by D. B. Thorne
‘Are you … I mean …’ This time Kay paused. ‘How bad is it?’
Always the same question, thought Solomon. And how to answer? ‘It’s pretty bad.’
‘What happened? Sorry. If you don’t mind me asking. If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine, I just, you know. Maybe it might help. Isn’t that a thing, talking about it, isn’t it supposed to help?’
‘I’d rather not,’ said Solomon.
‘No,’ said Kay. ‘Sorry. I, yeah. Forget it.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘I’m intruding.’
‘I’m asking you to knock on a stranger’s door and get details about their daughter’s death.’
‘True,’ said Kay. ‘Very true. So okay, what’s the address?’
‘Jim can’t deal with it,’ said Jean. She was maybe fifty and her short hair was dyed blonde, and with her legs tucked underneath her on the chair she looked as small and fragile as a fairy. ‘He started boxing up her things and next thing I know he’s given up and he’s drinking again. Which ain’t like him. It ain’t.’
‘Can you tell me anything about the investigation?’ said Kay. ‘Do you have any details?’
‘Investigation,’ Jean said, a derisory laugh in her voice. ‘Do me a favour. Three weeks and they’ve done nothing.’
‘Solomon told me they never found the man she was supposed to be on a date with.’
‘No, they never found him. But then they didn’t exactly look very hard. Left a lot of stones unturned, that lot.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Why? Because my Becky weren’t rich and she weren’t perfect. And when it all looked like too much hard work, they thought sod it, she’s tried it in the past so she must’ve tried it again.’
‘Sorry, tried what?’ said Kay.
‘Topping herself,’ said Jean, sudden hostility in her voice. ‘Overdose. What d’you think I mean?’
Kay didn’t know what to say, felt out of her depth, missing vital information. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I didn’t … I mean, I wasn’t aware that … that Becky, I just …’ Stop talking, she thought. Just, stop.
‘Anyway, Jim kept on at them but they didn’t want to know. And now …’ Jean closed her eyes and willed herself not to start crying again. ‘It’s done.’
Kay kept silent, and the only sound in the room was the ticking of a clock over the unlit gas fire.
‘Do you have anything you can share?’ she said eventually, as gently as she could. Think about each sentence, she told herself. Work it out in advance, test it in your head. ‘About this date she had? It’s just, Solomon, he thinks there are similarities. With his sister.’ She paused, planned the next sentence. ‘And if there is, perhaps it’ll help everyone.’
‘Sounds ridiculous to me,’ said Jean. ‘But he had a nice voice, your Solomon.’
‘We’re not …’ Kay began, then stopped. ‘So, was there anything?’
‘Only what was on her phone,’ said Jean. ‘The police made posters. Of the picture. Of him.’
‘You have one?’
Jean reached over the arm of her chair and found a sheet of paper. ‘Here.’ A copy of a photo, a man’s face. Dark hair, long. Slight smile. Nothing remarkable. But Kay might just have swiped on it, who knew?
‘Do you know his name?’
‘Caesar. Least, that’s what he called himself. C-A-E-S-A-R.’
‘Were there any messages?’
‘That’s how they do it now, isn’t it?’ said Jean, for the first time showing some animation, sitting up straighter in the chair, which seemed too big for her. ‘They look at a photo, send a couple of words, and that’s it.’
‘It’s easy nowadays.’
‘Too easy, you ask me. Anyway, yeah, there was. They were read out at the inquest.’
‘Do you have them?’
‘No. They’re on her phone, on Becky’s phone. The police have still got it. Odd.’
‘What is?’
‘The messages. They were odd. Sounded odd, I dunno. Can’t explain.’
‘Can you remember anything about them?’
‘They were meeting at a bar. Called the Gypsy Queen. He was taking her out for cocktails. That’s all I remember. That, and thinking that there was something odd about it.’
‘Odd, like what he said? Rebecca’s date?’
‘More the way he said it. Or wrote it. It just didn’t sound right.’
