by Gary Bell
I nodded to Zara. We were in the right place.
‘You once did some work with a solicitor named Jack Aaronson in Nottinghamshire?’
‘That’s right. Must’ve been, wow, three, three and a half years ago now? They were running a legal advice service, so they had a lot of queries about rights of tenants and the like.’
‘You didn’t happen to make any notes or transcripts during these meetings, did you?’ Zara interjected.
‘No …’ She frowned slightly. ‘That wouldn’t have been appropriate. Why do you ask?’
I took the poster out of my pocket, unfolded Parinda Malik’s blurred features, and handed it over. ‘It’s a long shot, we understand, but do you happen to remember this client coming in for a consultation?’
The sensible portion of my heart wasn’t expecting much, so I was surprised to see, from the way her eyes hollowed, that she did.
Her hands tightened their grip on the printout. ‘What’s this about, exactly?’
‘We’re not sure,’ I admitted, ‘but this woman went missing a matter of hours after she came to that consultation. You were present, weren’t you? You translated for her?’
‘Yes.’ She got to her feet, crossed the room, and checked the door. Sat back down and stared at the paper. ‘Parinda Malik was the last person to come in that day. I remember well, because she put me in a strange mood, one that stuck with me for the entire weekend. She seemed so … afraid.’
I hoped she wouldn’t notice my hands shaking with excitement. ‘Do you remember what she was there for? It’d be a big help. It might even help us find her.’
‘I remember,’ she said quietly, glancing back and forth between us. ‘She said that she was being harassed. She wanted advice on what to do about it. If I’d have thought, even for a second, that …’ She fell silent and remained that way for a while.
‘Anything else?’ I asked, barely able to draw the breath needed to do so.
‘Yes …’ She licked her lips, looked back down at the poster, and then stared me dead in the eyes. ‘She was being harassed by a senior police officer.’
Back through the snow, slipping on ice, we dived into the refuge of my car, causing the golf clubs to clatter off the back seat and into the well. I shook the snow from my hat and tossed it onto the seat behind me.
‘Oh, we’ve got him!’ Zara yelled, slamming the passenger door, sending a lump of snow dropping from the roof. ‘We’ve got that fucker nailed! This is the link, isn’t it? If we can get her to submit a statement, then we can tie it all together. Girls going missing across Nottinghamshire, and a report of harassment only hours before one suddenly disappeared!’
‘Maybe …’ I nodded, turning the key and blasting the heater. ‘Though it’s only another word against DeWitt’s, and McNally would have to breach code of conduct to submit it. That’s risky, and we have to avoid more risks. We need something solid. I’ve got to convince McCarthy to roll on his boss.’
‘So, let’s do it!’ She drummed the dashboard with her gloves. ‘To Notts!’
‘Slow down a moment.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Think about it. You really want to start your career by taking this further and officially accusing a senior commanding officer of … well, what exactly? Perverting the course of justice? Murder? Conspiracy?’ I shook my head. ‘No. First, I should get you back to London, and then I’ll give McCarthy a call when I’ve had time to –’
‘No way, Mr Rook! You think I don’t know what’s at stake here? We started this together, and we’re finishing this together.’
I opened my palms against the heater, and Zara placed a hand on my shoulder.
‘I once told you that I want to defend those who are powerless to defend themselves,’ she said. ‘Well, that goes for outside the courtroom, too. What if we could save a life? What if we could find out what really happened? Isn’t that worth trying for?’
I looked at the ferocious light coming from her eyes; I wanted to be the responsible mentor, but I couldn’t quell my own excitement. She was right, after all. Wasn’t this why we’d got our wigs in the first place?
‘All right,’ I relented. ‘I’ll try ringing him now, see if we can arrange a meeting.’
‘Yes!’
The only problem, which Zara didn’t know, was that I hadn’t spoken to Sean since hanging up on him the night before the verdict. It therefore came as little surprise to me when the phone rang and rang until it went to voicemail, every time I tried.
