Something Wicked (6 page)

Jenny picked up a piece of paper from her desk. ‘As far as I can tell, Nicholas Carr disappeared on the night of his eighteenth birthday. Three fingers from his right hand were found by a
dog-walker four days later in Alkrington Wood. Do you know the area?’

Andrew cringed, not wanting to say it out loud. ‘Sort of.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘When I first started doing this, before hiring you, before my infidelity policy, I was doing a trail one night. This poor woman had come in beside herself. Her husband kept telling her he
was working late at a call centre but he didn’t seem to be bringing any extra money home. She had these wee kiddies at home – three boys, two girls, all under ten. They’d
basically stopped having any sort of relationship because he wasn’t there and whenever she asked if there was anything wrong, he’d hit the roof. She came into my old office one morning
and just cried. She said she could give me fifty quid if I could figure out what was going on.’

Jenny held his gaze, brown eyes wide, staring into his, dragging the information out. ‘Fifty quid?’ She didn’t say it in a way to ridicule the woman, more because she knew what
their hourly rates were. Fifty pounds wouldn’t have gone very far.

‘I didn’t even take her money,’ Andrew said. ‘I told her I’d see what I could do and took her phone number.’

‘You old softie.’

‘Less of the old.’

Jenny’s dimple reappeared.

‘Anyway, it wasn’t that much work. Her husband was hardly the brain of Britain, or the brain of anywhere, really. When he knocked off at the call centre, he drove out to this car
park on the edge of Alkrington Wood. It’s not the main one but between these two hedges you wouldn’t normally look twice at and then down a dirt path. I left my car on the road and
walked it, but there was a Land Rover with the back doors open, a dozen blokes and a couple of girls . . . well, you can probably guess.’

Jenny picked up a pencil and started to twiddle it between her fingers, tapping each end on the desk in the exact way Andrew’s mother had repeatedly told him not to do many years ago for
fear of ‘breaking the lead’.

‘Aah, the passion of it,’ she said. ‘Do you think when Shakespeare wrote
Romeo and Juliet
, he thought that the great romance and tragedy would one day be eclipsed in
starry-eyed terms by a bunch of fat people dogging in a secluded car park?’

Young enough to be your daughter.

Andrew pretended she hadn’t spoken. ‘Either way, yes, I know where Alkrington Wood is.’

Jenny returned to her notes. ‘There’s nothing more specific about where the fingers were found and the woods are a whole bunch of hectares, whatever a hectare is. It’s big,
anyway. Details are
really
sketchy. I’ve gone through a few reports and they all say the fingers were found by the man’s dog – nothing about digging or anything like that.
They spent a few days excavating afterwards but the reports tail off after that. The person who found the fingers isn’t named, either. I’ve read up on the rest of what was reported and
made you a list of the people you might need to speak to. Do you want them emailed, or—’

‘Hard copies are best.’

Jenny hopped up and passed across a file. ‘Good, that’s what I thought.’

Andrew began thumbing through the top few sheets but it was all there. It was scary how quickly she worked.

Jenny leant on her desk, motioning a cupped hand towards her mouth: ‘Brew?’

Andrew shook his head but Jenny pottered to the corner anyway and filled the kettle before clicking it on.

She perched on the edge of her desk, ankles crossed, head tilted slightly to the side. ‘What I don’t get is what Richard Carr is hoping to achieve. The police found his son’s
fingers and looked for the body. He’ll just be buried somewhere in the woods, won’t he? Or his body will be washed up on a beach somewhere? There’s plenty of things we’ll be
able to look into, it’s not like we’re ripping them off, but the police have already done this. What’s he hoping we can do?’

Andrew didn’t reply for a few moments because, to him, the answer was obvious. ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’

‘No.’

‘Cousins?’

A shrug.

‘Okay, what about your parents?’

Another shrug. ‘They live abroad.’

‘Do you get on with them?’

Shrug number three. ‘I suppose.’

This wasn’t the response Andrew had expected.

He took a breath. ‘Okay, you know I don’t have children, right.’

‘That’s why you’ve not gone grey yet.’

Andrew couldn’t resist a smile. ‘And neither do you.’

‘Nope.’

