Sirens

by Joseph Knox

  ‘Waits,’ he said. Parrs always picked up the phone in the same way. Like he’d glared at it a moment before you called, expecting your name to appear any second. His voice was a low growl with a light Scottish accent.

  ‘Superintendent.’

  ‘How was Rossiter?’ he asked.

  ‘The elder or the younger?’

  ‘Elder first.’

  ‘We had a drink. I was surprised. And surprised you weren’t there.’

  ‘Hm,’ he said. ‘That was decided at a higher level. The Minister, in conjunction with our beloved Chief Superintendent.’

  ‘What’s her take on it?’

  ‘She decided if I were there, things might take on an official tone. She’s keen, for appearances as well as the legitimacy of our case, that the two prongs of your work stay separate.’

  ‘Good of her,’ I said.

  ‘Hm,’ he replied. Whenever Parrs talked about Chief Superintendent Chase, it was accompanied by an inflection of doubt that I was grateful to hear. He was unreadable in every other way. It made sense to me that Chase had forced the Rossiter affair on Parrs, and he resented it. That went double because the order had come from a woman.

  He cut into my thoughts. ‘Make no mistake about who you’re working for and where your priorities lie. You were due to make contact with the Franchise in a couple of weeks anyway. That’s the only reason I agreed to this.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘You went to the house last night.’

  Without seeing him, I couldn’t tell if he was asking the question or telling me what he already knew.

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And no Carver.’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘Around, but student stuff.’

  ‘So what about Isabelle Rossiter?’

  ‘She was there. Mr Rossiter asked me to keep my distance but she seemed OK.’ I thought of her taking the bottle from me, felt grateful not to be lying to Parrs’ face.

  ‘She’s staying there at the house?’

  ‘Far as I could tell. I thought I’d give the Minister a call but wanted to run it by you first.’

  ‘You’ll keep him fully apprised, but only after checking what I want him kept fully apprised of. He can have the vague outline of it. Seen a paper this morning?’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘Course not. I’d be surprised if you’ve seen your shower and razor. I’d planned to run the Greenlaw appeal later in the year, once you’d made contact with the Franchise. Given that we’re ahead of schedule, I managed to get it in today’s Evening News. There’ll be a repeat early next week.’ Despite its name, the Evening News ran a morning edition. I’d be lucky to catch it.

  ‘What’s the angle of the appeal?’

  ‘Ten years since she disappeared, give or take.’

  I heard him breathing down the phone. In spite of his stated interest in the drugs trade, I had the feeling that the Superintendent’s main fascination was in the disappearance of Joanna Greenlaw. A notorious cold case with links to the Franchise.

  ‘Are her family involved?’

  ‘Didn’t have any. There was a kid when she was fifteen but given up for adoption. I want to know how Zain Carver reacts to the appeal. If he doesn’t react, prompt him.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘I want him rattled on the subject,’ he reiterated. It didn’t matter to Parrs that this would put me in danger. It probably made it better. He had nothing to lose in our deal either. ‘Aside from that, proceed as planned.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Is there anything else?’

  I thought of Isabelle, blushing with the wine in her hand. I didn’t feel like turning her life over to a blackmailer as well.

  ‘I think that’s everything,’ I said.

  9

  The Greenlaw appeal was the Superintendent’s passion project. It hadn’t been part of our original deal, that I’d study the Franchise like a delicate ecosystem. It dropped a rock in the pond. Turned my covert operation into a suicide mission.

  Joanna Greenlaw was one rung above an urban myth.

  She had been a cash collector for Zain Carver back in the early noughties. His first. She passed into police legend when she agreed to give evidence against him. The old guard still used her name as shorthand for a long shot.

  You’ll never get anything on him, son. You’d need Joanna fucking Greenlaw.

  I got up, got dressed and found a copy of the Evening News. The appeal was prominent, sure to catch the eye.

