The Mystery of Mercy Close (17 page)

He
might
ring back. Most people love the idea of a reward.
Unless Digby was wise to scams. Unless he knew there was nothing in the car and he was afraid of being accused of pocketing stuff. Or unless Wayne had paid him well over the odds to keep his mouth shut about where he’d dropped him off. There were endless kinds of permutations and all this was based on the assumption that Wayne had disappeared voluntarily. And maybe he hadn’t. And if he hadn’t, I’d better find out where he’d gone.

I took another admiring look around Wayne’s living room. Beautiful. I wouldn’t malign it by calling it ‘cosy’ but it certainly wasn’t one of those over-male rooms with hard, square edges and brown leather Eames chairs. (So yawnsome, Eames chairs, so utterly unim
ag
inative.) No, this perfectly judged space had a wonderful sofa, neither too male nor too female, and two armchairs, in different but harmonious fabrics. There was a fireplace –
had
to be original – and a high, metal-framed window – again, had to be original – covered with a Venetian blind.

On the right-hand side of the fireplace there was a built-in shelf and drawer unit. It was very attractive, of very high-quality workmanship, and painted – a guess, of course a guess, but I’d have staked my life on it – in Holy Basil’s Poor Circulation.

However, as seems to be the way with men, one entire wall was covered with CDs. I should have started pulling them out, seeing if they could give me any clues about Wayne, but I just couldn’t be bothered. I have no interest in CDs, no interest at all in music. It bores me homicidal. And I’ll tell you something else – in my heart of hearts I don’t believe any woman likes music. I’m always suspicious of female musos. Being frank with you, I just don’t believe them. All that hanging around gigs and reading
The Word
and talking about ‘jangly guitars’ and ‘meaty bass-lines’ and such shite. I feel they’re only pretending, just to get a boyfriend. Then, the minute they land one, they crawl under their beds and retrieve
their Michael Bublé poster and blow the dust balls off it and stick him back up on the wall and give him a big kiss.

I wandered down the hall. Things were urgent, urgent, urgent, but I was trying to
feel
Wayne. Christ, the kitchen, the beauty of it, the cupboards in Sinister and the walls in Frostbite. The man had impeccable taste.
Impeccable
.

The kitchen chairs were from Ikea, but Wayne had chosen well and they looked like they belonged in this Holy Basil Wonderland. I dragged one of them down the hall, to near the front door, then climbed up on it.

For a moment I was seized with a powerful wish that I’d fall off and bang my head and get bleeding in the brain and be dead before anyone noticed I was missing. After all, most accidents happen in the home. The home is
very
,
very dangerous
and you’re far safer out in the world by all accounts, jumping out of planes and driving fast cars on curvy roads. But with my luck I was bound to just break my ankle very painfully and spend four days in A&E, begging for painkillers and being ignored in favour of those lucky bastards who’d caught their tongue in the J-hook of their bread maker and were in danger of bleeding to death.

I stood on the chair and attached a tiny little camera to the ceiling. When I say tiny, I mean it was no bigger than a pinhead. Almost invisible. And motion activated. Delicious! So if Wayne came home, say to collect a change of clothes, or whatever, the minute he came in the door – get this! – a text would be sent to my phone.

There were times, and not in the too distant past either, when a missing person case like this meant you simply had to park yourself in your car outside the subject’s house for days at a time in the hope that he’d eventually turn up. Now you’ve got this little beauty.

Next I nipped out and oh-so-casually, just in case anyone was watching, attached a tracking device to the side of Wayne’s car – because how embarrassing would it be if
Wayne came back and hightailed it in his lovely black Alfa while I was mere yards away?

Like the camera, the tracker was a tiny little thing, held on by magnet, nothing to it, easy as pie. How it worked was that the minute the car started moving a text – yes, another one – would be sent to my phone, then I’d be able to follow
Wayne
’
s every move
on my screen.

