by AD Davies
“Are you willing to help us?”
“Let me get this straight. Your sister goes missing a month ago. Possibly with a boyfriend. But no one else, I assume, is reported missing?”
She nodded reluctantly.
I said, “Maybe she stole a bunch of cash from a reputed criminal, maybe a case of mistaken identity. You can’t afford to keep your detective, so you hop on a train in the hope of convincing an ex-private investigator to take over. For free. Do I have that right so far?”
“Almost,” she said. “I couldn’t afford the train. I used a coach.”
“From Leeds?”
She nodded.
Leeds to Cornwall. That’s a long journey.
“Bloody Harry,” I said.
As the drizzle graduated to full-on rain, I hurried toward the pub’s entrance, the wind blowing my hair every which way.
“Where are you going?”
“Inside,” I said. “If Harry sent you, I never really had a choice. I’ll look over the case. But you’re buying me that drink.”
The original Sanjay’s Bar overlooked Aragon Bay, a white-sand beach in what Sanjay thought of as his wife’s special corner of Sri Lanka. But when the 2004 tsunami smashed that to a billion splinters, Sanjay sold his ruined land to the government, and followed his university-bound kids to England. Pictures from before, during and after the tsunami adorned the walls even now. Sanjay says he likes Bude almost as much as he did Aragon Bay, but he still misses his wife. Now he runs this pub in a small town on the North Cornwall coast. It’s like any other in this part of the world: a fire, booze promotions, quiz nights. Like any other pub, that is, except the main food menu sizzles with garlic and ginger, boasting twists on British staples as well as the traditional fare of pie and mash. Which leaves Sanjay himself—leather-skinned and fifty years old—who still dresses in sarongs and sandals, as he did back home, and insists on the same over-the-top welcome as when I first plodded up from the beach and flopped onto a beanbag on his deck.
“Adam, my good friend!” he called from behind the bar.
Caroline and I eased through the thin crowd, an odd mix of surfer dudes and gals fresh from the ocean and local drinkers who thought surfers were birthed by some demon to destroy society. Sanjay recommended the local brew, Bude-iful Day, and Caroline ordered two pints.
Sanjay eased back the pump, squirting bitter into the glass. “Good waves today?”
“Big ones,” I said. “A little scary.”
After our regular exchanges, I snagged a table near the window, and for a good minute or so Caroline and I watched the clouds sweep in. Others formed the same idea, and when lightening forked on the horizon, it drew an “Oooh,” from the gathered drinkers.
Caroline slid the envelope into view and took a pull on the bitter. I sipped mine too.
“Smooth and strong,” I said. “And a bit nutty. Exactly how I like it. Coincidentally, it’s how I like my women too.”
Not even the flicker of a smile. Fine, I thought. Business it is.
I said, “Did Harry tell you why I don’t do this anymore?”
“He said you were good at it. Literally good enough to make a million.”
“A lot more than a million.” I detected that old bragging smugness in my tone and called a halt to it.
She nodded, like she’d heard it before. “He also says you have some resource, a tool that can help. Illegal, but…”
“It’s called DDS,” I said. “I don’t have it. But I can get hold of it.”
“Okay. Why give up your business if it was doing so well?”
“Talk to me about Sarah.”
“Talk to me about why you gave up your business.”
Sanjay delivered two menus, flashed a look Caroline’s way, grinning like a teenager. Subtle, mate.
When he was gone, I said, “This is about your sister, not my employment history. I’m supposed to be interviewing you.” I concentrated on my pint. “I need to be sure, and you need to be sure, that me getting involved will be beneficial.”
Caroline used one finger to push the envelope towards me. I opened it.
A photo presented Sarah Stiles as a dark-haired girl with wide blue eyes and light freckles; an eighteen-year-old who looked fifteen. With her father departed and mother dead, Caroline put her through high school. She left aged seventeen to work her first job in a department store, where she commenced a relationship with a man two decades her senior, but her condition meant she would not concede the boyfriend could possibly be a bad person.
