Eoin Miller 02 - Old Gold (15 page)

“Had to happen at some point. That whole family are running from one thing or another. Just like yours, I reckon.”

I ignored that last bit and sipped at the drink. My moral high ground was not above accepting gifts. “What do you mean? What are they running from?”

“Not my place to say. Mick’s got a few things hidden away; you’d need to ask him what they were.”

There was something in the way he said it. As though he would have told me if his stooges weren’t around. I wondered what could be so secret that he wouldn’t tell me in front of the hired help.

“So you’re friends?”

“I wouldn’t say
friends.
I don’t think he has any, not really. But he used to come round here while it served him.”

“Doesn’t sound like a good memory.”

“He liked being here until it became inconvenient. As soon as it was embarrassing, we were old news.”

“Who did he replace you with, any ideas?”

“Just a better class of people. Suits and ties. Handshakes. The right
kind
of handshakes, if you know what I mean.”

“Bribes?”

He sipped his own drink and then shook his head. “Like I said, you need to ask him. But he’s going into politics, right? Not a cheap game, that. A man from around here, he’d need some help.”

“So you’re saying he’s bent.”

There was a twinkle in his eye. He nodded at the stooges and they stood back, the tension in the room fading away.

“Good luck finding the boy. I hope he’s well.”

I knew enough to quit and stood, nodding at Coley and turning to leave. The squirrel guy stepped forward and punched me in the gut, and this time I did hit the floor. One
of the bigger guys then kicked me hard in the face, and the room spun around me. As it slowed down I heard Coley laugh.

“Just a friendly reminder,” he said, “you come in here again, and we won’t be so nice.”

Coley’s words hung in my mind. Was Perry on the take? Was someone sponsoring his ambitions? I would have no idea where to start with that. The world of money, secret meetings, and politics was a scary place. I needed to get back into the world I
did
know.

I drove into Wolverhampton and walked onto the university campus without any security guards stopping me.

I began asking round campus. I had the names of Chris’s friends. They had to be there somewhere. I wasn’t getting any helpful answers. In the canteen I tried a new trick; I ran through the list of phone numbers that Stephanie had given me. Most of them went to voicemail, but finally one began to ring. I saw a young woman at a table in the corner pull her phone out of her bag and stare at the number. She shook her head and canceled the call. The phone in my hand disconnected.

I tried my best smile as I walked over and introduced myself. Three of them were sitting at the table. The leader of the group, a woman in her early twenties who looked slightly older than the others, was named Kelly. She wore a red scarf around her neck and seemed to view herself as an actor with a capital
A
. It was her phone that I’d rung. As she looked me up and down, I realized I was still in my suit from
the funeral, and she seemed to assume I was a cop. Either that or she just liked talking to anyone who’d listen.

“Chris was fun,” she told me. “He loved to go out. We went clubbing a few times in the first semester, us and a few other people who were on the course at that point, and Chris stood out.”

“In what way?”

“Well, to talk to him, like normally, as if he was sat here with us now, he was shy. But get him in a club, and he was different. Life and soul, y’know?”

“So he liked to party?”

“Oh, yes. He was better at that than anything else. He wasn’t an actor, not really.”

“He liked drink, did he, at these parties?”

“Oh, yes.”

“That’s funny,” cut in someone else at the table, a young-looking male. “I never saw Chris drink.”

I turned my attention to him. His name was Ryan, and he was a year below the others.

“What did you think of Chris?”

“He was a laugh. He was very quiet, not loud or noticeable, but he had a great sense of humor. He was one of the few people you’d meet here who seemed sure of themselves. He had a grip on who he was.”

There was a heaviness to his words. I wondered if he was making a point to someone else at the table.

“I don’t know,” said Kelly. “Maybe he just paid attention when we were taught about acting. He definitely had a broody streak in him.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

They all exchanged looks, trying to figure it out, or trying to get their answers straight.

“Last Tuesday,” Kelly said. “I’m sure it was last Tuesday.”

“A couple of weeks ago,” Ryan said after much thought. “I haven’t seen him lately. I’ve been behind on my work so I haven’t been seeing anyone.”

I looked at the redheaded boy named Mark, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring off into the middle distance, ignoring the whole conversation.

I leaned forward.

“Mark?”

“Thursday,” he said after a long pause. “I saw him on Thursday.”

“That’s the last day anyone saw him.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. You and Paul Lucas are the two people I’ve found who saw him last.”

He just looked at me while I stared back, trying to read his thoughts. I noticed that Kelly and Ryan were staring at him as well. I knew Kelly and Ryan were being straight. It was written on their faces that they were telling the truth. I’d never met a drama student good enough to hide that. But Mark knew something. Was it the same secret Paul Lucas was holding back?

I took my thoughts up to Lucas’s office.

I looked in through the thin vertical window set into the doorframe and saw that he was with a student. I moved away from the door so he wouldn’t notice me and leaned against the opposite wall.

I waited for fifteen minutes before the door opened and the student shuffled past me with a ring binder full of paperwork. I knocked once and then walked in without waiting for an answer. Lucas didn’t smile when he saw me.

“You should have made an appointment,” he said.

