Finding Milly

by Nathan Burrows

  ‘That’s what I’m going to do,’ Jimmy said, his mind made up. ‘Can you help me?’

  ‘No,’ Gareth replied, firmly. ‘I don’t do that sort of thing.’

  ‘Any more.’

  ‘Jimmy, listen,’ Gareth said, an edge in his voice that was unmistakable. ‘I don’t know how much you know about my background, but one place I am never going back to is prison. Not for you, not for your Milly, not for anyone.’

  ‘Do you recognise this girl?’ Jimmy asked the fresh-faced receptionist behind the main desk in the Royal Hotel. According to her name badge, her name was Alaina. She looked at Jimmy’s phone screen briefly through eyes shrouded with heavy black makeup and replied with a thick clipped Eastern European accent.

  ‘No, sorry. Is there anything else?’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Jimmy asked, pushing the phone back towards her. The conversation wasn’t going the way he’d thought it would when he’d planned it from a coffee shop opposite the plush hotel.

  ‘Yes, am sure,’ the receptionist replied, not taking her eyes off her computer screen. Jimmy stood there awkwardly for a few seconds before slipping the phone back into his pocket.

  ‘Bitch,’ he muttered under his breath as he walked away from the desk and back to the main lobby of the hotel. He sat down in an armchair and hadn’t even got comfortable before a waiter approached him.

  ‘Can I get you anything, sir?’ the waiter asked. Jimmy glanced at him. He could have been the receptionist’s brother.

  ‘Coffee.’

  ‘Latte? Cappuccino? A flat white perhaps?’

  ‘Coffee.’

  ‘Sure.’ The waiter bustled away to hassle another man who had dared to sit in one of the chairs in the lobby and Jimmy looked around the interior of the hotel. He’d been down the alleyway to the side to where they kept their bins hundreds of times, but had never been inside the hotel.

  The interior of the foyer was very traditional. High ceilings, marble floors, lots of windows. Jimmy remembered reading about the refurbishment of the hotel a few years ago, just after it got added to his bin round. It had started life as a hotel back in Victorian times, then become an office block, then abandoned for a while and finally, back into a hotel. He picked up one of the complementary newspapers on the table—the Eastern Daily News—and started reading an overly enthusiastic post about last night’s football game.

  Jimmy was interrupted by a discrete cough beside him a couple of minutes later. He looked up to see the waiter hovering next to the table where he had just placed a white china cup full of coffee.

  ‘May I take your room number, sir?’ the waiter asked.

  ‘I’m just visiting, thank you,’ Jimmy replied. ‘How much do I owe you?’ The waiter looked nonplussed for a moment and excused himself. Jimmy watched as he walked back to the service area and had a hushed conversation with a large man in a dark suit. A few seconds after this, the large man approached Jimmy.

  ‘Hello, sir,’ he said in a gruff voice, fiddling with the cufflinks on his shirt. Jimmy put his newspaper down and regarded the new arrival. He was bigger than Jimmy had realised and had a small badge with the name Carlos and the title Head of Security in copperplate script on his lapel.

  ‘Hello, Carlos,’ Jimmy replied in a bright voice. ‘How are you today?’

  ‘Er, I’m fine, sir. Thank you.’ The man looked over at the waiter for a few seconds. ‘I understand you’re not actually a guest. Only the coffee is complimentary for guests only.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Jimmy said, thinking about what to do. Was Carlos about to take the coffee away from him? The head of security made no move toward the cup, but just stood there. Lurking like men only his size could do. But Jimmy wasn’t far off the younger man’s size and wasn’t intimidated by men in cheap suits. An uncomfortable silence developed between them.

  ‘In fact, Carlos,’ Jimmy said eventually. ‘I am a guest. I’ve just not checked in yet.’ Carlos nodded his head in reply.

  ‘Ah, I see,’ he replied, shooting a filthy look in the waiter’s direction. Jimmy hoped he hadn’t got the young man into trouble as he got to his feet and walked over to the reception desk. If the receptionist remembered him from a short time earlier, she hid it well. A few moments later, he was poorer by one hundred and thirty pounds but had an electronic keycard to what Alaina had described as one of the hotel’s more bijoux rooms. It had however, she’d informed him in clipped tones, got a view of the castle.