‘Shit!’ I slammed the phone down onto my lap and returned my palms to the vents of the blower. The snow was getting heavier, landing with soft thumps across the windscreen of the car.
‘So, what, that’s it?’ she cried. ‘Come on! Nottingham is only a couple of hours from here, we could be there by eight o’clock if we got a move on! Let’s just turn up to the station, then we’ll see if he ignores us!’
‘Don’t forget that DeWitt runs that station,’ I chided. ‘No. We need to be clever about this.’
‘Well, I don’t know …’ She folded her arms and pushed back into her seat. ‘Don’t suppose you know McCarthy’s home address, do you?’
‘No, I …’ I paused and frowned; funnily enough, I did.
I looked up at the blanket of white through the dark, checked the petrol in the tank, and pulled my seat belt across my chest.
‘You’d better put your belt on, too,’ I said. ‘This could be dangerous.’
I was absolutely right.
38
Ralph Dickinson didn’t gel with our Cotgrave gang, but it wasn’t down to a lack of trying on his part. He was too soft for our liking; he wasn’t handy in a fight, and so he wasn’t especially handy to have around at the weekends.
He was, however, an avid Forest supporter, and relatively wealthy compared to the rest of us, so we’d always make the effort to troop up to his legendary summer parties at his family’s house in Radcliffe-on-Trent, the village north of Cotgrave.
Back then, in the early eighties, the house had stood alone on farmland, but now it was surrounded by new builds and it took me almost half an hour of circling through the snowstorm to gather my bearings.
‘It’s got to be around here somewhere …’ I muttered, peering through the blinding white.
None of the houses on the adjoining roads matched; there were small bungalows with motorhomes in the driveways, windscreens covered up and retired for winter, alongside larger two-storey houses with boxy UPVC porches. I had my phone on my lap, still trying Sean’s number, while Zara used her own to track our movements via satellite on Google Maps.
‘You’re sure it’s around here?’ she asked once we’d come to another dead end.
‘It has to be,’ I reasoned. ‘There’s woodland ahead that used to be part of the grounds, I’m sure of –’
I’d spun the wheel towards what I thought was the edge of the road, but the snow had fallen so heavily that it masked the kerb completely, and my car slid into it with a dull, ominous thud.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ I groaned. ‘I can’t see a thing through this. I’m going to get out and have a look.’
She unclipped her belt, one hand on the door, and I shook my head.
‘You stay here with the engine running. It’s a blizzard out there, last thing we need now is for the car to seize up.’
‘The start of a horror film if ever I’ve heard one,’ she said, looking out onto nothing. ‘What am I supposed to do in the meantime?’
‘I don’t know. Check the map again, maybe? Make sure it’s really out here? I’ll be back in a minute or two.’
‘All right.’ She turned to her phone. ‘Well, if you’re not back in an hour I’m leaving you for dead.’
I nodded, put my hat on, turned my collar up, and shoved the door hard against the force of the blizzard.
It took me another few minutes to make it to the towering wall of bushes at the rear of the turning circle, which were gathering white on every branch; emerging from those, topped by nearly
ten centimetres of snow, was a small mailbox, and behind that was a long, narrow driveway cutting through the middle of the hedgerow.
‘Blind as a bat,’ I mumbled, holding my hat in place, and crunched through the virgin snow up to the property.
At the top of the driveway a garage faced me, with the house off to the left, hidden by those bushes at the front and dense woodland separated by a low wall to the rear.
The house wasn’t quite as grand as I remembered – I suppose I hadn’t seen much real grandeur to compare it with back then – and the ensuing years of enhancements and adjustments had left it almost unrecognisable to me. Almost, but not entirely.
I didn’t head for the front door, instinctively cutting into the large garden at the side instead, guessing where the walkway might now be under crisp, untouched white. Perhaps it was only a small-town phenomenon, but we all used to call for one another through the back door, never the front, and so that’s where my feet led me. A small wooden shed stood out there, a swing set hanging static; the woodland beyond was already blanketed, and the silence it created was dense.
