Choose Your Parents Wisely (Joe Grabarz Book 2)

by Tom Trott

  I placed the envelope on the top log. The brown paper crinkled and crisped in seconds, spilling photographs and documents into the grate. In a few more seconds they were thin wafers of charcoal that danced in the air and crumbled into soot.

  No one gets to define me.

  Someone was banging on the street door.

  ‘Hello?’ they called. They kept hammering, I was worried they were going to chip the paint. ‘Hello!?’

  I headed out onto the landing, down to the door, and opened it. Standing there was a forty-something woman with hair all in her face. She pulled it apart, revealing bloodshot eyes. She sniffed some mucus down her throat.

  ‘Are you the guy who found the little girl?’ she asked through tears.

  I studied her. She was wearing an uninteresting top and a pair of tight jeans. A leather handbag was hanging off her arm as though it didn’t want to be there. She looked harmless.

  I told her I was.

  ‘I really need your help.’

  I was supposed to be taking the day off, but she looked so desperate. And I always need work.

  She followed me up the stairs and just as I lead her into the reception area the phone rang.

  ‘Take a seat in my office,’ I told her.

  She disappeared through my door and I picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hello,’ I answered matter-of-factly.

  ‘Hello!?’ came a startled, pompous, and frankly angry man’s voice.

  ‘Hello,’ I said again, slightly more acidly.

  ‘Is that Joe Grabarz?’ he bellowed.

  ‘This is Joe Grabarz.’

  ‘Are you the man who found Joy Tothova?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  There was a pause, then a clearing of his throat. ‘You’re just the type of man I need.’

  When I finally got back to my flat it was getting dark. It was cool at last. I leant on the living room window, looking out over the lights.

  Brighton. The world’s circus. Run away and join us. Gay or straight, black or white, everybody here is running away from something. Or running toward something. Some ideal. The city is a shining beacon to the desperate and the misunderstood.

  It’s nice that they think so. They never see what those born here see. But it’s my job to maintain the illusion, in the hope that one day it might be true.

  I moved to the bedroom window, looked over the flat rooves. A few lights were on. More were off. There was no baby seagull. He couldn’t wait for parents any longer. His wings might not have been long enough, but it didn’t matter. He had flown.

  last chapter

  Nothing Is Solved

  i woke in a bright, white room. A sliver of vision was all I had, and everything beyond my fingers was a blur. I could move the fingers but not the arm. I didn’t feel good. I felt like a bin bag full of broken crockery. Unable to move or talk, I lay there in desperate fear for what seemed like days. Every blurry figure entering the room was one of them coming to finish me, every injection swapped with poison, every dimming of the lights my death. But it never came.

  ‘I told you so.’

  ‘Told me what, exactly?’

  ‘Too many things to list.’

  We were on the pavement of a narrow road that cuts between hospital towers. Me in a wheelchair, still not smoking, Daye leaning on a bollard, smoking his eightieth of the day. He had the cigarette in one hand and the cup from a flask of tea in the other. A few metres away a man and a woman were disinfecting the inside of an ambulance. There wasn’t a green thing in sight, just tarmac and exhaust. Nothing about this place felt healthy.

  In one of the supreme ironies of life, the vehicle that had hit me in the fog that night was an ambulance. It broke half the bones in my body, but the paramedics knew what to do. They didn’t know my name, and I didn’t have any ID on me, so I was admitted anonymously. Not that the Society knew my name either, they never thought they’d need to know. All of these things saved my life.

  ‘The one you referred to as Father Christmas matches the description of Alan Douglas.’

  The sound of someone drilling echoed off the concrete cliffs.

  ‘Neighbours haven’t seen him in two weeks. According to his bank statements he went to Australia to visit his grandchildren.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘He was a bookmaker once, the type that would have your legs broken if you didn’t pay up. Last ten years he was a book-cooker.’

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘The ones you saw, nothing definite; but I’ve got some ideas.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I’ve given them to my sergeant to work up.’

