by Tony Parsons
‘Still a chance?’ Mrs Lyle said. ‘Still a chance?’
‘We have to give our forensic people time to see if they can find anything.’
Then I tried speaking to Frank Lyle like a cop. Because talking to him like a father just wasn’t working.
‘You know how it works, sir,’ I said. ‘If you go public right now then every sick nutjob in the land is going to crawl out from under his stone and contact us. And that will make finding Jessica almost impossible.’
He took a step closer to me and for a moment I thought he was going to strike me.
‘Yes, I know how it works,’ he said. ‘I know exactly how it works, son. I know that two hundred and seventy-five thousand people go missing every year in this country. And I know that a thousand unidentified bodies are found every year. And I know that the only missing the public give a flying fig about are the beautiful ones. Because they can’t care about everyone who goes missing – there are too many. An army of missing people. The public only care about the special ones. That’s right, isn’t it? A beautiful missing woman, exactly like my daughter. A beautiful little child. People care about them and we have to exploit the fact that they care about the beautiful ones. Because my daughter, son, was the most beautiful of them all.’
I took a breath and held it. He was right. The missing have to be beautiful before the public gives a damn. But publicity could also explode in your face.
‘Just give us a chance to do it our way for a little longer,’ I pleaded. ‘Before you go public.’
He shook his head. ‘There’s no time,’ he said. He lowered his voice but I think his wife was beyond listening to him. ‘Because I know that if we do not get her back quickly then we are not going to get her back at all,’ he said. ‘At least, not alive. She’s my daughter and we’re doing it my way. For you, she’s just another job. But she’s my flesh and blood. She’s my life. And if we get a ransom demand, then we’re paying it – whatever it is, understood? I don’t care. I – we – will find the money. I – we – have got the money.’
‘If you start talking like that in front of the cameras then we are going to have every scam artist in town calling,’ Whitestone said, her voice cold and unsweetened.
‘I don’t care,’ Lyle said, his eyes still drilling into me. ‘And I don’t give a monkey’s how busy you get. I just want Jess back. That’s the only thing in the world that I care about. And when I’ve got her home, and Jess is safe and sound, and she has her baby in her arms, then I am going to find the men who did this and I am going to kill them.’
6
I realised as I was driving to Auto Waste Solutions that I had been looking at it for years.
If you raise your eyes as you drive south past Camden Market, heading into town, then above the rooftops you will briefly see what looks like a mountain range made out of old metal and painted in primary colours. It is there only for a moment and feels as if you imagined it, or got caught by some trick of the light, for what you glimpse strongly resembles a child’s drawing of a mountain range – soaring, brightly coloured peaks and plunging crevices all made out of pointy triangles, a Himalayan skyline made of scrap metal.
This was Auto Waste Solutions, and that mountain range was built by Harry Flowers on a light industrial estate below Camden and Kentish Town, and just above King’s Cross. The area has been transformed in recent years but there are still pockets that have remained untouched for more than half a century, neighbourhoods that were bombed flat by the Luftwaffe but somehow escaped ever getting built over by the property developers.
Auto Waste Solutions was surrounded by businesses that all needed room to spread out in the middle of the city. A couple of car dealerships. A police car pound. The local council’s recycling centre. There was lots of space for lots of cars: cars to be sold, cars that had been impounded by the law and – at the centre of that untouched, unchanging little nook of the city – cars that had come to die at Auto Waste Solutions.
The gates were open and I drove inside.
Within the boundary of climb-proof fencing and razor wire, the man-made peaks of scrap cars loomed all around, in some places piled as high as a four-storey house. I got out of the BMW and stared up at the view.
Most of the vehicles were dying of the passing of time, models that had not been produced for twenty or thirty years, but – shoved in among cars that had expired of old age – there were brand-new, store-fresh write-offs, cars that had been wrecked beyond repair, and now had ten, twenty, thirty or more vehicles stacked on top of them.
