You Will Never Find Me

  The phone rang in the girl’s pocket and he dug it out, looked at the screen: ‘Josh’. He let it ring out, turned it off.

  Tel reached the City on the New North Road, doing as he was told by Lomax, driving like his old nan. It was quiet at this time of night so he cracked on straight through the middle: Moorgate, London Wall, Bishopsgate and over London Bridge. In ten minutes they were outside the barred gates on Neckinger. Lomax gave Vlad the keys. He unlocked the padlock, unthreaded the chain, opened the gates and Tel drove into the yard. Vlad repadlocked the gates and unlocked the big warehouse doors. Tel reversed in and shut off the engine. Vlad pulled the doors to.

  They got the girl out of the car, Tel on the legs while Vlad tucked her shoulders under one arm. They followed Lomax to the far end of the warehouse, where he unlocked a door that led into a narrow alleyway at the back of the derelict estate. Along the alley were some steps off to the right. Lomax went down them and opened the door to a basement storage area consisting of six windowless rooms off a central corridor.

  Dennis Chilcott had bought the estate in 2004, and it was a testament to the complexities of local government planning regulations that nothing had happened to it in eight years, apart from further degradation.

  To the Chilcotts’ gang members these basement rooms had become known as Abu Ghraib, after the Iraqi prison abuse by the US military came to light. The debtors and recalcitrants they brought here wished never to return. Two of the rooms had been soundproofed so that their screams did not disturb the neighbours.

  The room they entered contained the now infamous metal bed known as the Griddle because it could be plugged into the wall.

  Lomax unrolled a piece of foam rubber lying in a corner and laid it over the chain-link base of the bed. Tel and Vlad dropped the girl on it.

  ‘Dead to the world that one,’ said Tel. ‘What’s she on?’

  ‘GHB,’ said Lomax.

  ‘So we could give her one and she wouldn’t know anything about it?’

  ‘But I would,’ said Lomax. ‘And I’d have to tell Darren, and he’d have you riding the Griddle for a week, so don’t even think about it.’

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘You go back to the warehouse, take my car out, park it legally in the street and give me the keys. By then I’ll have her sorted out and I’ll see you off the premises.’

  ‘What about our money?’

  ‘You’ll get that too.’

  They left. Lomax put Amy into the recovery position and went to check the other rooms. He found an ugly collection of tools: pickaxe handles, pliers, mallets, claw hammers, rolls of electrical wire, duct tape, meat hooks, lengths of frayed cable. He shuddered at it all. A box contained plastic cuffs, sleeping masks, hoods and gaffer tape.

  Back with Amy, he put a sleeping mask over her eyes and cuffed her wrists and ankles to the four corners of the bed. He checked her breathing, obsessed with it.

  Jesús was telling El Osito how carefully he’d planned the operation to capture David Álvarez in the Kapital nightclub. El Osito was listening patiently on the assumption that it had been successful, and Jesús was spinning it out in the hope of getting a medal. It was only as Jesús reported that, as he was moving from floor to floor, the fire alarm had gone off and the whole club had been evacuated that El Osito’s face changed to the sick colour of a storm-laden sky. Jaime stepped in to divert attention from his brother.

  ‘You know what this means?’ said Jaime, drawing El Osito’s psychopathic glare from Jesús.

  ‘Tell me,’ said El Osito, as if this was going to be a miraculous revelation.

  ‘Álvarez was warned,’ said Jaime.

  ‘But we were the only people to know about the operation,’ said El Osito.

  ‘What about Charles Boxer?’ said Jaime. ‘He’s the only possible connection.’

  ‘You have to find that DJ,’ said El Osito. ‘You have to find out where he lives, or his girlfriend, or his parents. You have to find him.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Jaime. ‘We’ll have to take some defensive action in case the DJ goes to the police and tells them you were seen with the girl in the Charada. There’ll be some awkward questions and they’ll want to see your apartment.’

  ‘So what are you suggesting?’

