To Catch a Rabbit (5 page)

Bonfire Night: 7.10
am

Phil Holroyd hit the Clive Sullivan Way and Beverley Knight started to stutter and squeak. He ejected the cassette, but part of it stayed hooked inside the machinery and a slew of tape unravelled like spaghetti between his hand and the dashboard. A car hooted as he swerved into the outside lane. He dropped the cassette and it swung like a pendulum. Phil prayed it wouldn’t snap. Steadying the wheel with his right hand, he scooped up the cassette with its trail of tape and laid it on the dashboard. The teeth of the cassette player held on, but the tape didn’t break. Result. He would untangle it later, but in the meantime he’d have to make his own entertainment. In the drone of the engine, Phil found several harmonies. Third gear launched him into a chesty rendering of ‘Amazing Grace’ and shifting into fourth switched him up a key to ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’. By the time he was turning into the industrial estate, his throat was dry. He pulled up at a row of low breezeblock sheds with metal shuttered doors. There was no one there.

Phil was ready for breakfast. He swung round and parked by a burger van he’d spotted on his way in. A grey-faced girl pushed a stray lock of hair out of her face and served him without speaking. He thanked her, determined to get a smile out of her, but she wasn’t interested. Balancing a bacon sandwich and a lidded paper cup on his lap, he drove back, one-handed, to the sheds. This time, at the last building before a high brick wall, there was a short, thickset man in a green parka and a navy wool hat standing with his arms folded.

Phil wound down the window. ‘I’ve come for Mackenzie’s pick-up. The name’s Phil, Phil Holroyd.’

The man nodded and waved him down the side of the last building. A red freight container filled the gap between the building and the wall. Its doors hung open like a toothless mouth.

Phil heard the man opening up the back of the van as he jumped down on to the rutted tarmac.

‘Mr Mackenzie would prefer you to keep the back doors locked,’ the man said with a smile, revealing a flash of gold on one side. ‘You never know who might jump in. My little joke, don’t look so serious. Call me Len, Laughing Len.’

The smile vanished and Phil shivered. Inside the container, he could see stacks of cardboard boxes and plastic-covered cases of soft drinks, each one made up of a stack of about eight trays.

‘Take your time.’ Len jerked a thumb at Phil’s bacon sandwich, oozing fat and ketchup down his wrist.

‘Cheers. Bit peckish, early start.’

‘You southerners need a bit of feeding up? Cockney, are you?’

‘Not exactly,’ Phil’s mouth was full and he wiped his greasy lips on the back of his hand. He didn’t feel like chatting and he had a fair idea of how this kind of conversation would go. Jibes at soft southern bastards; questions about what he was doing up here and if he was to let on he was a musician, the inevitable: have you been on the telly?

‘Been on Mackenzie’s payroll long?’

Phil shrugged. ‘On and off.’

He finished the sandwich and screwed up the soggy paper napkin. He looked for somewhere to throw it but there was nowhere obvious so he chucked it on the floor of the cab. They loaded the van in silence until it was full. Phil reckoned there was still plenty of stock left in the container. Mackenzie had asked him to make several journeys until that consignment was all shifted. Pallets of soft drinks, boxes of crisps and sweets, destined for export to somewhere with Arabic writing, diverted back to the pound shops and market stalls of South Yorkshire. It seemed fairly legit, as far as Phil could see.

‘I’ll be seeing you later, sunshine, unless Mr Mac has other plans for you today.’  The gold tooth twinkled from Len’s cracked grin.

‘Yeah, see you.’ Phil slammed the door of the van, catching his cup of tea just in time as it bounced off the dash. He wedged it between his knees as he pulled away. Back on the first stretch of straight road he steadied into fourth gear and took a sip through the tiny hole in the plastic lid. Cold.

Then she started to cry and he held her.

‘Hey! Don’t give yourself a hard time, but you can’t solve everything, that’s all.’

Finally she turned over and lay with her head on his chest, wrapped around him, skin-to-skin, alone with her fear. A light snore caught in the back of his throat and she envied him his ability to fall asleep in seconds.

