Incinerator (6 page)

“Aren’t you going to answer that?” I said.

“They can leave a message,” he said.

“What if it’s Nicky?” I said. I didn’t know why Nicky would ring her own mobile number rather than the house landline, but I could tell I’d pricked Anderson’s curiosity. He pulled open the drawer, lifted out a smartphone in a distinctive silver sleeve—it
was
Nicky’s smartphone—and glanced at the screen.

“It isn’t,” he said. He cancelled the call, threw the phone back in the drawer and slammed it shut.

“Funny she didn’t take her phone,” I said.

“Not really,” said Anderson. “She’d hardly want to keep in touch, given the circumstances.”

“Shall I leave my number in case she does?”

“I’m sure she already has it,” said Anderson, tugging open the door.

“I’m terribly sorry, I can’t leave just yet,” I said, mimicking his public-schoolboy veneer of politeness. I could see him tense again, ready for an ungentlemanly scuffle. “I left my shoes.”

Anderson looked back and saw my tatty grey trainers lying at the bottom of the stairs where I’d slipped them off. He strode over, picked them up gingerly, returned and slung them at me.

“Thank you so much,” I said. I exited meekly, and when the door slammed shut I quickly pulled my trainers on and raced away into the gathering dusk without doing them up. The laces whipped at my shins, the gravel grated accusingly under my feet, and my heart was pounding. I didn’t want to hang around long enough for Anderson to discover I’d lifted Nicky’s phone when he went to fetch my shoes.

A few streets away I slowed down; there were still no angry shouts of pursuit or police choppers with night-sun searchlights circling. I stopped at a pub on the Thames towpath, sat down at a table and took out Nicky’s phone. Thirty-two missed calls, twenty-two voicemail messages. She’d always used a security code to lock it, but I’d seen the combination a million times, and when I tapped in the numbers the phone blazed into life. Lots of missed calls from me, Vora, and someone called … Joan
Bisham? Anderson had had a point … if Nicky had absconded, she would have had to abandon her phone—but why would she have packed a bag and then left it?

Anderson hadn’t seemed deeply distraught that his wife had left him. Or even that surprised. If anything he came across as excited and a bit hyper, but maybe that had been the cocaine talking. I’d met enough coke users to recognize the twitching and the constant sniffing and the dilated pupils. I wondered how Nicky had felt about her husband’s drug use and the implications for her if their house had been raided.

I couldn’t sit outside this pub all night. It was going to take me hours to go through this phone, reading all the messages to see if they offered any answers about what had happened to Nicky. I hated reading at the best of times—it felt like flossing my brain with barbed wire—and until she vanished Nicky had been doing most of the hard work for me. I felt a pang of self-pity that was immediately washed away in a surge of anger. Why the hell was I feeling sorry for myself when Nicky might be in danger?

If she was in danger, and not halfway to some sun-kissed island on the Indian Ocean.

Maybe I was refusing to believe the obvious explanation—that I’d been hung out to dry yet again by a good-looking woman. But something had been bothering Nicky that morning in the gym. Something had upset her or frightened her. Something had made her so furious she had lost all control in the ring, and her phone might hold the key to that something.

Before heading home I quickly checked her email app. Most of it was densely packed text that gave me a headache looking at it, but halfway down one short subject line caught my eye. It read
DEAD MEAT
and the sender field was blank. Somehow I didn’t think it was a message from her butcher. I touched the header and the message opened. It too was short and to the point, and it didn’t take me long to figure out.

UR GONNA DIE IN AGONNY NOSY BITCH

The gym was dark and locked when I returned. When I stayed out after closing time Delroy usually left me a note—only a few words: he was as good at writing as I was at reading—saying he’d see me tomorrow, or something equally obvious, but it was always reassuring. Tonight there was nothing, although he’d tidied the place up and emptied the bins and wiped down the stark little kitchen. I should have called him, I realized with a pang of guilt. I knew he felt that he’d let me down and embarrassed himself, but it was nothing compared to how I’d made things worse that morning at Sherwood’s office. I wanted to tell him that, but first I had to make it right somehow, and not just dump more worries in his lap.