“What condition?” I asked.
“What they euphemistically call ‘learning difficulties’. Non-specific, but closely related to Asperger’s.”
“Like an extreme form of OCD?”
“That’s something of a simplification, but not a million miles away. On the surface she is perfectly normal. But she does some things very, very well, while other things confuse and frighten her. And she has a near-eidetic memory too, which is tough.”
“Eidetic? You mean photographic?”
“There’s actually no such thing as a photographic memory, but yes, her ability to recall minute detail is remarkable.”
“What does she do very, very well?”
“She is the best at spatial-relations. She can beat the world at Tetris, or organize a room to be more efficient in seconds. And her art … it’s so detailed. She can look at a building or a bridge, and sketch it out, exactly proportioned. Here.”
Caroline took over the file and thumbed to a couple of pictures. The first was a black-and-white cityscape of Leeds, the town hall’s dome rendered in intricate detail. The other was a color painting featuring the rock formation on Ilkley Moor known as the Cow and Calf. Again, stunningly accurate. I also noted there were no actual people in either.
Caroline said, “A gallery told us they were too clinical to ever sell well, yet she keeps trying.” She slipped the pictures back into the envelope. “But when anything goes even slightly wrong, well … she goes into what I call ‘mission mode’, where she becomes incredibly practical and focuses on solving the problem before her. Pure tunnel vision. If I’m running late, she leaves without me, or—”
“Is she medicated?”
“She was,” Caroline said. “This man, he introduced her to something that helped but wasn’t exactly legal.”
“Heroin?”
“Marijuana.”
“There are worse solutions than a little medicinal weed.”
Without a reply, I concentrated on Harry’s case file.
After the spat, Sarah showed up on her true love’s doorstep, her way of solving the problem of betrayal. Unfortunately, her true love, being freshly divorced, “needed his space” and sent her away. She refused to go home, so had to make money quickly. Mission mode kicked in and she took the job where she could earn the most in the shortest time ...
“A table-dancing bar for Heaven’s sake,” Caroline said. “A strip-club.” She hushed her voice at the final words there, as if anyone nearby gave a crap. “I finally got hold of her on the phone one night, and I told her she was right, that she should make her own decisions. We both had a bit of a cry and she told me she loved me, and she’d be home eventually. No. Soon. She said ‘soon’.”
Lightning cracked over the ocean, its twin fingers stabbing the water. The sky was a blue-grey blanket, so dull that rows of night-activated bulbs twinkled on outside.
Caroline said, “But then she stopped calling altogether. And I contacted Harry.”
Harry tracked Sarah out to a terraced house in the district of Birstall, but it was in darkness and all its utilities were cut off. After much cajoling of Sarah’s boss, and a strict promise of confidentiality, he was also allowed to interview Sarah’s fellow dancers and other staff.
On Sunday 17th June, Sarah showed up as usual, and somewhere between one and three a.m., while everyone was out front servicing the peak-time customers, Sarah vanished off the face of the Earth. The next morning, the safe was em
pty, and all who Harry interviewed seemed oddly aware of the fact that Sarah knew the combination.
All those accounts of that night, though, each one, were so similar, so word-perfect, that the witnesses had obviously been coached, which lead to Harry digging out a snazzy shirt and paying the club’s admission. He found only one girl he didn’t recognize from his interviews, a pixie-like blonde called Lily. A higher-than-usual tip meant the unprepared witness took Harry into a private room with no music, but as soon as Harry assured her about confidentiality, three meat-head security types muscled in and demanded to know what the hell was going on.
I said, “No clue what she was going to say?”
“No.”
“Any idea how much was taken?”
“The owner says it’s between him and his insurers. But the people Harry spoke to estimated anywhere between fifty and two-hundred thousand.”
