The Trawlerman

by William Shaw

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Seriously, Mum. I’m glad you’re doing this. Even if you’re dressing funny.’

  Alex leaned forward for a kiss. Zoë jerked her head backwards, laughing.

  At work there was coffee, at least. The one without the beard had brought in his own beans and made the coffee on an AeroPress. Alex smelt it, took a sip and looked up. ‘This is actually amazing,’ she said.

  ‘I roast them in a popcorn popper,’ he said shyly.

  She looked at him. ‘Married or single?’ she asked.

  He blushed.

  ‘I’m kidding,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I’m half lesbian, according to my daughter. It’s just I don’t want to accept that I actually like you guys,’ she said. ‘I might get stuck here.’

  The man retreated, backing out of the door.

  ‘Wait,’ she said, calling him back. ‘That data you are putting together on domestic violence. Is it anonymised?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Before you get hold of it?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘I want to look at historical clusters of domestic abuse.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Particularly in Folkestone.’

  He hesitated. ‘Folkestone?’

  ‘Yes. Between say, seven and nine years ago. Can we do that?’

  A look of concern crossed his face. ‘That’s a very specific data set. You might not be able to learn much from such a small sample.’

  She took another sip from her cup and smiled. ‘That’s a risk I’m willing to take. Will it take long?’

  He blinked. He thinks I don’t understand anything he does here, she thought.

  ‘About the same time as it takes to make a cup of coffee.’

  Five minutes later an email pinged in: Is this what you need?

  She opened the link. There was a graph and a click-through to a map, created from the data she had requested. She zoomed in on it until it showed a small selection of streets in the north side of the town. A slider at the bottom allowed her to move through the dates, starting with the oldest. As she moved through the dates, a large blue blob appeared on the screen, first in early 2010, then it faded. It was back in the following summer and again that autumn. A blue blob indicating a roughly anonymised area of town that included the street that Tina Hogben had lived in with her husband Frank. She zoomed in closer. The blob hung over the bottom end of Broadmead Road.

  She called through the door. ‘Can you help me with this?’

  His head appeared around the door and edged around to her side of the desk. She ran through the dates over again. ‘What would explain that kind of pattern?’

  The man peered at the screen. ‘I would assume that to be a single household, with multiple call-outs over that period.’

  As she slid through the dates, she watched the blob bloom from some time in 2011 and disappear around a month before Frank Hogben disappeared.

  ‘Call-outs from that address?’

  ‘Yes.’ He hesitated, then changed his mind. ‘Not necessarily from the address. Just as likely the neighbours calling it in. You can’t tell from that data which address it is, but it’s very localised. So whether it’s someone calling from that address or people calling in a problem about that address . . .’

  ‘People who hear stuff and make the call?’

  ‘Yes . . . Is that all?’

  When he’d closed the door, she thought for a while, then took out her phone and texted Zoë.

  Do you have Stella’s number?

  At lunch she arranged to meet Jill on the recreation ground at the back of the HQ; on hot summer days, they weren’t the only people who took their lunch out here. Jill was sitting under the shade of a horse chestnut. She had several plastic pots around her containing brownish dips, and vegetables carefully cut into fingers. Alex had bought an egg sandwich from the canteen and wolfed it down faster than she should have.

  ‘Look at you,’ said Jill, looking approvingly at her shoes.

  ‘Bog off.’

  Jill grinned. ‘And what about Bob Glass? We were right all along. They released him. Apparently we’re looking at a possible murder suicide. Did you hear?’

  Alex said nothing.

  ‘Which is totally weird, isn’t it? If they’d actually listened to what we were saying . . . DI McAdam says he thinks it was all so the Younises could get insurance for their son on account of Ayman losing all that money.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You should do something about your hair too.’

  ‘Will you leave it alone?’ said Alex, but she didn’t mean it. Maybe she should look after herself a little better, she thought.

  ‘We are in such shit. Did you see the papers this morning? They mentioned DI McAdam by name as the one who’d cocked it up.’

  Alex lay on the warm grass, feeling like a woman with superpowers again. The Younis murder was a big lie. She had figured it out, all by herself. Sometimes she felt strong enough to handle anything.

  That afternoon she left work two hours early. ‘I have to see my counsellor,’ she said.

  The men nodded. They knew why she was on light duties. Nobody seemed to mind. She drove south towards the coast. At Folkestone, instead of going south to The Leas, where her counsellor’s office was, she turned east. This part of the coast made her glad to live at Dungeness. So much of the Kent coast was occupied by lines of dull bungalows facing the sea.

  The road rose up above the town. The Battle of Britain war memorial had been built on a stretch of green that lay between the row of houses and the escarpment that looked out over the Channel. She had moved to Kent two years ago but had never once visited here. She wasn’t sure why; she approved of remembering the dead, after all.

  On a weekday, the car park was almost empty. She left her car at the far side of it, tucked close to the hedge in the hope that it would shade the Yaris, and walked down the slope towards the main memorial. The summer grass was parched brown. Gulls swooped over the slopes towards a sea that was bluer here than she ever saw it on the spit where she lived.

