by Simon Mason
‘Two hours ago he phoned,’ she said, ‘to ask where you were.’
‘Who did?’
‘Mr Trindle.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘Your geography teacher.’
‘Really?’
His mother glared at him. ‘So what’s the answer?’
‘Answer to what?’
‘Where were you? Obviously not in your geography lesson.’
For a moment he considered telling her he’d taken flowers round to Mrs Dow’s, but before he could open his mouth his mother said, ‘This isn’t anything to do with the investigation about Chloe, is it? You’re not getting mixed up in that, are you?’
He registered the dangerous note in her voice. ‘Course not,’ he said.
‘Well, then?’
‘I didn’t go anywhere. I was just told Trundle had cancelled his lesson.’
‘Trindle.’
‘Whoever.’
His mother began to do the breathing thing, and, lying there, he braced himself for the usual argument, the storm of outrage at the untidiness of his room, the verbal assault on his unauthorized absences from school, the outcry against his general lack of effort. He sensed it coming. But it did not come. Cautiously, he glanced at her. Although her face was the familiar bunched mask of disapproval, she was holding something unfamiliar in her hand. A letter. A letter in an official-looking, somehow foreign envelope. While he was still considering this, she suddenly sat down heavily on the end of his bed and he blinked in surprise.
‘What’re you doing?’
‘You better listen to me for once,’ she said. ‘I’ve something to tell you.’
‘Can’t it wait?’ He paused. ‘I was trying to revise.’
Without warning she told him anyway, and he sat up and stared at her.
‘What?’
She told him again. The director of human resources at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Bridgetown, Barbados, had written to her inviting her to apply for the position of Senior Nurse, Surgery. ‘But it’s in Barbados.’
‘It is.’
‘And you’ve got a job here,’ he said. ‘Why would you want to go there?’
She told him. Money was tight here. The flat was expensive here. In Barbados the living was a lot cheaper and, as it happened, the house in Bridgetown where her elderly mother used to live was still standing empty, just waiting for someone to move in. There was family there too – Garvie’s other uncles and aunts, and more cousins than she could remember.
She hesitated. ‘And I think you’d be happier in Barbados,’ she said.
‘No,’ Garvie said.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I think it would be good for you living in Barbados.’
‘No,’ he said again.
‘It’s not for you to say yes or no. It’s my decision.’
‘I won’t go.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I’ll doss with friends.’
His mother sighed. ‘I’m serious, Garvie. I’m done watching you do nothing. I’m not going to stay here and watch you get into trouble.’
‘I’m not getting into trouble.’
‘I want you to stop before it gets serious.’
‘I told you, I’m not getting into trouble.’
There was silence while he suppressed a memory of what Inspector Singh had just said to him.
She got to her feet. ‘I have another week or so before I give them an answer.’ With a slow, fierce eye she looked around the room. ‘If you want me to turn the job down you better start showing me why living here is so much better for you. You’ve got exams next month.’
After she’d gone, Garvie sat alone, looking around – as she had done – at the hideous mess of dirty laundry and rubbish. Somewhere in all that was his school bag. Perhaps.
He got up wearily, but in the kitchen his mother put on the radio and he stopped to listen. A voice came to him, flat and crackly but still recognizable: Detective Inspector Singh making a statement.
There had been a new development, he was saying. The police had shifted their focus to the Market Square precinct in the centre of the city. He appealed to anyone who thought they might have seen Chloe there between the hours of six and midnight on Thursday to come forward to assist them. But he would not give a reason for this shift in focus, nor would he answer questions about CCTV pictures of the area or explain what Chloe might have been doing.
‘Is there anyone specifically helping you with your enquiries?’
‘The investigation is making progress,’ he said shortly. ‘I have no further statement to make.’
‘Are there any suspects at all, in fact?’ the reporter asked.
But Singh declined to comment.
Garvie lay down quietly on his bed again, and stared at the ceiling. Market Square: a small crooked block of cobbled streets long since redundant as an artisan centre, revived now as a picturesque collection of cafés, bars, restaurants and high-end clubs, all discreet awnings, clever floor-lights and menus in French, and strikingly more in period now than it had been a few hundred years earlier. The natural habitat of the old and rich.
Garvie gazed impassively at the ceiling.
Chloe had liked to talk about Market Square as if she knew it intimately. But her personal inclination was for the bigger, more popular venues in The Wicker – the natural habitat of the young and famous. She wouldn’t have shied away from Market Square, but it wouldn’t have been her choice.
Garvie’s eyes narrowed slightly.
It would have been someone else’s choice.
14
AS THE DAYS passed there was no subsiding of media interest in the ‘Beauty and the Beast’ murder, rather the reverse, and on the day of Chloe’s funeral it boiled up to a new intensity. The news channels were jammed with Chloe: her youth, her charm, her dreams, her hopes, her mystery, her murder and, like a piercing memory never to be forgotten, her picture: that snapshot, that face of heart-breaking innocence and beauty. At the Marsh Academy the camera-toting press besieged the gates in ranks of eight and nine, kept at bay only by the diminutive Miss Perkins, in whom they recognized, uncomfortably, a determination more extreme than their own.
On Top Pitch, at lunch time, Garvie Smith sprawled on the grass, exhausted. He’d been to three lessons one after the other, and was seriously beginning to doubt if he could keep up this level of attendance any longer. With Smudge he shared a calming Benson and Hedges as they listened to Felix report on the funeral, which he’d witnessed earlier in the morning during period one.