I stomped on up the dim stairs, cursing the bulb overhead. It was about forty years old and gave off less light than a luminous watch, but it was too high up to reach without an extra-long stepladder, and we didn’t have one, and I was the only person it was a problem for anyhow. My little place, tucked under the sloping eaves of the building, was as cold and dark and empty as when I’d left it early that morning, which felt like months ago. A little more of the wallpaper had peeled off on the section above my bed; one night the whole lot would no doubt slop down onto me and give me nightmares about being a mouldy filling in a stale sandwich. For the first time I missed the ramshackle little house where I’d lived all those years with my dad, and I wondered if the tenants in there would mind if I crashed on the floor. But when I thought about it, it wasn’t the house I missed. I couldn’t feel nostalgic about the place where I’d found my father slumped over a table with his head beaten in. It was Dad I missed, and his lovable, idiotic conviction that somehow everything would turn out all right in the end.

I heard a wooden banging down below, and
realized someone was thumping on our bolted doors with the heel of their fist. I thought maybe another drunk had taken the place for a nightclub, and tried to ignore it, but the banging went on, faint and angry and persistent. I sighed, skipped back down both flights of stairs again, drew back the heavy bolts, swung the door open, and stared.

“Where is she?” said Nicky.

Except it wasn’t Nicky. She certainly looked like her—she had the same neat athletic build, and wore her hair about the same length, pulled back from the same delicate, intelligent features. But this woman was five years younger, and her hair was fairer.

“If you mean Nicky Hale, that’s what I’d like to know,” I said.

“You’re sisters?”

She’d marched into the flat as if she’d expected Nicky to be hiding under my bed. Now the way she was looking around the place suggested she couldn’t believe a human being could live here.

“Half-sisters. My name’s Susan Horsfall.”

“Right,” I replied vaguely. “I saw your
name … on a holdall at her house.” I was still trying to get my head around this. Half-sisters? This woman didn’t just
look
like Nicky—she walked like her, spoke like her. I’d seen twins who looked less alike. “Nicky told you about me?”

The look of amused disbelief she shot me blew away any lingering hopeful illusions.

“No,” she said. “Harry told me you’d been round, when I went looking for her. Nicky was supposed to be coming to stay at my place, only she never turned up.”

“Why was she coming to stay with you? Because they’d argued?”

“They never stopped arguing,” Susan said. “She’d had enough. She said she was going to leave him. I never thought she really would … and certainly not this way. Harry says she cleaned you out.”

“Just about,” I said. “Look, now you’re here, can I offer you something? A drink, or …?”

She glanced towards the greasy stove and battered kettle on the corner unit. “I’m good, thanks,” she said. When I followed her look I could see why she’d wrinkled her nose. God, this place was a dump, I realized. But she
seemed to unwind a little, at least, and took a seat on my creaky old settee.

“For what it’s worth, I’m really sorry. It’s hard to believe she’d do something like this, but she was desperate. She’d been so unhappy the past few months …”

“So Harry really didn’t know what she was planning?”

“Are you kidding? This is going to cause him an unbelievable amount of grief, especially at work. I suppose that was one of the upsides, for her.”

“What does Harry actually do?” I said.

“He’s an account manager for a private bank in the city. Makes loads; more than Nicky ever did. She always claimed she didn’t care about money.”

“You didn’t believe her?”

“She obviously cared about yours,” said Susan. I must have looked pathetic, because she smiled at me with pity. “I’m sorry, Finn,” she said. “I’m sure she liked you. You’re definitely her type. She’s always gone for big strapping men like you and Harry.”

“Did she ever tell you about these?” I picked up Nicky’s phone from my rickety dining table
and unlocked it. It opened where I’d left it, on the nameless poison email, and I passed it to Susan. Her eyes widened as she scanned it.

“There’s another half-dozen like that,” I said. “And twenty more in the Deleted folder. She was getting about three or four of them a day.”

“Lawyers make enemies,” said Susan.

“They’re mostly the same,” I said. “I think this was just one enemy.”

“It certainly wasn’t Harry,” she said. “He’d never spell ‘agonny’ with two n’s.”

“Unless he was covering his tracks,” I suggested feebly. I hadn’t noticed the two n’s but I didn’t want her to know that.

