by William Shaw
Alex was distracted, looking out of the window, deep in thought. It was a long drive home. The car smelt of leather. There was a copy of the Financial Times tucked in the seat back in front of her. Everything Terry did was like this, she thought. A little too much on the flashy side.
‘Unfortunately I was invigilating that day and before I knew, she’d thrown up all over me . . .’
Alex wondered if it had been a good idea to agree to go back to his house. ‘What?’
‘You weren’t listening, were you?’
‘Sorry. Not really.’
He laughed. ‘Don’t worry. It was a pretty dull story.’
When they arrived at his house he paid off the driver, took out his keys and opened the front door. She waited on the step until he had switched off the alarm, then followed him in. When he took off his jacket and hung it up on a hanger in the hallway, she took her own jacket off and put it over his. ‘Gin?’ he asked.
He led her upstairs and opened the patio doors, lit candles on the balcony, then returned a few minute later with two glasses and a bowl of olives.
They sat on the balcony outside, overlooking the beach below and watched the sky darken.
‘A lot of junkies I know can’t drink,’ she said.
‘As I said, I was never a junkie,’ he answered, and raised his glass.
She took a sip from her glass, then excused herself and went to the bathroom. ‘I just need to wash up a little.’
Behind the locked door she opened the cabinet and checked through its contents; then opened his washbag and looked through it.
By the time she got back he had almost finished his glass. Hers was still there, barely touched.
‘You were a long time.’
‘You missed me?’
He looked at her. ‘Did you find anything interesting?’
She shook her head. ‘Nothing I could arrest you for, anyway.’
He nodded. He knew precisely what she had been doing. ‘I understand. You don’t trust me,’ he said.
She felt a heaviness in her chest. ‘I’m sorry. I find all this hard.’
‘Yes. You do.’
‘I should go home, I suppose.’
He stepped forward and took both of her hands. ‘I understand. It’s OK. We can go easy, if you prefer. But you know I really like you.’
‘It’s been a lovely day and it’s done me good, but yes. Maybe it’s for the best if I go home now.’
He nodded. ‘I’ll call you a taxi,’ he said.
While his back was turned, she reached for her jacket, and while she was doing so, slipped her hand inside the pocket of Terry’s blue jacket. The inside pocket was empty; the passport was not there.
Forty
That night she didn’t dare sleep. Her brain felt like it was on fire.
Instead, she took a blanket and cycled out to Lydd and sat on the scrubland where Zoë and Bill had showed her badgers.
In the darkness she thought she saw shapes moving, but she could not be sure. She heard cracks of sticks and the rustling of dry leaves. Everything that had happened in the last few weeks lay around her like patterns and shapes that she could see and hear, but only obscurely.
At around one in the morning it started to rain; a light drizzle falling out of the darkness. She had not brought waterproofs, so she let the blanket soak up the water.
At around two in the morning, two men came, tramping across the path that crossed the patch of land. They caught her in their torch beams. ‘You all right, love?’ one of them asked. When he lowered the torch and approached, she saw a man in his sixties dressed in waterproofs and waders. They must have been night-fishing in the marshes somewhere. The man who had spoken put down his kit bag, lay the torch on the ground and squatted down next to her.
‘Are you OK, darling? Want us to give you a lift somewhere?’
‘I’m local. It’s fine.’
‘What the heck are you doing out here then?’ The other man said, his face hidden in the darkness.
In a more kindly voice, the man beside her said, ‘You’re shivering. You should get inside.’
She nodded, but didn’t move.
‘Is she crying? Is she on something?’ the other man muttered. ‘You get all sorts out here.’
‘I’m fine, honestly. I just don’t want to go to sleep tonight.’
The man beside her stood again, took an umbrella out of his bag and opened it. ‘Something bad happened?’
‘Pretty bad.’
‘What you doing?’ demanded the other man. ‘That’s my umbrella. It’s not yours to just give away.’
