You Will Never Find Me (8 page)

‘I can see it. You're working yourself over. It's the most natural thing in the world to blame yourself. Don't. It won't help you to think clearly, and that's what you've got to try and do now. How do you think I know about Amy?'

She wiped last night from her mind and blinked her way through the possibilities until she focused once more.

‘The UK Border Agency.'

‘That's right. We've just heard back from them this morning. Amy left on a flight to Madrid from Terminal 1 at Heathrow last night. Her arrival at Barajas Airport passport control has been confirmed. The police in Madrid have been informed.'

 

‘What you want?' asked the guy, hood up, hands in pockets around his flat stomach, knackered jeans, trainers. He was leaning against the handrail halfway up the stairway in Perth House on the Bemerton Estate, a spit from the Cally Road. He was looking at Boxer in his knee-length black wool coat, jeans and brown leather boots and knew just from the man's haircut and health that he wasn't from the estate.

‘I've come to see Glider,' said Boxer, breathing in some calm, which he ordinarily had to do after his visits to Esme. He started up the steps.

The guy pushed himself off the handrail and barred Boxer's way, hands still in pockets.

‘You police or what?

‘No.'

‘You look like police.'

‘Well, I'm not,' said Boxer. ‘I just want to talk to Glider.'

‘What about?'

‘He knows my daughter.'

‘He's not in. Gone away,' said the guy, confident now.

‘So you know him,' said Boxer. ‘Why don't you take me to his flat so I can see for myself.'

‘You don't believe me?' said the guy, his face gone dead, eyes threatening.

Boxer grabbed the handrail on either side of him, hopped up and flicked his boot out and caught the guy on the inside of the knee. He went down with a shout, slipped down some steps, holding on to his leg.

‘Fa-a-a-ck!'

‘Which floor's he on?'

Boxer tore back the guy's hood, twisted it so that the neck tightened around his throat and banged the guy's head, first into the wall and then onto the step as if he was no more than a rag doll. An eyebrow split, blood trickled down his face.

‘Tell me,' said Boxer. ‘I'm not feeling very patient.'

‘Up the stairs, third floor, flat 306.'

‘Introduce me,' said Boxer, pulling the guy to his feet by his hood, throwing him up the stairs.

The guy hobbled up the dark stairs on all fours like a chimp, with Boxer following him at a measured pace. They reached the third floor and went down the covered walkway to Glider's flat. The guy knocked on the door, Boxer stood back. The door opened and he pushed the hoody forward, charged in behind him.

‘What the fuck?'

Boxer bundled the two guys down the short hallway and they came out in a heated living room with dark blue walls and red furniture that looked better than the rest of the flat. A thickset brutal-looking shaven-headed thug sat on the sofa in a white vest, jeans, no shoes, with his hand resting on the bare thigh of a young black girl in tight black shorts. His nose looked as if it had been broken a few times and his eyes were set wide apart over its shattered bridge. This was Glider, Boxer could tell from the heavily muscled arms, which were black, blue, green and red with tattoos, while his hands didn't have a mark on them. It made him look incongruously gloved. Boxer's imagination failed him as he tried to picture Glider with his daughter.

‘Says he's not police . . . just wants to talk to you about his daughter,' said the hoody, leaning against the wall rubbing his knee, while the other guy, arms held out, biceps tensed, pecs twitching, was looking for a way in to Boxer.

‘Don't bleed on the fucking carpet,' said Glider, pointing a vicious finger. ‘Fuck off back downstairs, both o' you. Useless wankers.'

He flicked a thumb at the girl, who got up and took her shorts, straining over her large behind, into another room. The hoody and his friend limped out; a door closed elsewhere in the flat. Glider supported himself with his hands on the sofa arms as if he might split them away from the seat. There was a large glass ashtray filled with butts on the seat next to him and, on the coffee table in front, a carton of Marlboros and a Zippo.

‘You don't look like the kind of bloke whose daughter I'd know,' he said.

‘You went to Tenerife ten days ago with a bunch of girls to bring back cigarettes.'

‘How do you know it was me?'

‘Your name came up as the gang leader.'

‘None of those girls knows where I live.'

