You Will Never Find Me (44 page)

The forensics were working around them so Hope and Mercy left the room, went outside the flat and stood in the taped-off corridor.

‘I don't mean to tell you how to do your job,' said Mercy. ‘I'm only doing this because I'm anxious about my daughter. My instinct's telling me to get some quick answers about what happened here. I'm scared for her.'

‘You've given me a good start,' said Hope, who hadn't taken her interference badly.

They exchanged numbers.

‘The neighbour said that Alice had been trying to stay off the crack. Hadn't had any since the new year. The only time she left the house was to get her money, go to her NA meetings and do some shopping. It sounds to me like the party came from the outside, and there had to be a reason for it.'

*

‘We need to talk,' said Lomax, nodding the Chilcotts back up the steps into the alleyway, ‘out of her hearing. I've no idea what your plans are for her, but it's best to keep your hostage in the dark about your intentions. Know what I mean?'

Dennis and Darren exchanged glances, not quite sure what he was on about. Lomax seemed to have thought himself into a position well beyond them.

‘Everything all right?' asked Dennis, going for upbeat.

‘Depends what you mean by “all right”,' said Lomax. ‘She's in there, if that's all that concerns you.'

‘What else?'

‘There are no facilities and I've been on my own here for twelve hours.'

‘What happened to Tel and Vlad?'

‘I sent them home, didn't want them to mess the situation up.'

‘How would they do that?' asked Darren. ‘They're just go-fetch boys—that was the idea.'

‘They couldn't be trusted to keep their dicks in their trousers.'

‘Why? She tasty or what?'

‘She's female, which is all they care about,' said Lomax. ‘But it's not the point.'

‘Why bring it up then?'

‘It had an impact on the situation.'

‘You know I always told Dad, that Miles Lomax bloke, he's too fucking brainy for his own good,' said Darren. ‘Read too many books, ain't yer?'

‘I seem to remember, Darren, you chose me for this job for precisely that reason,' said Lomax.

‘Faith that was well placed, I'd say,' said Dennis, trying to keep it calm.

‘So what have you got planned for the girl?'

‘We're exchanging her for somebody else plus thirty grand.'

‘Was that to cover my twenty-eight-grand debt?'

‘No,' said Darren brutally.

‘So you're exchanging her for someone who's prepared to be a hostage in her place?'

‘That's about it.'

‘That sounds like a very strange kidnap arrangement to me.'

‘It doesn't matter what it sounds like to you,' said Darren.

‘So the girl goes free and you get a replacement plus thirty grand?'

‘That's it,' said Dennis.

‘Then we have a problem,' said Lomax.

‘What went wrong?' asked Darren.

‘She was weak after the drug I gave her. I had to help her up off the bucket she was using for the toilet. She jumped me, tore off her mask and saw my face before I got her back under control.'

‘She'd already seen your face last night,' said Darren.

‘One of these days I'll give you some GHB, Darren,' said Lomax. ‘You'll find it'll take you a few days to remember where your arse is, let alone scratch it. GHB erases memory.'

‘So now you're saying she's seen your face when she's in a fit state to remember it.'

‘You're quicker than I thought, Darren,' said Lomax.

 

Boxer left the letters to Mercy and Amy on the dining table. The one to Mercy included instructions about things like the safe and the gun. She already had a set of keys to his flat. She was the only person he trusted to mind her own business.

He still had until evening before he had to hand himself over, so now he was on his way, with the thirty grand, to what he realised was going to be a very strange final meeting with Isabel, the woman who could have been the one, but now he would never know.

As he sat on the Tube his father came to mind, and he imagined it must have been a similar experience for him when he set about leaving his life in the space of twenty-four hours. Except that he'd just walked away. There were no goodbyes. Not even any final cryptic meetings or messages. Why hadn't he at least written a letter of explanation for his son to open in later life?

