Nothing Else Remains

by Robert Scragg

  ‘What kind of area is it?’ he asked. ‘Housing, shops, middle of nowhere?’

  ‘Somewhere in between by the looks of it, guv. On its way to being houses, but Google Maps says it’s still pretty much a building site.’

  Construction site, away from prying eyes. That didn’t sit well with Porter. They left the dual carriageway, and before long spotted the Conniston Homes sign, almost as big as the side of a house itself, welcoming them to the Sycamore Park estate, showing two faceless kids playing on an unnaturally green lawn while their parents watched. You too could be this happy if you lived here. The stark contrast to the reality of the scrubbed brown earth, skeleton houses with their exposed joists and stacks of bricks couldn’t be more striking.

  A smaller sign fifty feet past caught his eye. A site map, numbered plots hugging both sides of a road that curved back on itself in a semicircle. At the halfway point, another road cut back on itself, and a series of streets filled in the inside of the semicircle with more plots. Looked like a child’s drawing of a hat – straight line for the brim, curved top.

  Must be at least a hundred plots on there. Where the hell were they supposed to start? It looked, and felt, like an abandoned movie set. Maybe they still had security on site.

  ‘They’re not going to shift many at this rate,’ said Styles. ‘Sign back there said they were due in 2011.’

  The further they edged into the estate, the less had been done on each plot. The furthest he could see was just a dent in the ground, dug for foundations that had never been laid.

  Porter saw the comment for the peace offering it was. He couldn’t let whatever that argument had been turning into put Max in any more danger than he was already. At the same time, he was far from finished with Styles. Another time and place, though.

  ‘The recession,’ he said.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I heard of a few places like this. Companies threw up one too many estates, ran out of cash, and banks were too twitchy to bail them out, so they mothballed them.’

  ‘Really?’ said Styles. ‘They’d just walk away from it?’

  ‘Not for ever,’ he said, even though the potholes in the road wouldn’t be out of place in a war zone.

  ‘Still no movement, guv,’ Benayoun’s voice squawked over the airwave. ‘He’s there, give or take a hundred metres.’

  ‘We’re going to need some backup. No way we can search this place just the two of us.’

  ‘Roger that, boss. Call you back with an ETA.’

  They drove back to the entrance, and Porter parked the car horizontally across the road. There’d been no sign of another vehicle, but if there was one lurking anywhere in there, it made sense to make any escape as difficult as possible.

  ‘Might as well make a start while we wait,’ he said, and they both got out of the car, wandering over towards the nearest house. Porter checked his watch – 4.49. Shit, he was due in Sameera Misra’s office in a little over ten minutes. Couldn’t even manage that with a ride in the police chopper. He hoped she’d understand. Even if she didn’t, it wasn’t like he was about to turn back and head to the station. Milburn was another matter. He could practically hear the super’s fingers drumming against a desk from here.

  Porter gave himself a mental slap. Couldn’t lose focus, not now.

  ‘OK, we do each house together. One stays on the door, one goes inside. This side first,’ he said, pointing to the right. ‘You take the doors, I’ll do inside.’ The unspoken inference: if Max was in any of these, Porter owed it to him to be the one charging in. His mind flashed to what he might find, worst case scenario, but he shook it off, took a deep breath and reached for the first door handle.

  ‘Come on, mate,’ Callum said into the handset. ‘Pick up.’

  He slouched back in the seat of his old Land Rover, right hand holding the phone to his ear, pinned in place by an elbow jammed against the window. Five rings later he heard Max’s voice, a cheery ‘Hey’. False alarm, just voicemail.

  ‘Mate, it’s me. Good news. My guy came through. Your man was at Northridge Industrial Estate, out near Welling. Looks like he connected to their intranet through a mobile hotspot from somewhere in there. I’m heading over to take a look. Give me a shout when you get this, and I’ll meet you there.’

  The phone was halfway into his pocket when he pulled it back out, dialling Max’s home number as an afterthought. He’d rather not disturb Jen if she was resting, but if this didn’t qualify as important enough, what did?

