You Will Never Find Me (20 page)

‘You'll need these for the dogs,' he said. ‘I've just put out word to some of my dog-walking friends. Some of them belong to ramblers' clubs. They should be able to turn out some people between them.'

 

‘We'll take a cab back to my place,' said Isabel.

‘No,' said Mercy before she remembered who she was with. ‘It's O.K.'

They were heading for the lift outside Makepeace's office. Mercy had been surprised how glad she was to see Isabel. They'd fallen into each other's arms.

‘I didn't bring a car,' said Isabel, ‘and I'm not taking you back on the Tube.'

‘No.'

Why did she keep saying no? Was this just a manifestation of denial? Negate everything. And yet she wasn't in denial. She'd faced what had happened to Amy, taken it in. Maybe she hadn't dealt with it, but she hadn't blocked it out.

They stood by the lift, looked at each other. Mercy saw the woman's kindness. This was probably the last place she wanted to be: looking after her new man's ex. She reached out for Isabel's hand.

‘I'm sorry. I've got my car here. I'd like to drive, you know, do something that'll occupy my . . . my crazy mind. Don't worry, I'll take it easy. No blue flashing lights.'

Isabel squeezed her hand. They went down to the car.

‘Is it O.K. if we go back to your place?' said Mercy. ‘I don't think I can face my own house, just yet.'

Mercy drove over Vauxhall Bridge and took a left down the Embankment. She gave herself over to the occupational therapy of driving, the demand for concentration, which blocked out the horror thoughts.

‘What do you think of me?' she asked, the question appearing in her brain and coming out, uncontrolled. ‘As a person? I'd be interested to know what somebody who doesn't know me very well thinks.'

Isabel looked at her in the strange intimacy of the half-lit dark of the car. An odd question, and she wasn't sure how much truth was being asked for. Or whether Mercy was looking for reassurance?

‘Even if it's something . . . bad, I still want you to tell me,' said Mercy. ‘I . . . I'm . . . I don't know what I am right now. Maybe you can help?'

‘Something bad?' said Isabel, astonished. ‘You're not a bad person, Mercy. I know bad people. I spent a lot of time with people who didn't care, who didn't give a damn about anything human. That could never be said of you. Charlie told me how relentless you were in tracking down the people holding Alyshia. He said that without your intervention she wouldn't have survived. The only possible motivation people like you have for doing that kind of work is that you care. So stop thinking you're bad.'

‘I find it easier to care about people professionally,' said Mercy. ‘I imagine people's relationships as perfect examples of what, say, a mother and daughter's love should be like. So I imagined you and Alyshia together. That motivates me. But in real life my own relationships are hopeless.'

‘So are mine. So are everybody's,' said Isabel. ‘It's a messy business being human.'

‘At least you can show people close to you what you feel about them,' said Mercy. ‘I can't . . . unless I hate them. Like Esme. I hate her.'

‘You can't hate without being able to do the opposite,' said Isabel. ‘Why do you hate Esme?'

There were all sorts of reasons. She could enumerate them. But if she started to trot them out they'd seem piffling, unworthy of such a powerful emotion as hate. And yet she did hate Esme. She hated the influence she had over Amy.

‘I'm thinking about that, you see,' said Mercy. ‘And I'm already lying to myself. My mind is telling me I loathe Esme because she has a bad influence over Amy. But the reality is that I hate her because I envy her relationship with my daughter.'

‘Grandparents are always more successful with their grandchildren than they ever were with their own. The pressure of bringing them up properly is off.'

‘Esme and Amy have a connection. I see it every time they're together. It drives me crazy.'

‘Because almost every teenage girl has a problem with her mother?'

‘No, because when I look at Esme I see myself. I see a woman incapable of showing her feelings for another human being,' said Mercy. ‘You can't believe what she was like with Charlie. The life he had as a kid, his father disappearing, and yet she gave him nothing. And now she has this meeting of minds with
my
daughter. It makes me sick. Now don't tell me that isn't bad.'

