‘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.’
6
9:30 A.M., MONDAY 19TH MARCH 2012
South Lambeth Road, London SW8
Mercy 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.
‘I can see it. You’re working yourself over. It’s the most natural thing in the world to blame yourself. Don’t. It won’t help you to think clearly, and that’s what you’ve got to try and do now. How do you think I know about Amy?’
She wiped last night from her mind and blinked her way through the possibilities until she focused once more.
‘The UK Border Agency.’
‘That’s right. We’ve just heard back from them this morning. Amy left on a flight to Madrid from Terminal 1 at Heathrow last night. Her arrival at Barajas Airport passport control has been confirmed. The police in Madrid have been informed.’
‘What you want?’ asked the guy, hood up, hands in pockets around his flat stomach, knackered jeans, trainers. He was leaning against the handrail halfway up the stairway in Perth House on the Bemerton Estate, a spit from the Cally Road. He was looking at Boxer in his knee-length black wool coat, jeans and brown leather boots and knew just from the man’s haircut and health that he wasn’t from the estate.
‘I’ve come to see Glider,’ said Boxer, breathing in some calm, which he ordinarily had to do after his visits to Esme. He started up the steps.
The guy pushed himself off the handrail and barred Boxer’s way, hands still in pockets.
‘You police or what?
‘No.’
‘You look like police.’
‘Well, I’m not,’ said Boxer. ‘I just want to talk to Glider.’
‘What about?’
‘He knows my daughter.’
‘He’s not in. Gone away,’ said the guy, confident now.
‘So you know him,’ said Boxer. ‘Why don’t you take me to his flat so I can see for myself.’
‘You don’t believe me?’ said t
he guy, his face gone dead, eyes threatening.
Boxer grabbed the handrail on either side of him, hopped up and flicked his boot out and caught the guy on the inside of the knee. He went down with a shout, slipped down some steps, holding on to his leg.
‘Fa-a-a-ck!’
‘Which floor’s he on?’
Boxer tore back the guy’s hood, twisted it so that the neck tightened around his throat and banged the guy’s head, first into the wall and then onto the step as if he was no more than a rag doll. An eyebrow split, blood trickled down his face.
‘Tell me,’ said Boxer. ‘I’m not feeling very patient.’
‘Up the stairs, third floor, flat 306.’
‘Introduce me,’ said Boxer, pulling the guy to his feet by his hood, throwing him up the stairs.
The guy hobbled up the dark stairs on all fours like a chimp, with Boxer following him at a measured pace. They reached the third floor and went down the covered walkway to Glider’s flat. The guy knocked on the door, Boxer stood back. The door opened and he pushed the hoody forward, charged in behind him.
‘What the fuck?’
Boxer bundled the two guys down the short hallway and they came out in a heated living room with dark blue walls and red furniture that looked better than the rest of the flat. A thickset brutal-looking shaven-headed thug sat on the sofa in a white vest, jeans, no shoes, with his hand resting on the bare thigh of a young black girl in tight black shorts. His nose looked as if it had been broken a few times and his eyes were set wide apart over its shattered bridge. This was Glider, Boxer could tell from the heavily muscled arms, which were black, blue, green and red with tattoos, while his hands didn’t have a mark on them. It made him look incongruously gloved. Boxer’s imagination failed him as he tried to picture Glider with his daughter.
‘Says he’s not police . . . just wants to talk to you about his daughter,’ said the hoody, leaning against the wall rubbing his knee, while the other guy, arms held out, biceps tensed, pecs twitching, was looking for a way in to Boxer.
‘Don’t bleed on the fucking carpet,’ said Glider, pointing a vicious finger. ‘Fuck off back downstairs, both o’ you. Useless wankers.’
He flicked a thumb at the girl, who got up and took her shorts, straining over her large behind, into another room. The hoody and his friend limped out; a door closed elsewhere in the flat. Glider supported himself with his hands on the sofa arms as if he might split them away from the seat. There was a large glass ashtray filled with butts on the seat next to him and, on the coffee table in front, a carton of Marlboros and a Zippo.
‘You don’t look like the kind of bloke whose daughter I’d know,’ he said.
‘You went to Tenerife ten days ago with a bunch of girls to bring back cigarettes.’
‘How do you know it was me?’
‘Your name came up as the gang leader.’
‘None of those girls knows where I live.’
‘It didn’t take me long.’
‘Ten days?’ said Glider, smirking.
Boxer dead-eyed him. Glider frowned, trying to work out what this was about: an angry father, that was clear, but about what and why now?
‘Let’s start with your daughter’s name,’ he said.
‘Amy.’
‘Oh yeah,’ he said, holding eye contact. ‘The coloured girl.’
‘I can see you’ve got a taste for them,’ said Boxer.
‘You and me both, I’d say.’
Glider’s hand slipped off the arm of the sofa and came to rest on the glass ashtray. Boxer didn’t miss a thing, kept his eyes on Glider’s.
‘As I remember, there were four girls, all friends of Karen’s,’ said Glider. ‘We met up in Tenerife. Had ourselves a nice weekend.’
