by Tom Trott
The door to the farmhouse opened off the latch with a gentle push. I faced a set of narrow stairs. On a small telephone table was a rotary phone with the zero worn off, a pot of pens, and the cardboard from a notebook. On the shelf underneath were the Yellow Pages and a phonebook. Underneath me was thin, worn green carpet. To the left was a low doorway, not quite level, that lead into a small living room.
The room was quaint inside, but far from clean. It had all the exposed stone walls and wooden beams you could want, and with thin leaded windows that whistled in the breeze. It was packed with blankets and throws in a way that told you it was never warm. There was an open fire, but it wasn’t set up to be used. Instead an electric radiator ticked away in the corner. Around it sat a television, radio, stacks of dirty bowls each with one fork, a pile of laundry, dirty mugs, newspapers, Friday-Ad, empty cans of Carling Black Label, shoes, and a clock chiming one in the morning. All the appearance of life, with nothing personal. No photos.
The kitchen was even smaller, and even less interesting. Every white good was grey, the oven rusted and so old it didn’t even have a window. The chessboard linoleum floor was curling up at the walls. Mouse droppings dotted around the bag-less bin. It was a grimy place for cooking lonely meals. Both rooms were empty of human beings.
In my time as a detective I’ve learnt to walk quietly without doing the full Scooby-Doo, so I moved upstairs in a way that wouldn’t look suspicious if he jumped out of a wardrobe.
There was a bedroom above the living room and a bathroom above the kitchen. The bedroom was piled with throws as well. There were enough layers of blankets on the bed to keep a strong man pinned. There were still no photos, but there were a lot of books. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, they were all there. Even some Beckett. But they were all strewn across the floor, half-read, abandoned, trampled on. He hadn’t found meaning in them. Except the Beckett, they were on the bedside table. He had some Pinter stacked up, ready to read. No Man’s Land was next. He’d enjoy that one.
In the bathroom was a sink with a crack running across the base. It was full of curly golden wires and on the side sat a small pair of scissors: his mad beard had been a whole lot madder. There was a roll top bath with a tide mark less than six inches high. No products except a bar of coal tar soap. I could imagine him standing in the bath, strip-washing. He wasn’t the type for bubbles. Or even lying down.
The man himself was nowhere. He wasn’t in the wardrobe. So I headed back down to the living room and peered out the little windows into the darkness. I saw my own face, eye sockets in shadow. When I strained to look through them all I could see was a bush swaying in the breeze. Where is he? The breeze whistled through the lead, onto my eyeballs. What is he up to?
The quiet was cut by an angry buzz. It sounded like a bee in a shoebox and was coming from under my feet. I looked at them, but they didn’t offer an explanation. Next I heard footsteps, rising up stairs, getting louder, moving across the room, and then he appeared from the cupboard under the stairs. He was holding an espresso in each hand.
He held one out to me without a word. I took it. It was in a clear glass cup, and sitting on a red glass saucer. Both looked clean. I was happy to drink it. That said, it looked like espresso, but it didn’t taste like it. I didn’t know what it was, but it didn’t taste dangerous.
‘What did you think of the store?’ he asked.
‘I don’t really know what to think. It’s probably best if I send a friend round; someone who knows what they’re looking at.’
‘Maybe it’s not such a good idea to sell it.’
‘I can send someone round tomorrow.’
‘Give it a week.’
‘Are you sure, it’s no trouble.’
‘I won’t be here.’
I nodded. Then I finished my drink in three short sips.
‘I’d better call a taxi,’ I announced.
He nodded. ‘You’re better off using the landline, cell coverage round here is patchy.’
‘Cheers.’ I was happy to use the home phone, revealing I had anything less than the latest iPhone would break character, I was playing someone with more money than sense.
I went and made the call. The bastards said it would be forty-five minutes.
‘Help yourself to anything from the kitchen. I’m going to turn in,’ he announced when I told him. He was standing up and stretching. ‘You can let yourself out.’
I nodded. ‘Sweet dreams,’ I added once he had reached the bottom of stairs. He didn’t reply.
I followed his steps up, and into the bedroom. They moved around whilst he got undressed. Then into the bathroom. The bath tap ran for less than a minute. Then back into the bedroom. Then they were gone.
I glided silently toward the cupboard door. It had a new Yale lock. I had left all of my lock picking gear with my bike, back in the car park of The Bull. I had left my penknife, my brass knuckles, my Maglite, everything. But I still had his feeble torch.
I gently slipped out the front door, my thumb over the latch until the last moment. Then I paced the grass around the house, hoping the cellar had some kind of window. Round the back I could see three small arches curving no higher than a foot off the ground. They were barred just tightly enough to keep out even the most determined fox.
I shone the quivering urine-coloured beam down into the darkness. I could only see one detail at a time. Through this keyhole of information I saw stone, old wood, dirt, then an MDF worktable. It was nothing more than a table top with two sides; he had probably built it himself. On it I saw the chrome-effect trim of a push-button coffee machine, then two more glass cups, bigger than the espresso ones. Next to them there were two small gas hobs, and a gas bottle under the table.