It was a big yard, half the size of a football field. Off to one side there was a wooden hut, like an office on a building site, and plenty of parking space for the half-a-dozen cars that were in front of it. Parked next to a yellow forklift that was big enough to pick up a family saloon, there was the Bentley Bentayga.
The two men who had been with Flowers at Fred’s gym came out of the wooden hut.
The fat white man, Derek Bumpus, climbed into the yellow forklift and fired it up, frowning at me. The other one, the big black guy, Ruben Shavers, came over to me with a friendly smile on his handsome face.
I indicated the Bentley.
‘Your boss around?’
He looked at the car. ‘No, I’m borrowing it. Mo lets me sometimes.’ He looked back at me. ‘Mr Flowers is not here.’ He smiled, and it was a charming smile, as if we were sharing a joke. ‘You’re welcome to look inside the office, if you don’t believe me.’
‘I believe you, Ruben.’
‘Can I help you with anything?’
I raised my chin, taking it all in. ‘I wanted to see this place for myself.’
His white teeth shone with amusement. ‘Making sure it really exists?’
‘Something like that,’ I said. ‘I saw you fight.’
‘Then you must be older than you look.’
‘You were a heavyweight, but one of those heavyweights who can dance and move. Incredibly light on your feet, as I recall. And you had heavy hands. You knocked people out.’
‘Long time ago.’
He raised his hand, gesturing for me to step back as Bumpus lumbered past us in the big yellow forklift.
We watched the yellow forklift select a washed-out Ford Cortina from the foothills of that metal mountain range of cars. Bumpus then turned the forklift round and headed for a machine that looked like a garage made of steel with one side missing. It was a car compactor, or car crusher, designed to pound three-dimensional, 2-ton cars made of steel, glass and rubber into flat-pack scrap metal.
The car compactor was built into the back of a large lorry and when Bumpus had carefully placed the Cortina inside, as though he had parked the old Ford in a garage with a missing wall, he proceeded to destroy it, reversing a few yards and then advancing forward, reversing a few yards and coming forward, using the twin metal spikes on the front of the forklift to pierce the doors, break the side windows and crumple the panelling.
‘He looks like he’s enjoying himself,’ I said.
‘He is,’ Shavers said. ‘But the compactor actually works better if the car being crushed has already been broken up.’
He saw me looking at his hands.
They were twice the size of my hands, the hands of a professional heavyweight boxer, and although I knew it was an occupational hazard for boxers to have what they called bad hands – hands that were easily injured, hands that were slow to heal, hands that hurt when you threw a punch – from what I recalled, Ruben Shavers had never shown any sign of his hands hurting in the ring.
He showed them to me now, lifting them up, palms down, and I saw that they were covered in white circles where someone had taken a hammer to them.
‘Who did that to you?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Long time ago. Let’s call him a jealous husband. Every fighter has his weak spot. Weak chin. Bad hands.’ He smiled. ‘My weak spot was that I liked the ladies and the ladies liked me. Even if they were married ladies.’
Derek Bumpus was out of the forklift. He hit a button at the side of the car compactor and the roof slowly came down with a long unbroken whine that covered the sound of the cracking steel and glass and rubber.
When the Ford Cortina was 6 inches high, Bumpus hit the button again and the car compactor slowly rose with that same unbroken white-noise whine as he climbed back into the forklift and trundled off to get another dead car.
‘Mr Flowers took me in,’ Shavers said. ‘When my fighting days were done. After I got caught putting my hands where they shouldn’t have been. Took me in, as he took in Big Del there when he was an abused kid from a care home working as a bouncer on the doors before his balls had dropped.’
I thought of the Mahone family having their Sunday lunch interrupted by a pair of men with a petrol can. But every big-name gangster who ever scared the living daylights out of someone had someone else who thought they were a plaster saint.
‘Good old Harry Flowers,’ I said. ‘He’s all heart.’
‘Mr Flowers wants to help you,’ Shavers said.
