Shadow Box

by Peter Cocks

  The mention of Anna always triggered mixed emotions. She had saved my life when I was shot, and when she became my case officer I had got way too close to her. I felt she had allowed it so that she could manipulate me.

  And she had. More than once.

  I ended the call and jumped in the shower. I still felt rough, so I chucked down a Coke and a couple of paracetamol and pulled on pretty much the same clothes I’d worn the day before, leaving the flats by the back entrance – a little more cautious this time.

  At Vauxhall, I walked over the bridge, past the rows of Vespas and Suzukis outside the bike shop, to the Portuguese café under the railway arch. Sharpie and Anna were sitting outside in the sun, halfway through a couple of lattes.

  “Hello, handsome,” Anna said.

  Sharp laughed.

  “Deck it, you two,” I grunted. “I’m not feeling too handsome today.”

  “So… Hannah Connolly?’ Anna raised an eyebrow. “You don’t hang about, do you?”

  “She’s not my type,” I said. I ordered an espresso. Double shot.

  Sharp and Anna exchanged a glance.

  “She’s not,” I protested. “She’s deadly serious, really political. And she’s a bit goth. You know, all black clothes, tats and eyeliner.”

  Anna rolled her eyes.

  “Well, you’re going to have to get pretty political too,” Sharp said. “I think you’ll be seeing more of her.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes. Let’s go to my office – I’ve got some stuff to show you.”

  I finished my coffee and caught Anna studying me. She cocked her head to one side.

  “Where did you get that hideous jacket?” she asked.

  We sat down in Sharp’s bright office in the modern fortress-like building by the river. Anna had recently decamped here too: her “model agency” cover in Denmark Street had been shut down a few months earlier, maybe because it was becoming suspicious or, more likely, because of government cuts. We ate cheese and ham panini that Anna had ordered from the café.

  Sharp took a memory stick from one of the desktop Macs that lined the room. He plugged it into another and opened some files.

  “Thanks to your swift work last night, we have all Hannah Connolly’s emails and a bit of conversation,” Sharp smiled.

  “She saw me,” I confessed.

  Anna stopped chewing.

  “Saw you what?” Sharp asked.

  “She caught me in her room,” I said. “But she didn’t see anything.”

  Sharp and Anna looked at one another.

  “That explains the row,” Sharp said.

  He clicked on the MP3 voice recording in the file and I could hear Hannah on the phone, voice muffled by the armchair where I had planted the bug.

  “He just went to the toilet,” I could hear Hannah say.

  There was a pause as she listened.

  “Perhaps he had a shite and couldn’t find any bog roll because you didn’t leave me enough money.”

  Anna smirked at the exchange. Another pause.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” Hannah insisted. “He’s just a guy from college, OK?”

  “Just a guy from college,” I repeated. “That’ll do me.”

  “Anyway,” Hannah went on. “I think he’s probably gay.”

  For the second time that day Anna and Sharp laughed out loud.

  “It’s fine, we know you’re a red-blooded het, don’t we, Anna?”

  Anna raised an eyebrow in agreement and they both laughed again. I started to get a bit huffy.

  “Who do you think she’s talking to, anyway?” I asked.

  “That’s what we hope to find out,” Sharp said. “We’re trying to trace the call, but no joy so far.”

  “Keep it up,” Anna said, exchanging another smile with Sharp as I left the office.

  “Piss off,” I growled.

  In the absence of a real mission, I had little choice other than to “keep it up”. I was missing Tony already. I missed the feeling I always had that he was behind me, even when I suspected I was being used. I knew I had been ordered not to, but I tried to call him. His number was dead – just a long, monotonous tone. A flatline. The more I couldn’t get hold of him, the more I felt I needed to speak to him, just for reassurance. I tried another tack.

  “Mum?”

  “Hello, stranger!”

  I made excuses, like everybody does, for not calling the old girl more often, and we chatted about this and that for a bit. “You seen anything of Tony, Mum?”

  He often dropped in on Mum when he wasn’t too busy.