I searched the two corners I could see. The one at the bottom of the MDF steps, was empty; and in the other was the clean, white glow of a china basin under a copper tap. On the ground was a camping stretcher, and on it a thick thermal sleeping bag. Next to it was a one bar heater. I couldn’t see the half of the cellar closest to me as I couldn’t get the beam or my head at the right angle, but I had seen enough.
I returned the torch to his pickup and waited by the gate for the taxi. There was no way I was going back inside unarmed. Every now and then I would look back at the bedroom window, but there was nothing to see.
The bloody taxi driver was late by over half an hour. It was almost three in the morning.
‘I had trouble finding the place,’ the old geezer groaned.
Me too.
As we started trundling down the lane I leant over the back, watching the house recede into the darkness. Just then the bedroom light flicked on. He hadn’t been sleeping at all.
14
There Are No Happy Answers
tariq jilani let himself into his family’s pokey Whitehawk flat. He had just got back from a big argument with his boss; he wanted her to pay some of his insurance costs, she told him that was never going to happen. He stomped into the living room, taking off his jacket, and sifting through the junk mail. He separated the pizza flyers and takeaway menus from the credit card offers and other crap that someone had bothered to print his name on. As he went to throw the envelopes onto his armchair, he looked surprised to see me sitting in it. It flashed across his face, but then it was gone. Then he threw the post on the sofa instead, as though I was only just above it in his list of chores.
‘Who are you?’ he asked calmly, the way a chemist asks for your address.
‘I am the angel of justice,’ I told him.
He didn’t look impressed. ‘Whose justice?’
‘Your daughter’s.’
He didn’t move an inch, but everything behind the façade crumbled like a bombed-out factory. I watched his knees unlock, and finally, he sat down onto the sofa, staring at me from behind hollow eyes.
For once I had entered legally. I had arrived in that afternoon window, not too long
after school finishes, when normally Krishma would be looking after Mahnoor. She had been less than pleased to see me; we had agreed Tariq would never know. I lied, telling her I would leave before he got home.
Their flat could be described as two-bedroom. I mean technically. But the rooms themselves were more like cupboards, and the essential pieces of furniture were enough to create submarine-like corridors through which you bent yourself out of shape to move around.
As I squeezed through to the kitchen, I could hear cartoons in the living room. CBBC. It dawned on me I had never really spoken to Krishma, and never even seen Tariq. They were just abstractions. An addendum: every missing girl has to have parents, of course. Now here she was, standing in the kitchen, making me coffee, with the sounds of children’s TV in the background, because those had always been the sounds of four o’clock, and silence would be deafening. This would have triggered enormous sympathy in any other human, but that part of me doesn’t work. I used to wonder if there was something left out when they made me. Not that it did me any harm.
She was even smaller than I remembered, and last time I saw her she was sitting down. She walked with a stoop, which brought her below five foot. Her hair was as long as she was and hung in a plait down her back. Any longer and she could play Rapunzel in panto, except no one was going to climb up and rescue her. She was ungroomed, which is something I have absolutely no problem with; she looked like she was supposed to look; but she didn’t have any of the happiness or beauty that emancipation brings.
Her stoop almost hid the fact she had a black eye.
‘Are you ok?’ I asked.
She ignored the question. ‘Theresa say you not found anything,’ she told me, placing the coffee on the worktop I was leaning against.
‘Mahnoor isn’t her daughter. You deserve to know everything first, then you can decide what Theresa needs to know.’
She didn’t nod, or do anything really.
I continued: ‘The police think your husband is involved.’
‘I know, detective tell me.’
‘Daye?’
‘Yesterday. He smell of cigarettes.’
I nodded. ‘What do you think?’
She stared at me for some time. ‘I know he have second phone. He say is work phone, but he get angry I touch it or move it. Sometime he get message and he go in night. A wife knows. Is she white?’
I wasn’t listening, my attention drawn to a knife block sitting in pride of place by the side of the cooker. It held five different sizes. Four of them were in place. Where the fifth should have been there was just a narrow slot. There was no dishwasher, and I couldn’t see it in the sink or on the side.
‘That knife block, it looks expensive,’ I mentioned offhand. I don’t suppose by anyone else’s standards it was expensive, but it would be for them.
‘My birthday present. Tariq get cheap because knife is lost.’
‘When was your birthday?’
‘September.’
I had dots: the taxi, the phone, the disappearance, and now this. I was here to connect them.
I convinced her she needed to go food shopping this evening, and she needed to take her time doing it. But first I had to ask her:
‘Why did he hit you?’
Her eyes were deep wells, so deep you couldn’t see the bottom. ‘I was crying too loud.’
What a big tough man, I thought. What a big, tough man.
Sitting opposite me, his face was drawn and gaunt, disappearing into shadow around his eyes and in his cheeks. He was just skin on a hat stand. His eyebrows and his beard were turning grey, and the hair on his head had already gone. Radioactive decay. Which has a longer half-life, I wondered: grief, or guilt?
‘You’re one of them,’ he stated.
‘No. I’m unique.’