  El Osito’s mobile signalled a message. He read the text from Dennis.

  ‘They’ve got the girl in London,’ he said. ‘Charles Boxer’s daughter.’

  ‘Then that is how we deal with this situation,’ said Jaime. ‘We tell Charles Boxer we’re holding his daughter and that he must warn Álvarez not to talk to the police. In the meantime we have to get you out of Madrid as quickly as possible. We have to clear your flat, remove all the weights and sterilise the place.’

  ‘I will go to London,’ said El Osito. ‘Book me on the first flight out of here. You will come with me, Jaime. Jesús will stay here and sort out this mess.’

  ‘How are you going to talk to Charles Boxer?’ asked Jesús, trying to salvage some respect.

  ‘Let’s hope his daughter knows his mobile number,’ said Jaime. ‘You’d better ask Dennis to get that as quickly as possible. Jesús, you come with me.’

  The Mexicans left the room, pounded down the clinic’s sterilised corridors.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Jesús.

  ‘Getting you out of there before he has you killed,’ said Jaime. ‘Now you go to the flat and clean it out. Everything. Clothes, the lot. I don’t want a trace of El Osito in there.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘I’ll speak to Vicente.’

  ‘I talked to the two girls,’ said Tony, who was calling Boxer from outside the club Sy-Lo. ‘They were with Amy on Saturday night. One of them even had a shot on her phone of her friend and Amy dancing together. I’ll send it. You might not recognise her. She’s had all her hair cut off.’

  ‘Had they ever seen her with someone who looked like her when she had long hair?’ asked Boxer.

  ‘Yeah. They called them the twins. Said it was a bit freaky. They had the same hair and had it highlighted blonde in the exact same way. They even wore each other’s clothes. But they also said that if they were twins they were not born from the same egg. Chantrelle was really wild, into drugs in a big way.’

  ‘Is that her name? Chanterelle? Like the mushroom?’

  ‘Like the mushroom?’ said Tony.

  Education, thought Boxer. Kids know everything and nothing these days. He asked Tony to spell the name out.

  ‘And a surname?’

  ‘No surname. That’s not how people introduce themselves. It’s not a job interview.’

  ‘I need a surname and an address, Tony.’

  ‘They said she lived in social housing somewhere off the Holloway Road. Her mother was a crackhead and her father a crack dealer, and Chantrelle had been in and out of care before the council set her up in her own flat.’

  ‘That’s great, Tony, but I need you to keep working at it,’ said Boxer. ‘Those girls must know other people who knew Amy and Chantrelle. I have to have a surname and an address. It’s critical now. I have to move as fast as possible.’

  There was no signal in the basement so every half-hour Lomax had to go outside to check his messages. The last one had been from Darren: ‘We need her dad’s mobile number like now!’

  Lomax called him.‘She’s still out,’ he said. ‘Will be for another hour or more. I gave her GHB, tried not to give her too much, but you know how it is, not an exact science when you’re trying to spike a girl’s drink before she comes through the door.’

  ‘She got a phone with her?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Go through the contacts list and see if there’s a Charles Boxer.’

  ‘You think I’m an idiot, Darren?’ said Lomax. ‘I’ve been through it already. There’s no Charles and no Dad
. The only Boxer in her list is called Esme. Two numbers—one mobile, one fixed.’

  ‘Esme?’ said Darren. ‘Does that sound like a black woman’s name?’

  ‘Could be. It sounds old-fashioned,’ said Lomax.

  ‘Do you think Esme is the girl’s mother?’

  ‘Well, Darren, she’s got the same surname so she’ll have a better chance of knowing where Charles Boxer is than anybody else you know.’

  ‘Thanks for pointing that out, Miles,’ said Darren. ‘How are you getting on finding that twenty-eight grand you owe me? Now text me the fucking numbers.’

  ‘You might want a photo of the girl too. Show that we’ve got her.’

  ‘Yeah, do that ’n’ all.’

  ‘The only problem is I don’t have today’s newspaper.’

  ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘Traditionally, Darren, you show a photo of the hostage with the day’s newspaper, so they know it’s not some shot taken after a party three years ago.’

  ‘You always knew too much for your own good, Miles.’

  Tony again.

  ‘Now I have got lucky,’ he said. ‘I went back into Sy-Lo and those two girls had tracked down someone who actually knows Chantrelle. From school. Her name is Chantrelle Taleisha Grant. She lives at 10 Hornsey Street, not far from the Emirates Stadium. Flat 203. Her mother, Alice, is the crackhead. This girl’s never met her but she knows she doesn’t live far away on the Andover Estate, but no address.’

  ‘Good work, Tony.’

  ‘She’s even sent me a photo of Chantrelle with Amy taken about three weeks ago.’

  ‘She knew Amy as well?’

  ‘They spent a couple of evenings together, that’s all.’

  ‘Send me the shot.’

  Boxer hung up, waited for the message, looked at the shot of the two girls. They weren’t so similar that he couldn’t tell which was Amy, but he could see, smiling as they were under their great swags of hair, how they could be confused in a quick passport check late at night at Barajas Airport.

  He sent a text to Mercy with all the information Tony had gathered. Told her this was urgent, first-thing-in-the-morning stuff, that he’d go to Chantrelle’s flat, but it would be a good idea to have her mother’s address too. Amy would probably know them both, and when Chantrelle didn’t return with her passport, would have started to get worried. He sent the photo too, and the other shot the girls had taken on Saturday night of Amy with all her hair cut off and sown in corn rows.

  Mercy bought some beer and wine to drink with the goat curry and jerk chicken she’d just picked up from the Blessed West Indian Takeaway on Coldharbour Lane, which in her mind no longer seemed to be a place of last resort.

  They’d eaten the meal, and Alleyne had started to roll a joint, and she’d asked him to hold back while she told him the full story. He sat with his hands resting on his thighs listening, not saying a word. She could tell her story was having a profound effect on him, not only because of its disturbing content but also because, for the first time, she was being intimate with him. At the end of it he reached across the table and held her hand and for the first time she was drawn to him, not physically, but for his silent empathy.

  He didn’t roll the joint. They drank the wine, went to bed and made love. It was different. He was tender. He held her to his chest as they fell asleep. The messaging signal woke her.

  She rolled over and read the message from Boxer, looked at the photo. She rubbed her thumb over Amy’s face. She’d been missing her so badly since this afternoon’s news. She needed to hold her, wanted to show Amy how much she was loved. Then she could go off and do what the hell she liked.

  The murdered girl also smiled from the screen. What a waste. Mercy couldn’t help but feel angry at her daughter’s stupid determination to prove herself.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Alleyne, still drugged with sleep.

  Mercy showed him the picture.

  ‘This the other girl?’ he asked.

  ‘Chantrelle Grant,’ said Mercy.

  ‘That’s a very sad thing,’ said Alleyne, ‘which is why you shouldn’t pick up messages in the night.’

  He dropped it on the floor, pulled Mercy to him.

  Boxer hadn’t moved. He was still on the sofa in Esme’s darkened sitting room. All he’d done was shift himself into the lying position with a couple of cushions under his head, his mobile on his chest. He’d gone looking for whisky, but Esme was a Grey Goose girl. So he was lying there, sober, and thinking that only two things needed to happen to put his world back into kilter. He needed Amy here, with him, in the room. And he wanted to know what had happened to David Álvarez. If they had got to Álvarez it would tell him something. It would tell him that El Osito was hard at work closing down all possible openings. It would put pressure on the London end of things.

  He started as his mobile let out a message signal. He tilted the screen towards his face. David Álvarez: ‘I got out. It was close. Am in a cheap hotel. I leave on the first bus in the morning. Thanks.’ ‘It was close’ did not make him rest any easier. He toyed with the idea of asking Álvarez to do one more thing for him: talk to Inspector Jefe Luís Zorrita. Tell him, anonymously, everything he knew about El Osito. Forensics would go into that flat, and even if they’d cleared out all the weights they would never be able to totally remove the evidence of the dismemberment. Was that too much to ask of him? That tweet Álvarez had answered must have been the biggest regret of his life.