It was cold but sunny as he walked up the hill to Isabel's house. He felt remarkably cheerful and free of care. It was, he thought, perhaps how martyrs feel once they've embarked on their sacrificial mission.

Isabel was not expecting him. He hadn't called her because he knew she worked from home on Fridays, which she set aside for reading manuscripts away from the constant demands of the office.

‘Why didn't you call?' she said. ‘We could have done something.'

‘I don't want to do anything,' he said. ‘I'm waiting for a call to send me somewhere for work and I wanted to spend the time I had left with you.'

‘You look happy.'

‘I am.'

‘Does this mean you've found Amy? Are we celebrating?'

‘Not quite, but she'll be back with us soon . . . I'm pretty sure.'

‘That's very cryptic of you.'

‘You know what it's like when you've got to extricate yourself from the wrong choice. It takes time for a seventeen-year-old to swallow her pride.'

They went to the kitchen. She poured him a beer, gave herself a glass of white wine. She was in jeans, which was surprising, because she normally dressed for maximum feminine impact. She even apologised for being caught in her ‘sitting around reading' clothes. He told her she looked great—even younger.

‘I just wanted to thank you for looking after Mercy that night,' said Boxer. ‘You were the only person who could have done that.'

‘We covered a lot of ground,' she said.

‘About what?'

‘Amy, inevitably, and . . . you.'

‘Did you get anywhere with the latter?'

‘We talked about when you were married.'

‘Not our finest hour.'

‘No. She said as much.'

‘I'm not sure I'm the marrying type,' said Boxer.

‘Why not?'

‘Too secretive,' said Boxer. ‘And I can't take the pressure of my secrets under the relentless observation of a marriage.'

‘Have you lived with anybody else since you split from Mercy?'

‘Not for any length of time. I'm more of a staying-over kind of person.'

Isabel wanted to ask about those secrets, but she also didn't want any answers. This was her ideal state: to be in the presence of someone substantial who only gave her glimpses of himself. It was her own, very personal definition of love.

‘Mercy told me you that you were a good father to Amy when she was small, but how your work interfered and gradually you grew distant.'

‘Did she admit to you there was some question mark about Amy's paternity?'

‘Yes, she did,' said Isabel, hesitant, a little astonished.

‘We all have our secrets,' said Boxer. ‘Some bigger than others. Even between two people as close as Mercy and me. That can be difficult in marriage.'

‘And how do you feel about that?' asked Isabel.

‘It doesn't matter to me. I'm beyond genetics. It comes down to what I feel for Amy. I've always considered her my daughter and even more so this past week. If a lab tech says I'm not her father it makes no difference. I'm both deserving and undeserving. When I found that the body part did not belong to her I was so relieved . . . elated, even though I haven't always been there for her.'

‘A lot of men would find it hard to deal with a revelation like that.'

‘You mean Mercy's deceit?' said Boxer. ‘That's what you really mean. And you're right. Men have killed for a lot less. Paternity reaches down to their core. But I'm not that kind of guy.'

‘How do you know?'

‘You can't kill someone, even if it is in the heat of battle, and hope to remain the same. Once you've felt that kind of savagery and done that kind of damage to a fellow human you can never re-enter the world of men. You're always going to be separate, an outsider. Some can live with it, others can't. It was why Mercy, and then Amy, became very important to me.'

The truth was flowing out of him, but even in this new heightened state he could still feel the checks, small dams arresting the flow, never allowing himself to reveal everything. It wasn't easy to overcome a lifetime's withholding in a few hours.

Isabel sensed there was something different about him and imagined that, at this dramatic point in his life, he'd decided to draw her further in. She went to him, sat on his lap and kissed him, running her fingers up the back of his neck into his hair. Within minutes she was bent over the kitchen table with her jeans around her knees, her pants stretched between her thighs while he drove into her from behind with a passion and a need that had her hanging on to the edges of the table, as their empty glasses slid around and fell over.