None of the lights were on inside the house, but I gave the door a hard knock in the hope that one of the children might be squirrelled away on the top floor.
Nothing. No answer. No sound. No sign of life whatsoever.
It was only when I pushed my bare hands up against the ice forming across the window of the door, making a warm spot large enough to peer inside, that I realised I’d made a mistake. This obviously wasn’t the McCarthys’ home.
I was looking into a kitchen, and it was a familiar sight.
Filthy pots were stacked high upon the worktop, and there were empty lager cans scattered all over every surface. Beside the washing machine, clothes were piled up haphazardly, large white shirts and black trousers all bundled together. This was a bachelor pad. I knew it as surely as if I’d been able to smell my own kind through the door.
I still had my hands up against the glass, watching my breath cloud the pane, when my phone rang, vibrating in my coat pocket. Wary of leaving more footprints, I moved for the only patch of garden where the weather hadn’t settled – a cracked, concrete area beneath the shelter of the overhanging trees by the back wall – and fumbled for the phone. Now you decide to reply, Sean?
I pulled it out of my pocket and something came along with it, landing with a light, clinking, metallic sound on the wet concrete.
‘Shit!’
It rolled, following a trickle of freezing water down towards sunken cracks by the wall, and when I turned the screen of my phone – still vibrating in my palm – for light, I saw only the briefest glimpse of gold before it was swallowed by a fracture in the ground.
‘No, no, no!’ I flung myself onto the cold and reached into the crack, fingertips wiggling blindly, numbing in the wet. Eventually, to my great relief, I managed to prise the wedding ring out of the earth, but a small pebble – little more than a piece of grit – snagged at the back of my index finger, causing me to gasp in surprise. I poked it once more, found it astonishingly sharp, and lifted it out with the ring.
My phone vibrated again, a message this time, and I finally looked at the screen. It hadn’t been Sean after all. It was Zara, and now she’d sent a message.
!!! was all it said, accompanied by an image.
I waited for the picture to download, signal struggling to hold so far from what we’d learned was the only cell-site mast in the area. While it loaded, I pocketed the ring, turned the light back to the odd-shaped pebble that had scratched my hand, and held it closer to my face.
The small, gritty substance had turned so black and rotten at the edges that it took me a moment to figure out what it was in the low light. Then I realised.
There are moments when the body appears to enter into absolute free fall; it’s a form of shock that seems to send the brain hurtling out through the back of the skull, the nervous system plunging into unfathomable cold.
That’s how it felt when Jenny told me she’d fallen in love with somebody else.
And that’s precisely how it felt there, in that instant, when I realised it wasn’t a stone in my hand at all. It was a broken human tooth.
I didn’t run. I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe.
I didn’t even hear the crunch of footsteps approaching, until they were right behind me.
‘Rook? Is that you?’
Sean McCarthy was home.
39
In one hand he was holding three or four shopping bags. In the other, a crate of lager.
The coat he was dressed in was long and black, and when he knocked the hood back with a sharp jerk of his head, the falling snow was promptly lost in his grey hair. A memory came back to me then, of a photograph I’d seen framed in the Barber household, Sean marching around in a similar black coat at some sort of fancy-dress party. Always keen to shock.
Say something, I thought. Say anything.
‘Tried ringing you …’ It came out higher than I’d been expecting. Despite the cold, I was blinking the salt of sweat out of my eyes.
‘Really?’ He shrugged. ‘Been out for most of the afternoon. Thought this snow might’ve cleared off if I waited it out at the pub before walking back. No such luck. Left my phone here.’
I tried to nod, couldn’t tell if I’d managed, and slowly turned my own phone over in my right hand. The image had loaded. It was a screenshot from Zara’s iPhone, a satellite view from Google Maps. There was the house, but that wasn’t the point of her message: !!!
