‘Ready and go!’
The engine whirred and the mud sprayed in his face but as he put all his weight into the van it lurched back, stalled and stopped with all four wheels back on the track.
‘We did it!’ she called.
‘Yes, we did.’ He wiped a fleck of earth from his lip and went to help her down. She laughed at him, exhilarated by her success.
‘Is very powerful, to make an engine to go. I would like to drive, I think.’
‘You should learn.’
She lifted her hand and he almost flinched, but then she wiped his cheek with her fingertips. He felt a pulse in his groin and tried to ignore it. She took his hand and jumped down.
‘I’ll be back this way later on,’ he said. ‘I’ve got another load of stuff to bring down, so if you need anything?’
‘Okay.’ she said. ‘Yes. Something to eat. I am so bored with cup of soup.’
She asked for a sandwich and he promised he’d be back. The van rattled more than ever on the track and it was a relief to pull on to the smooth surface of the dual carriageway. He decided to risk the cassette player again and pulled a new tape out of the bag. He turned at the third roundabout on to the motorway and put his foot down as Jackie Wilson’s ‘I Get The Sweetest Feeling’ filled the van with sound.
Chapter Eleven
Florence Moyo sat in the boardroom with her hands on the table in front of her, fingers gripping the side as if she was holding on to a ledge.
‘There are some kind people in our church,’ she said, ‘but it is not enough. My husband is ashamed that we have to accept charity. He doesn’t know I am here. Please, is there anything you can do to speed things up?’
Jaz looked at his notes and then at Mrs Moyo. ‘We’re doing everything we can. It’s complicated. The Home Office thinks that everyone should apply for asylum as soon as they arrive, at the port of entry.’
‘We were told not to. We were told we would be sent back if we did that.’
Karen knew from Mr Moyo’s testimony that they’d used an agent, paid a lot of money for so-called help, which had turned out to be worthless. Jaz told her they might have got asylum from Zimbabwe if they’d gone through the proper channels, but the borrowed passport counted against them.
‘We’re going to have to find a way to prove you are not, in fact, South African. We’ll have to explain why you didn’t have your own papers.’ Jaz’s voice was calm and gentle, but Florence Moyo was restless. ‘If Mr Moyo wants me to go through it again with him?’
‘He’s gone to find work, with my daughter. A man has told him there is some work.’
It was illegal for them to work, but Karen understood they had to eat.
‘I thought Elizabeth was at school?’ she said.
‘She’s nearly sixteen.’ Florence Moyo sounded defensive. ‘Look, if we play by your rules, we will starve.’
Jaz put his hand in his inside pocket. ‘There might be some funding you can apply for, but meanwhile, I’d rather your daughter was able to stay in school, please, let me help.’ He took three twenty-pound notes out of the wallet. ‘Just a loan.’
Florence Moyo got to her feet unsteadily. She seemed to sway for a moment, her eyes fixed on the opposite wall. Then she walked out of the office with her head held high. Jaz folded the money and put it back in his jacket.
At the school gates Karen was the last of the Year Two parents to pick up.
‘There’s Mummy, at last!’ Mrs Leith forced a smile. Ben ran to Karen and fished her hand out of her coat pocket, gripping it in his own.
‘I’m on a new book. The dog’s not in this one. What’s for tea?’
‘Good. Or bad, if you like the dog. Fish fingers?’
‘Yeah!’
She held Ben’s hand as they crossed the road. He was telling her about an argument with his best friend but she didn’t hear the words, just the cues to nod or shake her head. She was thinking about Mrs Moyo and trying to imagine what she must be feeling. Florence Moyo had said she would do anything to keep her family safe. Since Karen had come back from her visit to Stacey, she’d done nothing more about trying to find Phil. That was useless, pathetic, when she had none of the problems Mrs Moyo had to face.
‘…anyway,’ Ben was saying, ‘it can’t be true, because you are the biggest Mummy at school. You’re almost as big as Mr Evans and he’s the headteacher.’
