Authors: Kevin Brooks
‘No …’ she said, pausing for just a moment. ‘No, I’m all right, thank you.’
She opened the door and we went through into a darkened room. Helen turned on the lights, and I stood there and looked around. It was a fairly small place – sitting room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom – but it wasn’t excessively cramped. And while it wasn’t spotlessly neat, it wasn’t overly messy either. I could smell stale cigarette smoke, and there were several overflowing ashtrays dotted around the room. The second-hand furnishings had clearly come with the flat, and although the overall state of the place left a lot to be desired, I’d seen a lot worse in my time. All in all, it was just a typical low-rent living space, ideally suited for a young woman desperate to leave home.
As I started wandering around the sitting room, looking at this and that, Helen went over and sat down on a cheap settee.
‘What are you looking for?’ she asked me.
‘Anything, really,’ I said, scanning a row of shelves. ‘Something that shouldn’t be here, something that should be here but isn’t …’
‘The police have already searched here, you know.’
I nodded. ‘When was that?’
‘The day after I reported her missing. DCI Bishop told
me that they didn’t find anything suspicious.’
‘Do you know if he thinks she came back here that night?’
‘He said it was impossible to tell. No one
saw
her coming back, but it would have been late … and, besides, the kind of people who live around here …’
I looked at her.
She shrugged. ‘Well, they don’t like to get involved, do they?’
I stood in the middle of the room and took a final look round, but I got the feeling that there was nothing here to tell me anything. It was a room that could have belonged to anyone, as bland and anonymous as a hotel room. No personal touches, no ornaments, no pictures, no books. It was just a place to watch TV.
I went into the kitchen, but there was nothing useful in there either. The fridge had been cleared out, the sink was empty. A small cupboard held a few cans of vegetables and a packet of crackers, and there was a drawer full of the usual kitchen stuff – cutlery, clingfilm, aluminium foil – but that was about it.
‘Did the police clear out the fridge?’ I asked Helen as I went back into the sitting room.
She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know.’
‘Are you all right there?’ I said.
She was perched on the edge of the settee, all hunched up, her hands held tightly together in her lap.
‘Yes … yes, I’m all right, thank you. Just … well, you know … you can’t help thinking about things, can you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, you can’t …’
She looked at me for a moment, her eyes glazed and haunted.
I said, ‘I’ll just go and have a quick look in the bedroom and bathroom, and then we’ll get going, OK?’
She nodded.
I went into Anna’s bedroom and turned on the light. The smell of cigarette smoke was stronger in here, and the room was a lot messier than the sitting room – piles of clothes all over the place, the bed unmade, dirty cups and plates on the floor. I went over and took a closer look at the bed. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but it didn’t take me long to realise that – whatever it was – I wasn’t going to find it in an unmade bed. It was impossible to tell when it had last been slept in, and even if there were any tell-tale signs that Anna had been sleeping with someone – which, as far I could tell, there weren’t – that still wouldn’t tell me anything.
I moved away from the bed and started searching through a chest of drawers that was set against the wall. It had six drawers; two smaller ones at the top, the rest full-size. The two at the top were underwear drawers, the next one down was T-shirts and tops, the one under that was jeans and trousers, and the next-to-last drawer contained skirts. It all seemed quite ordinary, the sort of clothing you’d expect a young woman without much money to own. Nothing too stylish or expensive, most of it quite practical and plain … the kind of clothes you’d buy at Primark or Tesco or TK Maxx.
In the bottom drawer though … well, the clothing in the bottom drawer wasn’t quite so ordinary. It wasn’t that it was any more fashionable or expensive than the rest of
Anna’s clothes, it was just that it was totally different in style. These clothes could never be described as practical and plain; in fact, if anything, they were the opposite. Incredibly short skirts, fishnet stockings, studded leather belts. Tiny strips of material with zips on the front, which I guessed were some kind of top. Leather trousers, ripped denim jeans that were more rip than jean, a little white shirt and school tie …
It was possible, of course, that there was a perfectly innocent explanation for all this – maybe Anna had been doing some glamour modelling, or maybe this was the kind of stuff she wore on hen nights, or maybe she just liked dressing up a bit outrageously when she went out …
Or maybe it was just me? Maybe these clothes weren’t outrageous at all, and I was just jumping to the conclusions of an out-of-touch, out-of-style, out-of-date forty-year-old man.