‘It didn't take me long.'

‘Ten days?' said Glider, smirking.

Boxer dead-eyed him. Glider frowned, trying to work out what this was about: an angry father, that was clear, but about what and why now?

‘Let's start with your daughter's name,' he said.

‘Amy.'

‘Oh yeah,' he said, holding eye contact. ‘The coloured girl.'

‘I can see you've got a taste for them,' said Boxer.

‘You and me both, I'd say.'

Glider's hand slipped off the arm of the sofa and came to rest on the glass ashtray. Boxer didn't miss a thing, kept his eyes on Glider's.

‘As I remember, there were four girls, all friends of Karen's,' said Glider. ‘We met up in Tenerife. Had ourselves a nice weekend.'

‘Smuggling cigarettes.'

‘Right,' said Glider. ‘Just covering our costs. They knew what they were doing and they were up for it. Nobody got hurt and they all got paid.'

‘You slept with my daughter,' said Boxer, matter-of-fact, not injured by it.

‘She's twenty-one.'

‘Seventeen.'

‘Well, there you go. Not what she told me. And not a criminal offence neither,' said Glider, getting riled now. ‘If every dad came hunting for every bloke their daughters had slept with of a weekend this city'd grind to a halt.'

‘Where is she now, Glider?'

Silence while the import of that question elbowed along Glider's synapses.

‘So, she done a runner,' said Glider. ‘Not to me, she hasn't. None of those girls knows where I lives . . . remember?'

Boxer was on him in a flash. One foot treading on the hand around the ashtray, the other foot in his crotch, knee on his chest. He reached for the ashtray, emptied it in Glider's face, who spat out the butts and ash.

‘You want to take a bite of this?' asked Boxer, ashtray high above his head.

Glider rested his head on the back of the sofa, showed he wasn't fighting. He'd seen the speed with which Boxer had moved, and the expertise had made him realise that this was no ordinary unhappy dad.

‘No need for that,' he said. ‘We're just talking.'

Boxer was surprised at how wound up he was. He wanted to ram the ashtray into Glider's teeth, and he'd have done it if the brute had given him the slightest cause. He stepped back off the sofa, turned and hurled the ashtray into the open-plan kitchen, where it smashed against the wall. Shards cascaded down onto the dirty plates and glasses on the counter.

Glider eyed him as he would an unpredictable animal, one prone to tail-wagging and seconds later taking chunks out of legs. He didn't move.

‘You're going to do two things for me,' said Boxer. ‘You're going to put all your feelers out to everybody you know and find out if they've heard anything from Amy. And you're going to be very cool about it. You don't want to spook her. When you find out something you call me, right?'

Boxer flipped Glider a card, which landed on his chest. He didn't reach for it.

‘And give me your number,' said Boxer, punching it into his mobile.

The mobile buzzed in his hand. Mercy. She told him about the UK Border Agency, said that Security at Heathrow Airport was going to put together some CCTV footage of the person they believed to be Amy and would send it to her at SCD 7. The Spanish police were already on to it. Boxer hung up.

If there was any change in Boxer's demeanour, Glider didn't see it.

‘You do that for me?'

Glider nodded.

Boxer trotted downstairs, nodded at the two hoodies in the stairwell on the way.

 

‘Amy,' said Mercy, riveted to the screen as she stood watching at her desk, fists planted, checking the clothes her daughter was wearing, the same ones as when she'd left the house, dropped in to say goodbye.

There were no passport checks on leaving the UK, but the Border Agency had summoned a passport photo of Amy Boxer and sent it to the terminal manager at Heathrow. One of the computer operators in Security, as a favour, had put together footage of the girl they believed to be Amy Boxer arriving at Terminal 1, visiting the ladies' toilet before heading through security and the departure lounge.

Once Mercy had seen that clear shot of Amy, arriving at the terminal and heading for the lifts wearing those clothes, despair settled in her stomach. She unplanted her fists, stretched out her hands and sat back in her chair, watching vaguely as the footage jumped to different cameras and angles tracking Amy over the concourse, through security, in and out of shops.