Once that first crazy desire was over they went upstairs, took off their clothes and made love again, slowly, until the afternoon light started fading and Isabel drifted into sleep.

Boxer lay there with his arm around her, staring out of the window for a long hour. He whispered, ‘I love you,' to her, even though he knew she couldn't hear him. He was trying it out, seeing if he believed it, seeing if it hurt. Then he quickly got up, took his clothes downstairs, dressed and left the house.

As he came out of the gardens in front of the development, his mobile rang. It was the Londoner.

‘Go to an Internet café and phone store on the Finchley Road called Hari's. It's between the Tube station and the O2 Centre. You ask for Ali. You'll get your instructions there.'

 

Zorrita was sitting in the coroner's office, watching him put the final touches to his report after his full examination of all Chantrelle Grant's body parts.

‘The interesting thing,' said the coroner, ‘is that I could find no evidence of violence sufficient to have caused death. The forehead bruise was consistent with bumping into a door or something like it and there was no evidence of haemorrhaging. The facial wounds were nasty but superficial, probably from a belt buckle. She hadn't been strangled, stabbed or shot. All her arteries were intact. None of the important organs showed any sign of damage. She'd had sex so I sent a sperm sample to the lab, so we'll get some DNA from that . . . eventually.'

‘Are you saying you don't know?' asked Zorrita.

‘No. It's just surprising, that's all,' said the coroner. ‘Given that the body was found in this state, we had expectations.'

‘That she was murdered.'

‘Exactly,' he said, nodding. ‘I managed to extract a blood sample large enough to reveal a high level of alcohol and cocaine, so I checked her liver and found it contained cocaethylene. That led me to look at her heart, because that combination can produce a metabolite which induces marked coronary arterial vasoconstriction, leading to myocardial ischaemia, infarction and sudden death, which is what had happened.'

‘So you're saying that
technically
she wasn't murdered?'

‘The way I see it, she was obviously out partying with someone. I think he got her back to his apartment. There was clearly some violence and some sex, but there doesn't seem to have been any sexual violence.'

‘Could she have been dead by the time the sex took place?'

‘Quite possibly,' said the coroner. ‘It takes between six and twelve hours for the cocaethylene to be produced.'

‘And time of death was . . . ?'

‘Around six in the morning,' said the coroner. ‘If the man had been consuming alcohol and cocaine to the same level as the girl it's more than likely that he would have passed out and woken up hours later to find a dead body on his hands. He probably panicked when he saw the marks on her face, thought he'd killed her and decided that the best way to get her out of his apartment was to cut her up.'

‘You'd only do that if you had good reason to believe you were guilty or you didn't want to be investigated by the police,' said Zorrita. ‘I mean, some student wouldn't take a girl home, pass out and wake up in the morning thinking his only way out was to cut her up and dispose of her. The killer bled her too. He'd thought about it. Knew how he was going to control the potential mess.'

‘Pig farmer?' said the coroner, shrugging.

‘I think we're still talking about someone with a criminal mind,' said Zorrita. ‘Not a total innocent.'

 

‘How's it going with your list of estate agents?' asked Mercy, on the phone to George.

‘No luck so far, and we've seen everybody on Olga's list,' said Papadopoulos. ‘Our problem now is coverage. We can't rely on just phoning around and asking if they've handled an enquiry from Irina Demidova or Zlata Yankov because firstly, we don't know what name she's been using. If she's got two names on the go she probably has more. And secondly, there are all sorts of people in these offices, and not everybody knows who the other agents' clients are.'

‘So you need to visit each one and show the photo,' said Mercy.

‘And hope that the agent who was dealing with her is in the office at the time,' said Papadopoulos. ‘There are still agents on that list that we have to revisit because of that.'

‘What about entering the spec for the house on one of those property sites, like Primelocation, and seeing what it throws up? Maybe some of these rentals don't get removed very quickly, and if it was for a short let they might not even bother to take it off the market.'