I started back to my BMW, thinking that one day it would end up in a car graveyard like this one. I nodded goodbye to Ruben Shavers, and I wondered if his boss knew that he sometimes borrowed his car.
‘I enjoyed watching you fight, Ruben,’ I told him. ‘Drive carefully now.’
The old cop was right.
Most of the vast army of the missing are ignored by the public, their disappearance considered of no interest or importance beyond those who knew them.
But nobody was going to be allowed to forget Jessica Lyle.
She would never be one of the forgotten.
Because when her parents brought her baby son to the press conference a few hours later, they guaranteed that tomorrow morning her kidnapping would be at the top of every news cycle and on the front page of every newspaper and the big lead splash on every media website.
Frank and Jennifer followed Whitestone into the media room of West End Central, baby Michael sleeping in his grandmother’s arms, only the top of his smooth bulging brow visible above his tartan blanket.
A room full of cameras flashed with excitement.
I was at home alone in the loft watching the news on my laptop and I shook my head in admiration. Frank Lyle had got exactly what he wanted. Now the whole world would know about his daughter.
The presence of the baby had a compelling effect on the press. In front of a blown-up photograph of Jessica Lyle’s laughing face, Frank Lyle stared out at a room that was hushed with an almost reverential silence. In the corner of the image of Jessica’s face, there were contact details for anyone with information. Below a telephone number and an email address at West End Central, there was a hashtag leaning up against one short cruel word.
#taken
‘Everybody loves Jess,’ Lyle began. ‘My daughter – our daughter – is a kind, decent young woman. A wonderful mother. A loving daughter.’ He looked up from his statement, his mouth set in a grim straight line, and the cameras flashed into life. ‘Jessica is not missing. Jessica has been taken. We want her home. We want her home with her baby and we want it with all of our hearts.’ For the first time, his voice faltered with emotion and the cameras flashed, as if in acknowledgement of the depth of feeling, the raw open wound of a father’s grief. They’re loving it, I thought. They’re lapping it up. If it bleeds, it leads.
‘We want our girl,’ Frank Lyle said. ‘Our grandson Michael wants – needs – his mother. My former colleagues in the Metropolitan Police are doing their best to find Jess. But as of this moment, only the men who have taken her have it in their power to bring her home. We will give you whatever you want,’ he said, punching out every word, to an audible intake of breath. ‘Money is no object. We are not negotiating. Name your price.’
Whitestone glanced sideways at Lyle, her face unreadable.
Lyle looked directly at the cameras.
‘Please,’ he said, and it was as if he was pleading to an uncaring world. ‘Anyone with information can contact the police at the telephone number and the email address you see behind me.’ He glanced back at the oversized picture of his daughter’s smiling face and seemed to swoon with missing her. A tall man, it was as if he swayed in a wind that was only in his head. Then he recovered himself and turned back to the room. ‘You can call us anonymously. You can contact us on social media using the hashtag you see behind you.’ He paused again, a man who had happily lived his life without the presence of hashtags who now discovered that a hashtag might be his last chance to salvage his crumbling world. ‘Hashtag taken,’ he said, and the words stuck in his throat like a tumour. ‘We await your instructions,’ he finished. ‘Thank you all for coming.’
Whitestone and the Lyles turned away from a babble of questions.
‘Frank, when you say you’ll give them whatever they want—’
‘Mrs Lyle – hold the baby up a bit, will you? Hold up Michael!’
‘But how do you FEEL? How do you FEEL?’
‘No questions,’ Whitestone said.
I shook my head, this time in disbelief, as I looked at the hotline telephone number on the poster of Jessica Lyle. I pictured TDC Joy Adams in MIR-1, waiting at the other end of the line as every crank, sicko and keyboard fantasist in the land gave us a call.
Frank Lyle had ensured his daughter’s disappearance would not be ignored.
But he might have made our job impossible.
I heard a car that I recognised pull up in the street below and I went to the giant windows of our loft.