  ‘Great,’ I drawled.

  ‘He’s a good lad, you’d like him.’

  ‘No thanks.’ I took a deep, painful breath. ‘And the one I didn’t see?’

  ‘You’re asking me if I can identify a person you didn’t see, by your description of his voice and a pair of slippers?’

  I didn’t answer that. ‘What about the Jilanis?’

  ‘They packed up, went back to Pakistan.’

  ‘Anyone see them go?’

  He blew out a thin stream of smoke. The air was so polluted it was hard to spot. ‘No.’ He threw the cigarette away.

  I rubbed my ribs. One of the fractures had left a lump just below my left nipple. ‘So what do I do now? When do I make a statement?’

  ‘You don’t.’

  He stood up and threw the cold tea from his cup onto the ground, then screwed it back onto the top of the flask, burying it inside his coat, ready to leave.

  ‘According to the file, the man who ran off the golf course that night never regained consciousness. He died a week ago.’

  I couldn’t understand him. He didn’t seem the type to lie in a casefile. Especially for me; this man who had tried to send me to prison six weeks ago.

  He read my mind: ‘Let’s call it an administrative error. If I believe everything you’ve told me, which I do, then it might be a good idea for them to forget about you. As for what you do next, I’ll leave that up to you. But you have a knack for trouble.’

  I gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Believe me, I’m never doing this again.’

  I was out of hospital in a couple more weeks. With the Jilanis gone there was no point in speaking to Theresa. I went to Debra’s to get my things out of the caravan but the caravan was gone. I couldn’t bear ringing the doorbell so I just left. And like that I was back to the world. Back to the world of trying not to steal shit. Back to the world of trying to find a job, and trying to find somewhere to live. Using my newfound people skills I managed to get a job in The Reel and Razor, a film-themed cocktail bar. We did a lot of Vesper Martinis and White Russians. I even managed to rent a room above the place. Both the drinks and the rent were too cheap and I have no idea how they kept the place up. It isn’t there anymore.

  It had been around two months when I found myself in Gentjan Hajdari’s favourite deli. I can’t remember why I was in there. Maybe I recognised it and wandered in. Maybe I went there deliberately. Whilst I was tucking into a pretty excellent plate of falafel, pitta, humus, salad, and stuffed peppers the owner asked what made me try the place. I lied, said I was a friend of Hajdari’s.

  ‘Gentjan? Not seen him in weeks, how is he? Not been sick?’

  ‘He’s fine,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Really,’ he frowned, ‘just sick of us, I suppose.’

  That was it, he went back to serving. Not seen him in weeks?

  I found myself riding over to his bungalow in Coldean. The people living in it knew nothing about him, they had bought the house from a young man with a spider tattoo on his hand.

  It had possessed me now. The only way to break free was to see it through. Then I would be done, then I would be finished. Against my wishes I had to speak to Sergeant Watson. I told him about Hajdari.

  ‘Dude,’ he said, ‘I know.’

  We were standing in a tiny basement, not too unlike Daye’s office, also deep in the bowels
of the station. It was dark, a couple of computer screens the only source of light. I’m pretty sure he did that so people wouldn’t think he was in. So he could get away with working.

  ‘You know what?’ I asked.

  ‘I know he was one of the drivers, and I know he’s disappeared.’

  ‘How exactly?’

  ‘You told Daye that’s how you ended up at the golf course, he told me, I looked into it.’

  I frowned. It made sense. ‘And?’

  ‘And, what?’

  ‘And what did you find?’

  ‘Nothing, he’s gone back to Albania. They didn’t leave anything behind.’

  He knew as well as I did that Hajdari hadn’t gone back to Albania, but he didn’t know I knew as well as he did.

  ‘What about the phone data?’ I asked.

  SOCO had found Jilani’s phone where I left it, and managed to pull the number from the burnt SIM. Daye had filed a warrant to get the data from the phone company. For every SMS this included the sender, time received, message contents, and the mobile mast the phone was connected to.