I was crouched down on the floor, staring into this drawer full of confusion, trying to work out what, if anything, it meant, when I heard a quiet shuffle in the doorway behind me, followed almost immediately by Helen Gerrish’s frail little voice.
‘Have you found anything yet?’
I quickly closed the drawer and stood up. ‘No … no, nothing yet, I’m afraid …’
‘Is there anything I can do to help you?’
Yeah
, I thought,
don’t ever creep up on me again
.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said, glancing around the room. ‘I’m just about done in here, anyway.’ Which I wasn’t, but I didn’t want to keep poking around in Anna’s things with
her mother looking over my shoulder, and it didn’t seem quite right to ask Helen to leave me alone either. So, noticing a few items of jewellery beside a little box on the bedside table, I said to Helen, ‘Actually, you could have a quick look through Anna’s jewellery for me while I check the bathroom … if you don’t mind.’
‘Her jewellery?’
‘Over there,’ I said, indicating the bedside table. ‘Just see if there’s anything missing …’
‘But I don’t know –’
‘It’s all right, just have a look. You might remember something.’ I smiled at her. ‘OK?’
‘Well, if you think it might help.’
I watched her as she moved hesitantly over to the bedside table, sat down on the edge of the bed, and started picking reluctantly at the pieces of jewellery. She handled the necklaces and bracelets as if she could hardly bear to touch them, and the look on her face – a pained and sickened expression – was a look that verged on disgust. It was like watching someone retrieving their lost contact lenses from a steaming pile of dog shit.
I stood there watching her for a moment or two, briefly transfixed by her oddness, then – with a baffled shake of my head – I left the room and went into the bathroom.
There wasn’t a lot to look at in there – toilet, bath, sink, cupboard. There was a toothbrush and toothpaste in a glass on the sink, and in a cupboard over the sink there were several more items which I would have expected Anna to take with her if she’d been planning to go away – Tampax, talcum powder, make-up remover, nail files … stuff like
that. There was a fair amount of over-the-counter medication in there too – paracetamol, Gaviscon, Benylin, Night Nurse. In fact, the cupboard was so packed full that I doubted if anything had been removed from it. Which, again, suggested that maybe Anna hadn’t just packed a suitcase and left.
The cupboard wasn’t all that sturdy, and as I closed the door and pushed it shut I heard a load of stuff inside falling over. I thought about just leaving it, but that didn’t seem right, so I carefully inched open the door again … and half a dozen bottles and tubs fell out, scattering pills and God-knows-what all over the floor.
‘Shit,’ I muttered.
Helen called out from the bedroom. ‘Is everything all right in there?’
‘Yeah,’ I called back. ‘I just dropped something, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.’
It was quite a poky little bathroom, with not much room for manoeuvring, and as I kneeled down on the floor to start clearing up the mess, my foot bashed into the bath panel and knocked it loose.
‘Fucking
hell
,’ I whispered, turning round to inspect the damage.
Nothing was broken. The plastic panel had just come away, as if it hadn’t been fixed on properly in the first place. And when I looked closer, pushing the loose panel back and peering into the space under the bath, I realised that the panel was
supposed
to be loose, because Anna had been using the space behind it as a hiding place. And what she’d been hiding in there, and what was still in there now, was
heroin. Four wraps of heroin, a syringe, a box of needles, a packet of alcohol swabs, and a spoon.
And that changed things. It changed Anna’s life and the world she inhabited. It made her more vulnerable, more desperate, more liable to risk. It made her more likely to associate with the kind of people who might want to hurt her. And if she
was
an addict, which was by no means definite, as it wasn’t
impossible
that she just used the stuff now and then … but if she
was
an addict, she’d never have willingly gone away and left all her gear behind.
And that changed the way I was thinking.
The way I was thinking now was that although Helen Gerrish’s reasons for worrying about her daughter were wrong, it was beginning to look like she was probably right to be worried.
