by Tom Weaver
She returned a couple of minutes later. In her hands was an envelope. 'Here,' she said, and handed it to me.
'Are you charging for the coffee?'
'Ha ha — you're a funny man, Raker. No, one of my old clients just opened a new place. I don't know what it's like, but maybe you can treat a few of the guys at the group one week. Working in law, I have no real friends, so it makes more sense for you to have them.'
She was smiling.
I looked inside the envelope. There were eight vouchers with the name of a newly opened Italian restaurant in Acton at the top. Each one got you a free main course.
'Are you sure?' I asked.
'Yeah, absolutely.'
I glanced at her, then down at the vouchers again. Don't think it through. Just do it. I looked up. She was watching me again, that same look on her face.
'Are you free Friday?'
She paused. Didn't say anything. 'Don't feel like you need to ask me —'
'I'm asking you because I want to.'
She moved back to the sofa, brought her legs up under her so they were crossed, then broke out into another smile. Yes,' she said. 'I'm free.'
'Then it looks like we're eating Italian.'
* * *
Chapter Seven
Megan's plastic storage box was still on the kitchen counter when I got in. I took it through to the living room and sat down at the table, spreading the contents out in front of me in three separate piles: jewellery, letters and photographs.
I went through the jewellery first. Some gold chains. A bracelet. A couple of rings. In the middle of them all was a necklace. It was unusual, almost out of place among her other things: a shard of dark glass, possibly obsidian, on a long black cord. I held it up in front of me and, as I watched it turn slowly in my hands, realized Megan's initials were inscribed on the back. I set the necklace down, away from the rest of the jewellery, and turned to the letters.
Handwritten letters were pretty rare now so I imagined the ones in the box would be at least a couple of years old. But I was out by another two. There were five, all unsent, all to her grandparents in Norfolk, the last written in the week after her thirteenth birthday.
Next, I headed to the spare room and fired up the computer. Megan's camera used a standard Sony USB lead, the same as mine. I plugged it in and copied the pictures across to my desktop. Most of them mirrored the Megan in the photographs I already had of her, so I turned to the last one at the block of flats.
Everything was much clearer. Two metal doors, reinforced glass panels in them. Blobs of sunlight shining in the glass, with only the merest hint of anything else: maybe a tree reflected, and perhaps the edge of another building. There were sandy-yellow bricks behind Megan, on the right-hand side, and she was dressed in a dark pair of jeans, a black V-neck sweater, a thick bomber jacket and a red scarf.
And there was that smile.
I opened one of the other pictures of her with Leigh at the beach, and positioned them side by side. Different times. Different places. Different smiles. The smile on the beach was warm, but created. A smile for the camera, not for anyone beyond that. This one was different. There was nothing put-on about it. This smile carved across her face, filled up her eyes and brought colour to the surface of her cheeks. I needed to find out where she was in the picture.
But, more than that, I needed to find out who had taken it.
Using the password the police had given the Carvers, I accessed Megan's email. There were forty-two messages in her inbox, most of them automatically generated newsletters from companies she must have bought from or visited in the past. Three others caught my eye: two from Kaitlin, and one from Lindsey. All of them had been sent in the aftermath of Megan's disappearance, and — when I opened them up - they were all asking her to come home, or at least call her parents. The police had probably questioned the girls about the emails, and checked their accounts for replies.
Right at the bottom was a mail from a charity called the London Conservation Trust. It seemed slightly out of sync with the high-street stores, fast-food restaurants and cinema times that made up her other emails, so I clicked on it. It opened on to a bland-looking newsletter detailing the LCT's concern about urban development, and the impact it was having on wildlife in the city's parks. It thanked Megan for her donation of £10 and said the money would be put to use ensuring wildlife was protected in the face of the continued expansion of the city.
Suddenly, my phone started ringing.
'David Raker.'
'David, it's Spike.'
Spike was a Russian hacker living in a tiny flat in Camden Town, whom I'd known since my paper days. Back then, I'd used him a lot. He could get you an address, a phone number, a credit card statement, even bank account details — basically anything you wanted. The riskier the job, the more you had to pay him, but back then — when the story was all that mattered - he'd helped me break some big ones. I'd only ever met him once in the flesh: he was painfully thin and pale, as if he barely saw daylight. It was probably something to do with the fact that he was five years past the expiration of his student visa and never ventured outdoors.
I'd called him earlier in the evening, before I went out to the restaurant, and asked him to get me Megan's mobile phone records for the three months running up to her disappearance, and for the six months since.
'Spike — thanks for calling me back.'