“I can see that you’re very busy,” I said. I smiled and sat down. “I’ve found that two people saw Chris last Thursday.
For all intents and purposes, we’ll call that the day he disappeared, shall we?”

He gave the smallest shuffle of his head, a gesture that was neither a nod nor a shrug.

“Two people, that’s all. One of them was you.”

I leaned back, making myself comfortable. I’d noticed that the more liberties I took, the more pissed off he got. I liked that.

“You saw him on the day he disappeared. So what was your meeting about?”

“Nothing important. I’m tutoring him through his third-year project. I was checking his progress.”

“What is his project?”

“It’s a script. He’s writing a script. Then he was going to produce a one-off performance of it and write an essay evaluating it all.”

“Can I see it?”

“What?”

“His script. I presume he was getting close to finishing it by now?”

“Pretty much, all but the final scene.”

“So can I?”

“No, of course not. It’s private. I can’t, and won’t, show you his project any more than I would show you anyone else’s.”

“Mr. Lucas, I’m not interested in anyone else. I’m interested in Chris.”

“Look, I understand, but I absolutely can’t let you read a student’s work. It would be against the rules, and frankly, it would be just wrong.”

“You’re either holding out on something or you’re lying. I just don’t know which. But I will.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, I don’t—”

“What was his script about?”

He blinked, caught off guard.

“Alcohol,” he said. “A young man and alcohol.”

“Mr. Lucas, was Chris an alcoholic?”

“No.”

He said it firmly, meeting my eyes dead-on.

I left without saying anything further. I didn’t need anything more from him. I was back out in the courtyard, walking toward the main entrance, when I heard someone call me.

I turned to see Mark, the red-haired student from the canteen, walking fast to catch up with me.

“Was Chris an alcoholic?” I called out, probably too loud.

It was a hell of a greeting, but it was the best I was going to give.

“Yes.” He said it quietly. No fuss.

“Let’s talk,” I said.

We crossed the road to Jay’s Café.

It was a small greasy spoon. It only survived during weekdays on students and police officers. On weekends it bustled with football fans.

We sat down at a table at the back. I had a glass of Coke, and Mark had a black coffee.

“Tell me about him” was all it took.

“Chris was great,” Mark said with a smile. “First year, get a drink in him, he really was the life and soul of the party. Well, that’s how it looked. You had to get to know him. Even at the parties there was a sadness in him. He really beat himself up about something, but none of us ever found out what it was.”

“So he was prone to depression.”

“Oh, yes. Lots of it.”

I guess I wasn’t too surprised to hear that. Chris’s mother had told me that he definitely wasn’t depressed, but then, mothers aren’t the most reliable reporters.

“He just had a way of melting into the background,” Mark said. “Like he didn’t want to be seen. You could sit at a crowded table for half an hour before realizing Chris was there.”

“Total opposite of his other face.”

“Yes, the drink did that, does that.”

I noticed that he changed from past tense to present, and his tone of voice changed too, turned lower, more serious.

“But what everybody’s been telling me is that he’s changed this year?”

“Yes. He realized what his problems were, the ones we know about and the ones we don’t. He just seemed to face up to them.”

“The alcohol.”

“You want the truth? I’m not even sure he’s really an alcoholic. I mean, yes, he drank to solve problems. But deep down, I don’t think he’s an alcoholic in the same way the other people you meet are. I think he just found that idea as a good way to, I don’t know—”

“To give a name to his problems.”

“Does that make sense?”

“Yes, I guess it does,” I said.

“Well, whatever, it helped. He was full of confidence this year. Like he’d figured out who he was and what he wanted to do, and quitting drinking was a big part of that.”

“You quit with him?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, a few minutes ago, you said something that made me think you were talking about yourself as well as Chris, and then when you said—”

“When I said ‘the other people you meet.’”

“Yes.” He paused and took a long sip of his coffee.

I’ve met a couple of recovering alcoholics over the years, and there’s something in their stare, something in its frank honesty, that unsettles me.

“Well, you’re right. I am. Alcoholic, I mean. And I really am. I just love the drink. Some people don’t understand how you can drink so much, but they don’t get it. I
just don’t understand, I can’t understand, how people can stop at one.”

I nodded.

I’ve never known what to say to confessions like this. I just nod.

“And Chris got me into the program.”

“Program?”

“AA. Alcoholics Anonymous.”

“There’s one around here?”

“Of course. They’re everywhere if you look. There’s one at the university. That’s more like an overblown support group than proper AA. And there’s a place just down the road where there are three, sometimes four AA meetings a week.”

“How many do you go to?”

“As many as I can. Sometimes all of them.”

“Chris?”

“He went to a couple a week. It seemed to get him by.”

“Anybody there get to really know him?”

“Listen, I can’t do this. We don’t share our secrets, other people’s secrets, to those outside the group.”

“But you’ve already told me—”

“Too much. I’ve already told you too much. I feel like I’ve already cheated everyone in the group, but the trade-off is I’ve given you some information about Chris that you wouldn’t get from his friends or family. I can’t give you any more. But usually, if someone stops turning up to AA, if an alcoholic goes missing, it means one of two things.”