by Tim Weaver
The flat had definitely been used recently.
I looked around. Pinned to the wall was a newspaper cutting, curled at the edges. BOY, 10, FOUND FLOATING IN THE THAMES. Parts of the story had been underlined in red pen. I stepped in closer: 13 April 2002. It was nearly eight years old.
I walked to the bedrooms. Both were empty, dust on the floorboards and paint blistering on the walls. The windows had also been covered in black plastic sheeting. The third door led to the bathroom. The bath was filthy, mould climbing up the sides and around the taps, spreading like a disease across the
Back in the kitchen, I checked through the cupboards. Two saucepans. A frying pan. Both had been washed. In another drawer I found washing-up liquid. Cornflakes. Matches. Cutlery. Orange juice. In the smallest drawer, right at the bottom, was a notepad. Nothing written on it. I took it anyway.
I ran my fingers along the underside of the units, then climbed on to them and looked on top of the cupboards. They hadn’t been cleaned since they’d been put in. The dirt was an inch thick.
The flat was obviously used as a base of some sort; a hiding place. Maybe Alex had even hidden here for a time. No one would live here. Not in conditions like this. There weren’t enough provisions and utensils for anyone to stay full-time. But as a place to disappear, it was ideal. The old man thought it was the council he’d heard – but it wasn’t them.
I glanced at the slashed plastic sheeting and the jemmied lock, and realized they’d know someone had been here. But it was too late to worry about that now. Whoever owned this place wasn’t making contact with the neighbours and it was unlikely they were paying rent or rates. Any break-in was going to go unreported.
Then, suddenly, a telephone started ringing.
I stood completely still in the middle of the room, trying to figure out if it was coming from inside the flat.
I checked the first one over. Nothing.
In the second, the noise got louder. At the bottom of one of the walls was a phone jack, a small wire running up and out of it, disappearing behind one of the black sheets. I stabbed my knife into it and tore away the plastic. On the windowsill was a cordless phone with a digital display, sitting in a recharging cradle.
The ringing stopped.
I picked up the phone and looked at the display. LAST CALL: NUMBER WITHHELD. In the options menu, there were no names in the address book. Nothing on the ‘recent calls’ list. No messages on the voicemail. I punched in my own mobile number, and pressed ‘Call’. A couple of seconds later, my phone started buzzing. On the display: PRIVATE. So, the landline’s withheld as well. I deleted my number from the ‘recent calls’ list, and placed their phone back in the cradle. The fact that there was nothing on it – no history, no record of anything – meant either it was brand new, or they wiped it clean after every use.
It was time to go.
I went to the windows in the living room, trying to see if there was any way to reconnect the sheeting. There wasn’t.
Then I caught sight of something else: two floors down, a man was standing next to my car, a mobile phone in his hands. The handset was flipped open, as if he’d just been using it.
The caller.
He leaned forward, cupped his hands to the glass and peered through the window into the front seat. He didn’t move for a long time. Then he straightened up, took in the full length of the car and looked up towards the flat. I stepped back from the window. Waited. Checked my watch thirty seconds later. When I looked again, he was gone.
I made sure I still had the notepad I’d pocketed earlier, and moved to the door, opening it a fraction. I peered through the gap.
The man was already inside the doors at the end of the corridor.
Shit – he’s coming to the flat.
I pushed the door gently shut and backed up against the wall, just to the side of the hinge. Gripping the knife, I listened for his footsteps. Then the door started opening.
Hesitation.
It opened further, but not the whole way. Through the slit between door and frame, I could see his face. He had a thick scar running towards the corner of his lips, which seemed to extend his mouth. He took another step forward. All I could see now was the back of his head. Another inch forward. His foot came into view at the bottom of the door.
‘Vee?’ he said quietly.
He took a step back.
‘Vee?’
Another step.
He backed up another step and, before I realized what was happening, a thin sliver of face was filling the gap between door and frame – and his eyes were moving from the knife in my hand, up to my face.
Suddenly, we were eye to eye either side of the door.
A heartbeat later, he ran.
When I got out into the corridor, the doors at the end were already swinging open and he was out of them. I sprinted after him, taking the stairs two at a time, adjusting the knife so the tip of the handle faced down and the blade pointed towards my elbow. When I got to the bottom, he was looking back over his shoulder, heading out across the grass to where a length of metal fencing separated the buildings from the road. He looked younger than me, twenty-two or twenty-three. I’d run a lot since Derryn had died, pounding out the frustration and the anger, but at his age he would be naturally fitter. It was unlikely I could catch him on a straight run.
Then the chase swung in my favour.
The kids I’d spotted earlier had moved their game of football further up, closer to the flats. As he looked around again, one of the kids ran across in front of him. The two of them collided. The kid went spinning, almost pirouetting on the spot, before collapsing to the floor. The man tried to avoid him but failed, falling over him, his body hitting the floor hard. For
He went down again.
As I came at him, he jabbed a boot up into my stomach. I staggered backwards, losing my footing, but managed to cling on to his coat. I pulled him towards me. He jabbed at me again with a foot, catching the side of my face. The impact stunned me for a moment. I dropped the knife. Blinked. Tried to refocus. He looked between me, the knife and the fencing. The tiny delay worked in my favour: I grasped the front of his coat and landed a punch in the side of his head.