‘Smuggling cigarettes.’
‘Right,’ said Glider. ‘Just covering our costs. They knew what they were doing and they were up for it. Nobody got hurt and they all got paid.’
‘You slept with my daughter,’ said Boxer, matter-of-fact, not injured by it.
‘She’s twenty-one.’
‘Seventeen.’
‘Well, there you go. Not what she told me. And not a criminal offence neither,’ said Glider, getting riled now. ‘If every dad came hunting for every bloke their daughters had slept with of a weekend this city’d grind to a halt.’
‘Where is she now, Glider?’
Silence while the import of that question elbowed along Glider’s synapses.
‘So, she done a runner,’ said Glider. ‘Not to me, she hasn’t. None of those girls knows where I lives . . . remember?’
Boxer was on him in a flash. One foot treading on the hand around the ashtray, the other foot in his crotch, knee on his chest. He reached for the ashtray, emptied it in Glider’s face, who spat out the butts and ash.
‘You want to take a bite of this?’ asked Boxer, ashtray high above his head.
Glider rested his head on the back of the sofa, showed he wasn’t fighting. He’d seen the speed with which Boxer had moved, and the expertise had made him realise that this was no ordinary unhappy dad.
‘No need for that,’ he said. ‘We’re just talking.’
Boxer was surprised at how wound up he was. He wanted to ram the ashtray into Glider’s teeth, and he’d have done it if the brute had given him the slightest cause. He stepped back off the sofa, turned and hurled the ashtray into the open-plan kitchen, where it smashed against the wall. Shards cascaded down onto the dirty plates and glasses on the counter.
Glider eyed him as he would an unpredictable animal, one prone to tail-wagging and seconds later taking chunks out of legs. He didn’t move.
‘You’re going to do two things for me,’ said Boxer. ‘You’re going to put all your feelers out to everybody you know and find out if they’ve heard anything from Amy. And you’re going to be very cool about it. You don’t want to spook her. When you find out something you call me, right?’
Boxer flipped Glider a card, which landed on his chest. He didn’t reach for it.
‘And give me your number,’ said Boxer, punching it into his mobile.
The mobile buzzed in his hand. Mercy. She told him about the UK Border Agency, said that Security at Heathrow Airport was going to put together some CCTV footage of the person they believed to be Amy and would send it to her at SCD 7. The Spanish police were already on to it. Boxer hung up.
If there was any change in Boxer’s demeanour, Glider didn’t see it.
‘You do that for me?’
Glider nodded.
Boxer trotted downstairs, nodded at the two hoodies in the stairwell on the way.
‘Amy,’ said Mercy, riveted to the screen as she stood watching at her desk, fists planted, checking the clothes her daughter was wearing, the same ones as when she’d left the house, dropped in to say goodbye.
There were no passport checks on leaving the UK, but the Border Agency had summoned a passport photo of Amy Boxer and sent it to the terminal manager at Heathrow. One of the computer operators in Security, as a favour, had put together footage of the girl they believed to be Amy Boxer arriving at Terminal 1, visiting the ladies’ toilet before heading through security and the departure lounge.
Once Mercy had seen that clear shot of Amy, arriving at the terminal and heading for the lifts wearing those clothes, despair settled in her stomach. She unplanted her fists, stretched out her hands and sat back in her chair, watching vaguely as the footage jumped to different cameras and angles tracking Amy over the concourse, through security, in and out of shops.
Mercy stared at the screen, her mind flitting between strange vignettes: an indistinct image of Madrid, a city she’d never been to, her daughter somewhere in the Spanish cliché Mercy’s mind was inventing and the rather more uncomfortable memory of her own shameful liaison with Marcus Alleyne because she’d first seen h
im with Amy in an airport.
Her concentration slipped away from the CCTV images as she tried to remember whether she’d felt any attraction to Alleyne on seeing him meet Amy at Gatwick just over a week ago. Then she was vividly reliving last night, with Alleyne’s hard body on top of her, his face staring down from above, his arms outstretched as he rammed into her, while her heels came up to the sides of his buttocks and spurred him on. He’d whispered her name, Mercy, Mercy, Mercy with each thrust as if begging for clemency. She sighed as the phone rang. The guilt kicked in once more as DCS Makepeace said he was ready to see her again.
‘Do you want some time off, Mercy?’ he asked.
‘Not at the moment,’ she said. ‘Now that we’ve established she’s gone to Madrid we’ll have to wait for the Spanish to give us some kind of lead.’
‘Does she know anybody in Spain?’
‘She had a Spanish boyfriend a couple of years ago, a holiday romance, but out on the coast. She’s never been to Madrid.’
‘So she’s probably in a hotel at least for the first night,’ said Makepeace. ‘Everybody who stays in a hotel in Spain has to give their passport details when they check in, but that information reaching any sort of data centre takes time.’
‘Well, I don’t speak Spanish. So I’m not going to be much use out there.’
‘Do you or Charles have any contacts who could speed up the process?’ said Makepeace. ‘What about that old friend of his from the army days? The one who works in MI6?’