The Disappeared

by Ali Harper

  He hesitated but turned to the screen in front of him. He typed in a few letters, then turned back to Jo and smiled without warmth. ‘I’m afraid we don’t have anyone of that name staying at the hotel. Was there any—?’

  ‘You’re sure?’ I asked. ‘Late thirties or something, blonde.’

  ‘We have over two hundred guests—’

  ‘From Manchester? Staying the whole weekend.’ I leaned across the desk. He tilted the screen away from me. ‘Wears big, kind of round, earrings. Like pearls.’ I made weird hand signals in order to help him imagine what a woman wearing earrings might look like.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you.’ He turned to indicate our opportunity to waste his time was now over. The telephone rang, and his hand shot out to pick up the receiver. ‘The Queens. How may I help?’

  Jo grabbed my arm and moved me away from the desk.

  ‘Maybe she used a false name,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t want her husband to know what she’s up to.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Jo. I had the sense she was humouring me. She led us through the foyer and back out the front doors.

  ‘She’s got to be his stepmother. Who else would be looking for him?’

  Jo pulled a face at me while I realized that was possibly a silly question.

  ‘She wasn’t a drug dealer,’ I said. A middle-aged couple on their way out for the night frowned at me as they passed us on the steps. I lowered my voice. ‘She didn’t even smoke fags properly.’

  Jo shrugged, grabbing my arm to pull me across the road, ducking between the cars.

  ‘Drug dealers aren’t going to hire private investigators.’

  ‘They might,’ said Jo.

  ‘If she is his stepmother, and she’s disappeared, she could be in trouble. Maybe the dealers have found her. Maybe they’re trying to get her to pay up to cover her son’s debts. She did say they’d helped Jack out financially in the past. She could be in trouble.’

  We crossed the square. ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ Jo said. ‘We haven’t got a phone number.’

  I bristled at that, couldn’t help feeling that Jo was blaming me for not correctly completing the form.

  ‘We have to hope she rings tomorrow like she said she would.’

  ‘I did ask,’ I said. ‘She said it was better if she rang us. Maybe she knows about the drugs. Maybe he’s been in this kind of trouble before.’

  Jo shrugged, and we walked up through the city in silence, both lost in our own thoughts. It wasn’t until we reached the Town Hall, right in the centre of town, I realized I had no idea where we were headed.

  ‘Where we going?’ I asked Jo.

  ‘Brownie,’ she said, rolling a fag as she walked.

  ‘How do we find him?’

  ‘It’s quarter past ten, Friday night, he’s an anarcho-hippy, lives in Woodhouse. Where do you think?’

  When you put it like that, it was obvious. ‘The Chemic,’ I said.

  Chapter Seven

  The Chemic is the local pub in Woodhouse, with a taproom full of anarchists and hippies. The lounge is a bit more upmarket, but not much. Everyone in the pub, including the bar staff, either is or was a student, once upon a time.

  It was heaving, as always on a Friday night. I waited in the corridor outside the toilets until Jo came back from the bar with two pints of lager.

  ‘Soz,’ she said, when she saw the look on my face. ‘Force of habit. What do you want?’

  ‘Nothing. Actually, a bag of peanuts,’ I said, just because I wanted to have something to do with my hands.

  She thrust the two pints into my hand and disappeared back into the lounge. I felt the coldness of the glass through my fingertips. My taste buds moistened, and I tried to swallow. Of course it’s tempting, but not really, not when you know where it ends.

  I decided to go through to the taproom, see if I could find a spare five inches of space before someone knocked the drinks from my hands. I’d already had a guy with a rat’s-tail spill the best part of his pint of Landlord down my back.

  Jo came back the second time. ‘Brownie is the guy in the black eyeliner.’ She shrugged a shoulder in the direction of the far corner. ‘According to the woman at the bar.’

  I turned to observe a group of blokes, all in their twenties, sat round a table. I hazarded a guess that they’d graduated five or so years ago, were probably signing on while trying to avoid the onset of real life, life outside of The Chemic.