  “Tony? No, love. Why?”

  “Nothing, really. Did you know he’s been suspended?”

  “No. Oh, you know Tony, he’ll be fine. Nothing keeps him down for long. Then he’ll just turn up when you least expect.”

  “Sure,” I said. This had always been the pattern of Tony popping up in our lives, but in the last couple of years I had relied on him to be there to keep me alive. “Let me know if he turns up, will you?”

  “Of course, love. Nothing wrong, is there?”

  “No, Mum. I’m good. Love you.”

  Going to college was what I had been ordered to do, and I started to enjoy it. I began to get into the photography and, after months of doing nothing, it occupied me and gave me focus, excuse the pun.

  I had no friends in London, and my time in Spain had made it difficult to make any new ones. My occasional drink with Hannah turned into something of a routine. She didn’t appear to have many friends either. We didn’t have much in common, but what we did have was that we didn’t really fit in with the fashion lot at college. Fashion was low down on Hannah’s list of interests.

  She was easy to be around, not because she was great company but because there was nothing tricksy about her. I asked her to join me on a photoshoot around London. We shot a few grainy, low-light pics in and around her flat, then went down to King’s Cross and walked behind the station up into the cobbled back streets. It was a bleak landscape of skeletal Victorian gasworks and railway crossings, overhead cranes and wires criss-crossing the ever-changing skyline. I took some moody black-and-whites and then asked Hannah to stand in for a few of them. She refused.

  “I’m a photographer, not a subject,” she argued.

  “Just one,” I suggested. “You’ll look great against this background.”

  She smiled. For the first time I had a sense that I was able to persuade her to do something against her will. I got a great shot: her black hair and eyes looked strong against the industrial backdrop. I showed her, and she reluctantly agreed that it was good.

  I was really getting into this photography lark, and had, for a moment, one of my recurring fantasies of what a normal life might be like. I imagined myself working as a photographer, doing something adventurous like photojournalism in a war zone.

  “Stand against that wall and look moody,” Hannah instructed. She gestured to a flaking canal-side wall, textural and grimy with soot.

  “I don’t…” I began to protest.

  “I did it for you,” she argued.

  “That’s different,” I said. “You looked good.”

  “I’m going for realism … in all its ugliness,” she grinned. I realized I had lost the argument. I had started something stupid: photos of me were never a good idea. I gave in and she fired off a few shots while I tried to keep my face turned away or in shadow, making a mental note to try and delete them from her memory card when I got the chance. Several months out of the game and I was making too many elementary mistakes.

  She checked the back of her camera and nodded. “Pretty rough,” she said. “You look like a gangster. Just what I was going for.”

  We walked down to the canal and continued across the King’s Cross basin, where brightly painted narrow boats were moored and birds dived and swooped across the water. It was picturesque and positive; far too colourful for the kind of shots Hannah and I were after.

  “Pretty, isn�
�t it?” I said. We were walking close to each other and my shoulder brushed hers.

  “If you like that kind of thing.” She turned and smiled at me, and our hands slipped together, almost accidentally. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Just holding hands.”

  She shrugged, and we walked up to the road to a greasy spoon for a cup of tea.

  Hannah was clearly at home in the run-down café. I fired off a few more shots, of old blokes and builders over steamy mugs of tea. She said places like this were “real”. The last thing you would find her doing was ordering a decaf skinny latte with hazelnut syrup in Starbucks. In fact, the mere mention of a coffee chain would set her off on a rant about American commercial imperialism, their corporate bullying, how they were killing our high streets and corner shops. That would get her going about where their coffee came from and how the coffee workers were paid slave wages. Passing Primark would get a similar reaction. If you were paying a fiver for a pair of trousers, someone, somewhere was being exploited. She was right, I guess. Intelligent and well informed, but she did go on a bit. She made me realize how politically unaware I’d always been.

  “So what do you think?” she’d ask, and I’d be forced to question my own ideas. Despite our growing familiarity, we were just mates. I never sensed a glimmer of interest from Hannah Connolly. I don’t think I was interested in her in that way either; sometimes she looked attractive to me, other times not.

