by John Harvey
‘And that would have happened in this case?’
‘I assume so.’
‘After that? If you hear nothing after that?’
‘We’re obliged to inform the UK Border Agency of his failure to attend.’
‘Which you would have done?’
‘We take our responsibilities seriously.’
‘Give or take the odd gas bill,’ said Ramsden quietly, an aside.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Nothing.’
September, October, November — by the time the Border Agency had been informed, Karen thought, Petru Andronic didn’t have so very long to live.
‘His details,’ she said. ‘UK address and so on, you can print us out a copy?’
No sooner said, almost, than done. The address was in Green Lanes, off St Ann’s Road. She knew the Salisbury pub.
3
The main street was awash with Kurdish and Turkish bakeries and cafes; mini-markets whose stalls, laden high with fruit and vegetables, stretched down across the pavement towards the kerb. Windows advertised cheap calls to Africa and the Middle East, secure ways of sending money home.
‘My old man brought me here once,’ Ramsden said. ‘Up the road from here. Dog track. Harringay. Couple of years before it closed down. I was still at school. Tucked a fiver into my top pocket. See how long it takes you to lose that.’ He grinned, remembering. ‘Couple of races. Three, maybe. Neither of us had a winner the whole night.’
‘Miss him?’ Karen asked. ‘Your dad?’ He’d died, she knew, the year before, cancer.
Ramsden shook his head. ‘Don’t give it much of a thought.’
He looked away.
‘He saw all this now, poor bastard’d be turnin’ in his grave.’
The street they were looking for ran off to the left, two rows of small terraced houses, flat-fronted, some showing signs of recent renovation, others dwindling towards decay. The address they’d been given was stranded midway between two extremes, work started and abandoned; a new window in the front downstairs, fresh paint, new curtains; the first-floor window had been removed and not replaced, a sheet of tarpaulin flapping in the wind and failing to keep out the snow that had begun, once more, to fall. Tiles had slipped from the roof and lay like crazy paving across the bare patch of garden. A coat of primer on the front door.
Ramsden rang the bell and, when nothing seemed to be happening, knocked loudly twice.
The woman who came to the door was wearing a black burkha, impossible to guess her age; a child of no more than a few months asleep in a sling across her chest. Seeing Ramsden she took a step back inside; stood impassive in the face of Karen’s questions, then called back into the house. The boy who sidled towards them was twelve or thirteen, dark-eyed, hair grown long.
‘You speak English?’ Ramsden asked.
‘Course. So does my mum. She don’t like to speak to no strangers, yeah? My dad, he goes crazy.’
His mother had retreated into the hall, a hand cupped round the baby’s head.
‘You from the council?’ the boy asked. ‘No. Police. Police, i’n it?’
Karen nodded. ‘We’re looking for someone who might know a Petru Andronic.’
‘Who?’
‘Petru Andronic. We were told he lived here.’
The boy was shaking his head, shifting his weight from foot to foot. ‘Just me an’ my brothers, my sisters, mum an’ dad, that’s all.’
‘And where are you from?’ Ramsden asked.
‘Tottenham. South Tottenham.’
‘Before that?’
‘Iraq, i’n it?’
‘How long have you been living here? This house?’ Karen asked.
‘I dunno. Ages. Long time. A year? More’n that. ’Fore my birthday. Yeah, more than a year, got to be.’
‘And there’s been no one else living here during that time? No one staying with you? A lodger?’
The boy shook his head. Behind him, the baby cried, just once, and was shushed.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Course I’m sure.’
Karen showed him the photograph. ‘You ever seen this person before?’
‘No.’
‘Please look at it carefully.’
‘I did.’
‘So look again,’ Ramsden said.
The boy scowled and murmured something beneath his breath, then, with exaggerated deliberation, did as he was asked.
Nothing.
Karen thanked him for his help.
They tried the other houses in the street. Three people thought they might recognise the face, without being a hundred per cent certain; one man — slow to the door with the aid of a stick, lived there the best part of forty years — deliberated carefully and then said he’d seen him for sure. ‘Last year, hangin’ round, that house over there. All them plants in the window. That’s the one.’
