You Will Never Find Me (7 page)

Applause.

Sasha looked up. Normally there was nobody in the street at this time. From between the parked cars on the other side of Netherhall Gardens came Sergei in his grey hoody, clapping and bouncing his own ball from his left to his right foot.

‘How long that take you?' said Sergei in Russian.

‘All weekend,' said Sasha.

‘Take a look at this,' said Sergei.

He popped the ball up high and headed it even higher and then caught it dead on his neck, rolled it down his extended right arm and then across his back to his extended left arm and then back to his neck.

‘Yeah?' said Sasha.

Sergei let the ball drop down his back to his heel and, looking over his right shoulder, he did Around the World with his right foot and then, looking over his other shoulder, did the same with his left foot. Then he back-heeled it high above his head and as it came down he dropped onto his hands, flicked his legs up and rocketed the ball into the railings.

Sasha gaped in awe. Sergei was fourteen years old to his ten, but he knew that some of the pros would have trouble with a trick like that. Around the World behind your back!

They walked down Netherhall Gardens towards Sasha's school, keeping their balls on the move, swapping them every now and again until Sergei darted down a side street taking both balls with him. He snaked around some bollards at the bottom and sent a ball up high, which Sasha took on his chest. The second ball he swept up and over Sasha's head. Sasha turned to chase and ran straight into the arms of a man in a thick wool coat, who threw him onto the back seat of a black Mercedes, where another man pressed his face hard into a rag in his gloved hand. The door slammed after him. Sasha didn't hear it. Sergei retrieved both balls as the Mercedes came out of its parking spot. He got in next to the driver, pulled the door to. The Mercedes took off with a sharp squeal from its front tyres.

 

Mercy came awake, stretched, eyes closed, languorous as a cat. She was warm and relaxed under the duvet, still with the thrill of last night in her sex.

That fierce hug had turned into a long kiss and urgent sex on the sofa and then a much longer session in bed, followed by a strange, careless sleep to be woken by Alleyne with a plate of cheese on toast and a glass of white wine, which they'd gulped down in bed. This was followed by a joint, from which, in the spirit of recklessness, she took two tiny tokes. There was a lot of giggling and then more sex and a longer sleep from which she'd had to struggle to come round.

She ran her hands over her head and face, stretched them up into the air trying to recall if there'd ever been a time when she'd woken up caring so little about the world roaring beyond the bedroom window.

She rolled her head, knew what she would see. His back. She was just reaching out to touch him when she noticed a piece of paper curling away from the ceiling with the damp and only then did the full horror of yesterday kick back in to her mind.

What a fool am I?

Sliding out from under the duvet, she gathered her clothes, went to the bathroom. She swilled some odd taste out of her mouth with water from a tap encrusted with limescale and refused to look at herself in the demanding mirror. She had a quick basin wash just to feel bearable and had to dry herself off with toilet paper as the only available towel was of the rough and slightly damp sort found in a car mechanic's toilet. She dressed. Had to look at herself to put on lipstick, hoped the make-up would drive out some of the self-pity from her face.

Her cop instincts, as Amy would call them, meant that she was unable to resist opening the one door in the flat she hadn't seen behind. The room was bigger than the bedroom they'd been sleeping in and was full from floor to ceiling with cartons of cigarettes, high-end trainers, state-of-the-art headphones, Bose iPod docks and Samsung, LG and Panasonic LED flat-screen TVs. She shook her head. Fucking with a fence, she said under her breath, determined to be hard on herself.

‘Now I'm going to have to kill you,' said a voice with so little threat in it she turned very slowly to see Marcus Alleyne standing naked in the doorway, running his hand up and down his washboard stomach. For a fleeting moment she thought about going back to bed with him, taking a break from the ugly world in which she operated, but then DI Danquah reasserted herself.

‘Just tell me where I can find Glider, Marcus.'

‘He not going to love me for sending you to his door.'

‘You said that last night.'

‘Did I? Must be all that weed making me forgetful.'