Anne, my ex-wife, got out of the driver’s seat.
Across the street, a pack of meat porters gearing up for the night shift at Smithfield turned to look at her. Anne did that to strangers. She turned their heads and kept them turned. She still looked like the model she had once been, but with ten years or so of disappointment behind her.
Scout clambered out of the back seat, clutching her book. And from the passenger side, a young man emerged. He was maybe in his early twenties, a decade or so younger than Anne, a real good-looking boy, fashionably unkempt.
As Scout was scrambling in the back seat to retrieve her rucksack, the young man placed a kiss on Anne’s mouth.
I turned away from the window and looked at Stan, who stared back at me with his black, bulging, Manga-comic eyes.
‘What now, Stan?’ I asked him.
The dog didn’t reply, but he headed towards the front door, his tail swishing with anticipation, sensing the return of Scout, smelling her scent, that Scout smell of shampoo and sugar, books and dog.
I knew there had been problems in Anne’s marriage, her next stop after she had left our little family for a new life – new husband, new children – in a leafier part of town. And I knew her husband – Oliver – had lost his good job in finance. But I didn’t realise that things had got to the point where handsome young men would be kissing her mouth in broad daylight in front of a bunch of leering meat porters.
I was at the open door waiting for them as Scout rushed into the loft, Stan jumping up beside her, wagging his tail off, delirious with joy as she threw herself on the sofa and opened her book.
Anne came in, the young man hovering sheepishly behind her, a fixed grin on his smooth face. He liked his smile, believed it was his secret weapon, but it wasn’t working on me. Excited at the sight and scent of someone new, Stan veered off the sofa to make a huge fuss of him, ready to fall in love.
Oh, you little slut, Stan, I thought.
‘Max, this is Roberto,’ my ex-wife said, with a theatrical gesture of one hand.
He smiled and nodded.
I nodded and waited.
Married for years but divorced for a lifetime, I thought.
What now? I thought again.
‘Roberto and I are going to Sicily,’ Anne said. A delicate pause. ‘And I want to take Scout.’
I looked across at Scout. The cover of her book displayed a sky-blue Vespa. The Rough Guide to It
aly. And suddenly it all started to make sense. The book she had been carrying around was not from the school library.
It was from her mother.
‘Mud baths, the beach and spa treatments,’ Scout read aloud. ‘Activities on Salina.’
‘When?’ I said.
‘Next week,’ Anne said. ‘For ten days. Leaving Monday.’
‘No,’ I said, not even needing to think about it. It was dead easy. ‘I’m not taking Scout out of school for a holiday to Sicily or anywhere else. She has months off in the summer. It can wait until then. She needs to go to school.’
Anne flinched, as if my ignorance caused her real physical pain.
‘But what’s she going to miss?’ she said. ‘A bit of finger-painting and making things out of Lego?’
I took a deep breath and slowly let it go.
But it was still inside me, all of it, all the tension wound up tight, everything I felt about what had happened between the three of us over the last few years.
‘She’s not three years old – she’s eight,’ I said, as calm and quiet as I could make it. ‘And it’s not finger-painting and things made out of Lego any more. It hasn’t been for a while. It’s maths and English and My Family and Other Animals.’ A beat. And I wanted to keep my mouth shut. I wanted to leave it there. But then I just could not resist it. The stuff about finger-painting and Lego pushed the wrong button. ‘But then you wouldn’t know that, would you?’ I said.
Scout looked up from her book, her face falling.
‘Are you having an argument?’ she said. ‘Please don’t.’
‘It’s a discussion,’ Anne and I said together, with the perfect harmony of a couple who had endured the assault course of a collapsed marriage.
I turned to smile at Scout. ‘It’s a school night,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you say goodbye to your mother and get your kit ready for tomorrow?’
Anne and Scout exchanged a fierce and silent hug. Scout went off to her bedroom. Stan was still attempting to climb up Roberto’s legs. The young man wasn’t a dog person, you could tell.