The building had been circled in bright red – I could picture her doing it with one index finger on the screen – and from that circle was an arrow pointing westward, through the trees beside me. On the western side of those trees, a couple of hundred metres away from the place I was standing, was a red X, also drawn by her hand; a thin, bird’s-eye view of a curve I knew well enough by now – the tracks of the abandoned railway.
‘What’ve you got there, mate?’ Sean asked.
I hadn’t realised I was still holding the tooth in the palm of my open left hand.
He came close. Peered at it. We stood in silence for a while.
‘Ah, the pleasures of kids running wild,’ he said cheerily. ‘Bet that’s the one Annie lost when she came off the swing a few years back. She wears a fake one now, but you wouldn’t tell.’
This time I managed the nod, but it was as stiff and brittle as the icicles forming on the nearby branches. The snow cast its pale glow over everything, and in it, I saw Sean break into a grin.
‘Since you’re here …’ He held up the crate. ‘I know you aren’t going to say no to one, are you? I need a drink after that trek.’
He turned away, placed the bags down by the door, unlocked it with keys from his pocket, and stepped into the shelter of the kitchen, casually gesturing for me to follow.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you what I’ve done with the old place.’
I hesitated.
I could almost smell the fuel from the Jag’s engine still running only a short sprint away to the right, but I was watching my body make all the decisions now, and follow my body did, phone still in my right hand, tooth now clenched in the fist of my left.
Sean clasped his hands together after dumping the shopping among the litter on the kitchen surfaces, rubbed his palms, and then hit the light switch, the strip bulb stuttering into life like a failing engine.
‘So, what d’you think?’ he asked.
I cleared my throat. ‘About what, Sean?’
‘Well, it’s a bit different to when Dickinson lived here, isn’t it?’
I looked around. The small part of my brain that was neither falling nor desperately racing to put the pieces together noticed again that there were no children’s clothes buried in that pile by the washing machine. The calendar on the wall hadn’t been changed since January, if not this year’s, the one before that.
‘Shut the door, would you? Costs a fortune heating this place!’
/>
‘Where’s Tracey?’ I asked, closing the door, shaking the handle to ensure it hadn’t locked behind us. ‘The kids?’
‘Gone.’ He removed his coat, snow turning to a puddle on the tiled floor, hung it from a hook on the wall alongside his uniform jacket, and took a couple of cans from the crate. Opened them up.
‘When?’ I was looking at the golden band on his left hand.
‘While ago now,’ he said. ‘I’d appreciate it if you kept that between us. You know how it is, don’t you?’
Ordinarily, yes, I did know how it was – very much so – but nothing here was making sense to me. I’d spoken to Sean a matter of weeks ago, heard his wife in the background of that conversation, but it looked as though there hadn’t been a steady partner here for months. Years, maybe. I took myself back to that conversation: what had I heard, really? Sean, of course, and a shrill, feminine voice rising in the background. Screaming, almost, before …
‘Rook?’
Back in the room, Sean, my old friend, was smiling again. He slid one of the open beers along the worktop and it came to a rest alongside me, frothing over the rim.
‘You’re still holding it,’ he said gently.
I was. I uncurled my fist and it was heavy as lead in my palm. I thought I could smell the decay, the warm stench of an open mouth being picked apart by a dentist, but it was most likely my imagination. We both stared down at the blackened lump until my phone shook in my other hand like one of those practical joke buzzers.
Zara’s name strobed onscreen. It rang, and rang, and rang.
Sean raised his eyebrows. ‘Are you not getting that?’
I couldn’t focus. Thoughts were smashing around my skull like rocks in a spin cycle.
It was only when the phone abruptly stopped vibrating, the last of its battery swallowed, that Sean rolled his eyes and reached into my left palm. He took the tooth, studied it for a moment, then slipped it into his jean pocket.
He sighed, and I smelled whiskey. ‘Stop that.’
‘Stop what?’ I asked.
‘Stop those wheels turning up there.’ Pointing at my head. ‘I can see it happening.’
