by Claire Moss
The lights of the station slid away as quickly as they appeared, and Simone felt the last tiny spark of hope disappear. Was this man really going to sit there all the way to London? And when they got there? Would he follow her home? Perhaps he would even escort her there? But why? Why did he – or Keith – want her to stop looking for Mack? What were they afraid she was going to find?
‘Excuse me.’ It was the woman across the aisle. Simone turned her head to respond, but then realised that the woman was in fact addressing the man. ‘Excuse me.’
He looked up from his paper, his face a study of dismissive boredom. ‘Yeah?’
‘Have you got a ticket to travel first class?’
The man took a heavy, wheezing breath. ‘What’s it to you?’
‘Well, have you?’
The woman’s voice was clipped school mistress Scottish – the most intimidating possible accent, Simone thought.
He shrugged and returned his gaze to the racing form. ‘No. Don’t make no difference does it? Not bothering you, am I? What’s it matter where I sit anyway?’ He continued, as though talking to himself. ‘Only means you get bigger chairs and free booze, what’s it to you, you nosy old bitch?’
If the woman was intimidated she did not show it. She simply stood up, ostentatiously taking her handbag and iPad with her, but leaving her newspaper and jacket on her seat, and left the carriage. After a few minutes, she returned with the train manager trailing obediently behind her.
‘Sir, can I see your ticket please?’
The man in the leather jacket levelled his blunt gaze on him. ‘Why?’
‘Sir, if you want to sit in first class, you need to have a first class ticket. Please can I see your ticket?’
He stared at him a moment longer, but the manager did not look away. ‘And what if I don’t want to show it to you?’
The train manager sighed and reached to his belt, unclipping a walkie talkie. He had obviously seen this man’s type and worse several times already just that day. ‘If you won’t show me a valid ticket, then I’ll have no option but to issue you with a penalty charge and a formal caution. Now, if you could give me your name and home address, I will contact the transport police to have that information verified.’
Simone could see a small flicker of panic in the man’s face. The word ‘police’ had been all it took.
‘Sir? Either show me a valid ticket or give me your full name and address so I can issue you with a penalty notice. And don’t bother trying to tell me you’re called Mickey Mouse and you live at Disneyland.’ He tapped his walkie talkie. ‘These guys can check it out for me in no time, you’ll only make things worse for yourself.’
The man pulled a face like a naughty schoolboy who has just realised he has gone a step too far, and reached in his wallet. ‘Here.’
‘This is a standard class ticket.’
‘Yeah. Sorry. Didn’t think it would matter, you know, what with this carriage being half-empty. I just wanted to sit with my friend here.’ He gestured at Simone.
‘Sir, you can’t sit here without a first class ticket. Now, if you’ll follow me to take a seat in standard class, we’ll forget this whole thing. Frankly it’s far too late in the day for me to be bothering the police over a pain in the arse like you. Come on.’
And, to Simone’s relief and amazement, the man meekly stood, picked up his paper and followed the manager out of the carriage.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, this train will shortly be approaching Northallerton. Northallerton, your next station stop. Thank you.’
Simone stood up, grabbing her bag from under her seat. ‘Thank you,’ she said feelingly to the woman across the aisle.
The woman smiled broadly. ‘You’re welcome. Goodbye.’
The door beeped open and Simone jumped down onto the platform, pressing the button so the door closed behind her. The cold air hit her in a vigorous blast, fresh from the hills and still smelling of sheep. Simone knew that air. She was here, she was home; she had done that thing she so often longed to do and got on the train that took her here.
Chapter Eighteen
It had been Ayanna’s idea to go and see Keith. Jazzy told himself that he had not considered the possibility because despite his instinctive dislike for the man, Mack liked and trusted Keith and Jazzy still, despite everything, trusted Mack’s judgement. But on a deeper level he understood the real reason he had avoided the plain truth that if he ever wanted to find out what was going on with Mack then he absolutely had to confront Keith; he was afraid of Keith, and afraid of what confronting Keith might reveal.