  We squashed into a corner near the dartboard and waited. I tried not to stare at the guy with the eyeliner, but his collection of facial piercings didn’t help. He had spikes coming out of his top lip that made him look like a porcupine.

  ‘Wouldn’t want to get too close,’ I said. ‘How does he kiss?’

  ‘Careful,’ said Jo. ‘You’re in danger of sounding like Aunt Edie.’

  Jo had drunk both pints by the time Brownie finally got up and made his way across the room towards the toilets. I elbowed her in the ribs, and she downed the last dregs as I followed him out of the taproom towards the gents.

  ‘Brownie?’

  He turned and struggled to focus on me, wondering who I was, how I knew his name. Up close I counted four spikes through the skin under his nose, each one nestled in a bed of stubble that would classify as a moustache if he didn’t shave soon.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Hi,’ I said. I smiled with the confidence that comes of being the only sober person within a hundred-yard radius. ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ‘I need a piss. Can you wait a sec?’

  Jo bustled into the corridor behind me. ‘Just a few questions,’ she said. ‘About Jack.’

  ‘Jack? What about him?’

  ‘We’re private investigators,’ Jo said.

  His expression changed. He glanced up and down the short corridor, like he was looking for the camera, or the police, or something. ‘Private investigators? Fuck off.’

  ‘Honest, we are.’ I nodded, still feeling a sense of pride and disbelief at the idea. ‘We just have a few questions. Only take a minute.’

  ‘Looking for Jack?’

  ‘That’s right. People are worried about him.’

  ‘Hang on a sec. I’m desperate. I’ll be right back.’

  He pushed through the door of the gents.

  I turned to Jo. ‘Did you see that look on his face?’ I asked.

  I noticed Jo’s eyes weren’t focusing and realized she was hardly going to provide any kind of insights at this stage in the evening.

  ‘He looked scared,’ I said.

  ‘Scared?’ said Jo. ‘What, of us?’

  ‘Go outside and keep an eye out.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Case he does a runner.’

  Jo sloped off through the back door. I paced the small corridor for a few seconds. Another bloke lurched past us, wearing a purple tie-dye T-shirt. He pushed open the door into the toilets and went in. I caught a whiff of men’s urinal before the door closed in my face.

  How long did it take for a man to take a piss? Not long in my limited experience. I counted to ten, a feeling welling inside me, a kind of certainty.

  I cursed my own naivety as I pushed open the gents’ door. The guy with the purple T-shirt stood swaying at one of the stalls, his back to me. Otherwise the room was empty. Fuck. I must have sworn out loud, because the guy turned, frowned and ended up pissing over the floor, his pee splashing my Docs. I clocked the open window and swore again.

  ‘Did you get him?’ I yelled to Jo through the open space but there was no reply. I sprinted back through the corridor and out into the car park. Fifty metres ahead of me, his head ducked into the wind, Brownie was sprinting at full throttle. Jo stood in the smoky back porch. ‘That’s him,’ I shouted. ‘He’s done one.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Jo. ‘Where’s he off to?’

  There was only one way to find out.

  I filled my lungs with oxygen and took off after him.

  The Chemic stands at the bottom
of the hill on which the red-brick terraces of Woodhouse are built. There must have been a quarry somewhere close because the streets all have names like Back Quarry Mount Terrace and Cross Quarry Street. Brownie had taken off up the hill, away from the main road. That direction would take him through a dense warren of back-to-backs to his house on Burchett Grove.

  Before I gave up drinking, I wouldn’t have run for a bus. But these last few months, I’ve had to do something with the time I used to spend getting wasted. That’s a lot of time to fill, I’ve discovered, and as I took off after him I realized that I’m actually quite fit. I’ve always been skinny, some would say malnourished, but lately I’ve added stamina to my frame.

  I heard Jo running behind me, but I knew I was leaving her behind. That was another thing in my favour. Brownie and Jo both had alcohol in their systems, disrupting coordination and slowing their pace. I caught up to Brownie in next to no time, three streets past The Chemic, up a flight of stairs that led between the houses. The question mushrooming in my mind, as I grew nearer and nearer, was what I was going to do when I caught him.

  ‘Wait,’ I shouted after him. ‘Only want to talk to you.’