‘They sent you here.’
‘I was sent by God himself. And he was in a vengeful mood. I will visit his vengeance upon whomever deserves it. If that’s you…’ I let his imagination finish the sentence, ‘If it’s not you, then you want to start talking.’
‘What do you want me to say?’ he asked, his voice not at all aquiver.
‘Last Christmas, you started picking up private fares. You got the address by text to a burner phone that you hid in an envelope, underneath the plastic tray in the centre console of your car.’
His eyes widened.
‘This seems like it was a happy arrangement until three months ago, when your daughter was taken. Are you going to start talking, or do I have to guess the rest?’
He had been growing pale over my last few sentences. This time his voice was aquiver when he asked:
‘Wh-w-wh…’
‘Start from the beginning. Christmas.’
‘I didn’t want an-any of this to happen. I just wanted to look after my family.’
‘Between beatings.’
‘I love my daughter!’ The anger gave him back his strength.
‘Then tell me what happened.’
He seethed.
‘Want to tell me to fuck off? Go ahead, everyone does. Or maybe you’re wondering why you should say anything to me? Good question. Why should you say anything that might help find out what happened to your daughter?’ I let that land, giving him time to work it out. ‘Unless you already know.’
His nostrils flared, eyes locked on me like a cat. He was still angry, but he took his time responding:
‘You people.’
‘Yes, me people. Is there more to that?’
He licked his teeth. ‘My mother was a thief, never had a job. My father, I never met. My childhood was short. I didn’t want that for my daughter, I was going to look after her. As soon as I found out Krishma was pregnant I moved us to England. Here I could look after her, there are so many opportunities, for all of us. And yet the only job I can get is driving a fucking taxi.’
‘Let me guess, back in the old country you were a doctor.’
He didn’t brush past that, staring at me until the moment dissipated. He wasn’t finished being angry yet. ‘I work hard every day—’
‘Everybody works hard.’
‘They don’t get the shit I do. I thought it was bad enough, but after 7/7, people won’t get in my taxi if they see a white man free. They spit at my wife. The other kids won’t play with my daughter. And you pretend you are tolerant. I used all my money buying that car, buying the hackney license on eBay. Forty-thousand pounds! I lease it out day and night, it is never off the road; and yet the money gets shorter and the rent gets higher. We had to move into this place. All those promises, they were promised to me and I promised them to my daughter. None of it came true, so I’m not sorry I took another chance to look after my family.’
‘You’re wasting time, telling me your fucking sob story when your daughter is missing. Who gives a shit about you?’
‘My daughter—’
‘Tell me about Christmas!’ I shouted. That must have been interesting for the neighbours. ‘You can waste her time telling me about how hard your life is, about how hard you work, but you can’t just admit to what you did. And I know the reason you won’t tell anyone, won’t tell your wife, it’s because you’re worried they’ll think it’s your fault. Because you already know it is.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Then tell me, because last I checked I’m the only person who cares.’
‘And me!’
‘What have you done to get her back?’
‘You don’t know.’ His eyes shimmered. ‘You don’t know.’
‘Then tell me.’
They pooled, begging me not to make him do it.
‘Tell. Me.’
He breathed in through his nose long and smooth, but it came out of his mouth in fits. He tried to nod, but he wasn’t in control, and his head just sort of shook. He swallowed a few times, licked his cracked lips, screwed his hairy hands into each other, then started:
‘He was just a fare, you know, like all the others.’
&nbs
p; ‘Where did you pick him up?’
‘Downtown, taxi rank on East Street; he wanted to go to Ditchling Beacon. On the way, he kept asking me questions. He wanted to know about Pakistan, about Krishma and Mahnoor. How much do I make? Where do I live? I talked to him, it’s good for my English. When we get to Ditchling Beacon it is nothing but a car park at the top of a hill. It was empty. And he doesn’t get out of the car. He asks me if I want to make some money driving his friends around, just one evening a week or so. He says he will pay me five hundred pounds every time, but I have to be on-call twenty-four seven.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘He was just a kid.’
‘Not good enough.’
‘He had a spider tattoo on his hand.’
‘Better.’
‘I said I would have to think about it, and need time to stop leasing the taxi. He offered me payment for the first two jobs upfront if I said yes right there and then. A thousand pounds. He showed me it all in fifty pound notes. I had never seen one before. Afterwards, I drove him back to East Street.’
The floorboards creaked above us. Their neighbours were stomping around, shouting occasionally. Outside the net curtains it was dark. An occasional siren wailed. This was a miserable little submarine, grounded at the bottom of a miserable ocean.
‘Who did you pick up?’ I asked.
‘There were loads of them. That young man. A few men, mostly white. One black man. One black woman. One white woman. Two old men. A Jew. There were a lot of others that I only drove once. They made me turn off the lights inside. No Muslims.’
He jumped up and pulled out a drawer by the television. He felt around in the back of it until he found a half-smoked packet of cigarettes. He sat back down, and shaking, put one in his mouth. But he didn’t light it. I would be smoking except that every time I went to roll one I saw Bill Harker’s teeth.