'Hey, no problem - sorry it's so late.' I could hear him tapping something into a keyboard. 'So I got what you wanted here. There's a lot of calls.'
'How many?'
'Two hundred and seventy-four, plus four hundred and ninety-two texts.'
'That should be a fun evening in. Any after 3 April this year?'
'Uh…' He paused. 'No. None. How come?'
'That's what I'm trying to find out.' I logged out of Megan's email account, and moved to mine. 'Any chance you could email me that information? Can you turn it into a PDF or a JPEG or something?'
'Yeah. I'll PDF it. It'll be there in a couple of minutes.'
'Nice one, thanks.'
'You got my new drop-off details?'
Spike was a cash-only man, for obvious reasons. He had a locker in a sports centre close to his flat, and he gave his customers the access code, which he changed every day. The locker was his bank.
'I got it. I might need you for something in a bit, though.'
'Yeah, no problem. You know I'm not a nine-to-five man.'
I hung up. By the time I'd put in the username and password for my Yahoo account, the email and PDF were waiting there for me. I dragged off the PDF and opened it up. Thirty entries per page. Twenty-five and a half pages.
I went back through to the kitchen and turned on the coffee machine.
Two hours later, at almost two o'clock in the morning, I'd narrowed her list of calls down to eighteen different numbers. A couple I recognized off the bat: her home number; her mum's and dad's mobile phones; a few others from her Book of Life. The rest I'd never seen before.
I redialled Spike's number. 'I'm going to email you back a list of eighteen different phone numbers,' I said once he answered. 'Can you get me as many details for each one as you can lay your hands on?'
'Sure.'
'I need names and addresses for each. Anything else you come up with, you can chuck in there too as part of the fee.'
'This isn't gonna be a quick job.'
'That's fine. Just get what you can and give me a call back. I'll be out and about tomor—' I stopped, looked at my watch '— today, so just give me a shout on my mobile, okay?'
'You got it.'
I hung up, and looked back at Megan's face on the monitor. I'd never failed to find a missing person. I suppose, in some ways, I had a gift for it, some sort of magnetic pull that drew them to me, even if their bodies were the only thing left to find. I studied her face, her features, and hoped she would be luckier than that, just as I hoped all of them would be when I took on their cases. Because the worst
moment of all was returning to the nest, sitting down opposite the people who had hired me, and having to tell them the child they'd brought into this world had just been pulled back out again.
* * *
Chapter Eight
Tiko's — Megan, Kaitlin and Lindsey's favourite night out - was squeezed between a gay pub called Captain S and a tattoo parlour, just off Charing Cross Road. Beyond a door decorated in Aztec masks and dark wood, I was met by a bone-breaking R'n'B bassline and a thousand televisions blasting MTV into my eyes. There was one barman and a single customer. The customer had two beer bottles in front of him and both were already finished. It had just gone 11 a.m.
'Morning,' the barman said as I approached.
At the bar there was a sign saying they served breakfast.
'Morning. What's on the menu?'
'Anything you want.' He looked around him as he dried a glass. 'The chef ain't exactly rushed off his feet.'
'I'll have egg, bacon, some toast and a black coffee, then.'
'No problem,' he said. 'Take a seat.'
I slid in at the bar, about five stools away from the guy with the beer bottles. He looked up, his eyes red and mottled. I nodded. He nodded back. Then he dropped his head back down and stared into the empty bottles.
I took in the club. It was on two floors, with a winding staircase between them and a cramped balcony above the bar area and dancefloor. There were probably worse ways to spend a Saturday night, but I wasn't sure what they were.
A couple of minutes later, the barman reappeared. The first thing he did was reach into one of the fridges and take out another bottle of beer. 'Food's ordered, coffee's on,' he said, flipping the cap off the beer and handing it to the other guy. 'You want anything else to drink while you're waiting'
'Yeah, I'll have an orange juice.'
He nodded. I reached into my pocket and got out a photograph of Megan I'd taken from the box. One of her at home in her school uniform. The photo was probably a couple of years old, but she didn't look massively different from how she did in the most up-to-date pictures. Sometimes you had to work the percentages, though. The younger the victim, the more emotion you generated, and the more help you were likely to get. I held up the photograph as the barman placed my juice down in front of me.
'I'm not only here for breakfast,' I said. 'I'm doing some work for the family of a girl who used to come in here a lot.' I placed the picture down and pushed it across to him. 'Do you recognize her?'
He glanced at the photo. 'Judging by that school uniform, looks like she shouldn't have been getting in at all.'
'I won't tell.'