  POLICE APPEAL FOR INFORMATION

  ON GREENLAW DISAPPEARANCE

  Ten years.

  It said that Greenlaw had been a popular twenty-six-year-old woman with connections to the criminal underworld. She had severed these connections and started a new life when she went missing. The truth was slightly more complicated.

  Carver’s bar franchise had been her idea. Before that, he’d been small-time. Selling recreational quantities of soft drugs while he worked out what to do with his life. The Franchise changed that. He had qualities that the city’s chaotic drugs market hadn’t seen before. Professionalism and a strategy. Unfortunately, that came with ambition. When he insisted on market growth, the scene started getting bloody. Joanna went to the police when another collector, a friend of hers, was killed.

  She’d been placed under Special Measures, a budget version of Witness Protection, and installed in an abandoned house on Thursfield. A ghost street in Salford, Thursfield was an entire row of derelicts. Empty and isolated, not even worth knocking down or renovating. Ideal for hiding somebody.

  Due to the low scale of the operation, there was no budget for a man on the door, but when an officer stopped in at the end of his shift he became concerned. He knocked repeatedly to no answer and then kicked it in. He wiped his boots once he gained entry. There had been black and white paint daubed all over her doorstep.

  I studied the picture alongside the appeal. Joanna had dark, naturally curly hair, and wore a long, thick jumper over black leggings. She looked more like an art student than a drug dealer. The expression on her face was half-formed, the prelude to either a smile or a frown. She was standing in a living room, by a fireplace, backed so far into the wall’s alcove she looked like she was trying to disappear into it.

  Ten years ago.

  The officer searched the house for her but she was gone, along with her suitcase and clothes.

  As far as we knew, Joanna Greenlaw was never seen again. Personally, I didn’t want to know what Zain Carver had to do with it.

  10

  I spent the following week returning to the mundane surveillance of the previous month. I haunted local bars, establishing in my mind how far the Franchise reached. I usually enjoyed this time alone, but Friday’s party had left an impression on me. I wanted to walk into the lives of the people I’d met, and the ones I hadn’t. There was a certain thrill in maintaining a double identity, but it was more than that. I felt like it was a second chance to absorb some of the life I’d missed out on.

  I put a call in to David Rossiter on the Monday, to update him on his daughter. He insisted that I meet him for coffee at his penthouse, to share my impressions.

  ‘I can be there within the hour,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll send a car.’

  It didn’t occur to me until after we hung up that I’d never told him where I was staying. Ten minutes later the black BMW arrived. Detective Kernick, alone this time. He drove us, wordlessly, back to Beetham Tower. I was escorted up in the lift. The background muzak went impassively on. There was a thrill, an electric charge, to being on the forty-fifth floor again. Detective Kernick led me along the corridor to the same penthouse suite. He opened the door and closed it behind me, remaining outside.

  Thin, winter light gave the room a sepia tone. This time, David Rossiter was already seated, waiting for me in the lounge. Even sitting down, he cut an impressive figure. He didn’t speak until Kernick had closed the door.


  ‘Waits,’ he said, standing to shake my hand.

  ‘Mr Rossiter.’

  ‘Please, take a seat.’

  We sat down.

  ‘There really isn’t much to say.’

  ‘I’ll decide that, if it’s all the same to you.’

  ‘Well, after our meeting on Friday I went to a bar on the Locks. For the last month or so I’ve been watching a man there who I believe to be involved in the Franchise.’

  ‘The bar’s name?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  He raised an eyebrow.

  ‘It’s my understanding that my work for you amounts to a personal favour. This is an ongoing investigation. There’s only so much I can share …’

  He frowned. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Fridays are of interest to me because it’s also when Carver has his money collected.’

  ‘Collected how?’

  ‘He employs a network of young women, feigning to be on nights out. They chat and flirt with the bar staff, then collect the money and get cabs home to Carver.’

  ‘Is that safe?’

