The Wolves of London (11 page)

I called her mobile again and got the same response. They couldn’t all have just overslept, could they? No, Kate was an early riser – unless, of course, she and Hamish had been up till all hours, bouncing off the walls, and had succeeded in exhausting everyone so much that they had all slept through their alarms, the phone calls, the banging on the door…

No, that was stupid and unbelievable. But I clung to it for a few minutes, if only to delay my thoughts from taking a darker turn. However, as I marched back across the landing and thumped on the door with renewed vigour, I knew that lurking in the back of my mind were lurid news stories of fathers who had suddenly gone mad and killed their wives and children before taking their own lives, of faulty gas fires poisoning entire households, of families being discovered slaughtered in their beds…

I conjured a picture of Paula in a nightshirt, face slack with sleep, tugging the door open and murmuring, ‘Alex? Wassamatter?’ I willed this image to become a reality, but again there was no reply to my knocking. I went back to my flat and paced for a moment. It was now 7.30 a.m. Was it too premature to call the police? Probably. Almost certainly. But something was wrong. I knew it. I could sense it.

Perhaps I should smash the door down? It might lead to embarrassment later, even to disgruntled accusations of over-reaction, but I could deal with that. If I knew that Kate was okay I could deal with anything. I thought about the shitty week I was having. First Candice, now Kate. What had I done to deserve this? Suddenly realising that I didn’t
need
to kick the door down, I darted back into my flat and into the kitchen. In the drawer beneath the wall-mounted water heater was all the flat-related paperwork: instruction books for the various appliances; gas, electricity and water supply info; a laminated list of rules and regulations; emergency numbers… ah.

Whipping out my mobile phone I thumbed in my landlord’s number, immediately storing it for future use. On the third ring a heavily accented voice barked, ‘Hello.’ The owner sounded resentful, as if I had caught him in the middle of something important.

‘Mr Grzybowski? This is Alex Locke from 22 Fountain Road in Chiswick. I live in flat 3. I need you to come over right away.’ Haltingly I told him why, my words tumbling over one another in my urgency to explain.

Mr Grzybowski was nonplussed. ‘This is a long way to come for such a paltry matter,’ he said. ‘Your friends must have simply gone out.’

‘Where would they go at 7.30 in the morning?’ I replied, trying not to sound sarcastic.

After some to-ing and fro-ing he agreed to come over, though not before I had threatened to kick in the door of flat 4 if he didn’t turn up. Breaking the connection I wondered about kicking in the door anyway, but instead I diverted my energy into running upstairs and knocking on the door of flat 5 where old Mrs Hersh lived.

She hadn’t seen the Sherwoods either, or heard them go out. ‘But I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about,’ she reassured me, and invited me in for tea. I refused as politely as I could and pounded all the way downstairs, almost slipping and falling in my haste. I knocked on the doors of the two ground-floor flats, whose occupants I barely knew, to ask whether they had seen or heard anything.

They hadn’t, and so at 7.45 a.m. I found myself upstairs again, perched stiffly on the edge of my settee, teeth clenched and hands clasped tightly between my knees, like a first-time parachutist waiting for the call to jump. I’d exhausted my immediate options, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should be doing
something
. I called Paula’s mobile again, and when the answer phone cut in I left a second message. I heard the waver in my voice as I did so: ‘Hi Paula. Alex again. Can you let me know where you are? I’m getting worried now.’

It was about fifty minutes later when I heard slow, heavy footsteps ascending the stairs. I ran out of my flat (I’d left the door propped open) to greet the new arrival. I guessed it would be Grzybowski, but that still didn’t prevent my heart from giving a little surge of hope that it might be Paula returning after having dropped the kids off at school. Again a little mind-movie ran inside my head. Paula would be flustered, full of apologies and explanations: ‘We went out to get croissants for breakfast, but got snarled up in traffic and had to go straight to school.’ Or: ‘I had to run Adam to the station to get an early train, so I took the kids with me. I did think of knocking on your door, but I didn’t want to disturb you.’