‘It's completely understandable,' said Isabel. ‘And not many people have that sort of insight.'

‘It seems ugly to me, which is why I've never told anybody about it before. I should be happy that at least they have a relationship with each other even if they can't with their . . . own.'

‘Remember, you have no real idea what's happened to Esme in her past, the experiences that shaped her. You only ever know about yourself, and most people don't know that much, and it's in a constantly shifting state, rarely still for long enough to be analysed.'

‘I'm glad you're here,' said Mercy. ‘I didn't really want it to be you and I think you know why.'

‘I saw it from the beginning,' said Isabel. ‘You're still in love with Charlie.'

Mercy shook her head as they crawled in traffic up Warwick Road.

‘I don't know whether I
am
still in love with him,' said Mercy. ‘All I know is that there's never been anybody else who's come close.'

‘He was there at a crucial moment in your life,' said Isabel. ‘He helped you escape from your father, installed you in England and you had a child together. That's a deeply connecting history. You don't extricate yourself from that very easily. In the same way it took me the rest of my life to get away from my ex, Chico.'

They finally got through the lights and headed up to the Cromwell Road.

‘Don't think I've forgotten that you haven't said what you think of me,' said Mercy. ‘I'm a cop. We've got a memory for dialogue.'

‘Back in your office you seemed scared, which was a bit confusing,' said Isabel. ‘I'd have expected you to be scared or worried if you
didn't
know what had happened to Amy. But in finding out, however terrible it is, at least the fear of the unknown is over. There's all sorts of other emotions going on, but not fear. As soon as I knew Alyshia was safe, the fear finished. My terror had no limits and then it was gone. Yours was still there. Was it me? Could I fill you with such dread because I might take Charlie away from you?'

‘No, it wasn't you,' said Mercy. ‘As always, it was me. The fear of being found out.'

T
he Pryors were a couple of very large Edwardian mansion blocks built in the first decade of the twentieth century on the edge of Hampstead Heath. They were flanked on one side by the open space of Pryor's Field, and on the other by the tree-lined Lime Avenue and the woodland beyond. Someone answering the description of Esme Boxer had been seen by a group of smokers outside the Well's Tavern making her way towards the Heath. Papadopoulos had taken the initiative of setting up a command post in the Pryors car park from where volunteers were dispatched to help in the search for the missing woman.

Thirty people had responded to Papadopoulos's Twitter call and twenty of the porter's dog-walking rambler friends had turned up. They had been dispersed mostly through the dense woodland between the Pryors and Kenwood House. At around half past eight police dog handlers arrived with a couple of German shepherds. Papadopoulos produced the scarf and hat taken from Esme Boxer's flat for the dogs to get the scent.

The female handler, Kirsty, took Esme's hat and went up the path towards the Vale of Health. Reg, the other handler, took the scarf. Papadopoulos joined him going down Lime Avenue. The volunteers' torches flickered in the blackness of the Heath. They moved forward in a vague line, the dry leaves rustling under their feet. There were other, untrained, dogs—golden retrievers, Labradors, various terriers, spaniels and a rather haughty standard poodle which seemed wary of leaving the main path to pursue this possibly dangerous work in the dark. Voices called out for Esme amid the barking of dogs and the distant thunder of overhead jets banking south to follow the Thames and land at Heathrow.

It was a clear, cold night and, with no rain for a couple of weeks, hard underfoot and good going for the volunteers. This made the task of finding a lone woman, dressed in black, in a large, heavily wooded, undulating area full of ditches and streams and the occasional lake only marginally easier.

Once beyond Pryor's Field the volunteers split into two groups, the larger heading north while the smaller group went south in the direction of Hampstead Ponds. Papadopoulos and Reg stayed with the larger group with the German shepherd roaming the woodland.

‘This is a business,' said Reg. ‘When they've made up their mind they don't make it easy, do they? You related?'

Papadopoulos explained the relationships and the murder in Madrid.

‘Vicki!' roared Reg. ‘You there?'

Two barks came back from the woods.