  But when we left the café and I turned to head off, I felt something tug at me.

  “So, see you at college next week, yeah?”

  She nodded and smiled at me again, and seconds later I found myself kissing her under a bridge by the canal. We walked back to the tube, holding hands, not talking. I was slightly embarrassed that I’d made a move, and didn’t mention it again. It didn’t seem to make any difference to her.

  We carried on like this for several weeks, knocking around at college together, comparing work – Hannah worked really hard. Once she got onto something she gave it her full attention. Sometimes I’d sit with her for lunch. She rarely sat with anyone else.

  “Haven’t you made friends with anyone else here?” I asked, pushing some chips and beans around my plate. She shrugged.

  “Not really. I’ve always been a bit of a loner,” she said. There was no self-pity in her voice, it was just matter-of-fact, as usual. The longer I knew Hannah, the less I seemed to know about her. It was like she existed in two dimensions.

  Since I had nothing to report, Sharp checked in.

  “Anything going on?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Been up to Kilburn lately?”

  “Not for a couple of weeks.” I hadn’t. After kissing Hannah I’d taken a step back. Didn’t feel right. Most nights I’d gone back to my place and crashed. It was tiring, this studying.

  “How’s it going with Hannah?” Sharp asked. I hated the cheeky note of enquiry in his voice.

  “No change,” I said. “I told you, there’s nothing…”

  “Well, I’ve got a little job for you,” Sharp said. “I want you to take a closer look at Hannah’s place.”

  “How am I going to do that?”

  It was Tuesday afternoon when I went to the flat. Kilburn was quiet. Sharpie had done his homework and knew Hannah was at college, as I should have been. I’d invented a dentist’s appointment.

  I felt antsy, looking out for nosy neighbours and curtain twitchers. I needn’t have worried: the street was dead as a doornail and no one noticed me as I walked past the flat a couple of times, climbed the three steps and put the key in the front door. At college I had taken a mould from Hannah’s key when her back was turned.

  The hallway smelled of damp. I sprang straight upstairs, avoiding the handrails or anywhere else I might leave fingerprints. I opened the door and went into the flat. Stale cooking. Probably more sausages. She seemed to live on sausages and pot noodles. I cooked linguine and prawns for us one night, explaining that I had worked in a restaurant for a bit. Hannah had scoffed it down, only stopping to ask if the prawns were sustainable. Otherwise it might just as well have been pot noodles; food wasn’t really her main concern.

  I checked each room of the flat to make sure I was completely alone. I could hear the distant hum of the traffic on the High Road. I went into Hannah’s bedroom. There was a knot of clothes on the floor and the bed was unmade. I felt awkward when I saw the open top drawer of her chest, a tangle of underwear spilling out. It was not glamorous and was quite worn. I felt I was invading her privacy. I was.

  Sharp had told me to be thorough.

  I booted up her laptop and entered: password. It came up as incorrect. She must have changed it after I’d been caught in her room.

  Her duvet was bunched up at the end, like a sleeping dog. Shoes and trainers were stuffed under the bed. I scrabbled about underneath and found a few carrier bags full of clothes.

  I moved on and opened the drawers. I went through them methodically, carefully taking out clothes that had not been carefully put in. In the bottom drawer I hit gold. A large biscuit tin, the kind you get at Christmas. Inside were twenty or thirty bags of pills. I tipped a few out on top of the chest of drawers. They were pale green, each stamped with a shamrock. Es. It looked like Hannah had a lucrative sideline. At a tenner a pill, that was a hell of a lot of money hidden in her drawers. I was surprised. I really would never have guessed. I took a few pictures of the pills with my phone, then gently wedged the tin back into the drawer.

