The Disappeared

by Ali Harper

  Mrs Wilkins muttered something that sounded to my ears like: ‘Never talks about it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Just, obviously they’re very close.’

  ‘So,’ I said, when it became obvious she wasn’t going to volunteer any information. ‘Do you know why she might have said that?’

  ‘I do.’

  Another silence that seemed to stretch into the distance. ‘Why did you tell us that you’re—’

  ‘Jack’s stepmother. I married his father after his mother died.’ She cleared her throat. ‘He was heartbroken. Still is. It’s taken years for him to come to terms with it. She was an amazing woman.’

  ‘Must be hard. To match up to a dead, amazing woman,’ said Jo, pulling a face at me as she spoke into the phone.

  ‘I don’t look at it like that,’ came back Mrs Wilkin’s voice. ‘I feel grateful to her.’ Jo stuck two fingers down her throat and pretended to vomit. I don’t know whether Mrs Wilkins had an inkling of what was going on in our offices, but her next sentence seemed pointed and directed at Jo. ‘Women shouldn’t be in competition with each other. If more women—’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ interrupted Jo.

  ‘Didn’t seem relevant,’ she said, and I heard her light another cigarette. ‘To all intents and purposes, I am Jack’s mother. He’s a lost soul, was a lost soul, when I met him. Haunted, really.’

  ‘You got any other children?’

  ‘Am I under investigation in my own investigation?’

  There was ice in her voice and an awkward pause as Jo and I glanced at each other.

  I flinched first. ‘It’s just the more background we have, the better and the quicker we’ll find him. Has Jack got any siblings?’

  ‘Have you managed to find out anything? Besides he’s got a girlfriend?’

  Jo and I had rehearsed this on our way down to the office that morning. How much to tell.

  ‘He’s moved out of the squat,’ I said. ‘And he didn’t leave a forwarding address.’

  ‘And he hasn’t been into work to collect his wages,’ Jo added. ‘No one’s seen him for a week.’

  ‘We were wondering whether we should go to the police,’ I said.

  ‘I hire a team of private investigators and your first idea is to go to the police?’

  I screwed up my courage. ‘We’re worried something may have happened to him. Something, you know, something bad.’ I prayed Jo wouldn’t revisit the list of possible catastrophes.

  ‘No.’ Mrs Wilkins’s voice was firm down the phone. ‘No, I’d know if something, something like that had happened to him. I don’t want the police involved, not until I know what this is about.’

  I glanced at Jo. Neither of us had been particularly keen on the police idea. We’d always seen them as the enemy, the hard black line on demonstrations, the invisible tail on stoned car journeys, the possible tap on the line as we ordered our recreational drugs. And, of course, after what happened with Andy. Well, let’s just say it’s hard to contemplate the idea of voluntarily involving them in our lives.

  ‘Did his flatmates say anything about where he might be?’

  ‘Not really.’ We’d decided not to mention the letter. Or the drugs. ‘He did a moonlight flit.’

  ‘What about Brownie then? Have you spoken to him?’

  ‘We’ve still more interviews to do,’ said Jo.

  ‘What’s the plan?’

  Interesting question, and at that point I couldn’t put into words the sense of unease that was hanging around my shoulders like a cloak. I knew she wouldn’t be that chuffed if we told her our next move was to track down her husband. I knew she had a very clear idea as to how we should run the investigation and poking around, testing the edges of her story, wasn’t it.

  ‘We need a phone number,’ I said. ‘We need to be able to contact you. We’re out and about for the rest of the day.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Following up some enquiries on the girlfriend,’ I said.

  ‘What enquiries?’

  That was as far as I’d got. ‘She’s from Huddersfield,’ I improvised. ‘Her parents might be hiding Jack.’

  ‘I want an address,’ Mrs Wilkins barked down the phone. A pause. Her tone softened. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a difficult time.’

  I could feel the tension emanating from her down the telephone line. I raised my eyebrows at Jo. ‘We’ll get back to you as soon as we have something concrete. But we need a number.’

  ‘What happened to your offices?’

  ‘Ah.’ I fingered the telephone wire. ‘You’ve been?’

