by Neil White
‘So, cards on the table,’ Dave said, ‘why are you here?’
I realised then that his brief had been just to follow me and get pictures. Harry hadn’t trusted Dave to know much about the story.
‘Just following a tip,’ I said.
He pulled a face and then asked, ‘How is it up north?’
We had reached Parliament Square and, as we threaded through the tourists outside the splendour of Westminster Abbey, the London Eye turning slowly behind the Parliament silhouette, I thought of Laura, alone in our Lancashire cottage. I had a sudden yearning to be there, away from all this noise and hostility. I wanted to hear nothing but the crackle of branches outside our window and the rustle of the sheets as Laura nestled into the crook of my arm. I wanted to smell her perfume, feel her hair wind around my fingers.
‘It’s good,’ I said.
‘You’re not being very talkative.’
‘You’re here to find out what I know,’ I said. ‘That makes me go quiet.’
Dave sighed at that and kept on walking.
We made small talk as we headed to the South Bank, and for a while we caught the remnants of street theatre, young African men in ragged T-shirts scratching a living by doing football tricks, or mime artists standing motionless in Tudor costumes. We stopped for a few minutes to watch them and take in the view, the murky Thames as the backdrop.
‘I miss this sometimes,’ I said.
Dave looked at me, surprised. ‘You said you liked it in the North.’
‘I do, but it’s so familiar,’ I said. ‘Maybe I never stopped being the northern boy, dazzled by the bright lights. Should I have asked Laura to leave all this behind? She’s from Pinner, and I know that’s got a small-town feel, but it’s nothing like where I’m from.’
‘Laura?’
‘I met her down here, a detective, and she moved to Lancashire with me.’
‘She must be special,’ Dave said.
‘She is,’ I said.
‘You weren’t like this in the old days,’ Dave said. ‘You’ve gone soft.’
I smiled. ‘Maybe.’ I pointed towards a footbridge that would take us over the river. ‘Let’s go for that drink.’
We sauntered towards Molly Moggs, a small bar on Charing Cross Road, intimate and quaint. Although I didn’t fit into its normal clientele—it was on the edge of the Soho gay scene—it was quiet and good for a drink. Inside the pub, the inevitable drag act hadn’t got going yet; only a skin-and-bones old man in short skirt and lipstick gave a hint of how the pub would finish the night.
I lifted my phone out of my pocket to let Dave know that I was making a call and then pointed him towards the bar. When Laura answered, I thought she sounded distracted.
I told her that my story wasn’t panning out like I had hoped and tried to keep the rest of the bar out of our conversation, but Laura didn’t seem talkative.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘It’s good to hear your voice though.’
‘You just don’t seem like you’re talking much.’
‘No, Jack, everything’s fine. I’m just tired, that’s all.’
We exchanged our goodbyes, and a promise that we would have some time together the next day, and then the line went dead.
The city seemed lonely at that point. People rushed past the pub windows, and in the bar young men in suits smooched or gossiped. An old man with wild hair and a long beard came in, and squeezed past me as he made his way to the bar.
Dave headed back with the drinks. ‘Do you fancy hitting a club afterwards?’ he asked, his eyes alive with the thought of a boozy late night.
I thought again of Laura alone in our cottage, just the television for company, the papers for her sergeant’s exam spread across the table.
I shook my head. ‘I need to get back to the hotel,’ I said. ‘I’m tired.’
Dave looked disappointed. ‘You really have changed, Jack,’ he said.
I raised my glass. ‘I know, and I’m happy.’
Laura clicked off the phone. She was convinced she had heard something upstairs. She had checked that the windows were closed and so it must be Bobby.
The noise became louder, something heavy moving along the floor.
She ran upstairs, two steps at a time, and she heard a bang.
‘Bobby!’ she shouted as she rushed into his room, clicking on the light. He was sitting up in bed, rubbing his eyes against the light. Then it sounded like someone was in her room, the rumble of feet loud.
Laura bolted towards her room and threw open her bedroom door. Her window was open, the curtains blowing. She had checked it was closed not long before.
She went to the window and tried to see outside. She had no torch and so all she could do was peer into the shadows. She reached for her phone and dialled 999, a quiver in her voice as she gave out her address. The cottage was isolated and they might catch him on the way down the hill.
Laura ended her call and listened out for movement outside. There was nothing. She looked into the darkness for a few moments, stared at the lights from the small huddle of cottages on the opposite hill, dots of yellow against the purple of the night, the light pollution from Turners Fold in the valley below not reaching them. It was the silence that struck her. For the first time since they had moved north, Jack was a long way from home.
She closed the window, making sure it was locked, and then went back downstairs to wait until the police arrived. She hoped it was someone she knew. She looked at her hands. They were trembling.
Bobby appeared on the landing. ‘What is it, Mummy?’
Laura tried to smile. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Go back to bed.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
The morning came around too quickly. The sun was just blinking through the trees as I waited outside the hotel for Susie. I heard the fast click of her heels before I saw her, and then my face was shrouded in her smoke as she took a long pull on her first cigarette of the day. The coughing that followed rattled her body, her cheeks a mottled purple.