They’d tried there already: no reply. The other end of the street from the address they’d been given, but numbers can become confused, misread, misheard. There were plants clearly visible between slatted wooden blinds, luxuriant, shiny and green. The blinds themselves were white and expensive, the kind Karen had enquired about getting for her flat, then baulked at the cost. There was a small painting visible on the wall — painting, Karen thought, not poster; a standard lamp left softly burning.
‘Raising the tone of the neighbourhood single-handed,’ Ramsden observed.
They walked back to the main road, sat in a cafe and ate borek with feta cheese and spinach, shortbread dusted with powdered sugar, drank strong sweet coffee. Fortified, they took the photograph from door to door, shop to shop. Blank faces, suspicious looks: some eager to be helpful, some not. Andronic? Andronic? A lot of shaking heads. You tried Turnpike Lane, maybe? Finally, they went back to the house with the plants.
This time there was a cat on the window ledge, ginger and white, waiting to be let in. When Ramsden reached out a hand to stroke it, it arched its back and hissed.
‘Not very friendly, I’m afraid. Still hasn’t really settled in.’
He was white, thirties, rimless glasses; neat, short hair. Tan chinos, grey T-shirt, grey sweater in a different shade. The cat slipped past him into the warm interior as, with some care, he looked at their ID.
‘Adrian Osborne.’ He held out a hand. ‘No sense catching your death out here, why don’t you come inside?’
He and his partner had bought the place a little over six months ago, summer; kept their flat in Stoke Newington while the bulk of the work was done; downstairs rooms knocked through, new kitchen, shower. Like to put in a big window at the back eventually, more light, but you can’t do everything. Not at once. People before, they’d been renting. Not long. Less than a year. Andronic? No, I don’t think so. Can’t remember exactly what it was, to be honest. But a family. Quite a few of them, I believe. Four or five at least, couple of younger girls, teenage son. Football posters on the walls. Only met them a couple of times. The father, when we first looked round. Scarcely said a word. After that, it was the estate agent, mainly. Going round with the builder, you know?
Osborne leaned forward, looked again at the photograph. ‘I wish I could be more definite, I really do. I mean, he could have been one of the boys, the boys I saw, but, to be honest, I didn’t pay them a lot of attention. It wasn’t as if we were introduced or anything.’ He slid the photo back along the table. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Perhaps you’ve got a forwarding address?’ Karen said.
‘Asked for one, several times. Thought they’d leave one when they went, but no.’ He shrugged. ‘You could try the guy we bought from. He’s the one, rented it to them originally. I’ve got his details, phone number, email. He should have something.’
The cat lifted a paw and looked at Ramsden balefully as they left the room.
The letting agency was just along the Broadway from Shopping City, slush splaying round their feet, splashing up the backs of their legs as they walked. The office was on the second flo
or, a faint smell of incense mixed with hair oil. The vendor was Asian, Pakistani. Music playing, vaguely classical, guitars. A quick shake of hands, lingering on Karen’s just a fraction too long. Manicured nails. Parma violets on his breath. A forwarding address, of course. Mile End, somewhere. A few swift manoeuvres with the mouse, wireless controlled, and there it was on the screen. Mile End, indeed.
‘If you’re ever looking for property,’ the agent said. ‘Investment …’
Out on the street, Karen breathed in cold air.
‘Fancy a drink?’ Ramsden said.
‘Bit early, isn’t it?’
‘Early or late. Depends.’
They found a small pub away from the High Road, a few old men wishing their lives away over slow-drawn pints of best. While Ramsden got in the drinks, Karen called in on her mobile, sent a request, the address in Mile End, get through to the local station, send somebody round. They were well into their second round, Ramsden’s conversation beginning to veer off into the now familiar fear and loathing, when the call came back: the address as given didn’t exist.