  ‘The front door is boarded up.’

  ‘We’re having some work done.’

  ‘You’ve been burgled. Who by?’

  ‘Kids. It’s a crime-ridden area. It’s nothing—’

  ‘What did they take?’

  ‘Nothing. There’s nothing to take. We have a security system. Nothing of any value is left in the office.’

  ‘The place looked trashed.’

  ‘Just kids—’

  ‘This isn’t happening fast enough,’ she said.

  ‘Give us a chance.’ I know I sounded petulant. ‘We only started yesterday. We’re making progress,’ I said as I crossed my fingers behind my back. ‘These things don’t solve themselves overnight.’

  ‘I can’t stay here,’ she said.

  ‘Where’s here?’ I asked at the same time as Jo said: ‘We went down to the Queens.’

  A barely perceptible pause. ‘I had to move,’ she said. ‘I think …’ her voice trailed off and for a moment I suspected that she was holding her hand over the receiver and talking to someone else. When she returned to the phone call, she spoke slower. ‘I think someone’s following me. I’m frightened Jack’s involved in something, something bad.’

  ‘Who would—?’

  ‘I’ll give you a number. Got a pen?’

  Jo pulled one out of the front pocket of her dungarees, and I took down the number that Mrs Wilkins repeated twice.

  ‘Ring me on that, two o’clock. I’ve got to go.’

  The dial tone sounded before I had chance to say goodbye.

  ‘Did you buy that?’ I asked Jo.

  ‘What, that about her being his adopted mother?’

  ‘Step,’ I said. These distinctions have always mattered to me.

  ‘She sounded worried,’ said Jo. ‘Why’d you tell her Carly’s parents might be hiding Jack?’

  ‘She sounded stressed,’ I said, refusing to recognize Jo’s look of bewilderment. I glanced at the biro marks on my left forearm. ‘Why would anyone be following her?’

  ‘You made it sound like we’d produce her son in time for lunch.’

  ‘I had to tell her something.’

  ‘We’ve got more chance of finding Madeleine McCann.’

  ‘You don’t know that. His dad might know something.’

  I wasn’t convinced. All we were beginning to discover was how little we actually knew.

  The next thing was to see if I could get the number for Mr Wilkins. I knew this was going to get us into deep trouble with our own client, but I needed some facts confirmed.

  ‘Where’s the form?’

  The filing system, such as we’d had, had been three lever arch files that stood on top of the cupboard that housed the electricity metre. All those files had been torn apart and discarded in the middle of the room and then I’d bagged their ripped contents into bin liners as part of the tidy up process the night before. ‘Bollocks.’

  I prised open the knot of one of the bin bags, the one that crunched, and sifted through the papers in there, but I couldn’t find the form.

  ‘It’s not here.’ I upended the only other bin liners that contained paper. The rest were full of the remains of Jack’s stuff.

  Jo came over to help me search and we went wordlessly through the papers, now strewn all over the floor, one more time. And guess what? It wasn’t there. There wasn’t a single piece of it in
evidence.

  ‘That’s weird. They wouldn’t take the form, would they?’

  ‘They might. Whoever burgled the office is looking for Jack. Maybe they’re on their way round to his dad’s house too.’

  ‘Give me your phone.’

  Jo passed it across, and I googled ‘Wilkins + Manchester’: 800,000 results. The first twenty or so pages were about Ray Wilkins, a defender for Manchester United. Apparently.

  ‘This is hopeless. We’ll have to go there.’

  ‘Where?’ said Jo.

  ‘Manchester.’

  ‘Why Manchester?’

  ‘Mrs Wilkins said she was from Manchester.’

  ‘Only we can’t believe a fucking word she tells us,’ said Jo.

  ‘Didn’t Carly say he was a car salesman?’ I added ‘cars’ to the search bar, which narrowed the results to a mere 65,000.

  I stared at what remained of Jack’s possessions, scattered on the floor. ‘The thing from Mancini – he’s a Man City fan.’

  ‘There’s people living in Japan that support Man City.’

  ‘You’re forgetting our clue.’ I pounced on the wallet.