  Carved out of Portland Stone, a lone airman sat facing the Channel, as if waiting for the signal to scramble. He wore a thick flying jacket; he would feel hot on a day like this, thought Alex. Far behind him, carved into black marble, were lists of names. She looked around, checked her watch. She was early.

  Thirty-two

  London was a place with open arms; this was a place that was used to defending itself. The monument was surrounded by ramparts; a green circular bank of earth that reminded her of the circle around her house. A small notice confirmed that this site, too, had been a wartime gun battery.

  Her father had been an Irishman with little interest or respect for English martial pride, but she found it moving, thinking of the names of hundreds of men, little older than Zoë, behind her who had died fighting for this place. She thought of the plane wrecks below the sea; the metal that Danny’s nets dodged.

  She checked her watch, looked around. An elderly man was walking down the path towards her. She stepped away from the memorial to let him have his time alone.

  Just as she was about to give up and go home, she saw a familiar, tall woman striding towards her, smiling. Stella was wearing red shorts and a big white T-shirt with the word Arizona on it. When she was close enough, she stopped and called her over. ‘I usually sit over here. I brought coffee.’ Two benches had been erected facing the black wall of marble. Stella sat on one of them and waited for Alex to join her.

  ‘Come here often?’

  ‘That’s my great-grandad,’ she said, pointing to the wall. ‘Flying Officer James Godden. He was twenty-two. Since they built it, my mum comes up here all the time. Ironic, really, because I used to come up here all the time when I was, like, nineteen, twenty, before they built it. It was a good place to get w
asted.’

  Alex looked at the memorial; the lists of names picked out in gold. ‘Did you tell Tina you were coming here?’

  ‘No. But I don’t like keeping secrets from Tina. What is it you want to say?’

  ‘You told me you knew her when she was still with Frank.’

  She nodded. ‘Course I did. Yeah.’

  ‘And you talked about how Frank disappeared.’

  ‘Yeah?’ she said blithely, as if it were nothing to her. ‘Coffee?’ Stella took a metal thermos from her backpack and laid two stainless steel mugs beside her.

  Alex waited until she was pouring the first cup before asking, ‘Now tell me about how Frank treated Tina.’

  A dribble spilled down the side of the cup onto the ground, just a small, tell-tale shake of her hands. Coolly, Stella completed filling the cup and passed it to her. ‘Who said?’

  Alex shrugged. ‘Does that matter? It’s true, isn’t it?’

  She had thought about the look on Tina’s face the day the taxi driver shouted at her and she realised she had recognised something in it; she had remembered what Terry Neill had said about the amygdala being like an alarm bell and about how some traumatised people just freeze up when that bell starts sounding.

  ‘No,’ said Stella flatly. ‘Course it’s not.’

  Alex had seen the blue circle on the map; the pulse of reports of domestic abuse incidents. ‘She was living with an abusive man, wasn’t she? Someone who probably didn’t like the idea that his wife was having an affair with another woman.’

  Stella poured a cup for herself and said, ‘I don’t know what you’re digging at here, but Frank never knew nothing about Tina and me. We were absolutely one hundred per cent sure on that. She didn’t want to hurt him. She didn’t want to hurt anybody; she never has. She was discreet. And so, believe it or not, was I, though the effort almost bloody killed me.’

  ‘It would give someone a motive for killing Frank, though, wouldn’t it?’

  Stella looked up at the wall of men’s names and said, ‘Oh Jesus. You’re nuts.’

  ‘People tell me that all the time.’

  ‘Is that why you wanted to talk?’

  ‘I wanted to find out what you thought.’

  ‘No. I’ll tell you what I really think. Listen to this, right?’

  ‘OK.’

  She looked Alex right in the eye. ‘I came out when I was just fifteen. My family was all straight, you know? They were Seventh Day Adventists and all that shit. I thought I was a complete freak. I was some total weirdo, you know? They didn’t like me. I didn’t like me either. So I hung out with everyone else who was different . . . I used to hang out with all the drinkers and druggies. Classic behaviour, you know?’

  She stood and pointed over the cliff behind them. ‘Down there, in the Warren. We used to come up here too, before all this was built. Cider. Drugs. Anything we could lay our hands on. Glue. Heroin. Pills. I got chucked out of school, used to rough-sleep in empty houses. My parents tried to look after me, but I hated them so much back then. Stupid, really. They weren’t that bad. Half the people I called friends were much worse than my mum and dad ever were. Before I knew it, I was in my late twenties, going absolutely fucking nowhere. People used to cross the street to avoid me, you know? Anyway.’

  She stopped, opened a tin and pulled out a pre-rolled cigarette, then lit it. ‘So. One day in summer I was coming down from something, I don’t remember what, and I’d been on whatever it was a couple of days and I realised I was starving. Literally starving. Probably filthy, too, but I knew I had to get something to eat, so on my way back into town from somewhere round here, I stopped into the fish bar down on The Stade and Tina was there behind the counter, and I must have looked like shit on a stick. I said, “Sorry. Got no money but I could kill for some of your chips.” And she gave me this look. And it was . . . Fucking hell. What a smile! I was expecting pity. It was like a really sexy little smile. And I looked like hell and was probably stinking but it was . . . wow, you know? She was a married woman as far as I knew . . . and one of the Hogbens, and if you grew up where I did, you never messed with the Hogbens. But that’s the kind of smile a woman gives another woman . . .’

