decided to buy a twenty pence coffee from a machine that buzzed, and coughed and spluttered it out into a flimsy plastic cup that made it feel like I was holding the hot coffee itself, before taking a seat. Someone had to come in at some point. Something had to happen.

  The next twenty minutes tested that theory pretty severely. It was nothing but me and the shit coffee and the ticking clock that mocked my patience. As a child I had always imagined what the staffroom looked like, the one place you could never go. I had never imagined it so boring. Noticeboards. Plants. NUT posters. A discarded filter coffee pot. Big group staff photos from the last few years. I didn’t recognise anyone.

  Instead I imagined what my life would be like if I had been one of these teachers; would I be the passionate kind, or one of those who takes it because it’s there and they give you a good starting salary and loads of holidays? I thought I knew the answer to that.

  I picked up a newspaper from the coffee table in front of me. It was a broadsheet, and it was just nice to read a front page that didn’t feature Joy Tothova for once. Sadly it seemed from the front page like the world was falling apart outside the Brighton bubble. Terrorism. Shootings. Brexit. Donald Trump. If we really made an effort, this year could be our chance to make the world significantly worse.

  The door opened with a raucous laugh and I clung onto the paper in an attempt to look occupied.

  ‘That was an interesting goodbye speech,’ a young, slightly too posh, man’s voice remarked.

  ‘Was it?’ a shrill female voice asked, ‘I’m surprised so many people clapped.’

  ‘Yes, I wonder why that was,’ he replied suggestively, as a coffee began to spurt into a cup.

  ‘John will be happy.’

  ‘No, he’s not getting the job,’ came the hushed reply, ‘haven’t you heard?’

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘Matt Newton’s getting it.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, and we all know why, don’t we.’

  ‘Do we?’ she asked. I thought the same.

  ‘Let’s just say that he does give Allyson a lift home every day.’

  ‘Does he?’

  I had very little idea what any of this meant but this man seemed to know the school gossip, so I listened until the woman decided that she did, after all, have work to do. To my immense luck he took a seat opposite me and I looked up from pretending to read the newspaper.

  I recognised him from somewhere. And what’s more, he recognised me.

  ‘Hello again,’ he said calmly, smiling with one half of his face.

  Late twenties. Floppy black hair. Thick eyebrows. White shirt. Designer jeans. Shiny black shoes. Work brain, work!

  ‘Tam.’

  ‘Tab,’ he corrected me. Close enough.

  It was that posh twat from the curry night. ‘How are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Great thanks, John. If that is your real name.’

  ‘It isn’t.’

  His eyes had already glazed over with disinterest. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Sniffing around.’

  ‘I see. Do you work for the paper or freelance?’ he asked, thinking he was clever.

  ‘Neither, I’m not a journalist.’

  ‘Oh really. Just another concerned citizen.’

  ‘No, I’m a detective. But I admit I do do it freelance.’

  His eyes darted up, at me, there was something different in them now: interest.

  ‘You work here?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Teaching.’ He said it like it was obvious, like this was some kind of school.

  ‘You don’t have a pigeon hole.’

  ‘Not yet. I’m training.’

  ‘I see.’

  Whilst I glanced away he reached up and undid one top button, revealing a little more pink skin. ‘The school won’t be very happy to find a detective in the staffroom. Even one as beautiful as you.’

  ‘Who’s going to tell them?’

  He smiled. It certainly wasn’t going to be him.

  ‘You know Joy is a pupil here?’

  ‘I do know that.’

  ‘That makes you someone interesting to talk to.’

  His blue eyes studied me. ‘Now I know what someone has to do to be interesting to you.’

  Gone was the gormless charity worker. The ‘Oh really?’, he was a different person. He was Mercury. And it wasn’t interest in those eyes, it was attraction.

  ‘We should go for a drink sometime.’

  ‘How about tonight?’ he asked.

  ‘How about right now?’

  A nervous smile danced across his lips. ‘Right now?’

  I nodded.

  He thought for another moment, then it was ‘Ok,’ and he picked his jacket off the chair.

  ‘They’re such a perfect family,’ he said into his gin & tonic. He had asked for it with a slice of orange instead of lemon or lime. It was about the most interesting thing he had said so far.

  We were in the nearest pub, just two roads from the school. No doubt this place would be swarmed with the rest of them come three o’clock, all toasting to the long summer, and the hope they were never coming back. At the moment it was scattered with a few of those afternoon drunks who fall asleep and sometimes never wake up.

  ‘They’re such a perfect family,’ he said again, ‘they remind me of mine.’

  I took a sip of the bright green Gimlet I had ordered. I had to insist on it made the proper way: half and half.

  He kept going: ‘Father, mother, and beautiful child. And me for good measure. My nan’s the only one who ever loved me.’ He offered me a boiled sweet, I turned it down.

  Yeah, I felt like saying, I’m sure your childhood was really tough, posh boy.

  ‘My sister was just like Joy. Just as innocent.’