  He didn’t reply, instead found an extra burst of energy and zoomed forward. I glanced behind and saw Jo appear round the corner of the street I’d just run up. Even from this distance I could see her breath like clouds of smoke around her. I hesitated a second or two, but then something pulled me forward, a natural desire for answers. Why had he legged it like that? He couldn’t be scared of two women. I increased my pace, noticing he’d crossed the street ahead, veering to the left. He wasn’t going home. I knew in the pit of my stomach where he was headed.

  ‘The Ridge,’ I shouted behind me, no idea whether Jo could hear me. ‘He’s running for The Ridge.’

  Sure enough, he took the small side street that led nowhere. I heard the click of the gate that opened onto the scrub waste ground. Great. Did I mention I hate The Ridge?

  Adrenaline pumped into my veins, endorphins kicked in – a heady combination. Like the acid freaks, who believe they can fly. I only wanted to ask him a couple of questions, for fuck’s sake. I pushed through the gate and followed into no man’s land.

  It was pitch-black, obviously. It was past last orders and there are no streetlights on The Ridge. As soon as I’d taken five, six steps inside I knew it was a stupid thing to do. But then, I reminded myself, the same had to be true for Brownie. He had to be somewhere close, hiding out. He couldn’t keep running: too many tree roots, too many obstacles. And he’d make too much noise.

  Instinct made me crouch, squatting on my haunches, allowing the air to go still so I could listen. Sure enough, as the silence settled around me, I heard a low panting to my right. It sounded like a dog, biding its time.

  I stayed down, figured no one would be looking for me at ground level. My eyes grew a little more used to the dark, silvery light from the moon occasionally appearing between the clouds. I didn’t move until I spotted him, a dark shadow, huddled against a clump of bushes. I calmed my heart rate by breathing deep and waited for my moment.

  When the moon ducked behind a cloud, I launched myself. I hit him at waist height, fastening both of my arms around his torso and using the whole of my body weight to knock him off his feet. We slid down the slope together, him desperately trying to stay upright, me pushing for horizontal momentum.

  I won.

  We crashed through bushes, through small clear patches of mud and grass. Halfway down his legs finally gave up the fight and we rolled the last half together, getting bashed by rocks, discarded glass bottles and broken branches. We didn’t stop until we reached the path at the bottom, the one next to the stream. The gravel hurt my knees as I threw myself on top of him, eager to maintain my advantage.

  ‘What the fuck did you run for?’ I shouted. Pissed off, because I’d caught my cheek against something on the way down and it hurt like hell.

  I could barely make him out. All I knew was I was sitting on his belly and his legs were behind me.

  ‘Bitch.’ He didn’t shout, just said the word, like it was a quiet statement of fact. His tone made me madder, and I punched him right in the chest, dead centre, just below the solar plexus – took the wind right out of him.

  He tried to throw me off, and I had to ride him like a bucking bronco. I had his arms pinned and his coordination sucked. He was fatter than he’d looked running up the hill.

  ‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ I said, when he’d got his breath back. ‘I wasn’t rude to you.’

  ‘Jesus, lady. What’s your problem?’

  I don’t know whether the moon came out at that moment, or my eyes had become still more accustomed to the dark, or whether I had a moment of psychic illumination, but I realized something. The guy I was sat on didn’t have porcupine-pierced lips. This guy was old and smelled of piss and Special Brew. This wasn’t the guy I’d chased through the streets of Woodhouse.

  This guy wasn’t Brownie.

  Chapter Eight

  I scrambled to my feet, brushed down my trousers like I could rub off the smell, the dirt, the bits of leaves and God knows what I had stuck to me.

  ‘What you doing hiding out in the bushes, you freaking weirdo?’

  ‘Can’t a man take a leak without …’ He tried to sit up, but he lacked the coordination skills required for the task.

  Please let his trousers be up, I thought, praying now for the moon to duck back behind its cloud. Pitch-black was preferable to the reality I was facing. But the moon resolutely ignored my pleas. Instead it seemed to brighten, illuminating the man on the ground in front of me.