  ‘Max, is that you?’ A woman’s voice, bordering on hysterical.

  ‘Jen, it’s me, Callum. I need to speak to Max. Do you know where he is?’

  He waited out the noisy sobs and wet sniffling until she started to talk, eyes widening as he listened. To hell with secrecy. He had to speak to Max’s pal, the copper. Rather him be pissed at Max than anything bad happen. He had to speak to Porter and tell him what he knew, before it was too late. He finished the call with Jen and started to make his next call when an ugly thought squatted heavy on his chest. What if it was already too late?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  July 2009

  Fletcher’s account was down to pennies, but the charade was still intact. He felt himself drawn back to the flat, almost disappointed each time to see it lying dormant. Even chanced another trip back inside a week later, leaving with a suitcase of clothes to stretch out the story of a man under pressure, needing to get away from it all.

  The saddest part wasn’t that Fletcher was dead. It was that nobody seemed to care. Michael Fletcher had dropped off the face of the earth, quite literally, and nobody gave a shit. That was a depressing slice of modern life served up right there. So many connections and connectivity in a digital world, but this gregarious City boy had no one, not a single person close enough to know he was gone, let alone mourn him.

  He almost felt sorry for Fletcher. Almost, but not quite. He had been everything that was wrong with a city so obsessed with public image, projected persona, that the real essence of a person had to be stashed away, safe from prying eyes that might judge any insecurity.

  He sat now, browsing through Fletcher’s hard drive. The pictures, music tracks, clients’ CVs, emails. His client list ran into the thousands, from people he’d placed in roles, through to those he’d kept on file just in case. He logged on to Fletcher’s database, courtesy of his passwords. So many profile pictures practically replicas of the one before, cut from the same cloth, conforming, bland. Not a million miles away from his own headshot.

  From such a small observation, an idea was born, began to germinate. Scrambled thoughts clicked into place, like points on a train track, making him do something out of character. He smiled. So much work to be done, and he was eager to get started.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  They had only cleared two houses when Porter heard it. Faint, but unmistakable, and he cocked his head to one side to work out where it came from. Strains of ‘Wake Me Up’ by Avicii. A ringtone? Hard to get an exact fix, but he was pretty sure it came from outside. The room he was in looked set to be a kitchen, pipes snaking their way up from the floor where a sink would go. Dust carpeted the floor, thick enough that he could see footprints where he’d walked.

  Porter tried the handle of a door that looked out onto a flattened square of dirt, weeds popping out from under pieces of rubble and cracked brick. Not quite the garden the signs were advertising. It opened with a loud squeak, possibly for the first time in years, and he stepped outside.

  ‘Styles! Phone. You hear it?’ he shouted just as it stopped.

  A dozen thumping footsteps on the bare floorboards, and Styles was beside him. ‘I heard it too.’

  They stood, shoulder to shoulder, nothing moving except a few dandelions, heads bouncing in the breeze. Traffic on the main road was just a low background hum.

  ‘Sod it,’ Porter muttered, ‘I’m calling him.’

  Styles looked at him as the opening bars sounded. Porter whip
ped his head both ways, walking out to the middle of the back yard. No sign of Max, or anyone else for that matter. Seven rings then voicemail. He hit redial. Did that mean he was unable to answer it? Didn’t bode well if that was the case. The phone sang out again, closer this time, like he was playing a game of hot and cold. He walked towards the fence at the far end. Must be around eight feet high sections, overlapping pine panels punctuated by fence posts.

  He dialled the number a third time, hopping up onto the lower fence support rail, peering over the top like a meerkat. It backed onto the entrance to the estate, and Porter scanned both ways, hearing Styles walk up behind him. A glow caught his eye and he pushed up, swinging his right leg up and over, letting himself drop over the other side.

