Eoin Miller 02 - Old Gold (8 page)

“Aren’t you worried he’ll kill you?”

“If he kills me, I’ll have nothing to worry about.”

I walked out of the park and crossed the road to my house and got into the car. I didn’t need directions to my next destination. Fifteen minutes outside the city, it was the closest thing I’d had to a hometown when I was growing up. I listened to Bob Dylan’s
Time Out of Mind
as I drove. The streets were deserted, and almost all of the shops were closed. Once the coal mines and factories had been taken away, suburbs like these had kept going through the life support of the service industry, but now that had gone too.

I drove past my old school, past places where I used to play football. It gave me a strange feeling that I hadn’t expected. My childhood had been anything but normal, but then, we all fictionalize our childhood, get nostalgic for happiness we never had. I’d done a lot of my growing up in a pub. My mum wasn’t Romani, and my dad drew a lot of heat for marrying a Gorjer. It wasn’t an easy culture to marry into, and Mum wasn’t accepted by many of the elders. She knew the problems her kids would face if they didn’t play the game, so she talked my father into settling the family. Their solution was to buy a pub—one with a car park big enough for caravans if family wanted to visit—and we made a go at a normal life. They sent us to a local school, let us make friends and become part of the community.

It was always fake for my father, though, and he never settled into it. There were people in the town who never took to it either. The pub was set alight so often the firemen
used to joke that we had them on speed dial. I still had nightmares sometimes about being woken up by thick black smoke and the sound of laughing kids.

The arsonists may have succeeded at some point, because as I drove past where my old home should have been, all I saw was a new housing estate. My memories felt as rootless as my blood.

I drove on through the familiar streets.

When I walked into the Myvod to meet the Perrys, it was nothing like I remembered. It had been full of brown wood paneling, with two separate bars, the way pubs used to be. The place I was in now seemed much bigger and brighter. The walls had been knocked through so that it was an open plan with the bar in the middle, and the remaining walls were painted in a neutral light beige. It looked like a large version of a very boring person’s apartment.

The parents were easy to spot, they being the only couple sitting without alcohol in front of them. I sized them up as I bought a Coke at the bar.

Michael Perry looked a very different man than the overweight figure I’d seen on the job. He looked taller, probably because he was thinner. His face was still round, though, carrying traces of puppy fat that had never left. It lent him a youthful appearance. He was wearing glasses, thin-framed ones that were probably meant to make his face look narrower, and his clothes were expensive looking and smart. He looked like a casually dressed politician.

The mother had a faded beauty. I placed her as someone whose looks had probably peaked in school and gone downhill afterward. Her blonde hair was straight and worn to her shoulders around a face that didn’t carry worry well. Her shoulders and waist showed more signs of age, with traces of extra weight that she wasn’t comfortable with, her hands in
her lap subconsciously covering her belly. She wasn’t really overweight or unattractive; in better circumstances she would have been cute.

I tried to picture them as a couple twenty years ago, around the time they would have finished school or perhaps a year or two after that. She would have been very attractive for her age and probably considered above him, with his bookish, chubby looks.

He stood to greet me as I walked over to them.

“Mr. Miller,” he said, waiting for a nod from me before he put out his hand. “I’m Michael Perry. This is Steph.” I shook his hand and nodded to Stephanie.

“DS Becker spoke very highly of you, Mr. Miller,” Stephanie joined in once we were seated. “He said you’re the best person he’s ever worked with at, well, this sort of—” She shrugged, avoiding the issue. “By the way, your first name is an unusual spelling, and you never said it on the phone. How is it pronounced?”

“Like Owen, but less E.”

“Irish spelling?”

I nodded. “From my mum’s family.”

My mum’s grandparents were Irish, and a few habits had stuck through the generations. My father named my brother and sister, but my mum named me.

Mr. Perry was apparently eager to get to the matter at hand, sitting impatiently through the small talk before trying to take control of the conversation. “I remember you on the force; you were good. Not very popular, though, with your family connections. Was that why you left?”

“No.”

Most people had stopped trying to get me to open up about why I left, but Perry hadn’t gotten the memo.

He finally took the hint and moved on. “And now you’re private?”

For some reason I wanted to be blunt with this guy. “I work for the Mann brothers, Mr. Perry. But I’m sure you already know that.” He didn’t nod or say yes, but he didn’t have to. “So what I’m wondering is, why not get the police involved officially? Surely you stand to lose out if people tie you to me. The press would love that.”

“We like our privacy. I don’t want to sound cryptic, but I have enemies on the force. I’m not sure opening myself up like that would be any help to Chris.”

“Fair enough. I appreciate the honesty. I’ll give you some advice now for free, and it could save you a lot of money.”

They both looked at me in anticipation, wondering where my sales pitch was leading. I was wondering myself.

“Students run away. All the time. Usually they come back after a few weeks; sometimes they stay away for a few years. It’s just the stress they’re under or money that they owe or a girl that they’re chasing across country. Hiring someone might make you feel better. But most likely? All it will do is drain your bank account.”

I had amazed myself.

That was possibly the worst sales pitch in the history of anything.

They finished their drinks at the same time, and Michael looked at his wife.

“You want another?”

“No, I’ll have something harder, I think—a vodka orange.”

Michael looked at me and pointed to my glass, still mostly full.

“No, I’m all right, thanks,” I said.

Michael had just stepped up to the bar when Stephanie looked after him and half stood up, saying, “I should remind him I don’t want ice.”