  I already knew the phone did nothing but receive messages, and from one number at a time, which would change on the fourth of every month. They needed the data from these “sender” phones. They filed for it, and thanks to new anti-terrorism laws they got it.

  ‘We can see from the data,’ Watson explained, ‘that they started with four drivers, growing to nine.’

  Nine. I thought about nine desperate immigrants, nine families. And what might have happened to them now. Andy could tell what I was thinking and let me think it without saying anything.

  Then he frowned, weighing something up, scratching his beard. Finally, he gave in to whatever it was: ‘Take a look at this,’ he said.

  He flicked on the strip lights, revealing a large map that covered the wall from floor to ceiling. Looking closer, it had been stitched together from several OS maps, and covered from Shoreham on the bottom left to Peacehaven on the bottom right, and from Steyning on the top left to Lewes on the top right. Ditchling was at the centre top and Brighton at the centre bottom. The entire thing was marked with red and green pins.

  ‘The red pins are the mobile masts,’ he explained, ‘to have signal a mobile phone has to be in communication with a mast. When an SMS is sent the phone sends it to the mast, it travels across the network, and is sent from another mast to the receiver. This mast data is all logged. It gives us a general idea of the location as the phone should connect to the nearest mast, depending on provider and network traffic.’

  ‘And the green?’

  ‘The pickups.’

  There were hundreds of pins across central Brighton and Hove. Less in the suburbs. The odd one beyond the city limits. It was a thorough job. Far more thorough than I had ever been.

  ‘We know they didn’t send for their own pickups, because they only had one sender phone at a time, so the mast data is pretty useless. But where there is a cluster of green pins, like here,’ he pointed to West Street, ‘we know they frequented regularly.’

  I looked at these clusters. There was one around Brighton Town Hall, Hove Town Hall, and other council buildings. Kings Road, The Chandler Club, and other places frequented by the rich and powerful. Hove Crown Court, and most strikingly the area containing Brighton County Court, the magistrates court, and the building we were standing in: John Street Police Station. The only cluster outside the city was in Lewes. It could be the Crown Court, but I took a wild guess it was Sussex Police Headquarters.

  We exchanged a look that said too much. He had the same questions I did, there was no point voicing them.

  ‘I’ve created a database on the computer, all the messages, dates, and numbers. So if you want to search by a specific driver, you can track every pickup they made and when. I can look up Hajdari if you want.’

  ‘What if you wanted to search by dates?’

  ‘Easy, what dates do you want?’ He sat down in a swivel chair and rolled over to the computers.

  ‘The day Mahnoor Jilani disappeared, to the day you saw your first corpse.’

  I could feel his eyes boring into me. I was too busy looking at the map.

  ‘Sure thing.’ He started typing.

  I was drawn to a solitary pair of pins. The only two in the top left of the map, north of Shoreham. One red, one green. The red pin, the mast, was in Steyning. The green one was a mile and a half south east, in the middle of nowhere, just outside a tiny village, nothing but four houses and a farm, called Botolphs. The green pin was in the OS symbol of a cross with a square base: church with a tower.

  One red, one green.

  ‘The red pins, are these all the masts?’ I asked.

  ‘Just the ones the sender connected to.’ He was preoccupied with his database.

  ‘So this one in Steyning, for example, how many times was that connected to?’

  ‘That’s a one-off.’

  A one-off. One message sent, one pickup requested. Was it enough to assume the sender himself wanted a pickup?

  Watson read out the messages from the days in question: ‘Edward Street/White Street, Ship Street/Prince Albert Street, Montpelier Place/Norfolk Terrace, Queen’s Park Rise/Down Terrace, St James Street/Lavender Street, Osbourne Road/Lowther Road, Dyke Road/The Droveway, Orchard Road/Orchard Gardens, Rutland Road/Coleridge Street, Grand Avenue/Kingsway, Marine Parade/Royal Crescent, St Botolphs, Eastern Road/Upper Abbey Road, Kemp Town Place/Rock Grove. That’s the lot. Any help?’