  Jimmy settled back in his chair, enjoying his newfound status as a guest, and sipped his coffee. Realising that it had gone cold, he looked over at the waiter and raised his hand for a refill.

  Chapter 32

  Jimmy finished his second cup of coffee, folded the paper, and got to his feet. He thought about taking the newspaper to his room to read the rest of it, but didn’t want Carlos hurrying after him to get it back, so Jimmy left it where it was. He walked toward a set of double doors marked Guests Only to the side of the reception desk. What was it that Alaina had said—through the double doors and then turn left? Jimmy did so, pushing open a heavy fire door just to the left of the double doors.

  He knew the moment he stepped into the room that he’d taken a wrong turn. He was now standing in a plant room, full of machinery. Was it for the lifts? The heating? Jimmy had got no idea and was just about to leave the room when a series of large white plastic barrels caught his eye. They were almost identical to the ones he used for his fish tank, and he made a mental note to arrange getting rid of them when he got back home later. These barrels weren’t for fish, though. According to the red labels plastered on them, they belonged to the fire suppression system for the basement.

  Jimmy wrinkled his nose at the musty air in the plant room and turned on his heel to leave before he started feeling nauseated. Opposite the plant room door was another heavy door, and beyond this one was a long corridor with hotel rooms off to either side. He wandered down the corridor until he found his room and unlocked it with the electronic keycard.

  Jimmy realised that the receptionist hadn’t been joking when she’d said the room was bijoux. It was tiny, with a double bed that he could just about get down the sides of, a flat screen television on the wall, and a small chair in one corner. Jimmy looked at the en-suite in the room's corner, realising that he would probably have to turn sideways to fit into it.

  He thought back to the photographs of Milly. The room she’d been in was definitely bigger than this one, but the colour scheme was the same. There was a print on the wall of the Norwich skyline. Jimmy examined it carefully, sure that a small part of the same print was in the background of one of the photographs. When he got back home, he could get her phone to check, but he was almost certain he was in the right place. Maybe not the same room, but definitely the right hotel.

  Jimmy crossed to the window and opened the half-shut curtains. Alaina hadn’t sounded enthusiastic when she’d mentioned the view of the castle, and as he peered through the window, Jimmy could see why. He had to open the window, lean out of it, and crane his neck to the right to get a glimpse of the medieval building that sat at the heart of the city.

  ‘View of the castle, my arse,’ Jimmy muttered as he took in the rest of the view out of his window. He was looking out over the back of the hotel, over an alleyway he’d reversed large lorries down hundreds of times. In the yard below him were the bins—one for general waste, one for recycling, one for food waste—and Jimmy idly wondered how heavy the general waste bin was that week, and whether Robbie wrote the weights down in a notebook like he’d used to do. Next to the bins was a set of double doors with a heavy chain hanging off one of the handles.

  Even though he’d been in the yard countless times, he’d never noticed them before but he soon realised that the bin lorry would have hidden them from his view. With one last glimpse toward the castle, he leaned his head back in and closed the window.

  ‘What a dump,’ he mumbled to himself, looking around the room. If he’d been here on holid
ay, or for an evening away from home with Hannah, and they’d been given this room he’d be mightily pissed off. Not enough room to swing a cat in the room, and a view over the bins and basement doors. For half the price, he could get a much larger room in the Premier Inn down by the station. He and Milly had stayed there one night in the middle of winter a couple of years ago when the boiler in their house packed up, and as far as he remembered, the room was luxurious in comparison. He lay down on the bed for a moment and extended his arms. It definitely wasn’t a full-size double bed—his outstretched hands hung over the edge of the bed, as did his feet.

  Jimmy left the hotel room and walked through the lobby. Outside it had just started raining, and he turned his collar up as he hurried to the bus stop. Home, some painkillers, and a nap in his own bed where he could stretch out properly were what he had planned.

  Jimmy was woken up a couple of hours later by the doorbell. He groaned, leaning over to check his phone. Realising that he’d slept for longer than he’d planned, he got to his feet and shuffled to the front door to let Gareth and Dave into the house. Jimmy had texted Gareth from the bus to let him know that the Royal Hotel was where the photos had been taken, and Gareth had replied straight away to let him know that he would call in later with Dave to have a proper look at Milly’s phone. Jimmy had meant to set an alarm for five o’clock, but been so tired when he got back that he’d completely forgotten.