  ‘It is if you own the cab company in question. After our conversation I made contact with one of these girls and got myself invited back to the Carver house. There’s a party there most Friday nights. Drugs, DJs, dancing, et cetera.’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘Ecstasy, mainly.’

  ‘And Isabelle?’

  ‘She seemed OK.’

  ‘OK?’

  ‘Like a young woman enjoying herself.’ It was right at the edge of the truth but, from what I’d seen, she had done nothing that warranted my spying on her. And nothing that her father needed to immediately know about. There was a pause as Rossiter took this in.

  ‘Your assumptions?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t make assumptions, I only know what I see.’

  ‘I rather think that’s true.’ He looked me firmly in the eye. ‘This won’t do, Waits. How are you to know what’s relevant to Isabelle? Relevant to me? You’ll tell me everything, and I’ll decide. I’m sure you think you know what you’re doing, but you’re a young man. You won’t notice every detail and you won’t always see its importance when you do.’

  ‘With respect, sir—’

  ‘I have quite enough respect. What I want are the facts.’

  Neither of us spoke for a moment.

  ‘Why do you take off your wedding ring, Mr Rossiter?’

  His gaze flickered.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Your wedding ring. Why do you take it off?’

  He fingered his temple. ‘I’m not sure what you’re—’

  ‘It was cold to the touch the first time we shook hands. Your skin was warm, though. Same thing today. In future, you should put the ring in a trouser pocket if you have to take it off. Somewhere it’ll keep the approximate warmth of your body. Dropping it into a loose coat pocket, especially if you’re out in this weather, will only make it colder than your hand. Raise unwanted questions.’

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘A detail I noticed.’

  We sat in silence for a minute, Rossiter staring into the middle distance over my shoulder. It made me think there was someone else in the room, standing behind me. I didn’t move. Finally, his eyes drifted back on to mine. He smiled coldly.

  ‘That’ll be all.’

  11

  I rationed the more interesting parts of the job for regular intervals in the week. As Friday drew closer, time moved slower and I became restless for the next party. Only Rubik’s, the bar on the Locks, carried the same thrill.

  I watched the staff. Their movements.

  It was the central hub of Zain Carver’s business. The bar manager was an integral part of that. I took a paperback one day and watched him over a couple of beers. Everything he did, from making a cocktail to taking a tip, was done hatefully. There was more to it than that, though.

  I recognized him from somewhere.

  Once I was certain, I walked up the road to St Peter’s Square. The central library had recently reopened its doors after a four-year renovation. An enormous, circular building, it had taken inspiration from classical Roman architecture and stood out against the grey office blocks surrounding it. It was the first time I’d been back since the refit, and I had to ask for directions to the newspaper archive.

  I flicked through endless Evening News articles until I found what I was looking for. A photograph of the bar manager, beardless and smiling on the court steps. Sweating through a cheap three-piece suit. He looked like he’d won a regional darts tournament.

  SMITHSON ACQUITTED

  Glen Smithson, the bar manager, had been arrested for the date rape of Eleanor Carroll, an eighteen-year-old fresher, away from Ireland for the first time in her life. Despite a CV including theft, domestic violence and the sale of Rohypnol, the case against him had fallen apart. The judge had blasted detectives for ‘contaminated, tampered with, and missing evidence.’ Reading between the lines, I wondered if the girl had been intimidated, too. She had dropped the charges, dropped out of university and gone back home.

  The Franchise in full effect.

  I contemplated his picture for a long time.

  Everyone else I’d met so far had personality. I could believe they were people in a shady world doing a job. But the bar manager hated. It was interesting.

  12

  November. Fairview. Friday night. The same thick pulse of music, beating out through the walls. Same gaggle of people standing at the end of the path, wanting to go in but not quite daring. Having got in and out once, I was nervous about going back. I took a pill before I set out, then another when I arrived. I didn’t knock this time. As I was about to, the door swung open. Sarah Jane, red hair in corkscrews, white skin in another black dress, inclined her head. The look said: I remember you, but not much more.