The gentler of the two men set it over her. Now rain pattered softly onto the nylon above her head.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That’s very good of you.’
‘It’s OK, love. Drop it into the Dolphin Inn next time you’re down there,’ said the man. ‘Hope everything’s all right, love.’
As they left, she heard the second man saying, ‘That’s the last I see of that, then.’
She sat, still thinking about how everything was not all right at all.
The nights were short at this time of year, but it seemed a long time before first light.
When the first rays finally warmed her, she stood, limbs stiff and cramped, folded her damp blanket and furled the umbrella, strapped it to her backpack and set off home.
The cold had made her hungry. After she’d plugged in her phone to charge, she fried two eggs and ate them on toast, washed down with strong coffee, then sat, watching the screen of her phone until, just after nine, it pinged. The message was a postcode. TN29 0DU. That was enough. She found the location on Google maps. It was just over ten miles away.
With no car she had only her bike, so she packed a thermos with more coffee, and two chocolate bars, and set off on the bike. Her limbs should have been tired, but they weren’t. She was itchy with energy.
On a bike around here it was like you floated above the land. The roads she cycled on had once just been banks, raised centuries ago to keep the water out of fields as the marsh grew, one field at a time. Over time they had turned into pathways, then tracks, then roads. It took her less than an hour riding from Denge Marsh, through Walland Marsh, into the oldest part of the landscape; what the locals called Romney Marsh Proper.
Midweek there were a few tents in the field. She looked around, wondering if he was in one of them. She wheeled the bike into the field, rattling it over a cattle grid, then walked towards them.
A European couple listening to music on their phone looked up and smiled. ‘God dag,’ they said.
She was approaching the next tent when she heard a cough behind her and turned, and there he was. Bill South had grown a beard. It was greyer than she wanted it to be.
She nodded, opened her arms wide and put them around him and hugged him tightly. ‘Stupid arse,’ she said.
He nodded.
‘You look a bit shit,’ he told her.
‘Yes. I probably do,’ she said. She reached out and pulled his beard. ‘You look worse.’
He had been staying in a wooden shepherd’s hut tucked into a corner of the next field. It was not one of the new ones, the caravans for the middle classes; it was an old one with a pitch-black corrugated iron roof and greying timbers, slightly askew on its base. ‘I know the farmer. I told her I needed a place to, you know . . .’
‘Hide,’ supplied Alex.
Bill nodded. ‘Yes. And she said I could have this for as long as I needed it.’
He opened the door. It felt even smaller inside; whitewashed wood, a pair of tiny casement windows, one on each side, fringed by faded curtains. A pile of clothes lay on the bed, neatly folded. There was no room for a chair. Stepping inside, he lit the gas hob under the kettle.
She looked around for empty bottles but saw none. �
�You still drinking?’
He shook his head. ‘Zoë told me she wouldn’t visit me if I carried on, so I stopped.’
‘Good girl.’
‘Isn’t she? She’s been coming to see you every day?’
‘Most days.’
‘How come you told her where you were and not me?’
He pulled two tea bags from a box and dropped them into a teapot. He knew Alex didn’t like tea, but that had never stopped him making it for her, as if he believed not liking it was just some kind of Londoner’s affectation. ‘Because I knew she would have been worried if she hadn’t known where I was.’
‘Like I wasn’t.’
‘It was you I was disappearing from. You know that, though, don’t you?’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Yes.’
He nodded. ‘I was worried you would figure out what had happened on The Hopeful. Thing is,’ he said without smiling, ‘you generally do.’
‘I found out you were on the docks when The Hopeful came in. You were the one who reported Frank Hogben missing all those years ago. You were in on it all along.’ She had asked Colin to send her the reports on Frank Hogben’s disappearance. It had been there on the printed sheets. Constable William South had been there on the dockside to take a statement from Daniel Fagg and the other crewmen.
He nodded. ‘Question is, what are you going to do about it? Same as last time?’
