The Lost Sister (8 page)

“I had ideals,” Wickes said. “Don't get me wrong.” He was talking about his own career. Putting me in the picture.

Confession is good for the soul, right?

I was curious what he had to confess.

Ideals.

I got into this gig so I could lose myself in other people's lives. But maybe I was deluding myself when I talked about making the world a better place, providing some kind of truth.

Ideals.

They're what people expect you to have. What you use to excuse your real motivations.

Wickes's ideals were sound, maybe even a tad more romantic than I'd expect from the burly man who sat across the other side of the table. He got into the investigation business to help people.

I couldn't sense guile or deceit, and he met my gaze straight on. Did I believe him? It was hard not to.

“Truly,” he said, and gestured, “Hand on heart.” He straightened his back, closed his eyes, held the pose melodramatically for a moment before relaxing. “Sounds like a bad joke, right enough. But we were all young and principled once. Right?”

That last word made me flinch, maybe even look away. Did he catch that? See past my composure for a moment? I would have, I knew it.

What Wickes found, the deeper he got into the business, was that he had a talent for finding people. He started working with another investigator in Glasgow, learned in a kind of unofficial apprenticeship. “A lot of security work. I've never been the wee man, you can probably tell. Guess I looked like a goon, whatever. He had me work the rackets. The kind of jobs I guess someone like you wouldn't even consider.” He smiled at me. Vaguely condescending. Did he mean it to be? I wasn't sure.

“These days, you lads are minted and trained and shaped and moulded. Told right and wrong, what you can and cannot do. Back in my day…we had no national organisation. We weren't monitored by bastards like the Security Industry Authority. No, we learned the trade on the streets. Christ, why would you even think about organising a business like ours? Once it becomes respectable, the services people require are impossible to provide.”

There was a strange air of nostalgia to his voice. A pining for days long lost. Not for the innocence, but for a power and influence that had eluded Wickes in later years.

His early work was in enforcement. His word, not mine. He didn't seem to shy away from it or try and disguise the work as anything other than it was. He dissuaded abusive husbands, confronted philanderers, made straight up calls for debts that needed collection. As time went on, he started to demonstrate an aptitude for tracing the disappeared.

“I went into business for myself somewhere around 1997,” he said. “
Wickes Investigations
. Above board. Got myself registered with the local police. Didn't join the Association, but that was laziness more than anything, you know? I specialised in trace and debt collection.” He smiled. “And other jobs, off the record.”

Deborah came to him through a recommendation. He didn't give me the specifics, and honestly, I didn't ask. His past was his past.

Did it matter? Not for what I wanted to know.

We all have our sins. Our mistakes. Not all of them reach out to the present.

“When she came to see me, I got that spark. You know the spark?” Wickes paused, fixed those wild eyes on me, looking for something. Nodded, more to himself than me. “Aye, you know the spark,” he said, “Can see that, at least. Wife?”

I held up my hand. No ring. Said, “She died.”

Wickes nodded, looking serious again. “Well, this lass, I guess you felt the spark with her. Electric. First time I saw her, I thought I was going to have a heart attack.”

I didn't want to disillusion him.

First time I saw Elaine, I was thinking,
here's another drunk driver
and then was glad to see someone sober roll down the window.

No sparks.

Maybe a connection, though. Tender. Fragile. Fleeting. One that would build, evolve, become something else entirely.

I'm not sure I believe in love at first sight. I think sometimes we want to see it; we fall in love with being in love. Retrospectively we create that fantasy of instant chemistry, desire, attraction. But the truth is, that kind of immediate spark with another person, that absolute certainty that here is the person for you…no, I can't believe in it. Love builds. Grows. Evolves.

I didn't say any of this to Wickes.

People don't like having their beliefs challenged.

“So I helped her. Because I couldn't say no. Not to this woman. Not with her story.”

He admitted fully that this was done, at least in part, for selfish reasons. “Did I know it at the time? Fuck knows, eh? We don't always have the idea why we do anything. No one knows nothing, eh? I just had this feeling that I needed her near me. That we were supposed to be together. You know what I'm talking about, don't you? Not that I want to bring up bad feelings, but you remember?”

“I remember.” And maybe I did at that.

He told me how he kept her close. Protected her. The cynical part of me thought it sounded as though he had made her dependant upon him.

It was what she asked for, after all. She came to him for protection. Looking for a way out.