‘Tallest, you mean I’m the tallest. Biggest makes me sound…’
‘Fat?’
‘Cheeky boy!’ she laughed and pretended to chase him. Just now, if anyone was watching, they would think what a jolly mum she was, a catalogue mum, kicking up the dead leaves, her corduroy skirt matching his dark red scarf. They thundered down the pavement and arrived together, breathless, at the front door.
When Ben was safely in front of children’s TV, she went into the kitchen and picked up the phone. The girl at Doncaster Central Police Station left her on hold for seven minutes. She counted it on the kitchen clock. She should have been on to this sooner. Charlie Moon was right, a thirty-two year old man, with all his faculties, was not a priority case, so she was going to have to be pushy. The line let out an intermittent beep and an electronic voice reminded her she was on hold and thanked her for waiting. She wondered if they’d put any posters up yet or whether the Missing Person’s Unit had decided to feature Phil in one of their newspaper campaigns. She’d seen them on screens in the doctor’s waiting room and by the Post Office queue. She might suggest that to the desk sergeant at Doncaster, if she ever came back on the line.
Leave it. Let them get on with their job. Max’s voice was in her head and maybe he was right. Except that she felt something gnawing away inside her and it was always the same question. She thought about the young support officer she’d met in Doncaster worrying about a dead Chinese girl. I can’t believe no-one’s looking for her. But what if someone was, just as she was looking for Phil? A woman’s voice came back on the line to tell her that there was no further information and a colleague would be in contact regarding the poster campaign in due course. She looked up The Volunteer Arms on the Internet and phoned Jackie. Would she put up missing posters? There was a silence and then, very kindly, very gently, Jackie said no. There was no point, everyone in the village knew Phil and if they’d seen him they would have said. If he turned up, or if she heard anything, she’d certainly let Karen know. It seemed that everyone, except Karen, believed it was entirely plausible that he’d run off with another woman. She stared out at a bank of grey clouds above the house next door and tried to imagine Phil in Florida. She liked to think he would have let them know if he was going abroad, but she couldn’t be sure. He didn’t even tell their father when he got married to Stacey. Just phoned up one day: by the way, guess what I did at the weekend. Maybe the others were right and she should just leave it, wait for him to get in touch and get on with her life.
Max came home later that evening, long after the children were in bed, and found her Googling local newspapers for North Lincolnshire and South Yorkshire.
‘Can I get on there?’
‘Just a minute…’
‘No, I haven’t got a minute. Look, Karen. I need to check some details for tomorrow. We’re pitching for the Ptarmigan Project.’
‘I’m just checking Saturday’s Gazette.’
‘You’ve had all day. I’m sorry, but you’ll just have to leave it.’
‘Isn’t a Ptarmigan a kind of bird?’
‘In this case, they’re a Scottish development consortium and they have a very big shopping centre in the offing.’ His voice was rising. The muscles in his neck seemed to be battling for control of his vocal cords, veins standing out with the effort. ‘A shopping centre which I’d quite like to design, so that my employers continue to pay me, so that I can put bread in the mouths of my
children. Please, I won’t ask you again. Will you leave all this amateur sleuthing and get off my computer. Now!’
She sat very still and watched the screen blur. She wasn’t aware that she was crying until she blinked and her cheeks ran with tears. She wanted to say something about not waking the children, but she couldn’t speak. If he’d tried to hold her or just put his hands on her shoulders, things might have been different, but he didn’t.
‘They’re my children too. And Phil is my brother.’
‘For God’s sake, Karen, just leave it alone! You can’t magic him up. He’ll come back when he’s good and ready. Now, move.’
As she got up, he stepped aside to let her get to the door. He went straight to the desk and logged himself on. Karen walked out on to the landing and stood for a moment, waiting for him to apologise, until she realised he wasn’t going to.