Yes, that figured, thought Mercy. The taste of it still in her mouth. The smell of it still heavy in the flat like a morning mist in the tropics.

‘I'm only interested in Amy,' said Mercy, rolling her finger over in a repeat, ‘and Glider doesn't have to know how we got to his door.'

‘He's not a fool, G,' said Alleyne. ‘He'll work out the info chain. And then where my balls going to be?'

‘Just tell me, Marcus, or I'll get the plods round here to take a look at this lot,' she said, nodding into the room.

He gave her an address near the Caledonian Road in north London.

‘Is that why you slept with me, Mercy?' he said, smiling. ‘Break me down?'

‘It seemed to work.'

‘You're cruel, lady, you know that? You're very cruel,' he said. ‘Not to me. No, sister. You're cruel on yourself. You need to take your foot off that pedal driving you into the dark.'

Is it that obvious? she thought, looking at him, questioning. ‘Thanks,' she said, and brushed past him.

‘You going to call me?' he asked, amused at this odd reversal for him.

‘Why?'

‘I like you. When you're nice and smoothed out you're a very likeable woman.'

‘Goodbye, Marcus,' she said, smiling. ‘The cheese on toast was memorable.'

She turned her phone back on and left.

In the car, messages: Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.

‘Where are you?' she asked before he could start.

‘I thought I'd go and see Esme.'

‘Ask her what rank ideas she stuck in Amy's head?'

‘I won't put it like that,' said Boxer. ‘You?'

‘Work. Talk to DCS Makepeace, see if I can get some flexibility on time. Chase the UK Border Agency. Go and see Amy's teachers and the headmistress at Streatham and Clapham High. And I've got an address for Glider.'

‘How did you get that?'

‘I slept around; people told me things.'

Boxer wasn't sure how to take that—not funny enough for a joke, too ugly for the truth.

‘I got to Marcus Alleyne, broke him down,' she said to end the silence, and gave him Glider's address. ‘It would be better if
you
went round to see Glider. Alleyne doesn't want the responsibility for sending the cops to his door and . . . he's violent.'

 

Boxer called his mother, said he was coming to see her. She didn't sound overjoyed, but then again she was someone who, if she'd felt joy, would be disinclined to show it.

Esme Boxer lived in an expensive development in Hampstead. The old Consumption Hospital in Mount Vernon. From the outside it looked like the set of a Victorian horror movie with a pointed turret on the corner, from which someone could be hurled onto the sharp railings below. Esme had a two-bedroomed apartment on the first floor. They sat in the kitchen, where she made coffee for one. Esme smoked Marlboros full strength, despising anyone who ate, drank, smoked or even spelled anything ‘Lite', and poured Grey Goose vodka direct from a bottle she kept in the freezer into a small shot glass. She sipped, smacked her lips, took long, luxurious drags from her cigarette, which she inhaled down to her heels, and listened to what had happened to her granddaughter.

‘Well, it's in her genes,' she said. ‘You ran away twice and you helped Mercy run away too. What can you expect?'

‘Amy didn't know anything about that.'

‘Yes, she did. I told her.'

‘And why would you do a thing like that?'

‘She wanted to know something about her parents. The two of you were a mystery to her. That's why we got on. We just used to sit at this table and talk. She'd ask about my life. I'd ask about hers. And, thinking about it, quite a lot of the time we were talking about you and Mercy. A couple of dark horses if ever there were.'

‘You ran away from home too,' said Boxer. ‘And you never went back . . . not even for your father's funeral.'

‘It's a long way to go to see a bastard stuck in the ground.'

‘And I suppose you covered the subject of my father, your husband's . . . disappearance.'

‘You mean, seeing as we're talking about bastards,' said Esme, her accent drifting back towards Parramatta, the vodka loosening her throat.

‘That doesn't sound like you gave him—'

‘A fair press?' said Esme, cutting in mercilessly. ‘It was one thing to leave me, but quite another to walk out on you. I told Amy the truth with no slant: that he was wanted for questioning in connection with a murder and he absconded. Clothes and passport found on a beach in Crete. Heard of no more.'