Jazzy had no idea how long it would take them to trek to the other side of London. It was something he had never done, nor had any desire to do. London to him, in the ten years he had lived there, largely consisted of the half that lay north of the river. He and Petra had liked to walk along the South Bank in the early days of their courtship, and he had taken his parents to the Imperial War Museum one rainy November weekend, but the sprawling southern suburbs remained a foreign country. Even Mack rarely ventured to what he still called ‘home’, still less as far as Chislehurst where Keith had chosen to invest the fruits of his long career (fruits, Jazzy was sure, all ill-gotten).
After studying his tube map and checking the journey planner app on his phone Jazzy realised with a sigh that it was going to cost them the majority of the morning to visit Keith – as the journey planner put it, he was looking at walk, bus, tube, tube, train, walk, followed by the same thing in reverse. But he could think of no alternative. He had Keith’s mobile number, but Keith also had Jazzy’s and caller display would make it too easy for him to dodge any phone calls. More than that though, Jazzy wanted to see Keith’s face as he was talking, to try and read his body language; see the whites of his eyes, as Keith himself would no doubt put it. Jazzy was far from an insightful person, he would be the first to admit that. If his wife, for example, were to say to him that she was fine and he should not worry about her, he would invariably take that to mean that she was fine and he ought not to worry about her – an assumption that had, on many occasions, been the cause of domestic friction. But even Jazzy had been aware of Keith’s shiftiness since Mack’s disappearance, the nervy gestures and the unnecessarily aggressive manner.
Plus, Jazzy reflected as he stopped into the corner café near the bus stop and bought a bucket of latte each for him and Ayanna, at least the long wakeful night meant they were up and out of the house early; the rush hour had barely started, but by the time they finally reached Chislehurst it had already died away, leaving them a conspicuous pair wandering the deserted suburban streets as they trekked to Keith’s house.
Jazzy had visited Keith at home before, shortly after he officially became one of his employees. It had been at Keith’s invitation that time, a ‘cocktail party’ straight from a 1970s-based sitcom. Keith had held court in a sports jacket, a cigar permanently in his hand while his (third) wife ran round with a tray of smoked salmon and a wall-eyed stare for anyone who tried to engage her in conversation.
Jazzy felt a surge of adrenaline when he saw Keith’s car parked in the drive. Keith never walked anywhere, not even to the golf course, which was about three hundred metres away. If the car was home, then Keith was home.
Jazzy attempted to open the gate at the bottom of the drive, but after half a minute’s unproductive fumbling, he realised that this was not the kind of gate visitors opened themselves. It was the kind of gate the house’s occupants opened (or not) once they had found out who the visitor was. On the pillar to his right was what looked like an intercom speaker. He reached over and pressed the buzzer.
‘Jeffrey,’ came Keith’s voice in – was Jazzy imagining things? – a mocking drawl. ‘Fancy you coming all the way down here just to see me. And who’s your little friend?’
Jazzy cleared his throat. ‘Hi, Keith. This is Ayanna. She works for us at Anastasia, she’s the cleaner.’ Actually Ayanna had nothing to do with Anastasia, she was employed by the
people they leased the building from, but Jazzy wanted to give some plausible reason for her being there. ‘She’s helping me out while Mack’s away.’
If the mention of Mack’s name troubled Keith, his voice gave no sign of it. It was the same familiar cool rasp. ‘Well, don’t just stand there. Come on in.’
The gates swung slowly open and Jazzy crunched self-consciously up the short gravel drive, with Ayanna trailing half a pace behind him. New money, thought Jazzy uncharitably. It was barely even worthy of being called a drive, let alone needing remotely controlled gates. Keith could have virtually leaned out the front window and opened them for him. The front door opened moments before Jazzy reached it.
‘Good afternoon, Jeffrey.’
Jazzy forced a smile. ‘Keith, I’ve told you. It’s Jazzy, everyone calls me Jazzy.’
Keith shrugged. ‘Whatever you say, Jeffrey. Now come in, take that weight off.’ He reached over and patted Jazzy’s stomach and Jazzy stiffened. He was six foot three and, at less than thirteen stone, hardly at risk of obesity, but Petra had mentioned a couple of times recently that she thought he was developing a bit of a paunch and Keith had managed, yet again, to find a raw nerve and hit it dead centre.