The next morning, she walked the children to school and came home to the silence of the house. She filled it with the sound of the vacuum cleaner and Radio Two in every room. She’d never liked housework, but today she wanted to do it, dusting and polishing, wiping marks off the paintwork. After an hour, she sat down on the stairs, sweating and breathless. She felt an overwhelming desire to get on top of everything, to straighten it all out. A small drift of dust behind one of the banister rails caught her eye and she rubbed it away with her fingertip. Lives could be like that. There one minute, gone the next. Like Cara, who’d hardly begun, and the Chinese girl, who couldn’t have had much of a life before the heroin took her out of it.
Over the next hour, she worked more slowly. She retuned the radio in the bedroom to Radio Four. It was a drama about a woman dying of cancer. She started the ironing. Up here, the sound of the street was muffled, and the dormer window looked out at a sky of aeroplanes and birds. The iron nosed under the pleat of Sophie’s skirt and the steam rose to tickle her nostrils. The woman on the radio talked about her chemotherapy. Karen felt a rush behind her eyes and knew that if she let herself cry again, she might not be able to stop.
‘Sod this!’
Her voice sent the cat leaping off the bed in surprise. He looked at her uncertainly, his body clock whirring towards the possibility of feeding time. He dodged her feet as she pounded down the stairs to the study. She chewed the jagged edge of a broken fingernail while she waited for the computer to get going, then she put Johnny Mackenzie’s name into the search bar. Just to see.
Chapter Twelve
Sean passed the door of the Crime Scene Investigation Office and saw Lizzie at the far end, almost hidden by a huge spider plant on her desk. The rest of the office was empty. He tiptoed up to the plant to surprise her but before he could say ‘boo’, she parted the leaves and said ‘hi’.
‘You trying to do camouflage or what?’ he asked.
She laughed. Nice. He hadn’t seen her laugh much. ‘Figured that if I sit at the back and hide behind the plant, they won’t know I’m here and then they might not take the piss.’
‘Good plan. I used to do that at school, without the plant obviously. And it was the teachers taking the piss in my case.’
‘Fancy a coffee?’ she said.
‘Canteen coffee? Not much. But if you’ve got time, we could nip out. There’s an Italian greasy spoon off Duke Street.’
‘Sounds lovely,’ she said sarcastically.
‘No, seriously, they have a proper coffee machine, cappuccino and that, but half the price of Starbucks.’
‘I’m not being funny, Sean, but can I meet you there? Rather than actually walk out of the building with a member of the opposite sex. I don’t want to give anyone any more ammunition to shoot me down.’
Sean nodded and left the office. He passed a couple of CID blokes in the corridor and asked them if they knew where DCI King was. They grunted in reply. He was about to say ‘what?’ when he realised that it had actually been a grunt like a pig. Funny joke time again. Well it was all right for them, they didn’t have to go out there everyday and deal with dog-shit on their shoes. He felt like slamming the door shut behind him, but he didn’t.
The Venetian Piazza Café was in a side street next to a charity shop. They sat at the back, away from the window.
‘I feel like a snout. Meeting in secret.’
She laughed for half a second, before her face went serious again. ‘What did you think about the news in this morning’s briefing?’
He shuffled in his seat. ‘Missed it. My bus was late. I heard it was another overdose.’
‘That’s what the autopsy says. The theory is that the body gets used to a certain level, so if it’s more pure than usual, it can be toxic. Su-Mai and the victim in Balby had taken something that was almost a hundred per cent. This latest girl had a methadone prescription, so she should have been weaning herself off, but it’s beginning to look like it was the same stuff that killed the other two.’
They went quiet as another customer came in and ordered a sandwich. Sean leant forward. ‘Was she on the game too?’
Lizzie shook her head. ‘Young mum with three kids.’
He felt a chill creep up the back of his neck.