‘That means yes,' said Reg. ‘You getting anything, Vicki?'

One bark.

‘That means no.'

‘You're kidding.'

‘Yeah, I am. I like to think dogs can talk and understand, but they can't—I mean, not really. But I know what her bark means. I've been with her longer than my last girlfriend—and I didn't understand a word she said and she was English and of the same species. At least, I think she was.'

‘Did she react badly to being brought to heel?'

Reg laughed.

‘She couldn't cope with the fact that I spent up to ten hours a day with a complete bitch and loved every minute of it,' said Reg. ‘Then I'd get home and she wouldn't do what I told her to
and
she was bloody useless at catching biscuits.'

‘I thought dogs were supposed to be a great intro to women.'

‘Not police German shepherds, mate,' said Reg. ‘That's why I've got my eye on that Kirsty, but then she's only got eyes for Dougal. We're a lost cause, us dog handlers.'

They were crossing Bird Bridge on the way up to the Hampstead Gate when Vicki crossed their path and stayed on it for forty metres before heading off into the woodland on the left with three sharp barks.

‘She's on to something,' said Reg.

They plunged into the woodland after the dog. Reg kept calling out and the dog would respond, sometimes trotting back to make sure she was being followed. After fifteen minutes they came into a clearing where, on the far side, there was a carved wooden seat that looked like a miniature whale.

Vicki was up on this carving looking down the other side and barking repeatedly. From the left side of the clearing came the other police dog, Dougal, travelling at full speed, followed by Kirsty. They met at the seat. The dogs piped down. Esme was lying on her back in the grass, wrapped in her coat, the contents of her handbag all around and an empty bottle of Grey Goose vodka which looked as if it had been flung from the bench.

Papadopoulos put a call through to Central to send for an ambulance. Reg felt for a neck pulse. Kirsty searched for any pills that might have been taken. Other volunteers came into the clearing.

‘We've got a pulse, but her breathing is shallow,' said Reg.

‘Temazepam,' said Kirsty. ‘There's two empty twenty-mil bottles here.'

‘That's bad news with the Grey Goose,' said Papadopoulos. ‘I'll get the volunteers organised to direct the ambulance here from Spaniards Road.'

Reg and Kirsty moved Esme into the recovery position while Papadopoulos jogged back to the radio mast leaving a string of torch bearers behind him. The ambulance whooped up the hill and ten minutes later Esme was under oxygen and on her way to the Royal Free Hospital, with Papadopoulos by her side holding the empty Grey Goose and the temazepam bottles.

The paramedics took her straight into A & E, where a team was waiting. Papadopoulos gave them a probable ingestion time of somewhere between 19:15 and 19:30. The team glanced at the clock, which showed it was close to 21:00, said nothing and went into action.

 

‘So what were you afraid of?' asked Isabel.

Mercy didn't answer. She needed more time, more trust. This wasn't something to tell another person lightly, especially if that other person was going to be deeply involved with Charles Boxer.

‘Amazingly enough, the one thing I was never afraid of was Amy getting . . . '

She stalled, couldn't get the word out.

‘You know how it is these days. The media whips us up into a frenzy of panic about the imminence of all sorts of horrors. Not . . . not murder, strangely enough, unless you're a fifteen-year-old black kid in a gang or . . . not,' said Mercy, things spilling out as they came into her head. ‘Terrible how ruthless children can be, isn't it? Only life can teach them how to behave, and yet they feel this great need to overtake it. To have an experience before they're ready.'

‘Charlie said he'd always been worried about Amy getting ahead of herself.'

‘Which isn't a bad thing—being independent, I mean, given that some kids like to hang around at home until they're thirty or more,' said Mercy, running out of steam, knowing that there'd have been no chance of Amy doing that.

‘Somehow they've got to learn to make choices and understand consequences,' said Isabel. ‘You can't be with them all the time. I thought the difficulty with Alyshia would be to get her to understand failure. I thought she'd never known it. It was only during the kidnap that I realised how much she'd shielded me from her disappointments and failures.'