  She grinned, looked back down at Alex. ‘Has anyone ever given you a smile like that? You know . . . I bet they probably have. Anyway. I cleaned up basically because I wanted her after that. I knew there was absolutely no way she’d let me near her looking the way I did.’ She turned and dropped back down onto the bench, head turned towards Alex. ‘So what I’m saying is, she saved me. Totally saved me. Tina is the kind of person who saves people. Even a wretch like me. And in return, I kind of saved her.’

  ‘Nice,’ said Alex.

  ‘Isn’t it? Smoke still. Drink too much, but you can’t have it all.’

  Stella finished her cigarette, stubbing it out in the lid of her tin and carefully putting the remains into her jacket pocket.

  ‘You didn’t tell me about Frank assaulting Tina.’

  ‘No,’ Stella said. ‘I bloody didn’t. Because, like I said. You’re barking up the wrong bloody whatsit.’ She picked up her flask and put it in the backpack, slung it onto her back and said, ‘I’ll tell Tina you said hi, shall I?’

  Halfway down the slope, she climbed up the steps in front of the memorial statue of the waiting airman, leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. Then she walked off down the sloping grass, the way she had come, without looking back.

  Alex had to get to her appointment. She was not supposed to be here.

  She walked back to her Yaris, alone at the far side of the car park. Her pace quickened as she saw something white under the wiper. A parking ticket was her first thought. In her hurry to get to the monument she had forgotten to check whether there were any parking restrictions; now she looked around and saw a pay-station by the main building.

  The closer she got, though, the more she realised it was nothing of the sort. It was a plain piece of paper torn out from a notebook, folded over, and tucked under the arm of the wiper.

  Before picking it out, she looked around. On first view, the car park was deserted.

  She lifted it out.

  In big biro capitals: PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE. STOP ASKING ABOUT ME. YOU WILL MESS UP EVERYTHING.

  Underneath that, the name: FRANCIS HOGBEN.

  She read it twice, just to make sure. Again, she looked around. On the north side, facing the road, the car park was surrounded by a thick old hedge, mostly hawthorn. Through the hedge beyond the bonnet of her car, she could see a silhouette. There was someone on the other side, watching her.

  ‘You,’ she called.

  The figure didn’t move.

  ‘Wait. I’m coming round. Don’t go.’

  With a crackling of branches, the figure disentangled limbs from the hedge and set off running.

  Alex set off sprinting towards the exit, twenty metres away. Stupid office bloody heels.

  Thirty-three

  She made it to the gap in the hedge but it was too late. She had already heard the car door slam and the engine start. All she saw was a red car roaring away loudly down the hill at speed, round the curve of the road out of sight.

  Sure that whoever had been peering through the hedge at her had been the same person who had placed the note on her windscreen, the same one she had seen driving away, she turned and ran as fast as she could back to the Yaris, turned the ignition and reversed away from the hedge, skidding on the tarmac.

  They would have a head start, but a bright red car was easy to spot.

  At the exit, the road was clear. She pressed hard on the accelerator but the car stalled. Her first thought was that she should have had it serviced. She restarted.

  The car spluttered, coughed and stalled a second time.

  Third time it wouldn’t even start. The starter motor just ground away to itself.
Again she turned off, turned on again, pumping the accelerator.

  ‘Shit.’

  Behind her, a car honked.

  Angrily she waved it past her and laid her head on the steering wheel.

  Getting out, she looked around for any CCTV cameras, but saw nothing, so there would be no record of who had left the note. Checking her watch, she saw she needed to be at her counsellor’s in five minutes. She would have to apologise for being late.

  In the end, she pushed the car to a corner, sweating like a fool. She left another note on the windscreen saying Broken down.

  The only person she could think of who could help right now was Curly. She called him. ‘I thought you weren’t speaking to me,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not. Except I’m in need of a favour.’

  ‘What was the make of Max Hogben’s car again?’

  ‘What are you on about, Alex?’

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘Ford Escort RS 1600-i. Kind of like an early boy racer classic.’ She didn’t know what an RS 1600-i looked like but she guessed it was probably quite like what she had just seen disappearing down the New Dover Road.

  ‘Red, right?’

  ‘Very.’

  She left the keys on the front tyre. The Uber was late picking her up and by the time she got to the counsellor’s office, down on The Leas, she was half an hour behind schedule.

  —Don’t worry. It’s your time.

  —I don’t feel great, to be honest. You want to know why I’m late? I’m late because I met a ghost.

  —Ah. So we’re back to that, are we, Alexandra?

  The session was exhausting. He had asked her, yet again, about the days that people had died; all the things she had witnessed and done. The stories came out exactly the same. Nothing changed. The endings were just as bad as they had been before.

  Her Yaris was outside the back of the house when another taxi finally dropped her home after the session. Curly’s pickup was there, too. After her time on the trawler, she was not sure she could cope with Curly.