Kay nodded and was about to thank Jean when there was the sound of smashing from another room, again and again, and a man’s voice bellowing, like an animal gone berserk, with the note rising higher and higher until it more resembled a cry of pain. Jean stood up, said, ‘Jim. You’ll need to go.’
‘I …’
‘Now. I don’t want him seeing you. Not like he is.’
Kay took the copy of the photo and stood up too, surprised by how much taller she was than Jean. ‘Thank you.’
Jean nodded, distracted, and pushed at Kay to get her moving. ‘Just head for the door. Don’t stop. He doesn’t need talking to, not now.’
Kay headed for the front door, keeping her eyes focused ahead of her, though as she passed the door to the kitchen the keening sound from Jean’s husband seemed louder than was possible. She fumbled with the opening but got the front door open and let light in – she’d forgotten how bright it was outside – and for a moment, stepping out into the sunshine, it felt like she’d escaped something, though she did not know what.
eight
IF THE DISPOSAL OF BODIES WAS SOMETHING YOU COULD actually rely on, if they’d stay drowned and never rise to the surface, if they’d stay buried and never get dug up, if sniffer dogs and forensic scientists and grasses never led you to them, then Luke would’ve got rid of Robbie White a long while back. And cheerfully, too. He’d probably have whistled while he shovelled, lost himself in the joy of the job, dug an extra-deep grave to wrestle the fucker’s body into.
But the problem right now was that he couldn’t even get hold of Robbie White’s all-too-alive one. He’d disappeared, gone off grid, which was suspicious enough, he figured. Tiff ends up in hospital and Robbie White vanishes off the face of the earth. As if he needed any more convincing that Robbie was behind it anyway. Solomon could say what he liked, all he wanted was an easy life, to rot away quietly in his apartment. Luke wasn’t like that.
‘Well if you see him, don’t tell him I’m looking for him,’ Luke said, talking to his dashboard, hands-free Bluetooth fuck-knows-what putting his mobile over the speakers. ‘And call me. Yeah?’
‘Count on it,’ said the voice on the other end of the line, a supposed friend of Robbie’s, except that Robbie wasn’t the kind of person who exactly had what you might call friends. Because he was an arsehole, basically.
‘Do that,’ said Luke, and hung up. He was on his way to his lock-up, or what he still called his lock-up, though things had changed from the time he was starting out and could only stretch to a single garage in a line of other garages behind a housing estate in Dagenham. This was bigger, a lot bigger, two corrugated-iron-sided barns and an office, behind a gate you could only open if you knew the code. Which he did, and could count on the fingers of one thumb the other people who did. Which was how he liked it.
He indicated and took an exit off the A127. He was driving an Audi but had had the RS badges taken off so that it looked like an ordinary exec-mobile, rather than a four-litre monster that could outrun any police car. Would give their helicopter a run for its money too, come to that.
He tapped his phone’s screen and called up Solomon’s number, hit call, waited, but his screen told him that the user was busy. Luke wondered who his brother could be speaking to. As far as he was aware, he didn’t know anyone. Apart from him and Tiff. He tried him again, got the busy message again. He’d try later. Right now, he had Robbie White to find.
Inspector Fox hadn’t particularly wanted to call Solomon Mullan back, not just because she didn’t have any news for him, but also beca
use the case of Tiffany Eloise Mullan wasn’t at the top of her list of priorities. Or to put it another way, she had better things to do. But eventually she’d found a ten-minute window and had called his number.
‘Hello?’
‘Mr Mullan? It’s Inspector Fox. You called.’
‘Yes. Thank you for calling back.’
‘How can I help you?’ said Fox, not somebody who had time for civilities. ‘I’ve got five minutes.’
There was a brief pause on the other end, then Solomon said, ‘Have you heard of a woman named Rebecca Harrington?’
‘No. Who is she?’
‘Who was she. She went on a date with a man she met online. She was found dead, in a canal, with barbiturates in her bloodstream.’
Oh here we go, thought Fox. Here we go. A member of the public with too much time on their hands. Spare me. Jesus, Allah, Buddha, one of you, any of you, please. Spare me. ‘Oh?’ she said.