In the middle of the night, she woke and listened to the ticking of the cooling radiators. This was originally Sophie’s room, but she got scared of the monsters who clicked their teeth in the darkness. When Ben was born, he had the room next to his sister’s on the middle floor because Sophie refused to swap with her parents. Karen fixed up an alarm and got used to listening to his breathing, watching the red lights flicker up and down in sequence. She didn’t have an alarm for Sophie or for their second child, Cara. The one they lost. Their cot death baby. She sometimes wondered if Sophie felt it too, the need to check on Ben, be nearer to him in case anything happened to him. Perhaps the monsters were just a ruse. Baby Cara was six weeks old when she died, but the space she left behind had been with them for eight slow years.

The next day, Karen was in the office trying to organise the notes that Jaz had left. He wanted a report on the Moyos’ reasons for refusal. There was a page labelled
Passport Issues
. The writing was swimming like tadpoles. She’d spent the last two nights lying awake, thinking about Phil, hoping that tomorrow would be the day the phone would ring and her dad would say, it’s all right, he’s turned up, all a fuss about nothing.

Her eyes were dry and her shoulders ached.
...used cousin’s South African passport... ...reasonable? Stress circumstances re. detention in home country...
The urge to tip forward and rest her head on the desk was almost overwhelming, but she needed to get this done before she broke off for lunch to meet up with her dad. Reg Holroyd had been to Lincolnshire to see Stacey, and now he needed to see his daughter, they needed to talk, he said.

When the buzzer went her heart sank. She picked up the intercom phone.

‘Hello RAMA.’

‘Hi there.’ The voice surprised her. Big hands, coal mines and Tom Jones all competed in her head in a crazy game of free association. ‘Jaz in?’

‘No. Sorry.’

‘Can I come up and leave him a message?’

She buzzed DCI Moon in and hoped he wouldn’t stay long. She didn’t want to be late to meet her dad.

‘How’s things?’ He smiled a twitch of a smile that sent sunbeams of fine lines shooting up around his eyes. She wasn’t in the habit of noticing men’s eyes, but she thought it was an interesting effect.

‘Me? Oh, fine,’ she looked at her watch. ‘You wanted to leave Jaz a message?’

‘Quite a result on the Grimsby case. Your man Jaz did us a favour.’

Karen started putting her coat on. Her father’s train would be here in twenty minutes.

‘The girl at Moreton Hall checked out.’ He was talking fast, unable to hide his enthusiasm, like a big kid. ‘Thanks to her we’ve pulled in the owner of a haulage firm and forensics have picked up skin, faeces and urine samples from the back of three of the trucks. Male and female. All human. Seven different ethnic markers.’

‘Nice.’

‘At least this lot are coming in alive. So far. Looks like we’ve nipped something in the bud. I was hoping Jaz might be around to celebrate.’

Coming in alive.
She was glad Moon turned round to help himself from the cooling coffee jug, before she gave herself away. For a second she thought her eyes were about to fill with tears. She hated being so bloody sensitive. After Cara she thought she’d cried all she could, but it had left her vulnerable and now this business with Phil. She blew her nose and held her breath.

‘I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m going to have to lock up. I’ve got a lunch meeting.’

‘Sure, no problem.’ He swallowed the coffee and wandered into the boardroom to stick a Post-It on the whiteboard. Then he walked down the stairs humming. It sounded like ‘Oh, what a Beautiful Mornin’.’

Karen watched the London train unload its passengers into the cold air of York Railway Station. Reg Holroyd was the last one off, his brown corduroy jacket and green scarf marking him out as a country mouse among the town mice. He gave her a little wave and looked down at his feet as he approached her, as if he was trying to work out what the protocol was. She kissed him on the cheek and met his eyes. He’d aged. Perhaps she had too. They walked towards Lendal Bridge in silence. She’d heard about a new place in one of the bridge towers, with tables outside.

When she brought their drinks out, he remarked that the smoking ban had suddenly turned the British into Europeans, with pavement cafés all year round.

‘Can’t even smoke at Party Meetings any more and I’m too old to stand around the dustbins.’