When I went back into the bedroom, Helen was still perched on the edge of the bed, but she’d given up on the jewellery now and was just sitting there staring at nothing.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked quietly.
She turned slowly and looked at me. ‘Yes … yes, I’m fine, thank you.’
‘Any luck with the jewellery?’
She shook her head. ‘No, I’m sorry … the only thing of Anna’s that I’m familiar with is a necklace she wore all the time, and that’s not here.’
‘What kind of necklace? Can you describe it?’
‘It’s a silver half-moon on a silver chain … she’s had it for years.’ Helen looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘You know, I don’t even know where she got it from …’
‘A silver half-moon?’ I said.
Helen nodded. ‘She should be wearing it in the photograph I gave you.’
I took the photo out of my pocket and saw that she was right. Sunlight was glinting from a small silver crescent on a necklace around Anna’s neck.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘well, that’s something.’
‘Are we finished here now?’
I nodded. ‘If that’s OK with you.’
‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘Yes, I’d like to go home now.’
It was getting on for nine o’clock when we left the block of flats and walked back to my car. The rain was still falling, thin and cold in the night, and the streets of Quayside were beginning to stir with a few early clubbers and drinkers. As I opened the passenger door, and Helen got into the car, I could hear the shrieks and machine-gun heels of a gaggle of good-time girls making their way into the night. I wondered briefly what the next four or five hours would hold for them – love, sex, happiness … a drunken slap in the face?
I looked down at Helen. ‘Would it be all right if I found a taxi to take you home?’
‘A taxi? Yes … yes, of course …’
‘It’s just that The Wyvern’s not far from here,’ I explained. ‘So I might as well pop in there while I’m down this way, you know … see if anyone knows anything.’
‘Yes,’ Helen repeated. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘Are you sure you don’t mind?’
She shook her head.
I looked at her sitting there – forlorn and lost, old before her time – and I thought about changing my mind. But she wasn’t paying me to look after her, was she? She wasn’t paying me to comfort her soul. She was paying me to find her daughter.
And, besides, I needed to be on my own for a while.
I needed time to think.
And I really needed a drink.
There was a taxi rank just along from the nightclubs, and I managed to get Helen in the cab with the least unsavoury-looking driver. She didn’t look all that happy as the taxi pulled away, and I couldn’t help feeling a tiny pang of guilt, but it wasn’t that hard to ignore it.
As I got back in my car and started heading down towards the old part of Quayside, trying to remember exactly where The Wyvern was, I noticed a silver-grey Renault about thirty metres behind me. It was too far back to see the driver, but I was pretty sure that I’d seen the same Renault parked in the street outside the block of flats.
It was probably nothing, but I made a note of the registration number anyway, and when I eventually found the street where The Wyvern was – a narrow little lane called Miller’s Row – and I saw that the Renault was still behind me, I momentarily slowed down, as if I was turning into Miller’s Row, then at the very last second I changed gear and kept going straight on. I didn’t speed up at all, I just drove quite steadily away from Quayside, up into town, and then I took a series of right turns that gradually brought me back down to Quayside, and by the time I’d reached Miller’s Row again, there was no sign of the Renault. I parked the car halfway along the street, turned off the engine, and waited.
Two cigarettes later, there was still no sign of the Renault.
I got out, locked the car, and headed up the street to The Wyvern.
When I was a teenager, The Wyvern was almost exclusively a bikers’ pub. Unless you were a biker, or a drug dealer, or you wanted to get beaten up, you didn’t go in there. Most of the clientele were members of a motorcycle gang called Satans Slaves (who, just like their more illustrious rivals, the Hells Angels, don’t bother with apostrophes – a grammatical error that probably doesn’t get pointed out to them all that often … at least, not to their faces anyway). There was always something going on at The Wyvern back then – fights, drug deals, stabbings, shootings – and over the years the pub has been raided countless times. It’s been closed down, re-opened and refurbished under new management, closed down again, re-opened again … and gradually it’s become a place that isn’t quite so intimidating as it used to be. Most of the bikers have gone now – gone to wherever old bikers go – but there’s still usually a few hanging around whenever you go in, a vestigial presence of scabbed leather, studs, patchouli oil, and spunk-stained jeans.