He pushed back and grabbed my arm, trying to snap it. Wriggling free, I pumped a fist at his face, and missed. Then did it again. He rolled to the left, my fist slapping against the ground, then used my weight transfer to push me off. When I swivelled to face him again, he was already on his feet, caked in mud.
‘Stop!’ I shouted.
But he didn’t stop. By the time I was on my feet again, he had made it to the metal fence, then dropped to his knees and quickly crawled through a gap. As he stood up, safe on the other side, he pulled up the hood on his jacket so I couldn’t see his face properly, and jogged away.
I got to the fencing and pressed against it. He was halfway along a narrow alleyway that led from the opposite side of the road, moving more slowly now
Then he disappeared for good.
On my way back to the car, about twenty feet from where the kids were playing football, I spotted something: a mobile phone. Mud was caked to it, the display face down, wet grass matted to the casing. I knelt, picked it up and wiped it clean. As soon as I unlocked the keypad, it erupted into life. I hit ‘Answer’.
On the phone: silence. Then the sound of cars in the background.
‘You’re gonna wish you hadn’t picked that up,’ a voice said.
I paused. Stood. I could see my knife about six feet across the grass from me. I walked over and scooped it up, then glanced towards the fence, back to the flats and out to the main road again.
I was being watched.
‘Did you hear me?’
‘Who are you?’
‘Did you hear me?’
‘Yeah, I heard you,’ I replied, and looked around again. ‘Who does the flat belong to?’
‘You just made a big mistake.’
‘Yeah, well, I’ve made them before.’
‘Not l
ike this.’ The line crackled and hissed. ‘Listen to me: you get back in your car and you drive back to
I took the phone away from my ear and looked at the display. Another withheld number. ‘Who does the flat belong to?’
‘Is that clear?’
‘What’s the Calvary Project?’
‘Is that clear?’
‘Where’s Alex Towne?’
‘You’re not listening to me, David.’
I stopped. ‘How do you know my name?’
‘One chance.’
‘How the fuck do you know my name?’
‘This is your one chance.’
Then the line went dead.
The restaurant overlooked Hyde Park. At the windows were a series of booths, dressed up like an American diner, with mini jukeboxes on the tables playing Elvis on rotation. Above me on the wall was a clock showing 10.40, Mickey Mouse’s arms pointing to the ten and the eight. Three booths along were a French couple and, beyond them, a group of kids eating toast and jam. Apart from that, the place was empty.
On the table in front of me, I had the pad I’d taken from the apartment and the mobile phone I’d picked up off the grass outside. Just like the phone in the flat, there were no contact numbers in the address book, nothing on the ‘recent calls’ list and no saved messages. Maybe they’d never used it. Or maybe they really did wipe it clean after every use.
A waitress came over carrying my breakfast. An omelet, some toast and lots of coffee. She set it down and wandered off again. I loved coffee, sometimes even lived off it. It was probably as close as I got to an addiction. Food didn’t appeal to me in the same way as it had once, mainly because eating on your own wasn’t fun, but also because I’d become lazy during marriage. Derryn had been an incredible cook, and it had been safer, and tastier, for us both if she made the
I filled my mug and, while I waited for the food to cool, started going through the phone again. Dropping it had been a mistake, but a mistake they could probably live with. There was nothing on it that would lead back to them. No incriminating evidence. No numbers. Nothing traceable. But whatever their connection to Alex, they were still warning me off something. Perhaps I was close, perhaps I wasn’t, but it was clear I’d made some inroads.
I pulled the pad towards me.
When I’d been inside the flat, the light from the windows had been shining across the surface of the paper. It had highlighted the scars and grooves left from notes that had been made on previous sheets. I asked the waitress for a pencil and gently rubbed the tip of it across the pad. Slowly, words started to emerge. In the top right: Must phone Vee. In the middle, lighter and less defined, a series of names: Paul. Stephen. Zack. Towards the bottom, barely even legible until I held it right up to the window, was a telephone number.
I picked up my phone and dialled it.
Eventually, someone answered. ‘Angel’s, Soho.’
I waited, could hear people talking in the background.
‘Is this Angel’s pub?’
‘Yeah.’
I gave directory enquiries the number, and they told me the address that was listed for it. It was a pub on the edge of Chinatown. But I knew that even before I’d made the call. During my apprenticeship, I was paired with an old guy called Jacob, an experienced reporter who covered the City. Angel’s was his local at the time. He stopped going a couple of years later, after retiring to the Norfolk countryside.
But I didn’t.
I continued going right the way up until Derryn got ill.
My car was on the other side of the park. I entered at Hyde Park Corner and headed towards the Serpentine. Everything was quiet. The trees were skeletal and bare; the water in the lake dark and still. The only movement on its surface were two model boats, gliding and drifting, their sails catching the wind. I carried on walking, taken in by the smell and sounds of the place; of the grass covered by a blanket of fallen leaves; of the oaks and elms stripped bare as winter approached.