She thought it was strange that they were once considered a threat, Reg’s tiny, Home Counties’ branch of the Communist Party; a group of aging comrades, now driven from their subversive activities by health-and-safety rules. She watched him fill his pipe and press the tobacco down with his thumb. As he lit it, a plume of sweet smoke billowed up and over her face.

‘Sorry love, you’re down-wind, should have sat on the other side of you.’

‘I don’t mind.’

It was the smell of her childhood, of following him round the garden with her own little trowel and bucket, squatting down to bury her fingers in wet earth and pulling out the weeds as he showed her. Reg was in no rush to start talking about Phil, but Karen was getting impatient, she only had an hour for lunch and the Moyos’ case notes were waiting for her in the office. She put her cup down too hard and the flimsy aluminium table rocked drunkenly on the stone paving.

‘How did Stacey seem?’ she said.

‘She seemed worried enough when she phoned last week.’

‘Yes, I spoke to her.’

‘I had to ask her if she thought he’d done anything stupid. I didn’t want to say it, but you have to consider these things.’

He tapped his pipe out on the edge of the chair. It was chilly out here. She wished she’d worn a scarf.

‘But that’s so unlikely, don’t you think, Dad? Phil’s always been so…optimistic.’ The frothy milk sank into her coffee. She stirred it and the separate strands of colour merged to fawn.

‘When I got there, she behaved as if I was over-reacting.’

‘What? But you’re his dad for God’s sake!’

Two girls at the next table glanced at her briefly and then looked away.

Reg lowered his voice. ‘When I asked her what the police had said, she told me she hadn’t called them.’

‘But…I don’t understand. Does she know where he’s gone then?’

‘She made out that he’s done this sort of thing in the past. He gets cold feet. Those were her exact words.’

Karen bit into her sandwich. It tasted like cardboard.

‘She thinks he’s just driven off with his employer’s van. A fellow called Mackenzie, who’s hopping mad and wants his van back.’

‘He wouldn’t walk out on Holly, I’m sure about that.’

‘Poor little Holly.’ Reg said. ‘She looks like her mother, that one.’

‘It makes no sense. He’s seemed really settled since Holly was born. Did you ask her if his passport was missing?’

Reg looked at his daughter with a weary resignation. ‘Maybe you should have gone. I didn’t want to pry too much. I’m not a detective. I’m just an old man.’

They sat in silence while a pigeon landed next to the table and looked hopefully for crumbs. Karen swung her foot at it.

‘Look, I’m sorry Dad. I’m just worried. That’s all.’

‘Me too, love. Me too.’ He reached across to squeeze her hand.

‘… not officially a cluster, but two deaths with a similar MO needs looking at. Early toxicology suggests poisoning from a high-grade batch of heroin, in combination with amphetamines in the first girl’s case. We’re just waiting for a second run of tests on the body from Balby. Meanwhile, The Chief Super’s ordered an information campaign and my team will be making it high priority. Any questions?’

The hand-dryer in the gents hadn’t been working properly for months. Sean gave it the obligatory thump on the side and it rattled into action. Two men came in. As the dryer cut out, Sean heard ‘prostitute’ and a question about suppliers on a different patch. He recognised Rick, the snooker player. He didn’t know the other man. He wanted to hear the answer, but they’d moved to the urinal. Sean decided it would look weird to hang around any longer.

When he got back to the conference room, it was empty. The whiteboard and the flipchart with the details of the victim were still there. Flora Brikenda Ishmaili, aged twenty-three, born in 1986, in Kosovo. The blown-up photograph showed a girl with messy brown hair, her head angled like something in her neck had just snapped. If you hadn’t already guessed she was dead, her skin confirmed it. Neither white nor yellow, it was an ageless, ivory grey. He felt in his pocket for his phone and took a picture. He had to get in closer to the one they had of her alive, a photo-booth image of Flora pulling faces with her friend; the girl who found her. On the whiteboard there were details of the place, names, times. He snapped that too.

‘What are you doing?’ Lizzie Morrison said, from the doorway.

‘Just trying to keep a record. So I can remember stuff.’ He shoved the phone deep into his pocket.