‘You don’t mind taking your shoes off, do you?’ Keith went on. ‘Her ladyship insists, I’m afraid.’ He ushered them into a vast lounge, over-furnished and under-decorated with a background smell of plug-in air fresheners mixed with a faint echo of last night’s cigarette smoke. At Keith’s insistence Jazzy took the armchair nearest the door and accepted a tumbler of Scotch, wishing desperately that he had not chosen to wear the ‘World’s Best Daddy’ socks that Rory had given him for Father’s Day. Ayanna refused Keith’s offer of the sofa and instead perched on the arm of Jazzy’s chair. She had not taken her shoes off. Jazzy wished, not for the first time, that he had half her balls.
‘Nothing’s wrong is it?’ Keith asked as he sat down opposite Jazzy.
Jazzy eyed him for a second. ‘No. Why would anything be wrong?’
‘It wouldn’t. Just asking.’
‘Well, no, everything’s OK. I just…’ The journey over there had at least allowed Jazzy time to think up a story to tell Keith, but in the end he had given up and decided that an approximation of the truth might be more likely to break down Keith’s defences. ‘I think you know Mack’s still not back, don’t you?’
Keith shrugged in an attempt at casual insouciance, but Jazzy noticed his eyes narrow and darken. ‘I assumed not as I hadn’t seen him. Like I said though, he’s owed some time off isn’t he? I’m not going to go chasing him to come back, the boy’s a grown man now.’
A few days ago this attempt to make Jazzy feel like a fussy mother-hen might have worked, but after everything, after Rory’s nursery, after the break-in, after the brief, pained phone call he had received from Simone early that morning explaining that a big, scary man had frightened her off the train but that she would be home later that day, Jazzy was unwilling to be shamed into leaving well enough alone. ‘Well, maybe,’ Jazzy said in a forcedly moderate tone, ‘but we,’ he gestured at Ayanna, ‘you know, the people who really know him well,’ he added, unable to resist. Keith loved to act as though he was the only person who really knew and understood Mack and this was bound to sting. ‘We think that he ought to have been back by now, or at least to have been in touch. It isn’t like him, you must admit that. And there were a few things that he did and said before he disappeared,’ Jazzy had chosen that word, disappeared, very deliberately, ‘that make us think there might be more to this than just a spur of the moment holiday.’
‘Like what?’ Keith snapped, before Jazzy had finished speaking. ‘Said things? Did things? Like what?’ he repeated, and at that moment Jazzy knew. Keith knew where Mack had gone, or at the very least why he had gone. And he was very, very keen to hide that information from Jazzy. Strangely, this realisation gave him an amount of confidence. On the journey down here, he and Ayanna had agreed they would not mention Rory’s nursery or the man at Ayanna’s college or last night’s break-in. If, and the idea still seemed far-fetched to Jazzy, Keith had played a part in any of it, then the mere fact of their not mentioning it would make it clear to him that they did not trust him. Jazzy’s plan was that this would make them seem as though they were not scared or intimidated in the hope that Keith decided they were tougher than he thought and that he should stop messing with them. Although, another faint but insistent voice in his head who happened to sound a lot like Petra kept repeating, surely a person who was not intimidated by someone breaking into their house in the middle of the night and leaving some newspaper cuttings behind along with a note reading ‘DO NOT DISTURB’, was not tough at all, but rather foolhardy and perhaps a bit stupid.
They had however decided that they would give Keith whatever information they had so far gathered themselves, which was to say not very much. There was still the chance that Keith might decide to help them, that he might genuinely be in the dark as much as they were, that he might want desperately for Mack to come home, just as they did. And if that was not the case then, Jazzy hoped again, it would make them seem tough and clued up and not the kind of people to be messed with. Jazzy looked at his novelty socks and at Ayanna’s skinny form curled on the arm of his chair and wondered just what kind of people they did seem like.
Ayanna spoke up before Jazzy could. ‘He bought some false IDs and stuff, but they weren’t for him, they were for some girl,’ she said, her words tumbling over each other. ‘And then after he’d gone we found another birth certificate for a young girl in his flat. Or at least Simone did, you know Simone, his kind-of girlfriend or whatever…’
‘She is his girlfriend,’ Jazzy interrupted with benign irritation.