How could he refuse?

But I dismissed the idea that he somehow twisted their relationship; manipulated her into falling for him the same way he had for her. Sure, he was over the top and maybe a little too in touch with his emotions, but there was something about him I liked. He appeared innocent in his beliefs, and the twinkle in his eye when he laughed…maybe that's what Deborah had finally fallen in love with.

He talked like it was an instant thing, their love affair, but I sensed it took time and maybe even a little coercion on his part. And sometimes I got the impression that even he realised how ludicrous he sounded. Just a dip of the head here or a shift of the gaze there that told me he was self-editing.

Touching as it was, his story was drifting. Two cups of coffee, both gone cold. If we had all the time in the world, I might have let him keep talking. But at the centre of this story, there was a missing girl. She couldn't afford to wait.

I said, “Tell me how all of this connects to Mary Furst. Her disappearance.”

And that's when he hesitated.

Never a good sign.

It started out with little things. Temper tantrums that were wildly out of proportion with what started them. Melodramatic behaviour. He'd come home late, she'd throw a plate at his head. The phone would ring, she'd start to tear up as though she thought death was on the other end of the line.

Wickes let it pass for the first few months. Who could blame her for being paranoid? After what Burns's hired muscle had put her through she had every right to nerves and anxiety. These would disappear in time. Wickes was sure of that.

Except they didn't.

They got worse.

“She became a different person. Started to live out this paranoid fantasy life. Self harming.” He blinked a few times in rapid succession. I couldn't see a trace of tears or broken capillaries in his whites. “Telling me someone else did it even when I knew that there was nobody who could have. She would leave the house without telling me where she was going.” He talked like she'd escaped, broken the walls of some compound.

How close was the protection he offered?

Even he had to admit that perhaps it was too close. Smothering, maybe. “You ever had that moment of clarity? When you realise that you were in the wrong all the time?” He told me with no hint of self-deprecation or regret about what he did to make her feel better.

“That's when I bought her the dog.”

That was when it became clear to Wickes that any attempt to substitute for the child she had lost was doomed to failure. Maybe even made her behaviour worse.

He started to spend more time at home. Became worried for her state of mind, started to fear that she might somehow kill herself.

It was art that finally saved her. “That's what she did before, when she was at university, before all of this crap took over her life. She was an art student. Duncan of Jordanstone, the art college. She was good, too. Know when they call someone promising? Aye, she was that and more.”

Wickes took the credit for reawakening her interest. “It saved her. Externalised all the shite she bottled up inside, you know? Her fear. Her need to make up for what she saw as her mistakes.” He stopped talking, cocked his head to one side as though thinking back on what he just said. “I sound like a psychologist, right?”

Without thinking, I corrected him: “A psychiatrist.”

That seemed to unnerve him. Struck some chord. Maybe he hadn't expected me to know what he was talking about.

He hid a lot behind the jokes and bluster.

Maybe more than I'd realised.

But the slip lasted only a moment. And then he was talking like nothing had happened. Just pushing through, maybe hoping I'd get caught in his slipstream, start to doubt I'd even observed the hesitation.

He told me how he persuaded her to start painting again. Encouraged her to apply to a local art college and finish her training. Get her teaching degree.

“She needed a life. She'd come to rely on me completely. I ask, is that healthy?” The hint of a laugh on the horizon, but it never came.

Deborah got a job. Art teacher at a Glasgow High School.

Her vocation.

Wickes told me how she appeared to finally put the memories of her daughter behind her. Their lives started to approach normal. “I loved her,” he said. “I love her. All I wanted was for us to be together.”

I expected him to add, “and for her to be happy,” but he didn't.

Of course, nothing good ever lasts. About five years later, he realised that the lies had started again. Little things. Inconsistencies and hesitations in her stories. They seemed insignificant at first but took on more weight with their consistency.

She began working longer hours. Attending more after school conferences. Leaving earlier in the morning.

He did some work. Put that old training into practice. Aye, he wasn't affiliated, but it didn't mean he wasn't an investigator, didn't have the skills.

He found out that she'd transferred schools. From Glasgow to Dundee. Back to the city she told him she'd left behind.

No wonder she was working longer hours. Taking all these trips out of town. “I shouldn't have let her out of my sight,” he said, and there was a tremor in his voice that should have been regret but came across as harder and more vicious. Subtle enough, I couldn't be sure if I'd imagined it.