‘There’s a connection between all three.’ Lizzie laid out three paper packets of sugar on the table. ‘First girl is from overseas, she’s on the game and she’s found here, the second is on the other side of town, but also foreign and a prostitute. Then number three, found a few hundred yards from number one. On your manor.’ She ripped the ends of the sugar packets and let the grains fall over the table. ‘Number one and number two are stuffed full of nearly-pure heroin and a pick and mix of male DNA, number three, same heroin, but only one recent sexual partner. I don’t know, maybe she was just unlucky.’
‘Why are you telling me all this?’ Sean’s head felt tight, like he had a migraine coming.
‘It helps me to think out loud. And I can trust you.’
She looked gorgeous. He rubbed his temples and forced himself to focus on what she was saying.
‘Now this guy from the HTS is asking for some of Su-Mai’s DNA,’ she said.
‘HTS?’
‘Human Trafficking Service.’
‘So we might find out who Su-Mai really is?’
‘Or at least where she’s from and how she got here.’
Sean had a vision of his sheet of flipchart paper, filled with names, dates, an address, a photograph of a family with a little girl in its centre. He wondered what it would be like, telling her mother, through an interpreter perhaps, that she had died peacefully on a sunny day, with the sound of birdsong in her ears, or the sound of the bypass at any rate.
‘Can you do that?’ he said. ‘Send her DNA off to another unit?’
‘I’ll have to get authorisation, and I need to think about how to get round Burger Barry. I just don’t want him saying no to me again, it’s getting boring.’
‘You’ll think of something.’ He meant it. There was just something about her that instilled confidence, even when she said she was being picked on. She didn’t make out that she was a victim; just made it sound like an irritation, something that got in the way.
‘Girl number three, what was she called, by the way?’
‘Taneesha McManus, known to her friends and family as Neesha.’
Sean spent the rest of the day on the Chasebridge Estate, listening to Carly’s unbroken monologue about the state of her house, which she’d bought off the council and wished she could give back. It was damp, the windows rattled, the new wallpaper wouldn’t stick. He felt numb. A pile of flowers had appeared at the foot of one of the blocks near the ring road. They watched a thin young man in a hoodie circle the estate on a BMX, standing up on the pedals, his tracksuit trousers hanging low around his hips. Sean squinted and tried to work out if he knew him but he couldn’t tell. These lads all looked the same. They didn’t d
ress to be different; they dressed to be invisible.
When he got home, he looked at the sheet of flipchart paper on his wall. He’d added a newspaper cutting: Tragic Refugee Girl Found by Flat-mate. The picture was the same over-exposed snap of both of them, crammed together in a photo-booth, which had been pinned on the incident board. You could see she’d been pretty. Then he got out a blue pen and drew a new line for Taneesha McManus. He didn’t have a photo for her, just a picture of the flowers but he knew what she looked like. She was the only one of the three that he’d seen alive. He could still see her bitten-down fingernails as she snatched the leaflet from him, her skinny legs, goose-bumped in the cold.
The Key Stage One assembly at Chasebridge Community Primary School was an easy-to-please sort of audience. They laughed at Sean’s jokes and put their hands up nicely at question time. He could have told them anything and they would have believed him. But he didn’t. He stuck to the script that he and Carly had been given: community policing, business as usual. They weren’t there to talk about the heroin problem, just to be a reassuring presence. Keeping things positive was supposed to help flush out those with information to share.
A little boy, with a smear of something ketchup-coloured on his chin, asked if Sean and Carly carried guns. A small girl wanted to know if they were married. There was barely stifled laughter from a couple of the teachers.
When it was over, Carly wanted to slip off to have a word with her son Daniel’s teacher. He was suffering from stress over his SATS revision and she wanted to know if they could lay off him a bit. Sean said he’d get the bus back into town, if she wanted to come back in the car. He was on a split shift, with time to kill, so he was easy. As he came out of the school gates, he nearly collided with someone on a bike, riding on the pavement.
To Catch a Rabbit Page 9