But, as I had expected, it was the rotund, panting figure of my landlord who rounded the bend in the staircase and stumped up the last half-flight towards me. He was dark-skinned and grey-haired and raised jaundiced, bloodhound eyes to regard me balefully.

‘I do not appreciate threats, Mr Locke,’ he growled as he approached. ‘If you damage my property you find somewhere else to live. It is a simple rule.’

Edgy as I felt, I was in no mood to waste time arguing the toss with him. Instead I fixed my face into what I hoped was an expression of apology and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Grzybowski, but I really am worried. My daughter stayed over with my neighbours last night, and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be there at this time in the morning. It doesn’t make sense.’

Grzybowski grunted as though unconvinced, but made no further comment. Clumping to the Sherwoods’ door he pulled a set of keys from the pocket of his shapeless, olive-green jacket and picked through them laboriously with his thick fingers. I hovered at his shoulder, fighting an urge to tell him to hurry the fuck up. He smelled of stale cooking oil and aftershave made more pungent by an under-hint of day-old sweat.

Finally he found the right key and fitted it into the lock. I all but tumbled in behind him as he pushed the door open. Like my flat the entrance hall was gloomy until you put the light on. When he clicked the switch I gasped.

The hallway was empty. Not just of people, but of everything. Where were the pictures on the walls, the slim bookcase on the right, the little bamboo side table on which the phone usually rested atop a stack of local directories? I pushed past Grzybowski, who grunted in protest, and ran from room to room, checking out the rest of the flat.

Empty. Stripped bare. Furniture, books, clothes, ornaments, everything… gone. It was as if a removals van had come in the night and taken away every single thing the Sherwoods owned.

My heart dropped into my stomach. I started to shake. I swung round to confront Grzybowski, who stepped back, alarmed, at what must have been a wild-eyed look on my face.

‘Where are they?’ I demanded, though it was clear that the empty flat was as much a surprise to him as it had been to me.

‘Gone,’ was all Grzybowski said, raising a hand as if that made everything clear.

My fear for Kate made me suddenly angry, furious. ‘But
where
have they gone? Because wherever it is, they’ve taken my daughter with them!’

T
he interview with DI Jensen and DS Earnshaw lasted about twenty minutes. It was DS Earnshaw who did most of the talking. He was a bulky, solid Mancunian with dark-framed spectacles and hair that looked like it had been slept on then forgotten about. He had a slow, deliberate way of speaking, and I got the feeling Jensen – a tall, balding man with a knobbly face – let Earnshaw ask the questions in order to lull most of the villains he dealt with into a false sense of security. Yet although Earnshaw might have seemed a plodder, behind his droning voice and sleepy eyes I sensed a thorough, methodical brain motoring away. He had certainly done his homework on me.

I don’t mean that the interview was a grilling, or that Jensen and Earnshaw gave the impression that they thought I had engineered my daughter’s disappearance, but they did know of my past form and of Lyn’s history of mental health problems and her current long-term incarceration in Darby Hall Psychiatric Hospital. When they asked whether any of my fellow inmates in Pentonville might have had reason to harbour a long-standing grudge against me I thought fleetingly of Benny – was it a coincidence that this had happened just as he had come back into my life, especially as I had turned down the job he had set up for me? – but I said nothing. Not because I was scared of how furious he would be if I should happen to drop his name into the pot only to then discover he was innocent, but simply because I couldn’t see what he would gain out of arranging to have Kate abducted. He was ruthless when he needed to be, but he wasn’t the sort of man who did things purely out of spite. So, although it was an instinctive decision, I decided I would prefer to keep Benny as a potential ally by withholding his name rather than earn his wrath by sending the police sniffing round his door.

After the interview was over, Jensen and Earnshaw crossed the landing to look over the Sherwoods’ now-empty flat. All they found was Paula’s voice on the answer phone and half a dozen messages which they told me were unusual only in that the incoming calls all seemed to be of a business or practical nature – nothing personal at all. They ordered Grzybowski, who had been hovering on the landing like a spare part, to lock the door and to open it for no one but the forensics team, who would be arriving within the hour to go over the flat with a fine-tooth comb. Jensen asked me if I would like a family liaison officer appointed to the case, who would remain with me for as long as I required his or her services and ‘provide me with a link to the ongoing investigation’. When I said no, he nodded as though in approval at my fortitude, and told me how sorry he was that this had happened and that they would let me know the minute they had any news. Then they shook my hand, thanked me for my co-operation and assured me they would leave no stone unturned in their hunt for the Sherwoods.