‘Do you always get up at this time?’ I asked, once she had recovered, my voice filled with morning bleariness.
She shook her head. ‘Not since Maisy was a child. It was Gilly’s idea.’
I was surprised. ‘I didn’t know you had a child.’
‘Any reason why you should?’
‘I just thought you might have mentioned her. Most parents do.’
Susie anticipated my next question. ‘No, she’s not Gilly’s child,’ she said. ‘I got married not long after Gilly disappeared, but it didn’t work out.’ She raised an eyebrow at me. ‘I bet that would have added a zero onto the price, Claude Gilbert’s child.’
‘It would have added something,’ I said. ‘So, where do we wait?’
‘Same place as yesterday,’ she replied.
‘I’m patient for a story,’ I said, ‘but this is wearing thin. If he’s not here soon, I go home.’
Susie nodded. ‘Okay, I understand. We’ll go for breakfast later. That might help.’
We went to the same park as the previous day, but it was still locked, and so we settled on a wooden bench that looked towards the entrance to Lower Belgrave Street.
As we waited, Susie asked, ‘Why did you follow me last night?’
I looked at her. I knew there was no point in lying. ‘To see if you led me to Claude.’
‘But that isn’t what we agreed,’ she said. ‘Claude will make himself known.’
‘Yeah, and I’m not sure this was in the agreement either, nursing a hangover with no sign of Claude.’
Susie fell quiet, but I wasn’t in the mood for apologising, and so I had only the passing crowd to entertain me. It seemed different in the morning; quieter, more earnest, everyone with the day ahead, teeming out of the station, heading for work or onward travel. The lights began to flicker into life as the shops began another working day, and I stared into the crowds, looking for a face that didn’t
fit. Everyone seemed passive, passionless, concentrating on whatever was streaming through their headphones. I expected Gilbert to stand out, his eyes flitting around him, furtive, alert, always waiting for the recognition.
But there was no one who caught my attention. Just a stream of suits and anonymity.
I checked my watch. Eight thirty. ‘C’mon, let’s go for that breakfast,’ I said. ‘He’s running out of time.’
Laura let the steam from her coffee bathe her face as she held the cup to her chest. She was scouring the fields, looking for some hint of whoever had been in her house, but it was hard to concentrate.
It had been a long night. She’d had no real sleep, just snatches in the chair, too scared to go to bed. She had tried to do some revision for the sergeant’s exam, but the words just swam before her eyes whenever she looked at a page and her head dipped and jerked as she tried to stay awake.
Coffee had kept her going, but now her eyes felt heavy, the skin sore under her eyes, and her legs twitched if she stayed still.
Who had been in the house, and why?
She checked her watch. She had to go to work soon, Bobby to drop off on the way, and then the house would be vulnerable again. Would someone be waiting for her when she got back? If Jack wasn’t home, she would take Bobby and stay away.
Laura cursed herself. She was supposed to be stronger than this, and now she had a whole day to get through on hardly any sleep.
She took a gulp of coffee. She would wait until the caffeine kicked in, and then she would set off.
She turned away from the window and looked at the papers strewn by her chair, revision books and specimen questions scattered over the floor. It would be a long day, and she knew that this wasn’t the best preparation. She jolted when she heard a noise from upstairs, and then cursed as hot coffee spilled over her knuckles. She knew that it was only Bobby, but she was jumpy, unnerved.
Laura sucked at her fingers to cool the heat from the spilled coffee and then headed towards the stairs. She had to start the day, somehow make everything seem normal again.
Mike Dobson joined the rush-hour queue into Blackley.
He worked out of one of the office complexes by the motorway, and so he knew he would be late, but he was nonetheless drawn to check out the streets he had driven around the other night, just to see if she was there. He’d thought about her ever since the other night, of her promise that they would do more than just pull up by the old viaduct.
The cars that streamed into Blackley snaked their way to work through twisting back streets, around some convoluted one-way system designed to get traffic in and out of the narrow Victorian streets without snarling up, and so for the last part of his journey Mike was taken through the streets he sometimes crawled at night.
Tears formed in his eyes. He should leave Mary, he knew that, but he couldn’t. Fear kept him there, scared of how much Mary might know of his secret, and how much she would strike back if he left her.
He heard a horn behind him, and as he looked up he saw that the queue had moved forward. He raised his hand in apology and set off to rejoin the back of the queue twenty feet further on.
As the car in front sent up small flumes of blue smoke, he looked out of the car window again, glancing up and down the streets, hoping for a glimpse of the girl, maybe on her way to the shops or something, doing something ordinary that would make her more real, not how she was when he saw her last, short skirt and vacant grin.
He sighed. He couldn’t see her. There was always tonight though. As he thought about that, he felt the excitement begin to flutter in his stomach.
Chapter Twenty-Five
We settled into a café at a crossroads on Lower Belgrave Street. It fancied itself as upmarket, real food having been replaced by cakes and small Italian biscuits. Oil paintings of Tuscan views lined the walls and the air hung heavy with the smell of strong coffee. I saw the relief in the owner’s eyes as we settled at the back, at a table in the shadows. I felt bleary-eyed and smelled of stale beer, and Susie was wearing the same clothes as the day before, so we hardly fitted in with the well-groomed businessmen sitting at a table by the door, their shoes so polished that they reflected the sun streaming through the large windows.
