Running Girl (37 page)

And now, despite himself, he felt a familiar mental itch.

He couldn't help it. He sat, puzzled, at his table.

For a while he considered the equation. It was so simple it was dull:
. Somehow that wasn't the point. The point was elsewhere, tantalizingly out of reach.

What was it?

Trying to rid himself of the itch, he got up and went to the window again, and stood there restlessly and went back to the table. The itch remained, itching furiously like the itch on a phantom limb, impossible to scratch because it didn't exist. Like an imaginary number, which existed only in the imagination.

Everyone knows what you have to do with imaginary numbers.

He started to tremble.

He glanced at his bedroom door. Then he ripped a sheet of lined paper from a pad and looked at it for a few seconds, and carefully tore it on the left-hand edge about an inch below the top. Taking a black felt-tip pen, he wrote without hesitating fifteen words in a list ten lines long in the top left-hand quarter of the sheet:

plain choc

milk

white

butter

pecans

plain flour

baking powder

eggs

vanilla essence

castor sugar

When he'd finished, in the bottom right-hand quarter he wrote:

And in the bottom left-hand quarter:
jacket
.

And finally, in the centre of the page:
Gone for a run Back 7.30 p.m.
, which he circled in a thick black line.

Even as he wrote it he didn't like it. But he forced himself to look at it. After a while he added a vague doodley scribble underneath the probability equation and got some spit on the tip of his finger and smeared it across the words
eggs
and
vanilla
.

He didn't like it any better than before. The itch hadn't gone away, either.

He stood at the window with his knuckles between his teeth.

‘There was nothing in the pocket,' he said out loud. ‘No casino chip, nothing. It doesn't matter. It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't—'

He froze mid-sentence, his head cocked to one side as if listening to the sound of three very precise memories rotating into a different dimension.

He went back to the desk, took up the paper, folded it in half, crumpled it, threw it in his waste-paper basket, fished it out again, smoothed it and put it back on the table. And stared at it for five seconds.

‘Shit,' he said.

First he called Felix.

‘Got a memory test for you, man. Remember Chloe bringing chocolate brownies in to school?'

‘Yeah. Sort of.'

‘What day was that?'

Felix heaved a sigh. ‘Don't know, Garv. Not long before she got bumped. Sometime that week.'

‘I need to know the exact day. You said it was MacAttack's birthday.'

‘Yeah, but it's not like his birthday's in my diary.'

‘Come on, Felix. Think. You said he was doing the register.'

‘Oh yeah. Must have been ... Must have been the Wednesday, then. He has meetings or something the other days, and this temp does it.'

‘You sure?'

‘Definitely. Wednesday. Do I get something for remembering so well?'

‘No.'

Next he phoned Jess.

There was a small noise, something between a gulp and a sob, at the other end of the phone.

‘Jess? That you? I need some information.'

There was a long silence. ‘Can't your new girlfriend tell you?'

‘Don't pull that, Jess. This is important.'

He heard her snort.

‘Only you can help me. I need your perfect memory. Listen. When you told me about Chloe turning up that Friday, you said you hadn't spoken to her since revising with her for a maths test.'

‘So?'

‘Test on probability, right?'

‘What's that?'

‘Outcomes. Lots of fractions. One over x plus two plus one over three equals minus one. That sort of thing.'

‘Yeah. I s'pose.'

‘You were revising at Chloe's.'

‘That's right. But, Garv, I—'

‘What day?'

There was a long silence. ‘I dunno.'

‘That same week?'

‘Yeah.'

‘All right. What days do you have maths?'

There was another long silence. ‘Monday. Wednesday. And Friday.'

‘OK. So the test wasn't Monday, 'cause you'd have revised for it the week before.'

‘I s'pose.'

‘Was the test Friday? Had you just had it that morning?'

‘No.'

‘So it must have been on Wednesday. So you'd have been revising Monday or Tuesday night.'

‘Yeah, that's right. I remember now. It was Monday. The test was on Wednesday. We didn't do much, to be honest. And anyway, she went off for a run after a bit.'

‘OK, Jess, that's perfect. Thanks.'

She was about to say something else but he rang off fast. He had one more call to make.

He looked up the number and dialled.

‘Bolloms dry cleaning.' A harsh voice, all pins and starching.

‘Hi. I wonder if you can help me. It's about a jacket left for cleaning a few weeks ago.'

‘Name?'

‘Dow. Chloe Dow.'

The phone went dead. Several minutes passed, then the voice said, ‘Dow?'

‘That's right.'

‘Jacket, white, cotton.'

‘That's the one.'

‘Picked up already. Long time since, I think.'

‘Really?'

‘Yeah, really.'

‘Can you tell me when?'

A silence followed, broken only by snippets of harsh breathing and the tapping of a keyboard. Garvie was holding the phone so tight his knuckles almost popped.

‘Yeah,' the voice said at last. ‘Got it right here.'

‘What day?'

‘The eleventh. Wednesday.'

He sat there shivering.

Ingredients for chocolate brownies taken in to school on Wednesday.

Maths revision for a test on Wednesday.

Reminder to pick up a jacket on Wednesday.

