The Cutting Crew (6 page)

An hour after speaking to Mr Sheldon, I was sitting in an internet cafe, drinking yet another coffee and running through the details that had been faxed through to me on the colour machine at the other side of the room.

I'd lied on the phone, but only by omission. Yes, I might have some news for them soon - that was true. No, I wasn't in the office; I was out, so could they fax the details to this number, please? Also true. But they hadn't asked if I was still a cop and so I hadn't mentioned that I wasn't.

I had six pages. The first had a picture of Alison Sheldon in the top right-hand corner. It was a relaxed shot: someone had snapped her from one side, just as she turned, and she was squinting against a sun that lit up her face. In this photograph she looked much prettier than she did on the driver's licence, and it was sad.

Sean always said that when people died all the photographs of them shifted into an emotional minor key. If you put ten prints in front of him, he could pick out the victims. In a way, people in pictures are always dead - because time passes and that particular person gets left behind - but there are still tendrils that attach images of the you in the past to the you in the present, and when people die the tendrils stop humming. Sean really thought he could sense that, and who was I to tell him he was wrong? Looking at the picture of Alison that had been faxed to me, I didn't understand how someone wouldn't know that she was dead.

The rest of that page was a brief bio, typed in Courier with headings underlined. I scanned it quickly, taking in the pertinent details. Alison was twenty when she disappeared, studying for a degree in Fine Art. There were details of her previous schools, and it said that she'd been arrested for a minor drugs offence in her mid-teens and cautioned, but apart from that her record was clean.

Just bad luck getting caught, that one. When she disappeared, she didn't even have points on her driver's licence.

The other pages gave information about the circumstances of her disappearance, but not as much as I'd hoped. From the scant details, I got the impression that Alison had lived a very independent life. She had an address in Turtle, but it seemed that she often stayed over with friends, sleeping on floors and in spare rooms. Her boyfriend situation was generally fluid, but there was some indication - from comments made by friends - that it had settled somewhat in the weeks prior to her disappearance. Some people thought she was seeing another student; some, a lecturer.

Others said they couldn't be sure that she was seeing anyone, only that she wasn't seeing them as much as she used to. In my experience of murder investigations, girls rarely benefit from having mysterious boyfriends. Despite the confusion, there was enough mention of a boyfriend for it to seem worth pursuing.

On to her actual disappearance, then. She hadn't been seen for a week and a half by the time she was reported missing. The last person to see her alive was her friend, Keleigh Groves. Alison had left for the library that morning, presumably after an evening of some kind of social debauchery, and she hadn't returned.

That wasn't unusual, Keleigh was quoted as saying. She'd do that all the time. She had loads of friends she used to stay with. If she turned up, I let her stay and maybe other people would be there and we'd have a party. But I didn't worry if I didn't see her.

Other people must have felt the same, because nobody had been particularly worried not to hear from Alison for that length of time, and the boyfriend - if there was one - seemed to have disappeared along with her. Nobody heard from her again. Not until some kids were fucking around in Bull and ended up running screaming out of that old, abandoned house. Then, she started speaking to Sean and me in our nightmares with a voice that - until yesterday - had no name. The Missing Persons Report was filed, a few relevant people were interviewed and that was that. People vanish all the time. Many of them because they want to.

And yet she hadn't vanished. We'd found her.

I checked through the dates on the sheet and put the chronology together in my head. We found her body around two weeks after she disappeared, and that was a good half week after this report had been filed. We would have picked it up. So why didn't we?

Certainly not incompetence - a large number of us worked this case very hard, and checking Missing Persons would have been one of the obvious avenues to pursue. The only real answer I could come up with was that someone had picked up the report: picked it up and buried it. Not me. Not Sean. Someone else in the department.

I rubbed my face a little and started to feel bad.

It occurred to me that Sean had sent a very small amount of information about Alison, which meant that he must have had a reason not to tell me a lot more. Maybe he didn't want to get me properly involved unless it was necessary. Which would mean that he'd sent me what he had as some kind of insurance.

I put it together in my head.

Sean investigates. Sean finds out something bad and realises that his life might be in danger. Sean sends me enough to get going so that if something bad does happen to him I can follow it up. Then I can get killed too. Thanks a fucking bunch, Sean, I would say to him, in whatever twisted version of heaven we ended up in.

It made a certain amount of sense.

He'd delivered it last night, so he'd been alive and fine yesterday.

Perhaps something had been about to change. A deal or a meeting.

Some kind of showdown.

I finished off my coffee and wondered where I was going next.

There was no question of putting this to one side. Sean was my friend and I needed to know that he was okay. That was the deal; since he'd always looked out for me, it was time to repay the favour. But even without that there was no question. I turned to the front of the file and looked again at the picture of Alison. It was strange, but I still dreamed about her sometimes; and when that happened, I always woke up feeling that her murder had injected poison into my life. Everything after finding her had gone rotten.

Discovering her killer wouldn't fix any of that, of course, but I felt compelled to try anyway, regardless of any danger that Sean might be in.

So: the first priority was probably a visit to the university. I'd see what her department could tell me. Maybe have a look at her emails too. Then, there was the boyfriend to check out - whether he had been a student, a lecturer or someone else altogether. I could look up a few of her friends; there were contact details for most of the ones who had given statements. And at some point I'd have to speak to Rosh or Lucy about who in the department might have hidden the report and why. But that was uncomfortable and it could wait.