‘When did you tell her that?'

‘She wasn't a minor. She was over sixteen. Able to hold her liquor. If that's what's worrying you. She'd asked me a couple of years earlier and I'd been vague. Then she mounted one of her campaigns and I cracked.'

‘Everything?' said Boxer. ‘As in, who he was accused of murdering?'

‘He never got as far as being
accused
,' said Esme. ‘But yes, I told her it was my business partner and director.'

Esme's hand trembled slightly as she reached for the shot glass. She sipped, took a crackling drag from her cigarette, held it in, let it trickle from her nose.

‘It's just history,' said Esme, ‘and you told me that was the very reason you didn't want to be a homicide detective any more. It was all past tense. It wasn't going to bring anybody back. And it won't bring Amy back. You might be able to winkle out some cockeyed reasoning as to why—'

‘I'm angry,' said Boxer.

‘With me?' asked Esme, astonished. ‘You think I put this idea into her head? Don't be bloody ridiculous. This has been building for years.'

‘I'm not angry at you,' said Boxer. ‘I'm angry at myself.'

‘Welcome to the club,' said Esme. ‘We're all platinum card members here.'

‘So what have you got to be angry about?' asked Boxer.

Esme didn't answer but looked out of the kitchen window, and Boxer saw what looked like some colossal hurt worming its way across her face as if she too had a stack of unanswerable questions, which for a moment had seen the light of day.

‘I suppose that's what humans do when left to their own devices,' said Boxer. ‘Rake things over. Part the shit in the hope that there will be some revelatory nugget to explain it all.'

‘In my experience,' said Esme, taking another thumping drag deep into her lungs, ‘parting shit will only reveal more shit underneath. The best thing to do, and also the most impossible, is to bury it. Forget about it. Move on with your life. Remember, nobody ever learned anything from history.'

Silence while Boxer wrestled with her penetratingly cynical insight.

‘Did Amy leave a note?' asked Esme.

Boxer produced a copy. Esme read it and was visibly struck by something.

‘Kids,' she said, shaking her head and scratching around in a kitchen drawer. ‘Nosy little buggers.'

She found a key. He followed her through the living room to the second bedroom, which doubled as Esme's office. There was a large wooden desk with a leather inlaid top and drawers down either side of a footwell. The key opened the bottom drawer and she sorted through some papers.

‘This is where Amy slept when she came to stay,' said Esme.

‘You think she went through your stuff?'

‘She's that kind of girl. I was the same. Incurably curious. Had to know everything,' said Esme. ‘I'd go out for dinner and come back to find Amy waiting for me with a bunch of questions which could only have come from nosing around.'

She pulled out a small sheet of paper ripped from a notepad, handed it to him.

The note was short and written in his father's handwriting but an extremely erratic version of it, as if he was hurried and stressed. ‘
I've had to leave. Don't come looking for me, Esme, because you will never find me.
'

M
ercy dropped her bag on her desk in the offices of Specialist Crime Directorate 7, Kidnap and Special Investigations Team, and went straight into see her boss, DCS Peter Makepeace, who was in his early fifties but looked ten years younger even with his almost white hair cut en brosse. He glanced up from the documents on his desk, fixed her with his grey eyes.

‘I've heard about Amy,' said Makepeace before she could get a word out. He nodded her into a chair. ‘I'm sorry, Mercy.'

Her eyes dropped from his face to the papers on his desk, not used to this kind of emotional interaction. She knew he was an understanding man from her colleagues who'd been in to see him after difficult cases. She wondered how he'd react if she told him of the strange state of intent that had developed in her when she'd looked at the photo of Marcus Alleyne with her daughter and found herself incomprehensibly attracted to the much younger man. How she'd gone round there, burst into tears, ended up on his sofa, in his bed, smoking a joint, eating cheese on toast and gulping down wine and then walking away from the towering evidence of his illegal trade.

‘Don't be hard on yourself, Mercy.'

‘Sorry, sir?' she said, crossing her legs at the thought of Alleyne's young, hard body.