  Jo stared at me. ‘We have a clue?’

  I opened it up and rang a finger through the various pockets. Nothing there. I rummaged through the papers on the floor. ‘Jesus, that’s gone as well.’

  Jo’s forehead scrunched. ‘His blood donor card?’

  ‘The membership card – remember? Here it is!’ I pounced on the small rectangular piece of cardboard among the debris. ‘Alderley Edge Cricket Club. Junior member.’

  ‘Junior member?’

  ‘It’s expired. But that’s where he’s from. Bet you.’

  ‘Alderley Edge? Was that where Beckham lived?’

  ‘Google it,’ I said, chucking her phone back at her.

  Jo tapped the screen. ‘“Alderley Edge”,’ she read. ‘“A village and civil parish in Cheshire – fourteen miles south of Manchester”.’

  ‘Carly said a village.’ We were on the right track, I could feel it.

  Jo frowned. ‘So we’re going to drive around Alderley Edge looking for Jack’s dad?’

  ‘He’s got a car dealership. He wants people to find him.’

  ‘You don’t know his business is in Alderley Edge.’

  ‘Any better ideas?’

  Jo pulled a face. ‘We should tidy this lot away again.’

  ‘Let’s just get there.’

  ‘Wild fecking goose chase.’

  ‘Worth a shot,’ I said.

  While Jo scooped the crap back into the bin liners, I paced the office, stopping only to scribble a few more questions on my notepad. Even if we didn’t find Jack’s dad, I wanted to see a bit of where Jack was from, get some of the background – and not just through the eyes of his stepmother. What does a stepmother know? Even assuming Susan Wilkins was who she said she was.

  One fact remained. Jack had done a runner and I suppose the thought was in my mind that he might have gone home. We reach for the past in times of trouble, it’s instinctive. The same way I still think about my mother anytime there’s a success or a failure. No matter she’s been dead four years. No matter that even when she was alive, she’d be too wrapped up in her own misery to take any notice of me, or my life. It’s in all our bones. We want someone to share the highs and lows with.

  We were on the road less than twenty minutes later. Jo stashed the rounders bat on the back seat and then climbed behind the steering wheel. I can drive, but I’m not a natural. I’m more your wing pilot – roll cigarettes, read maps, watch out for signs, that kind of thing.

  The clock on the dashboard said twenty to eleven as we arrived in Alderley Edge. It was the first day of the year that felt like it had any warmth to it, and I felt like I was coming out of hibernation – like I was waking up. It was obvious, we needed to come to the beginning to work out what had happened at the end.

  Chapter Eleven

  Alderley Edge is posh. Wide verges, houses set acres apart from each other. Doesn’t fool me though. Life is never like the chocolate box, no matter how much cash you have.

  ‘So,’ said Jo, as we drove past the village green for the second time. ‘What’s the plan?’

  ‘The newsagents.’

  The man behind the counter couldn’t have been more snooty if he tried. He took one look at me and wouldn’t give an inch, no matter how much I tried to persuade him I was a professional. It struck me again that we needed proper ID. A business card wasn’t enough. I gave up and went back to the car.

  ‘Not keen to lend a hand?’ said Jo.

  ‘We’ll have to go door to door,’ I said. ‘A place this small, someone’s got to know.’

  It was almost eleven o’clock and it appeared most residents of Alderley Edge did stuff on Saturday mornings. There was no answer at the first four houses we tried. A lanky streak of a teenager answered the fifth door we knocked on, but didn’t seem to know his own name, let alone anything about Jack Wilkins.

  We marched up and down the drives of the next dozen or so houses, encountering hostility at every turn. One woman shooed us off the drive with a broom. The only person who was anything approaching polite was a harassed-looking young woman who I guessed was the nanny. She invited us in for a cup of tea, which I took as a sign she was desperate for adult company. I didn’t blame her – I could hear the wail of at least two children in the background.

  ‘This could take all day,’ said Jo, as we trudged back down a rhododendron-lined drive towards the village centre.

  When a man who must have been 90 opened the next door we knocked at, I was all for packing up and going home. He was wearing a brown dressing gown that looked like it was made out of felt, rope like icing piped round the edges.