A few bum-numbing stakeouts furnished Harry’s file with a grainy photo, taken from a distance, of Lily exiting onto the street, but more importantly sent him to a forgery expert who paid a lot of visits to the club, an ex-copper who made IDs for some of the underage Eastern-Europeans. In a sales-tease, the forger admitted to Harry that, sure, he’d made a passport for the little cutie, but Harry could not afford the bribe that would reveal the identity issued.
I hate to brag, but I would have no such trouble in the bribery department. And Harry knew it.
A troubled girl falls for a violent ex-con.
The pair steals the contents of a criminal’s safe.
Then they abscond abroad, probably to Paris.
The police are ordered to cease investigating by sources unknown.
No communication for three weeks.
I said, “I’m not Indiana Jones. I’m not some super ex-government special agent. I’m just a guy who’s good at finding people.”
“So find her,” she hissed.
She seemed to shock herself at the outburst, but didn’t apologize, just shakily lifted the glass to her lips again.
I said, “You have to understand, if she isn’t in trouble, I will not drag her back to Blighty kicking and screaming.”
“But you’ll tell me she’s okay? If you find her?”
“Yes,” I said. “I can do that.”
Outside, night-lights twinkled up and down Bude Bay. Thunder boomed overhead and another fork of white split the vista in two. I suggested we eat here before getting some shut-eye. Sanjay’s B&B was full so she would have to share my VW. It was going to be a rough night, and we had a heck of a journey back to Leeds the following day.
Chapter Two
We set off before dawn. Rain lashed my camper van all the way up the A30, a road that feels like it loops around and around in a Groundhog Day-style procession of sameness, switching between dual carriageway and single-track road on a whim. The worst of the storm was over, but Caroline still fidgeted, hand gripping the passenger seat with every wind-assisted swerve. In the absence of a radio, voice raised over the chugging engine, her small talk felt forced.
“So what was the big thing Harry mentioned? What sent you away the first time?”
I said, “It was when my dad died. I took off with a rucksack and explored the world a little.”
“A little?”
“Okay, eight years. Almost nine.”
The wind changed direction and the van almost took off. Each time the vehicle aquaplaned or veered to one side, the chatter seemed to calm her. She asked how a guy like me—a “beach bum and thrill seeker”—came to specialize in tracking down lost people. For her benefit—absolutely not because I love talking about travel—I told her how, aged eighteen, I journeyed into Europe, where I met new people and drank foreign beer and took recreational drugs, and got mugged and pickpocketed, and learned how easy it was to meet someone in Marseille and bump into them six weeks later in Dubrovnik. I probably shared too much when I said I made love on beaches and up mountains, but it was such a release. I was a citizen of the world, a free man and, as far as I was concerned, the wisest person on the planet. And so it went, until three years later when I’d lived in South Africa a couple of months, and I met a young woman called Sophie, who became my first ever “client.”
Being twenty-one and handsome, I decided to hit on her in a hostel bar, but after a little probing I learned she was on the road with her boyfriend during their university gap year. I kind of looked down my nose at her then because—y’know—I was sooo superior having lived Out There for so long. But they planned to rendezvous here once she’d done her thing in Jo’Burg, and now he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Still hoping, I suppose, to impress the pants off her, I used my ever-so-superior experience to analyze all the ways in and out of the town and traced his movements from there, eventually discovering him on a sand-and-palm-tree island, doped up on acid and weed, shagging a Russian girl whose assets and free-spirit made him temporarily forget Sophie even existed. Literally. I had to remind him. He felt bad. But not bad enough to leave the free-spirited Russian, so it was up to me to convey the news to Sophie.
“And no,” I said, “she still didn’t sleep with me.”
After that, though, as soon as I understood the tribal nature of humanity, I gained something of a knack for tracing people. Even in a friendly country, our subconscious tells us it’s enemy territory, so almost everyone acts in a way they wouldn’t in a familiar place. I tune into that. Methodical investigation, logical deduction.