“Just waters it down,” I said.

“No, well, I used to grind my teeth, and if there’s ice in the glass…” She trailed off, shrugged, and sat back down.

In a minute, Michael came back with a bottled orange juice for him and a glass of vodka orange for his wife. She pulled a face at the ice in the drink but sipped it nonetheless. They seemed distant from each other, but I wasn’t really in a position to judge other peoples’ marriages.

“The thing is,” Michael said, “we don’t have a lot of money, but we need our boy found.”

He put his hand on top of Stephanie’s as if to emphasize the point, but it came off as a somewhat awkward gesture, not something they would normally do. She looked uncomfortable, like she wanted to snatch her hand away. This was a couple with problems, I could tell. Still. Their concern for their son felt real.

“How about this—I’ll give you five days of the best I can do for three hundred pounds. If you don’t like what I’ve found, or if you think someone else can do better, you can stop there and find someone else.”

They looked at each other, having the wordless conference only parents can pull off. They turned to look at me at the same time, and Michael nodded.

“That sounds like a good offer.”

This was without a doubt the strangest job interview I’d ever had. Perhaps I’d been doing it wrong all my life. Instead of trying to convince the interviewers that I was indispensable to their organizations and pension plans, I should have been telling them that the job they were hiring for was a waste of time and money.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get started.”

I pulled out my notebook and a pen.

Now I was working for two different crime families and a politician.

This kept getting better.

“So what do you need to know?”

“That’s the trick,” I said. “If we knew that, we’d know where your boy is. I need you to tell me who he was. I need to understand him to find him.”

Stephanie nodded and looked briefly on the verge of tears. Michael hesitated before patting her shoulder, and I wondered if they ever normally showed affection in public.

“What was he studying at university?”

“Drama. From an early age he loved the idea of pretending, being different people. He always loved to dress up, to paint his face.”

Michael cut in at this point. “But I’ve always been very keen to keep his head in the real world. I mean, acting isn’t really a safe career path, is it? Particularly round here. Who wants to employ an actor with a Midlands accent? It’s not like Wednesbury is Los Angeles.”

“So you wanted him to do something else,” I said.

“I wanted him to aim for something he could actually achieve,” Michael said. “Business studies or law studies, even a bloody English degree would be more use, give him more options.”

“Acting was what he wanted,” Stephanie said. “He could have gone to another university, there are bigger ones with
better drama departments, but to be honest I think he was nervous about moving too far away from home straightaway.”

“So did he stay with you? Stay at home, I mean?”

“For almost a year, yes. He left somewhere toward the end of it. It wasn’t a straightforward thing. He never announced that he was moving out, he just started spending more and more nights away from home, staying over with friends. And I never really noticed at the time, but soon he wasn’t coming home at all, not for long stretches at a time.”

“So how exactly did you know he’d moved out for good?”

“He came round one evening, at teatime, and rang the doorbell rather than letting himself in. Like he was visiting.”

I turned my attention to Michael. “How did this sit with you, Mr. Perry? Had you noticed Chris wasn’t coming home anymore?”

He paused for a beat, then started unsteadily, “Well, boys will be boys. I always tried not to pay too much notice to what he was doing.”

“You didn’t want to know what your son was doing?”

“What I meant is I know what boys are like. Especially when they hit that age, when they’re old enough to drink and vote and do all the grown-up things. I know how they see the world. I always thought, leave him to it, leave most boys to it, and they’ll sort themselves out in time. I’m just saying if Chris wanted to stay out all night, or for a week at a time, if he wanted to have a little fun, I wasn’t going to get too involved in worrying about it.”

I wondered if this had been a point of argument between husband and wife over the years.

“But you were quite keen to push him in other areas,” I said.

“Of course I did. I didn’t care if he wanted to have some fun outside of hours, but I wanted the best for him. I did my best to see him succeed.”

“Would you say you put him under pressure at university? Did you push him to get results?”

“What are you getting at here? It seems to me you’re implying I pushed him away.”

“Not at all,” I said, deciding to back off a little. “I just need to ask these questions to help build a picture of Chris in my mind.”

I had hit a nerve with my last few questions, and I didn’t want to set Michael against me so early.

“Mrs. Perry, would you say Chris was happy?”

“Happy?”

“Yes. It sounds like he had a lot happening.”

She thought about it for a long time, watched closely by her husband.

“No,” she said finally.

“No? So was he troubled? Was he sad?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. Chris was never what you’d call happy, not really. He was always preoccupied with one thing or another. But he wasn’t depressive or anything close to that, if that’s what you mean.”

“OK, tell me more. What did he enjoy?”

“Films.” Stephanie smiled as she said it. “He loved films and television. If you started him talking about that sort of stuff, you couldn’t shut him up again.”

“Did he like football? Sports?”

“I used to take him to the games when he was younger,” Michael said. “He was too young to remember the good times, and the bad times, in fact, but we used to go a lot.”

“What else did Chris do? Did he like to party? You said you didn’t want to stop him having fun.”

“Oh, yes,” Stephanie said. “He liked staying out, dancing, making a fool of himself.”

“Drinking?”

“Of course. All boys round here like to drink.”

I knew that was true enough. I’d been one of them for a long time. Drinking was a fact of life in this part if the world, just one of those things you did without thinking.

“Have you got the names or numbers of any of his friends from university?”

“Not off the top of my head, but I could get a couple,” she said.

“That would be great. I’ll need to talk to them. Did he have a girlfriend?”