  ‘We’re looking for Mr Wilkins?’ said Jo. ‘We believe you might know him?’

  ‘You’ll have to speak up,’ he said.

  ‘Mr Wilkins,’ I said, raising my voice. ‘Owns a car dealership somewhere around here.’

  ‘Or Manchester way,’ Jo muttered under her breath.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘I know everyone.’

  My heart lifted, and I couldn’t resist turning to Jo and smiling.

  ‘Pardon?’ said the old man.

  I faced him. ‘Do you know where his business is?’

  ‘What business?’

  ‘Mr Wilkins’s,’ I added, my throat feeling the strain.

  ‘You’d better come in. Don’t want everyone staring.’

  We followed him in to the strangest house I’d ever been in to. On the one hand, it was probably the wealthiest house I’d ever been inside, but it was also the dirtiest. And believe me, I’ve been in dirty houses. Antique furniture sagged under the weight of piles of books, papers, dust, tins of opened cat food, the tin lids still attached but peeled open. Ashtrays, empty bottles of whisky, wine. Bowls that may have once upon a time contained fruit now contained light bulbs, rotten vegetables, cans of WD40.

  ‘Sit yourselves down. Don’t get many visitors these days.’

  He lifted a fat ginger cat from one of the kitchen chairs and dropped it to the floor. It hissed at me, before finding itself a corner on a pile of newspapers.

  ‘So what do you girls want? Tea, wine, whisky?’

  ‘Tea, for me,’ I said. I glanced at the washing-up next to the sink. ‘I’ll make it.’ It would save me the problem of deciding where to sit seeing as how Jo had grabbed the chair the cat had vacated.

  The sink was one of those white pottery ones that are square and fashionable now, but this one was probably from the first time around. I tried to organize some kind of system, stacking as much as I could on the worktop. I eventually found the plughole, scooping out the heap of rotting tea bags that had congealed there. The dark gloopy liquid drained out, and I had an empty bowl. I even found a plug.

  ‘So, Mr Wilkins. Do you know him?’ asked Jo.

  ‘Lived here fifty-s
even years. Know everyone.’

  ‘Know his son, Jack?’

  ‘Who?’

  Jo repeated the question louder as the old fella lit a Dunstan. Jo took the one he offered to her.

  ‘Terrible business,’ he said before coughing.

  ‘What was?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘What was a terrible business?’

  ‘They moved here ’94. Day after Blair got elected.’ The old man shook his head, like it was more than the neighbourhood that was going to the dogs.

  ‘Blair was elected in ’97,’ said Jo.

  ‘Leader of the Labour Party, not the Government, sweet cheeks. Dawning of a new era. New money, you know. You can always tell by the plants.’

  ‘The plants?’

  ‘Got no idea, these young ones.’

  I glanced out of the kitchen window. The back garden was like a field – at the far end were so many trees it looked like a wood and made it impossible to see where the garden actually ended.

  ‘You seen Jack lately?’ asked Jo, her tone nice and conversational.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Jack Wilkins. The son.’

  ‘Don’t get out much these days. Too much to do in here.’ He waved an arm around as if he was showing us a load of unfinished projects. He poured himself a slug of whisky into a glass, three-fingers deep. For a moment I envied him. The guy was rich and old. What did he have left to fear? Might as well get pissed from the moment he woke up till the moment he collapsed.

  ‘What about Mr Wilkins?’ said Jo.

  ‘Nick Nickerless, I call him. Ladies’ man.’ He drank from his glass without flinching. ‘Women love him. God alone knows why.’

  For a moment I thought he was going to cry, but instead, he fell backwards into the only comfy-looking chair in the room. Another cat squawked and made a beeline for the door. ‘Young whippersnapper. I’ve told him a thing a two, in my time. You mark my words.’

  Jo pulled a face at me, and I had to agree. Trying to make any sense of what he was saying was giving me a headache.

  ‘Should never have put a woman in charge. I said it right from the start. Knew there’d be trouble. Bite like a black widow.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Thatcher. She was responsible for New Labour.’