‘Frank wasn’t on board because he wasn’t ever on board. You made sure you were there that night so that it was you who made the report that he had disappeared. So you disappeared, because seven years ago you were part of the conspiracy to make him disappear.’
He looked at her oddly. He handed her the cup, and she took it and followed him onto the steps which were just wide enough to sit on, side by side. ‘Did he have something on you, Bill?’
Bill looked shocked. ‘What?’
‘You let him get away with it. You were the one who let him disappear. There has to be a reason for that.’
‘What do you mean, get away with it?’
‘I’m not sure entirely he’s even dead, Bill. I think I may have seen him. I think you arranged for him to disappear so that he would never be prosecuted for running drugs. In return he had to leave Tina alone. That was the deal. You did it to save her life. I understand. That was a good thing. But to do it, you let him get away. You, Curly and Danny concocted that whole charade of the search for his body but he was never on that boat.’
‘Jesus,’ he said.
‘Sorry, Bill. You’re a good man. A much better person than me.’
On the step beside her, he turned towards her. ‘Jesus,’ he said again. ‘You’ll be telling me you believe in all sorts now, Alex. Frank Hogben is alive, you reckon?’
His laughter grew until she thought she felt the whole hut behind them rattling with it as she sat there, bewildered.
Forty-one
‘I thought you were the copper who got everything right, Alex,’ he said, when he’d finally got his breath back. ‘What went wrong?’
She frowned.
‘Frank Hogben definitely didn’t get away. I saw him dead with my own eyes. And he has been for seven years. No question.’
She frowned. ‘You saw him dead? You did? You never reported that.’
‘The reason I ran away is because if you knew the truth, it would result in good people going to prison. You have form on that. But here you are again, like a bad penny.’
‘Here I am,’ she said, with a small smile. ‘A bad penny. I can’t help myself. Tell me, then, Bill.’
He nodded. ‘I’m sorry I tried to keep this from you. I have reasons. But you’re here now, so it’s your call what you do with it now.’
‘I never wanted to send you to prison, Bill, back then. You know that.’
‘Here we go again, then,’ he said, and the laughter stopped and his voice was serious again.
There was the sense of time moving on now. The bright greens of midsummer were fading. The grass around them was flecked with pale seed heads. The alders by the ditches were looking dry. The two of them sat on the bed, side by side, looking out of the square white window and the flat fields, and he talked and she listened, asking occasional questions, making the odd comment.
‘Beginning at the start. Everyone knew the Hogbens. Frank’s father, Max, was the big man in town. He drove a souped-up Ford Escort with all the trimmings.’
‘Sunburst red,’ she said.
‘Sunburst red. Yes. You heard about him, then? Fast car. A real people’s car. Know what I mean? Him and his mates used to race rallies, all around these lanes. Terrified people. Only, Max died in a stupid accident in that car and Frank inherited his father’s reputation, and the car.’
Alex shifted with impatience. ‘Frank Hogben was a drug dealer. Tell me about that.’
‘Wait now. Be patient for once.’
‘Sorry. Go on.’
‘But you found that out too, then? Yes. Frank was a drug dealer. Right under everyone’s noses.’
‘You knew that?’
‘God, no. Not at the time. I only found out after he was dead. I’ll tell you, Alex, if you’ll only be quiet for a minute.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Right.’ And waited what seemed like an age for him to begin.
‘Frank wanted to be the big man,’ Bill said eventually, ‘just like everyone said his dad had been. Max Hogben was a violent man. Always punchy, you know what I mean? I think he used to beat up everyone. Not just enemies either. We had Max a few times on assault charges, but nothing stuck. Like father, like son, it turned out. Frank was one of those who we suspected was up to stuff, but we didn’t know what, exactly. Found out later that Curly used to crew with Frank on The Hopeful and that’s where it all went on.’
He had a way of telling stories that made her want to scream, she thought.