  Max’s phone lay half hidden by a messy clump of grass. Porter took off his tie to pick it up as the music stopped. If they were lucky, there’d be prints other than Max’s on there. Couldn’t see him throwing his own phone away.

  He turned a full three-sixty but saw nothing except a few passing cars back on the main road, and his own where he’d blocked the road with it. He looked at Styles peering over the fence, his partner’s expression seeming to mirror his thoughts. This was their only tangible link to Max. He looked back at the phone. Saw the screen start to fade. Wondered if Max’s chances were doing the same.

  Callum Carr was on hold. The officer he’d spoken to had gone away with promises of finding a detective almost twenty minutes ago now. He was weighing up his chances of finding Porter through another colleague at the paper who had good police contacts when he saw the sweep of headlights and heard the low grumble of an engine.

  He had parked a few hundred yards away from the unit his man had told him about. His Land Rover, enough dings and dints to put a rally car to shame, and permanent coat of everyday grime, shouldn’t stand out too much. Times like this, it paid off to neglect your car. Sunset was still a few hours away, but the battleship-grey clouds sitting overhead made it feel much later.

  His pulse quickened as the car – BMW, Volvo maybe – pulled up in front of unit 173. He slid further down into the seat, hopefully low enough that he’d border on invisible at this range, and peered over the dashboard. Hard to say for sure but it looked like there were two people in the front. The driver disappeared inside, but the passenger stayed put. He popped open the glovebox and pulled out a pair of binoculars, rolling the fly wheel to bring things into focus just as the driver got back into the car.

  Damn it, he thought. Two seconds earlier, and I’d have seen his face.

  Even from here, the sound carried as the roller door creaked open. Callum switched his attention to the passenger and froze. Their head had lolled against the window, brim of a cap pulled down, but not quite enough to hide the face. Max’s eyes looked closed, and he wasn’t moving. Didn’t even stir when the car started to crawl forwards, and by the time the door rolled back down, Callum’s hands were shaking. What the hell was going on? The best he could hope for was that Max was unconscious. Worst case, he was already too late.

  The fact that the phone was here meant that Max had been too, but right now that meant very little, like the last breadcrumb in the trail. Three cars, two officers apiece, arrived within a few minutes of the discovery. They’d only been minutes away, so it had seemed pointless calling them off. They could help search the rest of the place, although Porter felt sure that Max and his captor were long gone.

  They’d just finished dividing up the rest of the estate when Benayoun came though on the airwave, as excited as she’d been when they’d got the initial trace.

  ‘Got some good news, guv. We’ve got a fix on your boy.’

  ‘What? Where? How?’

  Benayoun relayed the call she’d just taken from Callum Carr. It took Porter a few seconds to put a face to the name. They’d only met a few times, but he remembered Max speaking highly of him. How the hell had he gotten involved?

  The journalist hadn’t been able to give a description of the driver, or the car, and he’d been rather vague about how he’d come by the location, but he was adamant about the identity of the passenger.

  ‘And he’s one hundred per cent sure it was Max?’

  ‘So he says. They’re inside the unit now, though, so he can’t see a thing.’

  ‘Call him back and tell him we’re on our way. He has to sit tight, and under no circumstances does he try and go in. We’ll be …’ Porter did some quick calculations, ‘ten minutes. Fifteen tops.’

  ‘Already told him that, boss.’

  ‘Tell him again,’ said Porter. ‘He’s a journalist. They never listen.’

  Callum wasn’t a hero. He didn’t jump in to break up fights, but could he really sit here and do nothing until the cavalry arrived? Max hadn’t so much as blinked, let alone moved. God only knows what was happening in there right now, while he sat on his backside in the safety of his car.

  The roller-blind-style door was fully shut, and the side door had no window to peer through. Maybe there was a way in around the back?

  Jesus, man, get off your arse. What would Max be doing if it was the other way around?

  He had a pretty good idea he knew the answer to that one, and it involved getting out of the bloody car and helping his friend. The clock showed six minutes since the officer had called him back to say help was on the way. Probably closer to ten since the car had driven in, maybe a few more.