‘But imagine we did. Imagine there was somebody who was literally a part of you – and then one day they weren’t there any longer. You’d want to know what happened to
them, wouldn’t you?’

Jenny gazed at him, eyes narrowing, before she did a very strange thing.

She lied.

Perhaps it wasn’t the mistruth that was strange, it was the fact Andrew spotted it. Jenny was always so convincing, so perfect, that it was a natural assumption she was telling the truth.
Certainly if she’d ever lied to him before then he hadn’t spotted it.

‘I get it,’ she said, her eyes darting sideways, clearly telling him that she didn’t.

Andrew was so taken aback that he stopped speaking, forgetting what his point was.

‘Okay, bad example,’ he said after the pause. ‘Who’s the most important person in your life?’

Jenny stared at him blankly. ‘I dunno. I suppose I see you more than anyone else.’

Andrew stopped again. That was news to him, even though it sort of made sense in terms of the time they were at work – but no one else would have answered like that. They might have
mentioned a boyfriend or girlfriend, husband or wife. Perhaps even a parent or sibling.

He returned to his original argument, having confused himself more than her. ‘Sorry, right, er, let’s say you did have a child – a part of yourself – you’d do
everything you could to discover what happened to them. The police tell you they’re dead but you don’t have a body, so you keep believing. A year from now, five years, ten years: you
still keep thinking they might return. It’s the natural way to be. It’s about closure.’

Jenny nodded slowly but Andrew still wasn’t certain she got it. Perhaps it was an age thing; she was so naturally confident that sometimes he forgot how young she was.

Andrew stood, accidentally sending his chair spinning across the room just as the kettle clicked off. ‘You busy?’ he asked.

‘Not really. I’ve got a bit of typing to do but it won’t take long.’

‘Fancy going for a ride?’

‘I thought you didn’t have a car?’

Andrew had already been reaching for his coat and the car keys. ‘Oh yes. Shite.’

Jenny pushed herself up from her desk and picked up her jacket. ‘Never mind, we can take mine.’

Andrew squished himself into the passenger seat of Jenny’s Volkswagen Beetle. He felt like he was in a circus act, as if he was going to fall out when they reached their
destination, only to be followed by three dozen more clowns as the wheels fell off. The seat was so close to the ground that he was struggling to see over the dashboard. His knees were pressed into
the glove box, while the neck rest was doing such a fabulous job of digging into his spine that it was like getting a tantric massage from a sumo wrestler with bratwurst fingers. Not that Andrew
knew what that felt like, of course.

‘Seatbelt,’ Jenny scolded as she pulled away, no hint of a joke in her voice.

‘I was just reaching for it! Bloody hell, it’s like a baked bean tin in here with less room.’

‘It’s not my fault someone set fire to your car. Besides, there are buses if you need to get around.’

Andrew shuddered. First job when we get back to the office, sort out a hire car.

Jenny crept her way into a stream of traffic heading north, away from the city, talking to herself quietly as she acknowledged the various signs and lane instructions. The inside of the car was
completely clear of clutter: no ornaments, no air-fresheners, no soft chimpanzees from a day-trip to Monkey World – nothing except for an ice scraper and a cloth, both neatly tucked into the
door pocket. She really was unnatural. Where were the screwed-up McDonald’s wrappers? The scratched CDs? The bent-in-half atlas with a footprint on the front cover? That thing that blocked
off the cigarette lighter rattling around the back seat which was always the first item to get lost? Hers was actually
in
the socket.

‘Do you know where we’re going?’ Andrew asked.

‘Obviously.’

‘It’s just that you don’t have a map, or your tablet?’

‘So?’

‘How do you know where you’re going?’

Her eyes didn’t leave the road. ‘Up Bury New Road, past the parks, over the motorway, right, left, second right, keep going for half a mile, then left, right, left. What’s
difficult to remember about that?’

Andrew had lost her at the first left.

He sat back as best he could, even though the uncomfortable chair made it feel like he was being mauled from behind by a gorilla with wandering hands. This was what it must have been like to
work at the BBC in the 1970s.

From what he could make out, Jenny was sticking rigidly to the speed limits. He’d been in a car with her many times before, but never with her driving, and the adherence to the law was
something he wasn’t sure he expected from her. It wasn’t as if he’d ever seen her break the rules but there was a defiant, rebellious streak to the way she spoke that wasn’t
matched by the way she drove.