I went back indoors and ten seconds later my phone beeped with a text telling me that a person had entered Wayne’s house. Adrenaline spiked through me, until I realized that
I
was the person and that every time I went into Wayne’s I’d get that selfsame text. But nice to know that the system was working. Surveillance technology, I really did adore it. New inventions were coming on stream the whole time and in the PI game you’ve got to keep up. But around two years ago, when the recession had really started to bite, I’d stopped being able to. At the time I was going head-to-head with a couple of big companies with plenty of moola so I lost several jobs. And less income meant less jingle to buy technology which meant less work and down we go.

Mind you, the recession had hit us all. Everyone had to drop their rates – big firms, lone operators, everyone was affected. But I was still bobbing along, still keeping my head above water, when, about a year ago, – and I’m not the only PI it happened to – things just went into free fall.

No money was coming in. Nothing. Even while I’d been too unwell to work, two and a half years ago, I’d turned a few quid because a couple of companies had me on retainer. But overnight, or so it seemed, I had no income at all. I’d been paring back on all my spending anyway. I’d let my office go, and when my annual home insurance bill had come round for renewal I’d skipped paying it. But everything changed drastically: luxuries like haircuts, scarves and expensive foundations had to stop; my washing machine broke and it had to stay broken; my electric toothbrush gave up the ghost and I
couldn’t replace it. I got an eye infection and a visit to Waterbury was out of the question. The obvious solution was to sell my flat, until I got it valued and realized that I’d be in negative equity for the rest of my life.

Like hundreds of thousands of others, I went to the social welfare and wondered which excuse they’d use to refuse me. They plumped for the fact that I was self-employed. But to be fair, if it wasn’t that they’d have found something else – that I had long hair, that I was born on a Tuesday, that when I was young I’d thought that all cats were girls and all dogs were boys and they got married to each other. The only way to get the social is to never get a job. My advice is to go straight from school to the dole
and
never come off it
.

Any odd little bit of money I earned, I prioritized: I
had
to pay my income tax because I didn’t want to be thrown into the slammer; I
had
to have my phone because it was my lifeline, more so than food and Diet Coke; and, if I could, I had to hang on to my car because I couldn’t do my job without it and, if the worst came to the worst, I could live in it.

I did exactly what everyone is advised not to do: I used my credit card to pay my mortgage. When I reached my credit limit, I had to stop. In a small reprieve, I wasn’t in immediate danger of being turfed out on to the street; there were so many people in mortgage arrears that the government had given a temporary amnesty.

Nevertheless becoming homeless was only a matter of time and I now owed a frighteningly large sum of money on my credit card and was unable to make even the minimum payments. That was so scary that I absolved myself from opening the bills. After a while, the bills stopped arriving and official-looking manila envelopes started coming in their stead. I ignored the first three until, in a fit of courage, I tore one open and discovered that I was being taken to court for non-payment.

In a panic, I thought about asking someone to loan me
money. The only solvent people I could think of were Margaret, my parents, Claire or Artie. But Margaret’s husband had just been made redundant, and Mum and Dad’s pension had been hammered and they were far from flush themselves. Claire managed to keep countless financial balls in the air, but if all her debts were added up she most likely owed more than me. Artie was probably financially secure, but it didn’t matter because I would
never
ask him for money. No, I was on my own in this.

Even though my expectations were very low, I went to one of those government-sponsored debt counselling things. A bespectacled man told me – quite judgmentally, I couldn’t help but feel – that I’d been very foolish and my situation was dire, then he asked if I had any ‘assets’ that I could sell.

‘Assets?’ I said. ‘Well, I’ve a yacht. Only a small one, but worth a couple of million. And a house on Lake Como. Would they do?’

He brightened up considerably, then his face fell. ‘Haha,’ he said flatly.

‘Haha, indeed,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think that if I was sitting on a pile of assets it might have occurred to me to sell them? What kind of cretin do you think I am?’

‘Please don’t use abusive language,’ he said primly.

‘What? You mean “cretin”? “Cretin” isn’t abusive language. “Cretin” is a medical definition.’ I managed to stop myself adding, in a voice dripping with scorn, ‘You cretin.’

