The Cutting Crew (5 page)

And what happened was, Sean left.

One day he did his usual not-turning-in routine, but this time his absence stretched to two days, and then to three, and then he just never came back. I didn't hear from him, and after a week of no word it seemed pretty clear that he was gone, one way or another.

The exact circumstances were unclear, but we learned a little, here and there. Sean had rented his flat and lived alone, and it turned out that he'd left instructions with his estate agents to say that he wouldn't be renewing his tenancy. On the last day, the landlord turned up, expecting an empty house and instead finding that all of Sean's things were still there. This was a few days before we went looking, and when we did we found the landlord, slightly aggravated, in the process of bagging and binning most of Sean's possessions. There was no forwarding address, no contact details.

It was as though Sean had simply not come home one night.

We looked for him, of course. We tried all the obvious places and people, and then we moved on to the less obvious. Some of them, we leaned on pretty hard - but there was no trace of him.

And in the months that had passed since - on those dark nights - I didn't find it impossible to believe that it had been a trade-off: that the city had accidentally let go of the girl's body in its sleep, realised its mistake and then lazily reached out and taken Sean instead.

The rest of us packed up and moved on. Photographs tacked to walls were taken down; papers were filed; people moved to different desks and started giving a shit about other things. But none of us - especially me - forgot about that girl properly. Like I said, she was different. A little more awful, a little more inexplicable. Without understanding why, she haunted us all in our own ways, whoever she was.

That was about five months ago, and those five months had been a blur: an emotional downhill roll in which I'd gathered speed until I couldn't even make out the scenery. Looking back now, it was tempting to see everything as starting with that dead girl. She got Sean first. It just took a bit more time for her to get me too.

A month after Sean vanished, the affair I'd had with Lucy was over and I'd split with Rachel and moved into my new flat. A month after that and I wasn't going into work. I didn't officially quit, in that I never handed in my badge or gun, but Rosh and Lucy were aware I wasn't coming back and informed the necessary people. Nobody knew exactly where I was, but I don't think anyone looked that hard. I could live with it.

I lied when I said I left because the job wasn't good enough. That was certainly a factor - and after Sean disappeared there were no more night-time excursions to take the edge off the monotony. But it's not the whole story. The real truth is that I left because I couldn't work with Lucy anymore. We were good friends, and I hoped we always would be, but she didn't want our relationship to go on any longer and I'd realised too late that, despite everything, she was all I wanted. I was hurt and upset and sad, and it was breaking her heart to see me every day and know that it was her fault. So I left. I emailed her and said goodbye and that I'd always be her friend but I needed some time alone to get over these dumb feelings I had. I didn't know how long it would take, but I never guessed that four months on they'd be as strong as ever, with a bad case of cabin fever on top of it all.

Money? I had savings, and it's probably best not to enquire too much about that. Let's just say that you don't whack that many criminals without picking up some financial compensation along the way, and that last guy, Halloran, set the four of us up quite nicely. Most of my share was squirrelled away in bank accounts held in fake names. For example, the rent on my flat was paid by someone else on behalf of someone else. I paid for my shopping with a third person's credit card.

In the circumstances, how Sean had found me was something of a mystery: a neat trick I wished I could manage myself.

When I saw him again, I'd have to ask him the secret.

Chapter
Three

By the middle of the morning, I was fairly sure that I hadn't shot anyone the previous night - or not deliberately anyway. Technically, if you fire a bullet straight up in the air it will reach its zenith, fall down and, wind resistance aside, by the time it hits the earth again it'll be travelling as fast as when it left the barrel. So I might have killed someone by accident or possibly clipped an innocent bird, but these were outside chances and I figured I shouldn't worry. Instead, I drank consecutive cups of coffee, felt sorry for myself and tried to put it out of my head. We all do stupid things when we're drunk and the important thing is to learn.

I opened the blinds in the kitchen and watched the outside world. It was approaching Summer but today was a miserable day: shitty, rainy and overcast. My concentration drifted for a while, unfocused, but after I'd had enough caffeine to feel properly alive I went back through to the bedroom and turned my attention to the papers that Sean had sent to me.

First, the envelope. The only mark on it was my name, scrawled on the front in blue biro. No return address on the back, and no indication of where it had come from. The envelope itself was generic. Next, I looked at the papers that had been inside. The alltoo-familiar picture of the girl's corpse had been printed on the station's colour laserjet, and since it was old and battered I presumed that it had once been part of Sean's original case file. Its horrors were old: the photocopy of the driver's licence was actually more shocking, because here was the girl - alive and smiling. She still didn't have a future, but the licence gave her a past of sorts and the contrast was telling.

I put the papers to one side.

Five months without a fucking word, Sean. And this is what you do?

There were a number of questions I wanted answered, many of them connected with who this girl was and why she'd been killed, but the ones that preyed on my mind most were to do with Sean.

How he was and what he'd been doing. And why he hadn't delivered this envelope in person. The truth was, I really missed him.

My first instinct was to contact him, but there was no obvious way to do that. Someone else lived in his flat now, and after two months his mobile number had started coming up dead. Now, a quick and casual phone call to the police confirmed that he wasn't working in the department anymore - did I want to leave a message? I said no, and hung up. I'd thought that maybe he'd returned to work and nobody had been able to find me to tell me, but apparently not.