‘Yeah, whatever,’ Ayanna said before Keith had a chance to speak, ‘and then just, erm, well,’ she glanced sidelong at Jazzy, ‘erm, just recently someone, erm, sent us something. Some newspapers. About a kid getting stabbed over in New Cross and about some other guy being mugged and beaten up. And there was a note with it too, look.’ She pulled the ‘DO NOT DISTURB’ note from her pocket and proffered it to Keith. He looked at it and nodded slowly, his face giving away nothing, but he did not take it from her. Ayanna put the note away and continued, ‘And we don’t know these people, any of them, not the girl in the birth certificate or these two people who got hurt. And we don’t think Mack knows them either. We don’t know what the hell’s going on but we thought you might.’ She paused for breath, but only briefly. ‘So? Do you?’
Jazzy had been watching Keith’s face carefully throughout Ayanna’s blurted speech, wishing he had paid more attention to all those CSI-type programmes Petra was so fond of. Did Keith seem nervous? Suspicious? Twitchy? Trying to play it cool? Was it looking up and to the right that meant they were guilty, or down and to the left?
Watching Keith though, Jazzy was forced to assume that either the guy was a Cumberbatch-standard actor or that he was genuinely baffled, and also starting to get worried. His eyes had narrowed, the frown-lines in his high forehead had deepened and he cleared his throat several times, harshly and reflexively, as though choking back words he could not bring himself to say.
After a moment’s tense silence Keith spoke, his voice quieter and softer than before and hence, somehow, vastly more intimidating. ‘I don’t know, darling. I don’t know what the hell’s going on and I don’t know where your precious Mack’s gone either. I think it’s time you were going, don’t you?’ This last part was addressed to Jazzy. Keith gestured to the door, palm open, a smile utterly devoid of human emotion on his face, as though he was trying to pretend that this was a normal way to treat people who came to your house. Jazzy noticed that the older man’s hand was shaking.
Jazzy could see that Keith was rattled, but he could also see that they were categorically not going to glean anything further by staying here any longer. He opened his mouth to assent, in fact was already halfway out of his seat, when Ayanna leapt up from the ch
air arm. ‘Hang on though. I need the toilet first. Is that OK?’ She jutted her small chin out and met Keith’s gaze as though daring him to refuse.
That chilling smile again. ‘Course, darling. Just down the hall, first door on your left.’ He gestured to the door once more, and Jazzy noticed that the tremor had calmed slightly.
One thing, perhaps the only thing, Jazzy had learned from the slick American crime dramas that never seemed to be off his TV screen and always prevented him from catching up on Game of Thrones, was to go for the jugular when the suspect’s guard was down. He had brought the newspapers from the kitchen table with him and he got them out and shoved them towards Keith. ‘These don’t mean anything to you?’ he asked bluntly, and Keith barely glanced at them before shaking his head.
‘Nah,’ he said dismissively, and Jazzy knew he was lying. He felt a pulse of anger rise through his exhausted body, fired by the whisky that was just starting to kick in. How could Keith watch them sweat like this, desperate to find and help their friend for no reason other than that they cared? What kind of a human was he?
‘You know that birth certificate Ayanna said we found in Mack’s flat?’ Jazzy pressed on, determined to try and eke some drop of truth out of Keith’s desiccated heart.
‘Yeah,’ Keith said flatly, and this time, Jazzy realised, his reaction was entirely different. This time the man sounded like Jazzy felt; baffled, defeated, angry at being presented with pile after pile of information which made no sense. Jazzy even thought he could detect an icy fringe of fear to Keith’s tone. ‘I told you, son. I don’t know nothing about any birth certificate. I know what you lot think of me, I know you think I’m some low-rent cross between Del Boy and Ronnie and Reggie, but I ain’t no fucking people smuggler.’
‘I know,’ Jazzy said feebly, although they both must surely know that he knew no such thing. He was quietly impressed though, as well as infuriated, at how able Keith was to see himself as others saw him. Maybe that was the key to his success.