Mercy stared at the screen, her mind flitting between strange vignettes: an indistinct image of Madrid, a city she'd never been to, her daughter somewhere in the Spanish cliché Mercy's mind was inventing and the rather more uncomfortable memory of her own shameful liaison with Marcus Alleyne because she'd first seen him with Amy in an airport.

Her concentration slipped away from the CCTV images as she tried to remember whether she'd felt any attraction to Alleyne on seeing him meet Amy at Gatwick just over a week ago. Then she was vividly reliving last night, with Alleyne's hard body on top of her, his face staring down from above, his arms outstretched as he rammed into her, while her heels came up to the sides of his buttocks and spurred him on. He'd whispered her name, Mercy, Mercy, Mercy with each thrust as if begging for clemency. She sighed as the phone rang. The guilt kicked in once more as DCS Makepeace said he was ready to see her again.

‘Do you want some time off, Mercy?' he asked.

‘Not at the moment,' she said. ‘Now that we've established she's gone to Madrid we'll have to wait for the Spanish to give us some kind of lead.'

‘Does she know anybody in Spain?'

‘She had a Spanish boyfriend a couple of years ago, a holiday romance, but out on the coast. She's never been to Madrid.'

‘So she's probably in a hotel at least for the first night,' said Makepeace. ‘Everybody who stays in a hotel in Spain has to give their passport details when they check in, but that information reaching any sort of data centre takes time.'

‘Well, I don't speak Spanish. So I'm not going to be much use out there.'

‘Do you or Charles have any contacts who could speed up the process?' said Makepeace. ‘What about that old friend of his from the army days? The one who works in MI6?'

‘Simon Deacon?' said Mercy. ‘Well, first of all, he's on the Asia desk so Europe's not really his area, and second, I don't know, that seems like a big gun to pull on a tiny little bird.'

‘But he'd have some kind of link into Spanish intelligence, who could make it happen now rather than it taking days, during which time Amy moves on and you lose the trail.'

Mercy was nodding at him but with no show of engaging the gears.

‘Mercy?' he asked.

‘I'm just thinking,' she said, ‘how well she's planned this. She's been meticulous. Far more meticulous that I was when I ran away.'

‘And?'

‘I'm just thinking out loud, sir. She hasn't torn off into the night after some huge family row, which is the ultimate vulnerable and dangerous state to be in. She's rationally and logically executed her plan to leave home.'

‘It's been difficult for you over these last three years, I know.' Mercy grunted at the understatement.

‘Part of me is thinking . . . let her go,' she said and waited for the shocked intake of breath, not just from Makepeace, who had two children, but from the whole of child-centric Britain.

‘What's the other part of you thinking?' said Makepeace, shrewd, used to seeing people operating under stressful circumstances.

‘Oh, that's the usual mess of love, anger, rejection, inadequacy, guilt,' she said, stumbling on, ‘you know, the whole gamut of emotions of the failed mother.'

‘Isn't the one influencing the other?'

‘What would happen if we got her back or rather brought her back?' said Mercy. ‘Or maybe
dragged
her back is the word I'm looking for?'

‘I suppose you'd go into some kind of family therapy where there was a forum for you all to express your . . . anger, disappointment and frustration,' said Makepeace, thinking he didn't like the sound of that much either.

‘Or she could go out into the big wide world and see if she could make a go of it,' said Mercy. ‘Like I did.'

‘Your father never spoke to you again.'

‘A blessing,' said Mercy. ‘And I would never cut Amy off. She can come back any time, talk to me whenever she likes.'

Makepeace frowned, couldn't imagine having these thoughts about his own children.

‘And her education?'

‘She wouldn't get A levels but she doesn't want them. She doesn't want to go to university. She's not interested. She's bored by it all. She wants a life,' said Mercy. ‘But she doesn't want anything to do with the old life. Karen, her girlfriend, told us that she's terminated her Facebook and Twitter accounts.'

‘Is Karen in on this?'

‘The one thing I can tell you from looking in my mirror every day is when someone is hurt,' said Mercy. ‘Karen is hurt and Amy's the one who's done it. She's walked out on everybody, not just Charlie and me. Her friends, family, even her grandmother, although . . . '