  ‘You okay, Jimmy?’ Gareth said as he walked into the house, rain dripping from his coat. ‘You look like shit, if you don’t mind me saying?’ Dave hurried in after him with a large neoprene bag tucked under one arm.

  ‘I’m fine, mate. All good,’ Jimmy replied. ‘I fell asleep when I got back. Do you want a drink?’

  ‘Nah, I’m good thanks,’ Gareth said, taking off his coat and hanging it up.

  ‘Dave?’ Gareth’s companion just shook his head in reply. Jimmy led the two men into the kitchen where they both sat down. In the middle of the table was Milly’s phone.

  Dave placed the neoprene case on the table and unzipped it, pulling out a much larger version of Jimmy’s MacBook. Just as Dave pressed the button on the laptop to turn it on, the phone in the middle of the table started buzzing and a number appeared on the screen. Jimmy reached forward, picked up Milly’s phone, and swiped the screen to answer the call.

  ‘Hello?’ he said, pressing the phone to his ear. A few seconds later he put it back down on the table. ‘They hung up. That’s the fourth or fifth time that’s happened.’

  ‘Let me see?’ Gareth reached for the phone and pressed at the screen a couple of times. Then he got his own phone out of his pocket and put it next to Milly’s. Jimmy realised that he was typing the number that just called into his browser. He’d not thought of trying that, but as he watched Gareth looking at the screen, he saw that there wasn’t much point. ‘It’s a burner phone,’ Gareth said, putting his own phone away.

  ‘What, you can tell from googling it?’

  ‘Yeah, kind of,’ Dave replied before Gareth could say anything. ‘If the search results for the number are that one and a load of other numbers, then it’s from a batch of them. So it’ll be a burner. Have you got an iPhone cable?’

  ‘Sure,’ Jimmy said, crossing to get the charger from the wall. He detached the cable from the plug and handed it to him. ‘There you go.’

  ‘So, how did you get on at the Royal?’ Gareth asked as Dave plugged Milly’s phone into his computer.

  ‘I ended up getting a room there for the night.’ Gareth looked at him, surprised. Dave’s computer beeped as it recognised the phone.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The security bloke was being sniffy, and I wanted to get into one of the rooms to see if the décor was the same as in the photos.’

  ‘You’re wasted as a bin man, Jimmy,’ Gareth smiled. ‘You could come and work for me if you want?’ Knowing that Gareth was just being polite, Jimmy returned the smile.

  ‘I’m good, thanks.’

  ‘So you’re going back there tonight?’

  ‘Wasn’t planning on it. I wouldn’t be able to sleep there. Bloody bed was tiny.’

  ‘You’ve checked out, though?’ Gareth asked him.

  ‘No, do I need to?’

  ‘They’ll add a wedge to your bill if you don’t give them the keycard back.’

  ‘Let them, I’m not bothered.’

  Dave looked across the table at Jimmy, a sly expression on his face.

  ‘I’ll take the key back for you? I’m in the city later.’ Gareth started laughing. ‘What are you laughing at, boss?’

  ‘Of course you’ll take the key back for him, Dave.’

  ‘I’m only trying to help him out,’ Dave replied, looking aggrieved.

  ‘My arse, you are,’ Gareth said. ‘What’s your new bird’s name again? Charlotte?’

  ‘So what if it is?’ Dave turned his attention to the screen, but Jimmy could see that he was blushing. He reached into his pocket and put the keycard on the table.

  ‘It’s room 102, Dave,’ Jimmy said. ‘You fill your boots if you want to take your Charlotte there for the evening. It’s a bit snug, though.’

  ‘I’m sure he won’t complain,’ Gareth said with a grin, slapping Dave on the back and winking at Jimmy. ‘The neighbours might, though.’ Dave’s face turned even redder, and Jimmy wondered what his reaction would be if the young man found anything on Milly’s phone. Or was he only embarrassed because they were talking about him and his girlfriend? Jimmy was in two minds—he desperately wanted to find out if there was anything on the phone, but he didn’t want Dave to see them if they showed Milly in a compromising way. Gareth he wasn’t so bothered about as he was more worldly wise, but Dave was only a youngster. Not far off the same age as Milly.