  The fixed-line phone rang in the other room. He rolled off the sofa and lurched into his mother’s office, threw himself into the chair, picked up the phone.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  Silence. He knew someone was there.

  ‘Talk to me,’ he said.

  ‘I want to speak to Charles Boxer,’ said the voice, a Londoner.

  ‘That’s me. Who are you?’

  ‘We’ll get to that in a minute. How do I know you’re Charles Boxer?’

  ‘You were the one who called this number.’

  ‘I was expecting to speak to Esme.’

  ‘That’s my mother—she lives here, but she’s in hospital.’

  ‘I’m going to ask you some questions just to make sure I’m talking to the right person.’

  ‘You’re going to have to tell me who you are first or I don’t answer anything.’

  ‘If you answer the questions correctly you’ll know who I am,’ said the voice. ‘Where were you on Tuesday night?’

  ‘Madrid.’

  ‘Which room did you take at the Hotel Moderno?’

  That question made him go very still.

  ‘Room 407.’

  ‘You took 407 because your daughter, Amy, had used that same room,’ said the voice. ‘What were you doing in Madrid?’

  ‘I was trying to find her. She’d run away from home.’

  ‘You were contacted by a homicide detective called Luís Zorrita. What did he tell you?’

  ‘That a body part had been found with some clothes and my daughter’s passport.’

  ‘And you assumed she’d been murdered.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And you thought you knew who’d killed her,’ said the voice. ‘How was that?’

  ‘Because somebody told me.’

  ‘Was that somebody called David Álvarez?’

  Boxer hesitated. But Álvarez was safe now.

  ‘Yes. He told me he’d seen her on Saturday night with a man who had a reputation for violence against women.’

  ‘And what was his name?’

  ‘I only know him as El Osito.’

  ‘You’ve done very well, Mr. Boxer, and I think you know who we are now.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘But you know you’re talking to the right people.’

  ‘If that’s h
ow you want to put it.’

  ‘So how did you find out your daughter wasn’t dead?’

  ‘The DNA from the body part didn’t match mine or her mother’s.’

  ‘So whose body was it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Boxer, thinking carefully now. ‘The last time I spoke to the detective was about the DNA results. We haven’t spoken since then. No reason to.’

  ‘Keep it like that,’ said the Londoner. ‘You’d better give us your mobile number.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’re going to be in touch.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘You’re going to tell David Álvarez not to go to the police,’ said the voice. ‘That if he goes anywhere near the police we will hunt him down, but only after we’ve dealt with his mum and dad and two sisters. You got that?’

  ‘I understand what you’re saying. I’m just not quite sure what’s in it for me?’

  ‘The other thing is you don’t talk to the police either. Not in Madrid and not in London. Right?’

  ‘Like I said, I’ve got a good understanding of English. I’m just not quite sure why the fuck I should listen to you.’

  ‘I was waiting for that,’ said the voice. ‘See a bit of your anger. El Osito said you were the angriest man he’d ever seen outside Mexico.’

  ‘Angry?’

  ‘Yeah. I think that’s what he must have seen before you smashed his legs to pieces.’

  ‘I’m sure, in my place, you’d have done exactly the same thing to your daughter’s murderer.’

  ‘Because you couldn’t fuck her any more?’

  ‘What?’ said Boxer, incredulous. ‘Now that’s the first thing you’ve said that doesn’t make any sense. Did El Osito feed you that line?’

  Silence.

  ‘Why did she run away from home?’ asked the Londoner.

  ‘She lives with her mother. It hasn’t been going well between them for quite some time.’

  ‘All right. You know what we’re going to do?’ said the voice. ‘We’re going to ask Amy . . . just as soon as she comes round.’