  He was dressed against the cold, some awful stinking anorak tied round his middle with what looked like a piece of rope. He had a woollen hat on his head. His breathing was shallow and fast, and an awful thought struck me. What if I’d caused him to have a heart attack? He didn’t look in the best of health. Guilt flooded my system. I held out my hand and tried to pull him to his feet.

  ‘Sorry. I thought you were someone else.’

  He got as far as his knees and put a hand on the ground to steady himself. He bent over, almost doubled up and I braced myself for his collapse. I’d be charged with murder. I deserved nothing less.

  ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got a cigarette?’ he wheezed.

  ‘’Course.’ I dug out my packet of Golden Virginia. ‘Help yourself. Here, let me make one for you.’

  As he pushed himself upright, I tried to roll him a fag. My hands shook, and my mouth was so dry I could hardly summon up the spit to seal the paper, but I managed to produce a fat one. He took a seat on a fallen tree trunk and reached for the cigarette.

  ‘Light?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ I handed him my lighter and watched him attempt to spark it into action three or four times. When the burst of flame finally came it illuminated his face for a brief second, so that I could see the ruddiness of his skin and the weather-beaten lines that zig-zagged across his forehead. I said nothing as he slipped my lighter into his pocket.

  ‘Could have killed me,’ he said.

  I didn’t tell him the thought had already occurred to me. I didn’t say it because I knew there was still time.

  ‘Minding me own business, nice and quiet like.’

  ‘I am so sorry.’

  ‘Crashing through the bushes …’

  ‘Do you think you should go to hospital?’ I didn’t like the way he was breathing. His chest rattled like someone shaking a tube of Smarties. It didn’t help when he inhaled a long, deep lungful of smoke.

  ‘A wild animal.’ He coughed and spat onto the ground.

  ‘I’ve got a phone.’ I patted my pockets. What had I done with my phone?

  ‘Nearly finished me off.’

  ‘I could ring an ambulance.’ Please don’t make me ring the police, I found myself thinking, and cursed my own selfishness. I couldn’t leave him here.

  ‘Me leg might be broken.’

  ‘
Lee?’ Jo’s voice floated down across the valley, filling me with relief. She’d know what to do. ‘Lee?’

  ‘Jo.’ I cupped my hands around my mouth to make my voice carry. I tried to think what directions I could give. ‘Down. Down here.’

  The man stood up. ‘Who’s that?’

  He looked terrified. The sounds of Jo crashing through the undergrowth didn’t help. I could hear her swearing as she stumbled down the hill.

  ‘Got the price of a cup of tea?’ he asked. ‘Something for the shock.’

  ‘’Course.’ I rooted around in my jeans pockets, emptying all the cash I had. I handed him a fistful of loose change and a couple of scrunched-up notes as Jo appeared, a small twig caught in her bleached blonde fringe.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Jo, panting like a steam train. She frowned at the old fella. ‘Where’s Brownie?’

  ‘I’ve just attacked this poor man.’ They say confession is good for the soul. For me, it just meant another flood of curdled guilt. ‘Thought he was Brownie.’

  ‘Could have killed me,’ the man said, for the second time. ‘My time of life.’

  ‘Well, she didn’t,’ said Jo. ‘So perhaps you’d better be on your way.’

  ‘Dodgy ticker.’ He banged his chest. ‘Doctor says it’s bad for me to get stressed.’

  ‘But you’re all right now,’ said Jo.

  ‘We don’t know that for certain,’ he said. He brushed the dirt off his coat. ‘Could have internal bleeding.’

  ‘Serves you right,’ said Jo.

  ‘Jo!’

  ‘Go find someone else to wave your willy at,’ said Jo, ignoring me. ‘Else I’ll call the cops.’

  Just as I was about to take issue with her lack of care for the elderly and the infirm and the disadvantaged, just as I was about to argue about stereotypes and jumping to conclusions and judging a book by its cover, the man leaped to his feet, turned his back to us and sprinted off in the direction of the beck.

  ‘How did you know?’ I asked, as we watched him go.

  ‘Obvious, innit?’ said Jo. ‘Come on, let’s get the fuck out of here. This place gives me the creeps.’