We didn’t talk. I didn’t want to miss Gilbert if he showed up, and so I concentrated on the door, my camera in my hand under the table. Susie had sent a text to let Claude know where we were, her hand shielding the screen from me.
The Italian coffee did a good job of waking me up and when the businessmen moved on we had the café to ourselves. I drank the coffee slowly, not sure when Gilbert would arrive, if he ever would. Over an hour passed as we watched the streets grow gradually quieter, until the morning rush was done and the tables outside were empty.
Then Susie grabbed my hand.
‘He’s here,’ she said in a whisper. I saw the excitement in her eyes and looked quickly towards the doorway.
There was a man at a table outside, the waiter taking out a large coffee to him. I felt my hand tense around my camera and found it hard to suppress a smile. If this was Gilbert, it was obvious that his roguish charm had long since left him. He was tall, I could tell that from the way his legs stretched out under the table, but his once-handsome face was now concealed behind a long beard, mainly grey, and above it I could see the spider’s web of broken veins. His eyebrows were bushy, with grey fingers of hair pointing to the side, but it was the hair on his head that drew the eye. In the pictures from the newspapers, his hair had been dark, thick and lush. Now, it was bushy and wild, straggling down to his shoulders.
It could be Claude. He looked familiar. I pulled my camera out from under the table. Susie started to look round, and then shook her head. ‘No,’ she hissed at me. ‘No pictures, that’s the deal. If you take one, he’ll run.’
‘But his picture will be everywhere once he comes forward,’ I said.
‘Except that he still has an escape route if he changes his mind,’ Susie countered.
I paused for a moment, and then relented and put it back into my pocket. The man outside had picked up The Times and was holding it in front of his face, which must have been the signal, because Susie put her hand on mine. ‘You can go speak to him now.’
I rose quickly to my feet and threaded my way through the tables. My mouth was dry with nerves as I drew closer, wondering whether the most infamous fugitive in recent history was really on the other side of the window. I heard the scrape of Susie’s chair as she followed me.
The man looked up at me as I strode to his table and, for a second, I saw doubt in his eyes, mixed with some fear, but then he recovered his composure and folded the newspaper back onto the table. I sat down opposite, Susie behind me.
‘Hello, Claude,’ I said.
His cheeks flushed and his tongue flicked through his beard as he licked at his lips. Then he tutted and wagged his finger. ‘A lot of people make that mistake,’ he said, his voice deep and rich. I had a moment of doubt as I heard traces of Eastern Europe in his accent.
Then Susie leant towards him. ‘Gilly,’ she said. ‘It’s okay.’
He swallowed and then whispered, ‘Not here.’ He put his folded newspaper under his arm. ‘Follow me.’
He stood quickly and brushed past my shoulder as he started to walk along Lower Belgrave Street, past the lines of black railings and porches supported by bright white pillars, with black and white chessboard floor tiles, and pinks and violets and purples trailing from window boxes. I rushed to keep up with him, the fast clicks of Susie’s shoes just behind me. His head was down, his steps quick.
I wondered if he was heading for the town park I could see ahead, some trees breaking the building line, but then he ducked quickly through a gate and then down some steps. I looked at the number—forty-six—and made a mental note for the story as I stopped to let Susie catch up. I heard the lock of the door below turn, and spun around to look at her.
‘Is he backing out?’ I said.
‘He won’t,’ she said, her face determined. ‘It’s a big moment for him, that’s all. It’s been a long time.’
I looked down the steps, into the shadows of the small concrete yard. But I hesitated. The person didn’t look much like Claude Gilbert, and all I had were the promises of a chain-smoking long-lost lover.
I walked down the stairs slowly, ready for him to rush out, and then gave a firm rap on the door. There was no answer, so I knelt down to the letterbox.
‘Mr Gilbert, please open the door.’
There was silence for a moment, and then I heard Susie clomp down the steps behind me. She pushed me to one side.
‘Gilly,’ she shouted, her face pressed against the glass panel in the door. ‘Please open up.’
There was silence for a few seconds, and then I heard footsteps and the low rumble of a key being turned. There was another moment of silence and so I turned the handle. The door swung open slowly and I entered the flat.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Laura was distracted as she wrote her statement.
She was in the report-writing room, another glass box, designed to be a quiet space for officers to work, away from the briefings and the CCTV and the chatter. But what should have been a simple write-up of an arrest she had made a couple of days earlier was turning into a patchwork of mistakes and corrections, the page filling up with crossings-out and initials.
She put down her pen and reached into her pocket for a mint; she could taste her tiredness on her breath. Laura knew what the problem was: the visitor from the night before. Laura knew about the pervert who had been watching people’s houses, but she also remembered Joe Kinsella’s warning about Jack’s story. Was Jack getting involved in something that he needed to keep away from?
She leant back in her chair and looked through the glass walls, into the atrium, at the case-builders heading for the morning canteen run, and the police drivers exchanging moans about their lot, the files delivered to court, taking a break before they began the forensic runs, taking samples to the lab.