  His arm came to rest on my knee. I didn’t know if it was a crash landing or a deliberate stopover. I let it sit there, this was the new me, the calm me; but I knew I had tried a similar technique myself and if it attempted to taxi anywhere else then I would give him the same slap they gave me. The difference was that I was drunk when I tried it. If I hadn’t bought him his only drink I’d think he was drunk now.

  ‘Can you think of anyone that would want to hurt her?’ I asked.

  ‘My sister?’

  ‘Joy.’

  He scoffed. ‘Isn’t that why everyone is so upset? No one can think of a reason.’ He was staring into the drink, into the bubbles, and the ice. ‘But something being perfect can be reason enough to want to destroy it, can’t it? Ever seen a beautiful painting and wanted to rip it to shreds? Ever seen a matchstick model standing so brilliantly tall that you want to trash it? Ever seen a kitten so cute you want to squeeze it until it bursts?’ His fingers gripped my knee.

  ‘I can’t say that I have.’

  ‘That’s not true.’ His hand flew up from my knee to express his point dramatically. ‘Everyone gets jealous. Everyone loves to break things. It’s nature. Look at a toddler, if you build something they’ll knock it down. Laughing.’

  ‘They knock it down be
cause they get attention.’

  ‘Yeah well, we know where everyone’s attention is now, don’t we?’ His hands were back on his drink.

  ‘Sounds like your childhood might have fucked you up even worse than mine.’

  ‘Your childhood? I bet it was terribly tragic, wasn’t it? What was it like?’

  I couldn’t help smiling. ‘Short.’

  Tab looked at his watch, ‘The others are going to be here in a minute. One of us had better leave.’

  ‘I’ll do the honours.’

  ‘Before you do…’ He grabbed my arm. Something I did not like. ‘…I don’t know if this is important, but the police are looking for a van, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Chris, in the site team, he has a van. It doesn’t belong to the school, and he doesn’t normally drive it to work, but I’ve seen him park it at the school a couple of times in the holidays. I just thought… he would have seen her.’

  I asked him what he looked like. He told me.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘I’ll check it out,’ as I peeled him off me.

  I waited at the top of the school road. I had checked, and there wasn’t another sensible way out. I heard the high-pitched buzzing of a moped down below and then one zipped past me. As much as they can zip.

  I got a quick glimpse of the rider: tall, lanky, white guy, wispy beard and checked shirt. That was him all right. Tab had described him to a T.

  I followed as gently as possible on my Honda. It was quite an effort to stay a distance from him, my bike being so ridiculously overpowered compared to his. He headed up Preston Drove to the Fiveways, and over the other side, then left along Stanmer Villas just before The Dip. And finally, a minute later he headed onto Golf Drive.

  I pulled over to the kerb. Golf Drive is a dead end, and too deserted for him not to spot me following. If he didn’t live there then he only had one good reason: Roedale Valley Allotments. I got off my bike, and wandered up the road.

  Golf Drive has four weird terraced house-sized buildings just on one side, split into flats, and then nothing. I couldn’t see his moped in front of any of them, so I headed for the nothing. I say nothing, there’s a small car park at the end next to a recycling point.

  The car park looks out over, and leads to, acres of allotments. They stretch up out of sight, all the way to Hollingbury Golf Course. They looked empty, but I assumed that there must be some odd people hidden amongst the rows of crops, beds, ramshackle sheds, and grimy greenhouses.

  In the car park, again, there was no moped. But there was something else: a van. A white van. A Ford Transit. But a white one. It also looked far too old for the description. It looked like the type that used to ram raid shops. I half expected men with stockings on their heads to come pouring out. It was the wrong damn age and the wrong damn colour, but incongruous enough that I wanted to stay out of sight.

  It was parked up against the furthest of the car park’s only two lamp posts. The back doors were open, but before I could move to an angle where I could see inside, the lanky, wispy-bearded man in a checked shirt and now a baseball cap, stepped out of the back and shut them.

  I knelt in the bushes by the side of the road, and waited. He was taking a very cautious look around. He didn’t see me. He didn’t see anyone.

  He put the keys in his pocket and marched quietly down the path, through the open gates, and into the allotments. I waited five minutes, he didn’t return. I wanted to wait ten, but I was too impatient. It was white. I stepped out of the bushes and into the car park, trying to move to a position where I could see into the allotments. It was no good, they were too overgrown, too full of bamboo sticks and polytunnels to see anything.

  I orbited the van, it was in bad condition. Rusty. Dented. More orange than white up close. And longer than the normal model. There was nothing interesting in the front that I could see through the windows. I noted down the number plate, then I tried the back door. It was locked. A new lock. And I couldn’t pick the laser cut type.

  I circled round to the other side and almost tripped over something: rubber trunking. The type designed to stop you tripping. The type they use to cover cables when they run across the floor in an office. Or a school. I kicked it over. It was covering a wire that ran from under the van, along the metre of tarmac, and into the base of the lamp post.