  Out in the hall, I looked up at the small hatch that led to the loft. On a hunch, I grabbed a chair, climbed up and pushed the panel open. I levered myself up into the loft space and pulled a light cord dangling over my head. There were boxes stacked up to the left and right of the loft door. I opened the nearest one. It was full of polythene bags containing the same type of pills I had seen downstairs. Thousands of them. Multiplied by the quantity of boxes, I was looking at tens of thousands of them, possibly millions. Times ten quid a pop. My mind spun at the maths.

  I closed the lid carefully and lowered myself back down onto the chair. I heard a door slam somewhere downstairs followed by feet on the stairs. Shit. I checked everything was as I had found it and tucked myself in behind the bedroom door, trying to hear above my own heavy breathing. The footsteps stopped and I heard the muffled thud of a door slamming. It was the floor below.

  I had taken long enough, and the interruption made me jumpy. Music started in the flat below; I could faintly feel the beat through the floorboards. I quickly scanned the sitting room and let myself out, closing the door silently and creeping down past the door of the lower flat, the beat of house music bleeding through the door.

  On the street, I breathed out my relief, checked behind me and walked in the opposite direction of the station. I called Simon Sharp.

  “You knew, didn’t you? There’s a major stash of pills up there… Ecstasy, I think. I mean, thousands and thousands. I’ll text you pics.”

  “OK, hold the details,” Sharp said. “Tony didn’t put you on to her for nothing. I want you to stick around up there for a while. Go and see Hannah later, try and work out what she’s up to. It’s good for you to get back in there straight away. You’re going to have to stay close to this girl.”

  Sharp left the implication of “close” hanging in the air as he rung off. I checked my watch. It would be a good hour until she was home, so I walked down towards Queen’s Park to kill time. This suddenly felt like deep water. I didn’t feel like sticking around at all.

  Donnie stepped out from the newsagent’s. He had bought a packet of fags and pretended to read a free paper there while he kept an eye on the door opposite.

  It was the same kid, he was sure. He had become more familiar the longer Donnie shadowed him. He watched him walk off down the tree-lined street and called Dave Slaughter.

  “Dave?”

  “Wassup, Don?”

  “He’s been back to the flat on his tod.”
<
br />   “Which flat?”

  “Kilburn.”

  There was a pause while Dave considered.

  “Tommy wonders what the fuck this has to do with finding Sophie.”

  “Search me, Dave, I’m just doing what I was told and sticking to the kid like shit to a blanket. I’m like his shadow.”

  “The guvnor thinks they’re dicking us about. He thought he had a deal with the kid’s handlers to find Sophie.”

  “All I know is, he’s hanging out in this flat in Kilburn. Perhaps Sophie’s being held prisoner there?”

  “Don’t be a tit, Don. Kilburn? Sophie wouldn’t be seen dead in Kilburn. We’d know.”

  “Just an idea, Dave.”

  “Well, don’t have ideas. Go in and have a butcher’s, see what’s going on up there.”

  Donnie did as he was told. He crossed the street and, with a practised shoulder, let himself in.

  I wandered around Queen’s Park for a while then texted Hannah.

  What time you back? I’m in yr neck of the woods. Kieran

  I walked around the park again and waited. She texted back.

  In around 6. Drop by? Bring Guinness.

  I replied that I would. I wasted another twenty minutes then walked back to the newsagent’s and picked up a four-pack. Personally, I was getting sick of the stuff.

  I crossed the road and was about to ring the buzzer when I noticed the street door had been forced in. I pushed it open and stepped silently into the hall. No sign of life. I crept up the stairs. The door to Hannah’s flat was open. I walked into the living room and found Hannah pacing about, staring wide-eyed at the walls. The place was wrecked: cushions all over the floor, carpet ripped back, drawers pulled open and emptied on the floor.

  “Hannah? What’s happened?” I pulled her down on the sofa and sat beside her. I felt sweat break out on my brow.

  “I’ve been burgled,” she said. Her voice was flat – shocked, I guess. “Someone’s broken in. They’ve been through all my things. Look in my room.”

  I was confused; I’d only been gone an hour and had locked everything behind me. I went into her room. The drawers had been pulled out, clothes were all over the floor.