Like so many others, Petru Andronic had come into the country, severed all traces, and, until his body had surfaced on that frozen December morning, virtually disappeared.
4
Cordon turned at the edge of the hill, salt from the night air bright on his tongue, and looked back across the bay. Early January and cold as a witch’s tit. A forecast of more snow. What kind of a happy new year was that?
Beyond the lights of the far town it was just possible to make out St Michael’s Mount, a hump of black against the blackness of the sea. Amongst the huddle of houses to his right, a light flickered and then went out. Collar up, he turned again and continued to climb, cobbled stone beneath his feet, key already in his hand.
He’d bought this place, a converted sail loft in Newlyn, before prices had spiralled out of control. Now all around him were holiday lets and second homes, kids with names like Tristan and Toby and people carriers with customised number plates blocking the winding lanes.
Not that he was quick to judge.
A long room with a kitchen at one end and a bed at the other, lavatory and bathroom partitioned off, it had been somewhere to move into, move on from, part of the plan. Chief inspector in another five or six years, superintendent by the time he was fifty. One of those nice old Georgian places in Penzance, down near Penlee House, that was where he’d seen himself by then, what he’d fancied. Till some bastard pulled away the ladder and, perforce, he’d stayed put.
His own bloody intransigence hadn’t helped.
Passed over, these last few years he’d been stationed in the middle of nowhere cosseting a team of five: two young PCs, wet behind the ears, a sergeant close to his own age, prone to outbursts of gout, and a pair of community support officers who needed all the support they could get. Neighbourhood policing, that’s what it was called. Low-level drug use, common-or-garden domestic disputes and routine drunk and disorderlies; inebriated yahoos with public-school accents down from Oxbridge or London for the surf; a little casual breaking and entering. Other things.
In the past twelve months, there’d been several cases of sheep rustling, but more recently even the sheep were getting thinner, barely meat enough on their bones to warrant all that up and down through the heather. The only reason Cordon hadn’t jacked it in and walked away before his thirty years were up, he hadn’t wanted to give his bosses the satisfaction.
Besides, there wasn’t so very long now to go.
So he reported for duty, clocked in, clocked off, kept Home Office directives piled high in a corner until there were enough for a decent bonfire, happy enough to let the powers that be forget he was there.
At home, he sat with his feet up, reading, listening to music, rationing the Scotch. A mishmash, where the music was concerned: Mingus with Eric Dolphy at Cornell; Bach Partitas for solo violin; some Ellington; some blues; Britten’s String Quartet in C. And the reading? Trollope, his current favourite. The Way We Live Now. There was a man who knew a thing or two.
Opposite the one comfortable chair was a television set with its screen turned to the wall. Occasionally, as if to remind himself of the world beyond his own, he would swivel it round and watch the news. Bankers and captains of failed industries slinking wantonly into the shelter of their offshore accounts with their air-brushed mistresses or surgically reconstructed wives; men whose pensions would bring them more in a year than many of the men Cordon knew would earn in a lifetime. Trollope all over again. We never learned.
Hungry, he took the remaining half of pork pie from the fridge. He was just levering the cap from a bottle of Tribute ale, when the mobile sounded from his coat pocket across the room.
The custody sergeant in Penzance. ‘Woman here, sir. Bit of a state. Half out of her head on drink and I’d not like to say what else. Not making a lot of sense.’
‘My concern?’
‘Asking for you, sir, that’s all. Thought you’d like to know.’
‘She have a name?’
‘Carlin.’
Cordon stopped his breath. ‘Rose? Rose Carlin?’
‘Maxine.’
‘You sure it’s not Rose? Or Letitia. She could be calling herself that.’
‘Maxine, that’s what she says. Maxine.’
Cordon looked at his watch. A quick drive eastwards around the bay. Newlyn to Penzance. His car parked at the bottom of the hill. ‘I’ll be right there.’ Pressing the cap firmly back on to the bottle, he took a healthy bite out of the pie and reached for his coat.
The custody sergeant pushed the paper he was reading aside.