Detectives in Britain and the States would find me via this new-fangled thingamajig called “the internet” and recruited me as their eyes and ears, and even though the vast majority turned out well, I still located a couple of subjects in morgues and, in one case, their hotel room with fourteen stab-wounds. Ultimately, though, the good work—putting parents’ minds at rest—outweighed that tiniest fraction of humanity that is wired so differently to the rest of us that they might as well be a separate species.
In time, I convinced myself I was not only wise, but also tough. A hard-man. Turns out, I was wrong about that.
“Harry told me you got involved with some goons.”
“Goons,” I said. “Yeah, ‘goons’ is fairly accurate. Poked around somewhere I shouldn’t have. Bangkok to be precise.”
“And that’s the reason you came home?”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess I needed my mummy.”
She wrinkled her nose in a chuckle, but it died quickly, as if she had no right to be happy at this precise moment. She needed to keep talking. “And the business? You wouldn’t tell me last night why you gave it up.”
“I didn’t like it anymore,” I said. “In a nutshell, after I came home to the UK, Harry and I started up together. We tracked missing people, and one day we took on a corporate client to locate a financial officer who ran off with a pension pot. We got recommended to other high-end companies. We grew from there. Harry said it wasn’t ‘proper’ work, though. He’d been on about retiring for years, so he let me buy him out and I took things to the next level. I brought in actual executives to push the business side, made sub-contractors full-time employees, and hired accountants to invest our income. And you know what?”
“They invested badly.”
“They invested brilliantly. Private investigations became ‘corporate security’, and the investment portfolio? It made ten times what the core business did. I was running an investment bank with a private investigation business tacked on the back.” I shook my head and steadied the wheel again. “But we were investing in companies who … let’s say I wasn’t comfortable with their worldview.”
“Couldn’t you have stopped? Done something else?”
“I owned fifty-one per cent of the company. But when I tried to sack the senior VP, it turned out he had more friends on the board than I did.” I braced myself as a sixteen-wheeler roared past, drenching the windows in spray. “They made me an offer.”
“Resign?”
“Sell my shares and live a long, wealthy retiremen
t. I negotiated. I let a prick called Roger Gorman take over running the place while I could veto certain clients.”
“Roger…”
“Gorman,” I said. “With a G. Not the filmmaker. Now all I can do is take the money they make and pour it into good causes. And keep a hefty chunk for myself, of course.”
“Doesn’t explain why you don’t start a new firm. Help people like me.”
“Non-compete clause. I’m not allowed to work as a private investigator unless it’s through the company. Not here, or anywhere in the world. I’d forfeit all my shares and position. I’ve tried everything I can to get rid of the current board. I still hope to.”
“Hope to?” she said. “While you bum around on a surfboard?”
I often asked myself the same thing. Many evenings I stand there on a beach, watching the sunset, envisaging scenario after scenario where I gutted the company and put it to work for good. The sun would go down without me seeing it, and I suddenly find myself bathed in twilight, and only the waves lapping at my ankles ever sparked me back to reality.
I said, “When inspiration strikes I’ll know what to do.”
A long silence ground itself out. I hoped she was finished with the interrogation. She wasn’t.
“Is it true you failed your psychology degree?”
“I didn’t fail,” I said. “I got a third. A new exec suggested a qualification might add prestige. I excelled in the practical stuff, but I couldn’t write for love nor money. Kept going off-topic. ‘Too fond of introspection,’ was how one professor put it.” That and—what did my professors call it again? Oh yeah—my “moral judgments.” Only Harry often added the adjective “sanctimonious.”
We hit the M1 and the further north we travelled, the brighter the sun shone, and a full English breakfast and a couple of extra-shot-infused coffee-stops later, I was playing songs in my head, tapping the wheel, and my feet danced when not on the pedals. Caroline hadn’t indulged in as much coffee as me, so she slept most of the remaining four hours. When I passed the sign confirming I had officially returned to Leeds, I wound down the window and felt the city’s air on my face, the summer sun hot, the breeze cool and clean.