‘And the police never managed to trace him. The man she met. They never found him.’
‘And you think …’ She left the sentence hanging. She wasn’t going to give him any help, wasn’t going to supply the oxygen.
‘I don’t think anything. The similarities are self-evident. Wouldn’t you say?’
Don’t encourage him, she thought. ‘On the face of it? Maybe.’
‘I think you need to hear this.’
I’m sure I don’t, Fox thought, but said, closing her eyes in anticipation, ‘Okay. What have you got?’
Kay had taken shots of Rebecca Harrington’s date. She’d called him up and messaged them over as JPEGs.
‘That’s his name?’ said Solomon.
‘It’s what he calls himself,’ said Kay. ‘I guess it might not be his real one.’
‘Caesar. That could be, I don’t know, Italian?’
‘It could be. It could be anything.’
Solomon looked at the man’s face. Dark. Not blond, not like Tobes. ‘What do you think?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ Kay said. ‘I never saw the other one.’
‘There’s something about the mouth,’ Solomon said, mostly to himself. ‘Maybe.’ He thought back to the face he’d seen on his sister’s mobile, in Fox’s office. Wondered if he remembered it right, if it hadn’t been distorted by his own wishful thinking, reshaped by his conflicted interests. But Solomon had never misremembered anything, as far as he knew. Certainly he’d never forgotten anything. It just didn’t happen. Everything he’d ever read or seen was there, ready, waiting to be whistled up from the vast vault of his memory in a moment.
‘And you don’t have the messages?’ he said.
‘They’re on her phone, and the police have still got it. But Jean did say that they sounded odd.’
‘Odd in what way?’
‘She couldn’t say. All she remembered was that they were meeting at the Gypsy Queen. For cocktails.’
‘And that definitely exists?’ said Solomon.
‘Passed it on the way home,’ said Kay. ‘Looks okay, actually.’ Stop talking, she thought. Don’t invite him. She watched her screen, his question-mark avatar, as close to Solomon’s face as she’d ever got.
‘Mmm,’ said Solomon. ‘It’s possible that I’m mad.’
‘We all are,’ said Kay. ‘It’s a question of how far we embrace it, rather than how far gone we are.’
Solomon nodded at Kay, aware that she couldn’t see him but doing it anyway, feeling unexpectedly in tune with her, with her offbeat worldview. But not to the point that he’d let her know, because then some kind of rapport would be established, which might lead to affection, which in turn might lead to her, eventually, wanting to see him. And she mustn’t. She couldn’t.
‘Maybe,’ he said, his tone dismissive.
He saw her face close and wished that he hadn’t said it, but knew that he’d had to. He’d see her at the Brain Pool meetings, and that was enough. This, all this, was a mistake. He could see it now.
‘Well,’ said Kay. ‘I’ve got, you know …’
‘Yes.’
‘So, if there’s anything else … You know where I am. Here, I guess. You know, if you want …’
‘Thank you,’ said Solomon. ‘I appreciate it. What you’ve done.’
‘Then …’ She paused, then quickly said, ‘Okay, well I’ll see you,’ and closed their link, leaving Solomon with an empty screen that he knew he should be grateful for but definitely wasn’t.
Fox listened with a growing sense of relief to what Solomon Mullan had to say about the similarities between his sister’s case and that of Rebecca Harrington. He had nothing. There were surface similarities, but nothing else. Nothing deeper. She was sure of that. Didn’t even need to think about it.
‘No record of her ever going to the bar,’ she said, scrolling through the casework on her monitor. ‘Looks like she overdosed.’
‘She was found in the canal,’ said Solomon.
‘Part of her,’ said Fox. ‘She’d got tangled in a mooring rope. But she didn’t drown, definitely overdosed.’
‘Possibly,’ said Solomon on the other end of the line.
‘Not the first time, either,’ said Fox, ignoring Solomon’s scepticism. ‘And she’d been arrested …’ she scrolled back up, checked, ‘seven times for possession.’
‘Of?’
‘Of heroin, MDMA, Seconal, which I believe is a barbiturate. Diazepam.’