As it was, I’d tried flogging my surveillance equipment on eBay but the money offered was so risible that I decided I’d be better off hanging on to the stuff.

‘I suggest you write to your creditor and offer to pay off your bill in small instalments,’ the prim man said. ‘Now would you leave, please?’

As I walked out of there I reflected on how easily I managed to make enemies. I hadn’t even been trying and now this man hated me. Nevertheless I did as he suggested and
the credit card people replied and told me that my small instalments weren’t big enough and they were still taking me to court.

Meanwhile, I kept on battling. I never stopped going after work and I was managing to get bits and pieces, but everyone was going out of business before they could pay me and I’d spent the past month just trying to track down people who owed me money.

Things continued to deteriorate. My cable telly got cut off and I was reduced to watching shitey terrestrial stuff. I could no longer afford for my bins to be collected and had to do the horrible, horrible job of bringing my rubbish round to Mum and Dad’s. My court date arrived and I didn’t show up because I felt there was no point.

Ten days ago, in a different disaster, the final demand for my electricity bill arrived in my letter box. If I didn’t pay within a week I’d be cut off. Defiantly I decided I could live without it; it was summer, I didn’t need heating or lights and I never cooked. I could have cold showers and I could manage without a fridge. Granted, I wouldn’t be able to watch DVDs and – more importantly – I’d have to go to someone else’s house when I needed to charge my phone. Still, valiant to the last, I told myself I’d manage.

The electricity people were as good as their word and after seven days my supply was terminated. Despite everything, it came as a shock; I’d thought that they might have a heart and turn a blind eye for at least a while. But no. So no lights, no hot water, no magic juice coming through the wall to give life to my phone.

The following morning I was woken by a loud knocking on my door. Three burly men were outside; one of them presented me with a piece of paper. I took a look at it: a judgment had been entered in court in my absence and they were there to remove goods to the value of my credit card debt. It was all perfectly legal.

There was no point resisting, so I invited the boyos in and offered them my broken washing machine. They spurned it, and they weren’t too keen on my oil paintings of horses either. In fact they seemed mildly freaked out by my entire apartment.

I could have done what lots of people do. I could have attacked them, spat at them, tried to make them stop. But jostling and throwing useless punches wouldn’t make any difference.

My couch, armchairs and telly, they had out the door with a speed that made my head spin. The men were looking around, wondering what to go for next and suddenly they perked up – they’d noticed my bed and they liked the look of it. Yes, they really liked it. They decided it might be worth a few quid. With extraordinary efficiency they produced a box of electric tools and dismantled my Mother Superior bed in jig time.

Mute with humiliation, I watched them carry it away. They took the beautiful laquer-inlaid headboard and footboard, the mattress, the duvet and pillows – even the black covers that I’d gone to such trouble to procure.

Fighting back tears, I said to one of the men, ‘How do you sleep?’

He looked me in the eye and said, ‘With great difficulty, actually.’

Then, as dramatically as they had arrived, they were gone and in the silence left by their departure I saw that I was in an apartment that had no electricity, no couch, no chairs, no bin collection, no insurance and no bed.

That was the deciding moment. I gave up, gave in, whatever you want to call it. I’d been putting so much energy into pushing back the catastrophe, into striving to find new work, into trying to be optimistic and I wasn’t able to fight any more.

I didn’t even bother to ring my mortgage company to tell
them I was gone, they’d figure it out themselves soon enough, and I quietly organized two men and a van to parcel up what remained of my life and put it into storage.

To banish these dark thoughts I sat on Wayne’s sofa and enjoyed the experience very much. Then I sat on one of his armchairs and enjoyed that too. Then I sat on the other armchair and that was also very pleasant. I realized I was getting attached to the place and that could be a danger because I was on the rebound, having lost my own lovely home only a day ago. I’d want to take care, now that I had Wayne’s key and alarm code, that I didn’t find myself accidentally moving in.

Right. I had a list of things to do.

1) Find Gloria.

2) Canvas the neighbours.

3) Talk to Birdie.

4) Find Digby, the possible taxi driver.