‘What I found out after was Frank had been using the trawler to meet a Spanish boat in the Channel and bring back drugs. It started off as just a bit of marijuana but it grew into something pretty big. Curly turned a blind eye and then Frank kept giving him a bit of money to do exactly that. That way everybody kept quiet about it. I think it crept up on Curly. No harm in it at the start, he thought. Then, the bigger it got, the unhappier Curly was.’
‘Curly was in on all that too?’
‘Insofar as he was on the boat, yes. Frank had learned the value of scaring people from his dad. He threatened Curly. Told him to keep working and keep his mouth shut. Curly didn’t even want the money. Never spent a penny. It came to thousands of pounds in the end, and he never never once spent a single cent. He just kept it in a tin under his bed. Lucky for him he didn’t.’
‘Why was it lucky?’
‘I’ll get to that, for pity’s sake, Alex. Almost fifteen grand by the end of it.’
‘Jesus. It was a big operation.’
‘Not at first. Not big enough to get too much attention. Not big enough to get noticed by the bigger gangs either, who’d have wanted part of it. Just steady, over the years. I know. Either way it couldn’t last. They were bringing in up to almost a hundred kilos of heroin a trip by the end of it, Curly says. That’s industrial quantities. I believe Curly must have been terrified about what would happen if they were caught and just as scared about what would happen if they weren’t. Give it a couple of years, and Frank Hogben would have been a full-on don himself, you know. Or they’d all have been dead.’
‘You knew Curly and you had no idea any of this was going on?’
He sipped his tea. ‘I had a good idea that Frank Hogben was a self-centred bastard. I had a good idea that people were scared of him. But nobody dared peach. You have to understand what Frank was like. There was a man killed in The Grenadier eight years ago in a fight; we found his body in the toilets. He’d been beaten and kicked to death. Rumou
r was Frank had done it, but nobody would come forward. Everybody swore he wasn’t even there, though we know from CCTV outside the pub that his Escort was. Tina said he was at home with her, and she stuck with that, so there was nothing we could do. There was nothing on him.’
‘He was beating her up too.’
‘You found that out as well?’
‘She still wears it. I think you can see it in her face. I guessed it from the way she behaves, and I took a chance and looked at the domestic abuse stats in East Folkestone. Around the same time you’re talking about there were multiple reports of domestics taking place at the bottom end of Broadmead Road. That was all Frank and her, wasn’t it?’
He looked at the bare pine floor; the curve of planks where the softer parts had worn, leaving knots and the grain. ‘I remember all that. Neighbours said they heard fights but nobody named names, you know? They were afraid, too. Without Tina saying it, we couldn’t do a thing about it. The neighbourhood team up there knocked on doors to see if everything was OK, but Tina always told them she was fine.’
Alex nodded.
‘I’ve known Tina all my life. She’s not a bad girl. She just ended up in the wrong place. I went down to the docks, saw The Hopeful leave, and once I knew it was out of the way I would drive up to their house, knock on the door. I said, “Tina. Tell me the truth.” She wouldn’t say anything, even to me . . .’
‘Stella told me I was barking up the wrong tree with that angle. Why would she do that?’
He said, ‘We’ll come to that, OK?’
He stood, opened a drawer under the cooker ring, took out a packet of digestives. He offered her one, then took one out of the packet for himself and lowered it carefully into the cup. Before the wet biscuit could disintegrate, she watched him pop it whole into his mouth and then chew. ‘I knew Curly was the one who went out on The Hopeful with Frank Hogben. I came across him one day out on the beach at Dungeness and asked him straight out if he thought Frank was assaulting Tina. Like everyone, Curly said he knew nothing at all about it. I reckon he suspected all along, just like we had. Hearing it from me was confirmation; Frank was beating his wife. Know what? Curly never went out on The Hopeful again with Frank. Refused point-blank. Frank wasn’t happy at all, roughed Curly up pretty bad, but Curly wouldn’t shift so nothing he could do about it. Curly said he wanted to give all that money he’d been given back to him. Frank just laughed at him. Know what Frank said?’