There was silence on the other end of the line, and Fox leant back from her monitor and mentally disengaged. This, all this, was a waste of her time. Eventually Solomon said, ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Did you know that a note was found on her, addressed to her parents, telling them she was sorry?’
‘No.’
‘Well now you do,’ Fox said. ‘So. Was there anything else?’
Solomon didn’t answer immediately, then said, ‘Any progress on my sister’s case?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Fox. ‘We’ve had nothing on this, erm …’
‘Tobes?’
‘Tobes. Yes. Yes, him. Nothing’s come back yet. If anything does, I’ll let you know.’
‘Okay.’
‘Are we done?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fine.’ Fox looked up at a knock on her door. It opened and her boss’s head showed around its edge. She held up two fingers – two minutes – and he nodded his head upwards, my office. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she told Solomon. ‘And please, next time, give me something more substantial?’
She hung up and looked at her monitor one more time. There was a screen capture of a messaging exchange between Rebecca Harrington and her potential date included in the case file. She opened it up and read it.
Want to go out sometime?
Maybe. Where u want 2 go?
I love the Gypsy Queen …
Wheres that?
A barj
Barge?
Sorry. Meant bar, in Hackney.
Lol.
Gluh
?
I mean glamorous. Can’t type. Cocktails of infinite variety.
Sounds ☺
It all looked perfectly normal to Fox. Nothing to see here. Move along. She closed the screen capture, then closed down the whole case file. It wasn’t her investigation, and as far as she was concerned there was no new information, nothing to warrant further enquiries. Besides, her boss wasn’t the kind of person you kept waiting.
Solomon couldn’t sleep that night. Around three in the morning he went to the bathroom and rubbed cream into his face without turning on the light. He winced, not at the pain but at the memory of his conversation with Inspector Fox. She must have thought him ridiculous, his theory beneath contempt. And Kay, getting her involved. He shook his head. He wasn’t used to being wrong. It was a feeling he didn’t like.
He went to his living room and picked up the copied photograph of Rebecca Harrington’s date, Caesar. He had dark hair, where Tobes’s was blond. Brown eyes, not blue. There was a harder look to
his face, something challenging. Tobes’s had been softer. But still, wasn’t there something there? In the mouth, a ripeness, the bottom lip thrusting forward almost in a pout. Wasn’t there? Solomon remembered reading about the difficulty of facial recognition in AI, the complexity of the algorithms, which needed to adjust for different lighting, angles, expressions, all the nuances provided by the myriad of muscles in the face. He looked again at the photograph. Yes, he knew all about faces. And he’d learnt long ago that they were tricky things.
nine
CATO, NAMED AFTER THE CRAZY BUTLER IN THOSE PETER Sellers films, he told her, only she’d never seen them, but anyway, Cato, he was brilliant. Talking to him was like – she tried to think about what it was like, it was like swinging through the jungle on Tarzan’s back, the conversation shifting, this way and that, the subjects changing like he was leaping from vine to vine and taking her along with him. Sarah lay back on the grass in the bright sunshine and closed her eyes and congratulated herself on what she thought was not a bad analogy at all. Or was it a metaphor? She didn’t know. Didn’t care, and anyway, it wasn’t a perfect analogy or metaphor or whatever, because Cato was nothing like Tarzan, was funny and sensitive and, what was it? Yeah, brilliant. He was brilliant.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked her.
She still had her eyes closed so she couldn’t see him, but said, ‘Yeah. Brilliant.’
‘So you haven’t?’
‘Haven’t what?’ Sarah was prepared to admit that she’d lost track of this last conversational tangent.
‘Seen anything good at the theatre recently.’
‘Um,’ she said, stupidly she thought, which made her giggle. ‘No. I saw The Book of Mormon, but that was like two years ago.’
‘Enjoy it?’
‘Haven’t you seen it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then.’
‘Well then what?’ said Cato, a laugh in his voice.
‘Well then, you know it’s fucking hilarious,’ said Sarah, and chuckled to herself, her head heavy on the warm grass, its smell in her nostrils, all around her.