“Harry’s a shit, yeah,” said Susan, “but he’d never have hurt her.”

“OK,” I said. “Then it was someone else. I can’t believe she ran away.”

“But if she was getting threats,” said Susan, “wouldn’t that have been one more reason to run?”

I suddenly felt deflated, confused and despairing. I’d imagined myself riding to Nicky’s rescue, wherever she was, and winning her breathless admiration. I could see
now I’d been fooling myself. Everything I’d done in the last few months had been part of a colossal con and I might as well have gone out and blown my inheritance on lottery scratch-cards and cider. Nicky had led me around on a string like a lovesick puppy, and thanks to her I’d made promises I couldn’t keep to people who would take it out on me and my friends in blood and brain damage.

“Have you shown these messages to the police?” Susan said.

“Not yet.” I held my hand out. She passed the phone back to me, and stood up to leave. “It doesn’t make any difference,” I said. “I have to know. I have to find her, or find out what happened to her. And I’m not leaving it to the cops, because they’re useless.”

“Finn …” She swept her blonde fringe out of her eyes in a gesture so familiar my heart twisted in my chest. “Has it occurred to you … Nicky might not want to be found? If you liked her, maybe you should let it go. Contact the Law Society, put in a claim, find another lawyer. There’s plenty more where Nicky came from.”

“What’s the Law Society?”

“They run an insurance fund. All practising solicitors have to pay into it. If one of them runs off with a client’s money, the fund repays it. That’s probably what Nicky expected you to do. They have an office in the City somewhere—Google them.”

After Nicky’s sister left I paced the tiny flat trying to figure out what to do next, but my mind kept sliding back to something she’d said, words that had snagged under my skin like a splinter. About how Nicky had been deeply unhappy for months. She’d felt that way all the time I knew her? Had I been just a distraction, some comic relief? I could see what Susan had meant about Nicky’s type: there was a distinct resemblance between me and her husband Harry, if you disregarded the dimple in his chin and the expensive haircut and the posh accent and the private education and the BMW coupé in his drive. But maybe that’s why Nicky had liked me—I was a younger, dumber, more pliable version of her husband without all the trappings of success that she resented so much. The bed squealed and groaned as I planted
my big ass onto it, and the noise sounded a lot like the dispirited voice in my head. I was swinging between feeling sorry for Nicky and feeling sorry for myself, and neither was getting me anywhere. I would do what I always did when the thoughts running round and round in my head started to wear a rut in my brain: I pulled off my clothes, pulled on my sweats, and hit the street.

A brief summer shower had left the pavements gleaming, and my trainers splished through shallow puddles as I weaved through the drunks staggering out of the pubs after last orders. In twenty minutes I reached the park by the canal, where the trees were rustling ghosts of green and the paths were pale grey shadows; in the bushes around me rats fought over stale crusts and foxes screwed, screeching. Disregarding the darkness I ran faster and faster until I was running full tilt, my pulse thumping in my head and sweat gushing from my pores, deeper into the night.

When my bedside alarm spewed out its horrible cheesy fanfare it felt like I’d only just closed my eyes. The morning sunlight was
bursting through my flimsy orange curtains, but although I hit snooze and tried to grab another few minutes of shuteye, it was no good. I lay there staring at the slope of the peeling ceiling instead. I had hoped the run and a good night’s sleep would straighten out my thoughts, but they seemed to have curved back on themselves and melted together in a mess like overheated plastic. Had Nicky really been planning all along to rip me off, or was it just a spur-of-the-moment thing? I didn’t want to listen to her sister, but then Susan wasn’t the one who’d cleaned out my account.

Lost in a dark maze of contradictions I showered, shaved and ate breakfast in something like a trance before mopping the gym floor, wiping down the equipment and stomping downstairs to open the doors. Delroy showed up at his usual time, grunting and panting as he reached the top of the stairs, and I brought him a cup of tea without him having to ask.

“If this is your apology for disappearing last night,” he said, “I accept.”

“I did call the office,” I said. “But no one answered the phone.”

“Then why didn’t you try my mobile?”
protested Delroy. “Or text me?” Dammit. My dad had been so crap with his mobile phone I’d expected Delroy to be too, but he always kept his charged up and ready, though nobody ever called him except me.