Kids ran across in front of me, their muddy footprints a reminder of where they’d been and how often. Their parents watched from the side: chatting, laughing, their breath drifting away. It made me ache with loneliness. I remembered the times Derryn and I had talked about wanting a family, about what it would be
Sometimes I remembered the sense of finality as I watched her coffin being lowered into the ground. The feeling that there was no doubt any more; she was gone and she wasn’t coming back. I knew, deep down, there was no way Alex could have died in that car crash and still be alive, in the same way I knew there was no way Derryn could be. Yet, when I looked in Mary’s eyes, I only saw conviction there, so lucid, as if she had no doubt in what she was telling me. And I knew a small part of me wanted her to be right. I wanted Alex to be alive, however impossible it seemed. And the need to find out was driving me on, and, at least temporarily, helping me forget the loneliness.
After days of heavy skies and biting winds, snow finally started falling as I got back to the car. I climbed in, put the heaters on full blast and started scrolling through the numbers on my mobile. When I got to the one I wanted, I hit ‘Call’.
‘Citizens Advice Bureau.’
I smiled. ‘Oh, come on.’
‘Who’s that?’ the voice said.
‘Citizens Advice?’
‘David?’
‘Yeah. How you doing, Spike?’
‘Man, it’s been ages.’
‘So, what can I do you for you, man?’
He spoke that form of American-influenced English that a lot of Europeans used, picked up by watching hours of music videos and TV shows.
‘I need you to fire up the super computer.’
‘Course I can. What you got?’
‘A mobile phone – I want to find out who it belongs to. It’s got no numbers on it, no address book. If I gave you the serial number and the SIM, could you find out where the phone was bought – maybe who it’s registered to?’
‘Yeah, no problem. You’ll have to give me a couple of hours, though.’
‘Sure.’
I gave him all the details and then my phone number.
‘Oh, and my fee’s gone up a bit,’ he said.
‘Whatever it takes, Spike.’
I hung up – and, within seconds, the phone was buzzing again. I looked down at the display. john cary. I’d forgotten to chase him up again.
‘John,’ I said, answering. ‘Sorry I didn’t get back to you.’
No response.
‘I can’t talk for long,’ he replied.
‘Okay.’
‘You still want that photograph looked at?’
‘Definitely.’
‘Send it to me at home. I know a couple of people at the Forensic Science Service, and one of them owes me a favour from a while back. I can ask him to take a look at it.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘No.’ The line drifted. ‘But make the most of it.’
‘Look, I really appreci–’
‘I’m probably making the biggest mistake of my life.’
I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I said nothing. But I knew my instincts had been right: what had happened to Alex still ate at him, and a part of him longed for closure.
I killed the call and watched the snow slide down the windscreen, my thoughts turning back to Angel’s. The last time I’d ever been inside, the winter had been the same as this one: long and cold, stretching from the beginning of November all the way through to the end of February. Two different times, both connected – like a small part of my past was now merging with the present.
Angel’s was a thin building, west of Charing Cross Road. Snow was already piling up against the door when I arrived. Next to it, barred like a cell, was a small window. I peered inside. It was dark; a square of white light at the back was all I could make out. Above me were a pair of neon angel’s wings, and next to the doorway a sign that said it wasn’t open until midday. I looked at my watch. 11.40.
‘You’
re early.’
I turned. ‘Woah! Where did you come from?’
A woman was standing behind me, looking me up and down. She was in her mid-forties, pale and boyish, her blonde hair from a bottle, her eyes grey and small. I smiled at her, but she just shook her head. She glanced from the door of the pub to the sky, then pulled her long, fake fur coat tighter around her.
‘Come back in twenty minutes.’ She started unlocking the door.
‘I’m not here to drink.’
She turned to me, disgusted. ‘You wanna strip joint, you’ve come to the wrong place.’
‘I’m not here for that either.’
She pushed the door open and stepped into the open doorway. ‘You wanna chat?’
‘This ain’t the Samaritans.’ She went to push the door closed, but I shoved a foot in next to it and took a step up to the doorway. She didn’t look surprised – as if it happened a lot.
‘There ain’t no money here.’
Her accent was strong. East End.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’m not here to rob you.’
She stared at me, then rolled her eyes. ‘The Old Bill. Shit, this must be my lucky day.’
‘I’m not a police officer either.’
She tossed her coat inside, across one of the tables near the door. ‘What do you want?’
‘Can I come in?’
‘No.’
I rubbed my hands together. ‘We’ll just freeze to death out here, then.’
She glanced up and down the street as snow settled around us, then looked at me and rolled her eyes. ‘Whatever,’ she said, sighing, and gestured for me to follow her in.
It had hardly changed since the last time I’d been in. They’d replaced the wallpaper – but nothing else. The room was long and narrow, with a five-pointed cove at the back big enough for a couple of tables, and a jukebox wired up to the far wall.
‘So, what’s going down, Magnum?’ she said.
I turned back to her. She was smiling at her joke. I removed my pad and a pen and set it down on the bar, sliding in at one of the stools. ‘What’s your name?’