  The clever bastard, he was powering something inside the van by sharing the power fed to the lamp post. In fact, he had probably diverted the power entirely, that way the van would be hidden in the darkness at night, avoided, and no one would spot what he was doing. What was he doing? The thought gave me shivers. And then I realised quite how quiet it was around here. Just the birds and the wind. No civilization.

  The car park was full of other silent vans, and even more silent caravans with ratty net curtains hiding the inside, as though anyone would dare look. Were they abandoned, just kept here in this free car park, or were they all used for nefarious purposes? The two dwellings, I refuse to call them houses, a few metres from the car park were much the same. Wooden construction, single floor, like a holiday cabin. But with the same ratty curtains drawn; rusting, rotting children’s garden toys, and dead plants everywhere. As though a sickness in the cabin leeched the life from the soil.

  I took out my penknife and peeled a chunk of paint off the van. It was pretty much rust underneath, but what wasn’t rust was blue.

  I headed through the gates into the allotments. The little shop and tea shed were closed. Empty. I couldn’t see anyone around. The path ran along the bottom of the valley, and the holdings rose up on each side. They looked pretty large, a couple of hundred square metres each.

  I headed up the path, peering at each plot as best as I could. I passed tidy ones with neat rows of vegetables and strawberries, climbers like runner beans and raspberries. I passed a lot of untidy ones, with half broken greenhouses full of rubbish and rubble. Weedy, over grown, grassy plots; and neat, prim lawns.

  Halfway up the path I hadn’t spotted him, and I was beginning to worry that he was in one of the dark sheds that I couldn’t see into. Or that he had ridden his moped up out the other end and onto the golf course.

  It was hot again. Too damn hot. I stood for five minutes under the only tree I could find just to get some shade. Then I passed a communal tap with a leaky pipe that was spraying water onto the grass. I caught some of the spray on my hand and rubbed it on the back of my neck. It was good. So good I had to do it again.

  Three quarters of the way up, I spotted his moped parked outside a smart looking, recently woodstained shed. He didn’t come out until I had been standing there for three minutes, looking as imposing as I ever have. He was carrying a cutting of some kind and almost dropped it when he saw me.

  ‘Chris Corpe?’

  He swallowed a comical gulp. He was very skinny, pale, and his beard was the thin, almost spray-on type that only very young men or very old women can grow. The former in this case. He was weedy. I had absolutely nothing to worry about.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked feebly.

  ‘Show me what’s in the van, Chris.’

  He swallowed again, and sort of pretended to relax. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘The one you have wired up to the lamp post.’

  He twitched slightly, ready to bolt. ‘Are you the police?’

  ‘I am so much worse. And if you don’t show me what’s in that van then you’ll find out how.’

  Two-hundred metres later, his hand was shaking as he unlocked the back. It swang open with a rusty screech.

  There was no one inside. No little girl. What there was, was dirt. Soil, I mean. And plants. Two rows, under strip lights. Sodding marijuana.

  I just walked off, I didn’t even say anything.

  ‘Hey, dude!’ he shouted, ‘we’re ok, right?’

  I didn’t reply, I just kept walking.

  Another sodding day wasted. This was beginning to feel like the Mahnoor Jilani case: no clu
es, no trace, no motive. Nothing. Surely this thing couldn’t run for months. Not again. What did I do that time? I had tried to forget.

  10

  Nice Ideas

  people always want to know. I can see it in their eyes. It irritated me, but at least he had the balls to actually ask. I had a rehearsed answer. He wouldn’t like it of course, people always thought it was flippant. But for me, it was the truth.

  When I had left Daye’s office I had been full of optimism, full of purpose. All I had to do was prove that Tariq Jilani had a second bank account and things would begin to unravel, or fall into place, or whatever metaphor you want to use. But just in crossing the road it drained out of me like someone had turned on a tap. I couldn’t face it. Not that shitty caravan. Not Debra’s cold dinner under rain-covered foil left on the plastic step.

  I stopped into The Jurys Out and took a spot at the bar, ordering whatever was on the tap in front of me. I figured the expenses the mothers were covering must include beer money. It was a human right. I was far less sophisticated in those days; I wasn’t the cocktail drinker I am now. I was a beer drinker, and not the posh craft stuff, that wasn’t even a thing yet. Not even real ale, just beer. The cheap stuff too. I drank it like water.

  I lit a cigarette, I had had enough fresh air already, and started to mope. A few people frowned at me lighting up, half of them were likely policemen, but there was nothing they could do. The ban was on its way, but it wasn’t here yet.

  I felt sorry for myself, wondering how I was ever going to prove a second bank account. Picturing a whole load of hard work in front of me. It wasn’t my style, I was much better at lazing around getting drunk. Today, a second bank account wouldn’t even be a problem. It would be a chore. I was pathetic.

  We were all pathetic. No one in this place was rushing home to a family or lover. We were all drinking, hypnotised by the muted television in the corner, and trying not to think. I saw a man crack an egg into his pint and drink it. I had never seen that before.

  Pints later is when this topknotted, bearded young man drifted in and up to the bar, waving to a couple of red nosed, mac wearing real ale swillers on his way.