  The truth is that she was a cruel kind of beautiful. Someone you might remember on your deathbed, wondering where your courage had been on the day you met, wondering why your courage only ever surfaced at the wrong time and for people who weren’t worth it.

  I stepped inside and she closed the door behind me. If anything, the party was busier this week. Life was exploding in every corner of the house and the walls looked like they were sweating. Turning to thank Sarah Jane, I saw the reason why.

  Zain Carver.

  He was standing beside her, radiating charm and cold, clean malice. The oldest man in the room, some thirty-six years of age, Carver was rich enough in money and drugs to overcome any stigma. He dressed casually in designer clothes, like a hip-hop entrepreneur. He was mixed race, with a brilliant, bright smile. The house belonged to him, although his height meant that he had to slouch in the hallway. It gave the impression that he was holding up the ceiling and I think he liked that. Fairview had been left to him by his parents, along with a small property portfolio and an annual income. There was no real need for him to inhabit such a violent world, but I suppose that’s how you can tell a man who comes from old money. There’s no one so keen to get hold of the new kind.

  Sarah Jane was half-turned towards me and about to speak.

  Carver interrupted her.

  ‘Right, though, aren’t I?’ he said, with the kind of Southern accent people only get from not living there.

  She turned to him, speaking quickly, quietly. He half-listened while scrolling through messages on his phone. My arrival had brought an atmosphere in with it and I thought about leaving. Instead, I moved warily out of the doorway with a nod in their direction.

  I’d been drinking in the hallway for a few minutes when I saw Sarah Jane again. Next to the other girls, their jaundiced, liver-

  failure fake tans, she was pale and smooth. She ghosted her way through the human wall with an ambivalent, removed ease.

  I called her name over the music but she didn’t look back. I started to follow but was forcefully shoved from behind. I fell into a group of people and, finding my feet again, saw
our celebrity host, Zain Carver, strong-arming his way through the crowd after her.

  I reached out for his shoulder but someone pulled me back. He was a small mountain, all piss and uproar that I’d spilt his drink. I recognized him as Carver’s enforcer, Danny Gripe.

  Grip to his friends.

  He pushed me. ‘The fuck’s your problem?’

  Close up, there was something off about him. His eyes seemed to be swelling out of his skull, his left arm looked smaller than his right and his hair was thinning in patches. He kept looking from his fallen glass to me in mock-awe at the power of gravity.

  ‘I said, what the fuck’s your problem?’

  I didn’t reply. I didn’t know. He pushed me again and I laughed at him. His mouth shrank down to a small, puckered circle of outrage. There was no chance of fighting in such a cramped space, but when he clenched his good fist some people held him back.

  I could leave now or go deeper inside, after Sarah Jane and Carver. Reluctantly, I turned and pushed through the crowd in their direction. Whether it was earned or not, Carver had a reputation for making women disappear.

  I arrived in the kitchen to see ten or so people standing around closed patio doors leading out into a garden. The music was much quieter, and I could hear them all speaking in the same hushed tones. The unhappy couple had already passed through. I went to the doors and saw them in silhouette, standing at the end of the garden path. They were having a heated argument. I could see their breath in the cold but couldn’t hear them. Carver’s frame loomed over Sarah Jane’s. I expected the worst and shouted over my shoulder to the room.

  ‘Hey, everyone out. Zain needs some privacy.’

  His name scared most of the gawpers back into the hallway. One man dragged his knuckles across the room, tried to look past me.

  ‘What’s he doing out there?’ he said, all admiration.

  ‘Proposing,’ I said. ‘What the fuck do you think he’s doing?’ He huffed out like I’d hurt his feelings.

  Because the light was on indoors, I could see Carver and Sarah Jane framed in a reflection of my own face. They looked like a two-headed monster, but began to struggle and pull apart. I pressed up against the glass and made to open the door, when one of the shapes hit the other bluntly about the head.