It wasn’t until after they had gone that the anxiety, which I’d been bottling up for the past half-hour or so, hit me like a virus. Suddenly I was shaking and the strength went out of my legs. I just about made it back into the main room, where I dropped on to the settee as if the tendons behind my knees had been cut. Staring blankly in front of me I suddenly registered what I was looking at, and swallowed to clear a lump in my throat. It was Kate’s beloved
Toy Story
colouring book, surrounded by a scattering of coloured pencils. I’d bought this for her after the two of us had seen
Toy Story 3
in 3-D earlier that year. Kate had loved the film, but she had huddled up to me during the scary bits. It was heart-breaking to recall how cute she had looked with the 3-D specs perched on the end of her nose over her pink-framed glasses. After the film we’d had dinner in Pizza Express and she’d bounced up and down in her chair with excitement at what she’d seen, chattering away as she relived her favourite scenes.

It was only as I was leaning forward and stretching out a hand towards the colouring book that I realised what I was doing and checked myself. The way I was feeling I knew that opening the book and looking inside would be unbearably painful. Even so, I might still have opened the book if my mobile hadn’t just then started to ring. I yanked it from my pocket to see who was calling, but my screen informed me it was an ‘Unknown Number’.

‘Hello?’

‘Alex,’ said a female voice. ‘It’s Clover Monroe.’

I guessed Benny must have given her my number and assumed she was calling to ask whether I’d reconsidered her job offer. Irritated I said, ‘Sorry, but this isn’t a good time right now.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m ringing.’

My thoughts were too scrambled to make sense of her words. ‘Sorry?’ I said. ‘What?’

Her voice was urgent, willing me to understand. ‘I need you to come and see me right away,’ she said. ‘It’s about what’s happened to Kate.’

I
felt like ripping the world apart. Getting angry, and staying there, was the only way I could handle the gut-wrenching terror and helplessness threatening to overwhelm me. I’d been in some tricky situations before, situations where I thought I might die, but the mortal fear I’d felt then was like a pinprick compared to how I was feeling now. Not knowing where my beautiful little girl was, or why she’d been taken, was like harbouring a bubbling volcano that was about to erupt. Although I knew it was futile, I had an almost irresistible urge to be
out there
, running through the streets, looking for Kate.

The best I could do right now, though, was head across London to see Clover. She was the only lead I had. The journey was maybe ten stops on the tube, changing from the District line to the Piccadilly at Hammersmith, but it felt like an eternity. All the way there I was gripped by a kind of madness. I hated my fellow commuters for calmly getting on with their lives like there was nothing wrong in the world. When a French tourist on the platform at Hyde Park Corner prolonged my agony by throwing himself at the closing doors and forcing them open again, and then laughing merrily with his girlfriend as the two of them entered the carriage, I could quite happily have rammed something sharp and pointy into his eye.

Clover had been unwilling – or unable – to tell me much over the phone.

‘What do
you
know about what’s happened to Kate?’ I said, struggling to keep my voice under control. ‘What’s going on, Clover?’

‘Let’s not talk now,’ she replied. ‘It’ll be better face to face.’

‘Why will it? I haven’t got time for this shit. Where the fuck’s my daughter?’

‘I don’t know. Genuinely. Just come and see me, Alex.’

‘If you’re fucking me about…’ My voice choked off. Suddenly it felt as though there was cotton wool jamming my throat.

‘I’m not fucking you about,’ she said.

My brain was buzzing, whirring. I couldn’t think straight. I knew that if I was going to be any help to Kate I needed to stay calm, keep my head clear, but that was easier said than done.

Swallowing the obstruction in my throat, I said, ‘What if I tell the cops about this phone call? Send
them
round to see you instead?’

‘That would be a mistake,’ Clover said. ‘I’m not your enemy, Alex.’