  ‘No. Not at all.’ I turned back to him and smiled. ‘It was just a stab in the dark.’

  I couldn’t ride my moped on the bypass without feeling like a twat, it couldn’t do more than about thirty-three, so I headed down Old Shoreham Road, all the way through Hove, Portslade, Southwick, over the Holmbush roundabout, onto Upper Shoreham Road, through Shoreham until I hit the Adur. I didn’t fancy pushing it across the old wooden toll bridge, so I joined the Steyning Road and headed north, out of Shoreham, hoping to find another route across the river.

  I rode under the swooping overhead spiral of the bypass junction and onto the country road, then past the bus cemetery on the left and the abandoned cement works on the right, a set back row of houses, and then nothing but fields and pull-ins and the odd empty house. I was too far north already, but there was nowhere to cross the river.

  I kept going for another mile, came to a roundabout where I took the first on the left, and on this road finally crossed the river. Another mile, another roundabout. I took the first again, heading west along a single-track lane rowed with rotting trees that became rotting farms. And then a sharp left again, another small lane, closed in by steep banks of dead leaves, now finally heading south, on the right side of the Adur.

  Every hundred metres or so a field or a farm would open up on one side. Then the “village” of Annington. Grain silos. A posh house with a tennis court. Fields. At last I rode through Botolphs, four houses and a farm was about right, until the “village” ended and there was nothing but fields on both sides, until a flint wall on my left, and behind it a graveyard, and beyond that a flint church appeared from behind a tree.

  I pulled up by the wall, breathed in the country air. The road was empty. One side of the church there was a nice house, on the other a crap house, and nothing else but fields. From somewhere sheep baaed. The afternoon was ending a dim, windy, grey day. The shadows of clouds rolled down the hills into the valley. I pulled my jacket around me as I wandered ten metres from the road down a dirt path that skirted the graveyard toward a square flint tower, no more than three metres wide, and barely taller than a house. Behind that, the main church building was also flint, smaller than a barn, rectangular, and with a humble pitched roof. Part of the building dates from 950. A simple little church for simple little people living in simple times.

  The door was unlocked. The inside was as modest as the outside. One space with a tiled floor, wooden pews, plastered stone walls, a meek altar, timbered roof, and a gue
st book that no one had signed. There was nothing here but the mournful air of forgotten history.

  I stepped out and beyond the tree line, looking out down toward the murky river. Poking above another line of bare trees I could just see the chimney of the old cement works on the other side. It dominates the landscape, once a huge operation, it’s quarry having carved an irreplaceable wound out of the chalk hill. The place is abandoned now. Between the church and the factory this entire valley is a graveyard.

  I felt a scratching in my brain. A tingle. A tingle I would learn to trust. Possessed, I marched down the slope of the valley toward the Adur. As if upon request a footbridge appeared in front of me, part of the South Downs Way. If I had known it was there, I would have ridden my moped across it.

  I crossed over to the Steyning Road, opposite that strange row of terraced houses in the middle of nowhere. I can only guess they were built for the cement workers. I crossed the road and drifted further until the titanic edifice was looming over me. The site might date from 1883, but the factory that is still standing was built after the war. It is nothing but concrete, steel, and broken glass now, still a gargantuan complex. A colossal monument to an industry that ripped up the land, the very Downs themselves, to forge the future.

  It was dark now. I steeled myself and stepped into the shadows and the darkness within, swallowed by the skeleton of the beast.

  Sparks crackled from my lighter. I knew the truth was here somewhere, in the darkness. Hidden amongst the broken windows, and the dirt, and the rats.

  I crunched my way through the place, stepping over jagged steel, ducking through collapsed frames, up and down stairs, rusty bolts screaming in agony.

  The feeble orange glow of the lighter gave me a dancing bubble of light, revealing straight steel, curved steel, bolts, glass, the word “DANGER” painted in black; details without context, until I was lost in darkness. But I was not alone.