“You know the work,” he said. “It takes time. And I didn't want to be wrong. Didn't want to accuse her of anything, maybe kick off more problems. Who knew why she was coming back, right? So I tried to keep it on the QT. Figured maybe she got a transfer, didn't want to tell me because she knew what I might think. It's been fourteen years. I doubted that eejit Burns even remembered who she was, eh? And then…I got a look at her email account. Broke in, found out she'd been in touch with the girl. With Mary.”

I nodded. Could figure where this was going.

“I was going to confront her before I realised she was gone. Last email on the account, she had arranged to meet the girl a few hours before she was reported as missing.”

“She give a location?”

“Oh, aye.” Wickes shook his head, a gesture of disappointment more than a contradiction. “The train station, you believe that? I was only twelve hours too late.”

By the time he got there, she was long gone.

And, of course, so was Mary Furst.

Her daughter.

The baby she'd never really been able to let go off. To forget.

I couldn't help thinking of Deborah in the dark, cradling the corpse of the dog she had killed.

Hoping she could tell the difference between a pet and a human being.

We finished our coffee, took a walk through the town centre. Stopped in the City Square, shadowed by the Caird Hall. Someone once told me how the square had been used as a double for St Petersberg when the British film industry was in full swing. Was it true? Sometimes it's hard to distinguish local rumour from actual history. But a brief glance at the austere architecture and you might believe it.

The weather had turned fair but brisk and people seemed in a hurry to get where they were going. Some walked cautiously along the cobbled pedestrian area outside the eastern doors of the Overgate shopping centre. The ice on the ground was invisible; one of nature's more frivolous little jokes.

Wickes walked to one of the fountains in the square, passed his large hands through a jet of water. Shivered. “Should have bloody known, eh? But maybe you can't help people like Deborah. I mean, not really help them,” he said. “The people with scars that'll never heal.”

I watched him as he passed his hands back and forth through the water. His eyes were in shadow, as though he was trying to hide something from me. He hunched his shoulders; defeated.

I still couldn't figure his sudden mood swings. Upbeat and laughing one moment, the weight of the world pressing down on him the next.

I figured: stress. Worry. Fear.

Things I could relate to.

He felt responsibility for what had happened to Mary Furst, even if he wasn't to blame.

Susan had made similar accusations to me before. Tearing her hair out as she tried to tell me how I couldn't solve the world's problems. How I wasn't the single catalyst for all the bad shit that happened in people's lives.

Things look different from the outside.

He said, “You know what I'm asking, don't you?”

“I've done what I can on this case,” I said. “I don't have a client. Only reason I came anywhere near it was a favour to a friend.”

He nodded. Hunched further, shoved his hands into his coat pockets. “You're going to make me ask?”

I didn't say anything.

“I don't know the city. I've not worked a case in years. And I know I'm too close to Deborah to get the kind of distance…”

“I told you –”

“The cost doesn't matter.”

I sighed. “There are reasons I can't –”

“I don't think she wants to hurt the girl,” Wickes said. “But I can't take responsibility for what she might –”

“Go to the police.”

He swung round. “You know I can't. I want this to end quietly. I want it all to go away. I know I can't pretend it never happened, but I…maybe I can make it right.”

I tried to turn away.

Thinking about the dead dog.

About the look in Wickes's eyes when he talked about Deborah.

What else did I have going on?

Why was I so reluctant?

Because I knew how badly this could end?

Because I'd promised Susan I'd play things straight these days, wouldn't throw myself into hopeless and suicidal cases?

Wickes reached inside his jacket, pulled out his wallet. Peeled notes from inside.

Two hundred quid in twenties.

He held them out. In broad daylight.

“Whatever else you need,” he said. “I have to fix this. Can't help feeling like it's all somehow my fault.”

I looked at the outstretched hand.

I nodded.

“But we play by my rules,” I said. “It gets out of hand, we take what we know to the police.” I licked my lips. “Okay?”

He smiled.

I took the cash. Said, “So we go to the office, do this right.”

He stepped forward. For a moment, I thought he was going to hug me. The idea was terrifying. His build, he could crush me.

But he didn't. He just said, “We'll find her.” And then he turned away from me, and the brisk wind stole something mumbled from his mouth. And if I didn't know better, I might have thought the words were, “We'll find the bitch.”