Okay then, I thought, gathering up my papers.

As I paid up, I realised I was experiencing something I hadn't felt since I'd left the police: a kind of vague thrill. It was a buzzing feeling that wasn't quite excitement. You never enjoy the job, but sometimes you get the sensation of rightness - of things falling naturally into place. You shake the facts and drop them, and they begin to form a line that leads to the truth; and when that happens it can feel like you're coming into alignment with the world and doing exactly what you should.

I went outside, and was heading towards the university campus which was a long walk away - when my mobile rang. The investigation vanished from my mind, and I thought Lucy as I took the phone out of my pocket. But then the display said rachel home calling and I looked at it for a good five seconds, debating whether to answer it or not, before finally pressing green.

'Hi,' I said.

'Didn't you get my text?'

'No.' But that was too much of a lie for it to live. 'Well, yes. But not until a few minutes ago. I've been busy.'

'Well, it's nice to know you're keeping yourself busy.'

'Right.'

Since I'd moved out, Rachel had two ways of dealing with me.

The first was the tone of the text message last night: vulnerable and hurt, and not afraid to show it. The other way was the flipside of that: cold, detached, professionally annoyed - mainly at me, but also at herself for the times when she was more open. I wasn't sure which was the hardest to deal with, but it was clear I had the pared-down half-hatred to deal with today.

She said, 'I need to see you.'

'What do you need to see me about?'

'I need to talk. I know you're busy - apparently - but I need to.'

'Yeah,' I said. 'I am busy.'

'Well, I need to. I think you owe me that much at least.'

I checked my watch; the afternoon was passing quickly, and I wasn't going to have time to meet Rachel and then check out the university. It was one or the other. I closed my eyes.

Half of me thought that she was being unfair - that I didn't owe her anything, because life doesn't work like that. Relationships die, and usually one of you hurts a lot more than the other. I'd felt enough guilt to sink my entire life, and so I'd tried to convince myself over time that you can hurt someone very badly without it necessarily being wrong. But it never quite worked. For a start, there was my affair with Lucy; in reality, I had such a lot to be guilty about. If Rachel thought that meeting up and talking to me might numb the pain a little, then I could do that. Whatever she asked, in fact, I could probably do. It didn't balance against the one huge thing I couldn't do for her, but at least it was something.

I opened my eyes and said:

'Okay. Where do you want to meet?'

Chapter
Four

At the western edge of Horse, where it borders Elephant, there is a place called the Clock Cafe. It's on the cusp of both studentland and the bohemian market end of the business district, and therefore it's needlessly trendy: nestled in between a fake authentic pizzeria and a shop filled with old clothes that had come back into fashion by virtue of simply being so revolting. The cafe itself is a mixture of glass-fronted utility and old-world decor that doesn't really work.

On the front, above the window, somebody had painted an enormous white clockface - Roman numerals, and all - onto the brick, and obviously that doesn't work. And yet it's always full, presumably because students don't work either.

The drizzly rain had stopped now, and a fair few people were sitting outside at tables on the cramped pavement. There were too many couples and they seemed too happy. Whenever I saw people who were blatantly in love with each other, I was always torn between thinking that either they were very stupid or I was. Today, it was edging towards the latter.

I crossed the street heading for the cafe, but I stopped a little way down from the entrance as something caught my eye. A friend of society had spray-painted graffiti onto the flagstones in the middle of the pavement. It said:

LIFE SPEAKS

LOUDER

AT DEATH

I stared at it for a few seconds, feeling confused and intrigued by it, and then I shook my head. It was just graffiti.

I headed inside the cafe and ordered a cappuccino. The waiter slick, tanned and ponytailed - was drying the inside of a cup with a tassel-edged tea towel, using an action that suggested a previous customer must have been drinking some kind of glue. He took my order imperiously and then set about taking as long as physically possible to make it. I sat down at a table not far from the counter, and decided that if he didn't bring my drink over within five minutes then I was very probably going to shoot him. It seemed reasonable.

He just made it and I almost scowled. Instead, I sipped the froth off the coffee, waited and remembered.

There's this strange thing. Whenever I travelled by train, I couldn't help looking for bodies out of the window. Macabre perhaps, but the side of railway tracks always seemed such a likely disposal site for corpses: all those wastelands and embankments and litter strewn sidings. Looking out of the window, all you ever saw were fields and gravel, desiccated buildings and rubbish.

There were no bodies that day, as far as I could tell.

We were on a train, side by side, with me beside the aisle and Rachel by the window. She had been sleeping for most of the journey. I would have quite liked her to rest her head on my shoulder but instead she was facing forwards, her head tilted back slightly, with the four-four rattle of the tracks moving her gently.

Sitting opposite, there were two indifferent strangers, arms folded, bored and lolling. We were all doing our best not to touch knees or look at each other.

The tannoy system kept performing strange grammatical loops: 'The next station is Lindley. Lindley is the next station.'

I alternated between looking at the dirty, rubbery floor of the aisle and the landscape outside. In the distance, the bare trees turned slowly on the spot as we passed. Closer, the world accelerated: the yellow fields trotted backwards, the hedge was running, and then the gravel of the track was a blur of speeding complexity. In the carriage itself, there was peace: only the shudder of the tracks; the occasional shuffle.