He'd been right. Everything matched. Grabbing his coat, he went fast out of his room and was halfway to the front door before he remembered his mother in the kitchen. When he turned, she was looking at him with those watchful eyes and he muttered, ‘It's OK, it can wait,' and went back into his room.

He called Alex.

‘Man, I need a favour. Yeah, right now. Listen, you know the sports shop in the centre? Yeah. I want you to go there and ask some questions. You got a pen? Write this down.
Asics Lady GEL-Torana 4 Trail Running Shoes. Size 4. Lime green with orange pattern and laces.
Got that? OK. Here's the question. Somebody bought a pair of those shoes from that place the Friday Chloe got killed. Late afternoon. That's right. I want you to find out who that person was. No, it wasn't Chloe. Yes, it's important. It's the most important thing you've ever done in your life. Yeah, well, ask. Get hold of whoever who was serving. Those shoes are evil ugly. There's a chance they'll remember. Give me a ding soon as you know.'

When he got the call an hour later he was lying on his bed, hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. His mother had been in twice but he hadn't responded to her, hadn't even moved. But when his phone rang he leaped like a salmon to grab it.

‘Alex? What's the news?'

And he stood there in the middle of his room, listening in horror.

ON MONDAY MORNING
he finished breakfast, his mother wished him luck and he went down the stairs with his bag containing everything he needed for his exam and out through the lobby into the morning sunshine. Halfway down the street he turned to look back and saw her still watching him, arms folded at the window, and forced himself to walk on, slowly, all the way to the end and round the corner.

Just out of sight he stood there, considering. In one direction was school and exams and pleasing his mother. In the other was doubt and pain and the desperate pursuit of something like the truth. He glanced down the street towards school. Then hurried across the street and caught a bus going in the opposite direction.

At ten o'clock Fox Walk was deserted: most of the people who lived there had gone to work or to school. The cul-de-sac lay empty and gleaming in the sun. Red and yellow tulips were out in the front gardens, and purple pansies in hanging baskets, and a few early roses, white and pink, in plastic tubs. The council had trimmed the verges and the grass was the fresh green of summer. Garvie ignored all this. He walked past the end of Fox Walk to the wicket gate leading to the Marsh Fields and turned into the path that ran along the backs of the houses. As he'd thought, the fence behind ‘Honeymead' had been repaired but it wasn't difficult to climb, and inside a minute he was standing on the patio next to one of those modern vinyl doors beloved by Felix.

Garvie's information was that Mrs Dow had returned to work and the house would be empty, but he stood for a moment listening. Except for a blackbird in the shrubbery everything was quiet. He unrolled the oil-cloth Felix had lent him and took out a tension wrench and the half-diamond pick. Putting the short end of the wrench into the plug of the door-handle lock and holding it firm with the thumb of his left hand, he slipped the end of the half-diamond in with his right and prodded around for the shift of the pins until they fell into line, then swung the tension wrench anti-clockwise until the handle moved freely. He repeated the trick with the deadlock above. Again he waited for a moment, listening. Then he opened the door and went quietly into the Dows' conservatory.

‘Never stay longer than an hour. Always secure more than one exit.' Remembering Felix's advice, he crossed the living room to the hall and unlocked the front door. In the hallway he paused, listening once more before padding silently up the stairs. The heavy silence of emptiness filled the house, but he took no chances, going along the landing as quietly as possible, ducking below the level of the window. Chloe's room was still sealed, a drooping piece of police tape strung across the door. But it wasn't Chloe's room he was interested in. He went past it to the box room at the far end of the landing. He'd seen inside it once, in that brief period when he was going out with Chloe, and he remembered what was in it: a desk and a chair and lots of shelves. It would be where Mr Dow did his paperwork. Garvie opened the door and slipped inside.

He sat at the desk and tried the drawers. The first was filled with stationery – neatly bound bundles of biros and pencils, boxes of paperclips and drawing pins. The second contained cables, plugs and chargers, again all neatly bundled together and secured with plastic ties. The third was packed with files – records of jobs and copies of invoices. It was only when Garvie took them out that he found something more interesting at the back of the drawer. A ten-spot and a packet of cigarette papers. Mr Dow had a secret little habit. Garvie thought about that while he put the papers back and looked around the rest of the office.

The files he wanted were on the top shelf, all neatly labelled:
House, Car, Garden, Holidays, Misc, Bank, Tax
. He took down the file labelled
Misc
and began to look through it. Twenty minutes went by in slow quiet stages. He put
Misc
back on the shelf and took down
House
. More minutes passed as he flicked steadily through correspondence about the conservatory extension and receipts for bamboo-cane furniture, then he put
House
back and took down
Garden
.

He marvelled at the obsessive orderliness of Mr Dow's files. He himself had no use for neatness whatsoever; to him it seemed a form of private stupidity. In fact he was hoping to prove it.

He put
Garden
back, took down
Holidays
and went through it slowly, glancing at brochures of hotels in Spain and printouts of booking confirmations, then put it back and took down
Tax
and went through it more rapidly, and put that back too. Looking at his watch, he saw he'd been there for nearly an hour, and sighed and got to his feet. And that was when he saw the other file, lying open on the floor.