  To hell with it. Every minute he waited was a minute more that Max was in harm’s way. He sat up, eyes fixed on the unit ahead, ready to slouch back at the first sign of a door opening, but it was all quiet now. He eased himself out, pushed the door slowly until it clicked, rather than slamming it shut, then scurried across the road. The short dash to the near corner of the building was like crossing no man’s land, feeling the itch of unseen eyes as if he was being tracked.

  He reached the corner, flattening his back to the wall, peering around to check the front was still clear. His back prickled against the cool concrete, nervous sweat soaking into cotton. He’d studied the buildings while he’d waited in the car. Four units in each row either side of the road. A quick lap of the structure should show him what the options were.

  A few seconds’ hesitation, then he was away, edging along the line of the wall into the shadows by the rear, listening out for sirens, but all he heard was his own heartbeat. They weren’t coming, at least not fast enough. He was the cavalry.

  He left Max slumped in the car and went to check on his house guest in the storage room. Exactly where he’d left him, no movement except a soft rise and fall of his chest. He grabbed a battered wooden chair that had resided here longer than he had and set it down next to the car.

  Max hadn’t budged since the housing estate but it didn’t do to take any chances. He moved off to the side, squatted and stared through the window, watching for signs Max was playing possum. Not a flicker. He walked around, leaning in through the driver’s side and looped another cable tie around Max’s ankles before pulling a pair of scissors from his pocket and snipping the ones that fastened him to the door. Another trip around the car and he opened the door carefully, easing Max forwards so he bent at the waist, slipping him over his shoulder and straightening up into a fireman’s lift.

  Two minutes of manoeuvring and Max was secured to the chair, facing away from the car, ties looped around wooden legs and armrests. Almost time to wake him up. Just a few things to pop in the car first, for after he was done here. He rummaged in a black rucksack until his fingers closed around the glass bottle he was looking for and walked back towards the storage room with a spring in his step.

  When Max was fifteen, he’d suffered the only knockout of his junior boxing career, and it had stung in more ways than one. His opponent had been big for his age, freakishly quick hands, and the uppercut had been little more than a blur. It caught him flush on his chin, and he’d been out before his head hit the canvas. To this day, he couldn’t remember feeling it connect, just the sting of smelli
ng salts as he came around.

  He was back there now, the fuzzy face of his coach a smudge of colour. Eyes blinking, trying to jump-start them into focus. Wanting to touch a hand to his jaw, except it wouldn’t move. Couldn’t move. Colours started to merge, a face forming in front of him. Realisation that he wasn’t flat on the canvas but sitting up. Neon lights overhead, bright as a supernova. He winced, eyes watering, tried to blink away the stars hovering in front of him, stench of ammonia in his nostrils.

  Blurred lines gave way to an outline, and soon he could make out the face of a man, vaguely familiar, sitting on a chair opposite him. Sure as hell isn’t my boxing coach. His mind slipped from neutral into first, remembered being in the car. The officer – no, not an officer, Him, driving him somewhere. A housing estate? Remembered the judder of pain that had gripped his body. His face racing towards the dashboard, until it filled his vision, then just black.

  ‘Evening, Max,’ the man said. His voice sounded different to what Max remembered from the car. More confident, assured.

  Max twisted his head as far around as he could manage, took in his surroundings, saw the restraints pinning him in place. He felt only two things right now: helpless, and for the first time since all this had started, he was afraid.

  The path around the building had been fairly clear, and Callum quickly found himself at the opposite corner, the mirror image of his starting position, and still none the wiser about how to get in unnoticed.

  He had scurried past a second roller door at the other side, but that was shut too, and putting his ear to it achieved nothing except getting a dirty smear across his cheek. On the plus side, he had almost tripped over a piece of wood, two-by-four. It was discoloured, like it’d been at the bottom of a pond, but it had a reassuring weightiness and he wasn’t likely to find a better weapon anytime soon.