‘Sorry to call you out, sir. Only way to shut her up.’ He nodded in the direction of the cells.
‘She’s under arrest?’
‘There for her own safety. Thought she might sleep it off.’
‘Be suing you, next thing you know, false imprisonment.’
The sergeant made a face. ‘Human bloody Rights Act, like as not succeed.’
The door to the cell was unlocked, the air inside vinegary with disinfectant. Maxine Carlin lay curled in one corner, face to the wall. She turned only slowly when he spoke her name.
One side of her face was pinched tight, the corner of her mouth aslant; a scab above the right eye had been picked away down to the pink skin beneath. He could smell the drink on her from where he stood.
‘You wanted to see me?’
‘Took your bastard time!’
‘Wanted to talk?’
‘Not here.’
She could only walk unsteadily at first, ignoring Cordon’s proffered hand. Once they had reached the car, she leaned against the roof until her breathing had become more regular and her head had begun to clear. He drove south past Morrab Gardens and parked along the West Promenade, windows wound down, waiting while, painstakingly, she rolled a cigarette. Faint, under the occasional clamour of gulls, he could hear the rhythmic shushing of pebbles as the tide moved them up and back along the beach.
‘It’s about Letitia?’ Cordon asked.
‘That stupid bloody name!’
‘Rose, then. What you wanted to see me for, it’s about your daughter? About Rose?’
‘She’s gone missing, i’n’t she?’
Missing, Cordon thought: missing from where? He hadn’t clapped eyes on her in months, years.
‘Her father, he rung me. She was supposed to be going down to see him, stay for a bit. Hastings, where he’s got some excuse for a bloody bookshop. Down from London. Never turned up. Never showed.’
‘Changed her mind, perhaps.’
‘Called him, didn’t she, right before she left. Charing something?’
‘Charing Cross?’
‘Maybe. I dunno. Meet the train, she told him. Waited half the day. Her mobile switched off each time he tried. Got on to me in the end, see if I knew anything. I didn’t know a bloody thing.’ She flicked the cigarette away in a shower of sparks. ‘Since she moved up there, Lon
don, we’ve not exactly kept in touch. Not like when she was here. Used to be, we was more like sisters. These last few years, never tells me a thing. More secrets’n the Queen of bloody Sheba. Don’t even know where’s she’s living. Not properly. Never been there, never been asked.’
Cordon nodded. ‘All this was when? When she was supposed to meet her father?’
‘Last week. Beginnin’ of last week. Right after New Year.’ She rubbed a cracked fingernail against the corner of her eye.
‘The two of them, they were close then?’
‘When it suited him.’
‘But she did see him?’
‘Like I say, when it suited him, miserable bastard.’
‘And this time, no explanation, she just never arrived?’
‘Christ! Didn’t I just bloody say so?’
‘You’ve tried contacting her?’
‘Much good it did me. Old mobile number, that’s all I had. Waste of bleedin’ time.’
‘And you’ve not got an address?’
‘Just this. Here.’ Maxine started scrabbling in her bag. ‘Place she used to work. Housekeepin’, somethin’ like that. Never said too much about it.’
She pushed a piece of paper into his hand. A street name and house number in London, N16.
‘And this was when? When she was working here?’
‘A year back, got to be. Maybe more. Something though, isn’t it? If you’re lookin’. Somewhere to start.’
Cordon sighed and folded the paper carefully into his top pocket. She’d been missing, if missing she was, for just a week, not yet quite two. No time, no time at all. The air through the open windows was cold and getting colder, a breeze lifting off the sea.
‘You’ll do what you can? To find her?’
Cordon turned away. The lights farther around the bay suggested home, a glass of whisky and a warm bed.
‘You will?’
‘I could make a few inquiries from here. Get somebody to go round, maybe, check that old address. Beyond that, I don’t think there’s a great deal I can do. Not until we know more. Grown woman, independent. No suggestion of foul play. She’s probably fine. Just changed her mind. Last moment. It happens. Went somewhere else instead. Friends.’