He nodded, smiled a little! 'She doesn’t seem familiar.'
'I imagine the police came in at one stage, about six months back.'
He raised an eyebrow. 'Police?'
'She used to come in with a couple of other girls her age.'
'Is she missing?'
'Her name's Megan Carver.'
His eyes widened for a moment. The name rang a bell. 'She was that girl on the news. The one that disappeared.'
'That's her.'
He looked at her picture again, as if trying to see something he hadn't managed to pick out the first rime. Then he shook his head and pushed the photo back across the counter to me. 'I remember the news stories, but I was still sitting with my feet up on a beach in Thailand when she went missing. I've only been working here four months.'
I nodded, took the photo. 'I guess I'll just wait for my breakfast then.'
It arrived a couple of minutes later and was surprisingly good. The eggs were runny, the bacon was crunchy and both slices of toast were drenched in butter. When I was done, I pushed the plate back across the bar and set about finishing my coffee and juice. The barman was away cleaning tables on the other side of the room. Five stools down from me, my drinking partner had just finished his third beer.
I glanced at him. He was looking down into the empty bottles, one eye open, one eye closed. Stubble was scattered across his face. His hair looked like it had gone weeks without shampoo. But he was dressed in good clothes: Diesel trousers, a Ted Baker sweater, a Quiksilver bodywarmer and, sneaking out from under his sleeve, a Gucci watch. Basically the best-dressed drunk in London.
'Nice breakfast?' he asked without looking up.
'Pretty good, yeah.'
'You sound surprised,' he said, his voice quiet.
'I am.'
'You shouldn't be. It's a good breakfast in here.'
'I know,' I said. 'I just tasted it.'
I pulled a twenty out of my wallet.
'Your girl,' he said, turning on his seat, pushing the bot- des away from him like he wanted to forget he'd spent his breakfast necking three beers. 'Megan. She sounded like a nice girl.'
Now he had my attention. You knew her?'
'No, I didn't know her.' He took one of the bottles and separated it out from the group. 'But I had the Old Bill in here asking me questions about her a couple of days after she went missing'
I eyed him. He sat up straight, smiled and turned towards me. He could see I was trying to put it together in my head: the drunk owns this place?
'You're the manager?'
'The owner. I employ a manager.'
'What did the police ask you?'
The same sort of questions you just asked. Did she come in here? Did I recognize her? Did she ever get into any trouble?' He paused, pulled the beer bottle back into the group, then looked up at me again. 'I didn't have any answers for them, just as I won't have any for you. She could have come in here for years, and she would have meant as much to me as someone who comes in here for the first time.' He shrugged, a little regret in his eyes. That's the nature of these places.'
'Did the police take anything away?'
'CCTV footage.'
'How much?'
'As much as we had.'
'Which was how much?'
'We keep a year's worth. That's what our legal people and security team advise us to do, in case anything kicks off in here and we have to go to court. We keep an additional year as well, but only one copy of that, and in a deposit box at a bank near St Paul's. Anything outside of those two years, we dispose of.'
'So the police took a year's worth of footage from you?'
'No. They took the six months up to, and including, the date of her disappearance, and the month after.'
'Did they find anything?'
'You'd have to ask them that,' he said. 'But as it's sitting in the drawer of my desk upstairs now, I guess not.'
He looked up at me then, and a smile spread across his face like glass cracking. I realized then that this was a man for whom drinking wasn't enjoyable, or an addiction, or just something to do. It was a way of finding an exit. For a brief moment, as we locked eyes across the bar, it was like seeing my reflection in a mirror.
'Are you okay?'
He nodded and looked away. 'Maybe I can help you.'
And when he looked back, his eyes were filling up. He got down off the stool and gestured for me to follow him up to the second floor.
His name was Paulo Janez, and his office overlooked a tiny London backstreet, full of townhouse doors and slivers of office space. On one wall was a huge black-and- white painting of Tony Montana. On the other were a series of photographs. Paulo was in most of them, as was someone I presumed was his dad. They looked the same: dark skin, black hair, brown eyes, immaculately dressed. He caught me looking at them.
'My father,' he said quietly, and sat at his desk. He opened one of the drawers and started going through them. I sat opposite and watched in silence. Eventually he brought out seven DVDs, bound together with two elastic bands. He closed the drawer and placed them on the desk in front of me.
'Be my guest,' he said, gesturing to them.
'That's the seven months the police took?'
'Correct.'
I got out a card and passed it across the desk to him. My guarantee I would return the DVDs. He took the card, stud
ied it, then nodded that he understood.
'You married?' he asked.