Trundle, trundle, trundle.

Richard and Elaine Carr’s house was much like Stewart and Violet Deacon’s: big without being extravagant, on a sleepy street away from the main road. It was somewhere between
Prestwich and Bury, a little outside of the city of Manchester itself but part of the Greater Manchester county.

All the houses were pretty four- and five-bedroom places, with wide driveways and trimmed expanses of lawn at the front. On a patch of green separating two houses a few down from the
Carrs’, three young boys were kicking a football around, using a tree and rucksack as a goal. Their improvised commentaries drifted on the wind, added to – and perhaps improved –
by the squawk of a blackbird somewhere nearby.

Andrew and Jenny made their way up the driveway, each looking around and taking in the scene. For Andrew, he’d seen much of the same that morning: clean brickwork, paving slabs, a lawn,
tidy hedges. Apart from the cosmetic differences, the Carrs and the Deacons seemed to be largely similar.

Richard Carr was already standing on the front step before they’d reached the door. He squinted past them at Jenny’s Beetle at the front of the house.

‘I had an
accident
in my car,’ Andrew said in answer to the question which hadn’t been asked.

Richard hurried them inside with various offerings of thanks. Out of the rain, his hair looked thicker than it had the previous day. He seemed thinner and a little frailer now he was dressed
down. He’d obviously discovered the middle-aged man clothes shop too, the location of which was only revealed to you once you’d had children. His brown slacks were topped off with a
purple and yellow monstrosity that was masquerading as a woolly jumper.

He led Andrew and Jenny into a living room that screamed ‘beige’. From the light brown carpets to the greyey-browny nothingness of the three-piece suite, with matching lampshades, it
was as if someone had pointed to a page in the IKEA catalogue and said ‘that one’.

Elaine Carr was pretty much what Andrew would have guessed: mid-fifties like her husband but with a hint of the looks she’d once had. Her greying hair had been coiffured up into a
backcombed bob and she was wearing a below-the-knee skirt with a knitted cardigan.

She stood and shook hands with Andrew and Jenny, introducing herself and offering to make them all some tea. Before she could leave the room, Jenny blocked the door in a
not-blocking-the-door-half-in-half-out-look-at-me-smile way.

‘I’ll make it, if you want,’ she said. ‘Let you two have a good chat with Andrew.’ She pointed towards the back of the house. ‘Through there, is it? I’m
sure I’ll find everything.’ A nod towards Richard. ‘Milk with one sugar, wasn’t it?’

He tilted his head slightly. Jenny had spoken so quickly that it seemed like he needed a moment to catch up. ‘Right, er, well remembered. Elaine has it the same way, don’t you,
dear?’

After a nod from Elaine, Jenny skipped away, all smiles, swinging hair and single dimple, as if what had just happened was perfectly normal. In many ways, with Jenny, it was.

Andrew sat in the armchair as the Carrs took the sofa. Richard reached out for his wife’s hand, giving it a squeeze before they returned to their own corners.

After taking the notepad and pen from his satchel, Andrew offered a sympathetic smile. ‘Thank you for the information you sent through yesterday. If possible, I’d like to go more or
less back to the beginning. I realise you’ve been over this, probably many times, but I always prefer dealing with primary information.’

Two nods.

‘Can you talk me through the circumstances leading up to when Nicholas disappeared?’

Elaine pressed back into the sofa, clearly willing her husband to do the talking. Richard took the cue: ‘There’s not an awful lot to tell you that I didn’t send over yesterday.
Nicholas was a very normal teenager. He was at college and his reports seemed to be good. He’d been talking about going to university when he finished and had stepped that up over new
year.’

‘What about friends?’

‘We wrote down the names of the ones we know but you know what it’s like being young. You know all sorts of people; some of them are close friends, others are just people you say
hello to. Then you’ve got the issue that most teenagers do all they can to keep their best friends away from their parents. I know the police went into the college to interview everyone.
It’s even more awkward now, of course, because Nicholas was in his final year so people are spread all over. One of his older friends is at a university in Europe: France or Germany or
something. I’ve passed on all we know.’