  ‘So, I’ve copied the entire contents of the phone onto my hard drive,’ Dave said a moment later. ‘And I’ve had a quick look to see if there’s anything you’ve not already found on there, but it looks clean to me.’

  ‘No hidden folders or anything?’ Gareth asked, earning a withering look from Dave in response.

  ‘No, boss.’ Dave pointed at the screen. ‘There're the pictures that Jimmy’s already seen.’ To Jimmy’s relief, Dave didn’t enlarge any of them but was focused on something else. He had two windows side by side and was busy copying and pasting text between them. ‘These are all burners, as far as I can see.’ Jimmy realised that the text he was cutting and pasting was the phone log from Milly’s phone.

  ‘But when it rings, whoever’s on the other end just hangs up. So what can I do?’

  ‘You could give the phone to the police,’ Gareth said. ‘They’ll be able to do a lot more than we can. No offence, Dave.’

  ‘None taken, Boss,’ Dave replied. ‘But why not just get a woman to answer the phone?’ Jimmy saw Gareth staring at his colleague and wondered if it annoyed him he’d not thought of that first. ‘They’re phoning someone they think is Milly, right?’

  ‘Right,’ Jimmy said, a slow smile creeping across his face.

  ‘Then some bloke answers. That’s probably why they’re hanging up as they’re expecting a female voice.’

  ‘He’s right, Gareth,’ Jimmy said. ‘He’s bloody right. Would Laura–’

  ‘Don’t even go there, mate,’ Gareth cut him off. ‘She’s a criminal defence lawyer, not a phone sex worker.’ Jimmy started smiling, but his smile only lasted a few seconds once he realised what Gareth had just said. Was that what Milly was doing? Some sort of premium rate phone line for sad, lonely men?

  ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked,’ Jimmy replied. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’ Gareth nodded at Jimmy to accept the apology. Just as he did so, Dave piped up.

  ‘Charlotte would do it.’

  ‘What?’ Jimmy and Gareth both spoke in unison.

  ‘Charlotte would do it. She’d get a real kick out of it. Do you want me text her and ask her? Especially if she’s promised a night of passion at the Royal Hotel with yours truly in return.�
�� Jimmy looked over at Gareth who just started laughing.

  ‘Don’t look at me, sunshine,’ he said to Jimmy. ‘You’ve got cock all chance of getting Laura to do it, so why not?’

  ‘Could you do me a favour though, Jimmy?’ Dave asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Don’t tell her anything about the fact it’s your hotel room we’ll be staying in.’

  ‘My lips are sealed, Dave.’ Jimmy watched as the youngster pulled his own phone from his pocket.

  ‘Texting her now. She’ll not long have finished work, so could be here in half an hour.’

  Chapter 33

  ‘Oh, I know her. I know her.’ Dave’s girlfriend Charlotte looked at Jimmy’s phone screen and pointed at it with a bright red fingernail. ‘She went to my school. I was a couple of years ahead of her, but I know her.’

  ‘Thorpe High?’ Jimmy replied, looking again at the girl. When she’d arrived at his house less than twenty minutes after Dave had texted her, he’d put her as late teens. But based on what she had just said, he realised that she must be mid-twenties or older.

  Charlotte and Dave were, in Jimmy’s opinion, an odd couple. If he had seen the two of them separately, Jimmy never would have put them together. Charlotte was short, not much over five feet tall, and dressed in bright-coloured clothing that contrasted against Dave’s bland jeans and hoodie. She was stick thin, wearing a pair of red leggings that matched her fingernails and a baggy silky top that was a horrible turquoise colour. Blonde hair framed a pinched face, and she had a ring through the septum of her nose. Jimmy wondered if she had any piercings anywhere else before deciding that he’d rather not know.

  ‘Yeah, that’s the one. Shit, it was,’ Charlotte replied excitedly, jabbing again at the screen. Her voice was high and almost reedy, and much less angry than when Jimmy had heard her before on the phone. ‘So she’s missing, yeah? How cool is that?’