I went into the kitchen to make another coffee - the final straw, surely: the one that would send me into the street tap-dancing like a fool - and wondered what to do about Sean's delivery while the kettle slowly boiled. It was doubtful that he had sent me the information out of courtesy - he clearly expected me to act on it in some way. I thought it over. There was no point in me taking it to the police, as he could have done that himself, so more off-the record enquiries seemed to be in order. As to why he hadn't established contact properly, I'd just have to trust that he had a good reason. I was his friend, after all, and I owed him that much.

Perhaps it would become obvious.

I poured the coffee and took it through to the front room.

A couple of simple calls, then. And to be fair, it wasn't like I had anything else to do with my day.

Like most of the students in our city, Alison had travelled a long way to be with us. The address on her driver's licence was her parents' house, and they lived on the other side of the country in Bracken, where I guessed that she'd grown up. It took a little searching on the internet to get a phone number for them, and then ten minutes of planning before I decided what I was going to say.

Then, I made the call.

A man answered after five rings:

'Hello?'

'Mr Sheldon?' I said.

'Uh-huh.' The line crackled a little. 'Who am I speaking to?'

'My name is Martin Weaver,' I told him. 'I'm a detective. I'd like to talk to you about your daughter.'

'Right. Go on then.'

His lack of concern took me aback a little, but I tried not to let it register. Instead, I took my first risk, figuring that Sean must have been in touch with this man at some point.

'I believe you spoke to one of my colleagues recently?'

'No, not me.'

'Oh,' I said. First risk taken and fucked up. 'In that case I must have been misinformed.'

'It was my wife who spoke to him.'

'Ah, right.'

Her parents were a logical place to start, I supposed. Of course, living so far away, it was unlikely that they'd have much insight into Alison's life in the city; they probably wouldn't know that much about what she did and who she did it with, or even - given the realities of teenage alienation - much about who she was. But Sean had given me their address for a reason, and so there must be something here.

Sheldon said, 'He rang up about a month ago. Sean something, I think. I don't know - my wife wrote it down. Said he was a policeman.'

'That's right,' I said, and it occurred to me how strange it was.

Their daughter had been murdered and the only people who had contacted them about it were men claiming to be policemen who actually weren't.

I said, 'Could you tell me what he discussed with your wife?'

It was an awkward question anyway - as by all rights I should already know - but I knew that Sheldon's irritation and indifference could make it even worse. Fortunately, he wasn't paying attention.

'Yeah,' he told me. 'Said there had been a possible sighting that he was looking into. But since then we haven't heard anything. He asked us to get in touch if we heard from her.'

Okay, I thought. They don't know she's dead.

'Did he ask about anything else?'

'He asked about Alison,' Sheldon said. 'Wanted to know about her friends. Her work. Stuff like that.'

'And what did your wife tell him?'

'She told him she didn't know much about it. To be honest, Alison hardly ever contacts us. Wasn't much my wife could say.

Anything he wanted to know would have been in the Missing Persons Report anyway.'

Missing Persons Report?

I almost said it out loud, but managed to stop myself just in time.

We'd gone through every one of those reports for the months before and after we found the body, and Alison's name had never turned up. Right age, right physical characteristics - if she'd been there we would have seized on her file and run with it. When had it been made?

I spoke to Alison's father for a few more minutes, trying to find out if he knew anything else, but there was nothing. He was obviously uninterested by my enquiries, and it became apparent that Alison had been distanced from her parents for quite a while before her disappearance. Her father's attitude was that this was the kind of thing she did - no doubt she'd turn up eventually, and she shouldn't expect much of a welcoming committee when she did. It was very sad, but he didn't know what had happened and I tried hard - but unsuccessfully - not to hold it against him.

'Thanks for your time,' I said at the end of the conversation.

'We'll be in touch if we hear anything.'

The nearest Missing Persons Bureau is based a little out of town: around three hundred kilometres north, and then west a bit. It is notoriously efficient, mostly because it was founded twenty years ago by an everyday couple who had started off searching for their own missing son. It had expanded since then, of course, but it's still run on a voluntary basis by dedicated staff. The police force had trouble keeping track of things that happened ten minutes ago, but Missing Persons maintains files on every runaway and absentee reported to them since the operation began. Even better - the files are hard-copy and the staff know where to find them.

Missing Persons isn't a public operation, in that if you rang up anonymously and asked for information you wouldn't get it, but they work closely with the police. They keep the files but they certainly don't want them, and if the police find someone then they can throw a case away. We all cooperate and maintain a useful two-way exchange.

Of course, I was a normal member of the public now - I still had a badge, but the number was probably void. Fortunately, I'd worked with Missing Persons enough times to know a couple of the staff by name, and so I could call and ask for one of them personally. The sad fact is that missing people ended up in our city all the time, in various states of mental and physical cohesion, and I was one of the few cops who had conspicuously cared about putting names to some of them and maybe sending them home. As currency went in Missing Persons, I was a rich man until proven otherwise.