It had been a private family affair at Five Mile Methodist Church. But by chance Felix had been on the roof of the newsagent’s opposite at the time.
‘Nothing private about it,’ he said. ‘Massive crowd. Super-massive. All these reporters and photographers. Cameramen, TV crews. About a thousand coppers in the line, looked like. But the weird thing was how everyone was really, really quiet. Eerie quiet. Like it was a ... a ...’
‘A funeral,’ Garvie said.
‘Well. Yeah.’
‘What were you doing on the roof?’ Smudge asked.
Felix looked vague. ‘Just looking for something.’
Smudge said, ‘I reckon this is the biggest thing that’s ever happened in Five Mile. Can’t turn on the TV without seeing her face. And think how many rozzers we’ve had here.’ He paused and looked at Garvie. ‘Have you been interviewed yet?’
‘No.’
‘Really? Everybody else has. Even me.’
‘I’m not cooperating.’
‘You told them that?’
‘Not exactly. They told me.’
It was strange, the way the police had ignored Garvie. As Smudge said, they’d interviewed everyone else, not just Chloe’s friends but almost all of Year Eleven, and teachers too, even the caretaker and the school nurse. Every day kids were called out of their lessons to go to Tech 2, the ‘interview room’, and sit at the end of a row of tables borrowed from the dining room for what wa
s always called a ‘little chat about Chloe’. It was meant to be confidential. But information given in the strictest privacy in Tech 2 circulated freely in the rest of the school, and at any given time the kids knew significantly more than the police did. It was no surprise to them that Chloe had been the victim of rumour and petty thefts, and that Jessica Walker was behind a lot of it. Or that Chloe was herself the source of other rumours involving luxury cars, millionaire admirers, modelling contracts and besotted teachers. They were familiar with the notion that she had not just one but several stalkers. They even had a shrewd idea what sort of testimony was being given by the teachers; in fact, they could have informed the police themselves that Mr MacArthur often gave Chloe a lift home after her training sessions at the track.
But some interesting information came the other way. Conducting his own interviews over cigs up on Top Pitch or in Marsh Fields snicket, Garvie had learned about police interest in three key issues: a black Porsche, the fact that something had upset Chloe on Thursday night, and her unexplained absence from school on Friday afternoon. He’d also learned that the police had been disappointed not to find Alex at the Academy; they were keen to interview him again.
‘All that about the Porsche is bollocks though, Garv.’
‘Is it, Smudge?’
‘You know what she was like. “It’s so comfy riding in a Porsche, Smudge. It’s so quiet, Smudgy. Everything matches, Smudgster.” Just Chloe-speak, Garv. Like a fantasy.’
Garvie thought for a moment. ‘What about Thursday night? Anyone know where she was?’
Smudge shook his head. ‘The one question of theirs I couldn’t answer, to be fair. Word is she was down Market Square, at some bar. The Black Cat. I don’t know.’
‘Felix?’
‘Apparently she said she was going to Jess’s, but she never.’
‘And Friday afternoon?’
Smudge shrugged. ‘Taking it easy, probably. Friday afternoons I like to go home for a nap. You know, before going out. I need my beauty sleep.’
Felix said, ‘You need more than a nap, my friend. You need to sleep for a thousand years.’
‘What’s your theory, Garv? Know what I reckon?’
‘What do you reckon, Smudge?’
‘I reckon a vagrant done it. One of them drifters sleeping rough at Four Winds.’
‘Very likely.’
‘Yeah, but this is the best bit. Not any old vagrant. Her dad. Her real dad.’
‘Her real dad’s been dead ten years, Smudge.’
‘Yeah, but come back. From the dead.’
Felix chipped in. ‘Yeah. ’Cause he’s been in hiding.’
‘That’s it. In Bolivia, or Kathmandu, or maybe down the Town Road, you know, above a shop.’
‘’Cause he’s a drugs baron.’
‘And a zombie. And he’s come back to ... claim his daughter.’
‘And he shows her the tattoo on his wrist, to prove it to her.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Tattoo of a llama, like they have in ... wherever he’s been.’
‘Yeah. But she fights back.’
‘So he kills her.’
‘Kills her dead.’
‘I reckon that’s how it happened.’ Smudge coughed modestly. ‘What do you think, Garv?’
Garvie took his time finishing his Benson and Hedges, and flicked the butt into the long grass, and said, ‘MacAttack is a teacher.’
There was a long pause while Smudge and Felix looked at each other.
‘So?’
‘So he doesn’t drive a Porsche.’
‘Yeah, but all that about a Porsche is—’
‘Let’s pretend for a second it’s just as likely as the llama-tattooed zombie real-dad theory.’
‘I think you’re pushing it, but all right.’
‘MacAttack doesn’t drive a Porsche, so where would Chloe go to find one? Where would she go to meet some rich young tosser with a Porsche?’
‘Actually, that’s pretty simple,’ Smudge said. ‘That’s easy, that one. Imperium, innit? Down the casino. Plenty of rich tossers in their shiny Porsches down there.’
Garvie smiled. ‘Smudge, my friend. You’re a genius. In disguise.’
Smudge went pink and spent a long time examining his feet, and when he lifted his head, saying, ‘Yeah, but what do you think about the—’ Garvie was already halfway down the slope towards C Block.
15
AT FIRST ABDUL didn’t recognize him. He was out of his cab, opening the back door and letting him in with all his usual little clicks and murmurings of politeness when he suddenly stopped.
‘My Garvie! Is you?’
‘The same.’
‘My Garvie man, what have they do to you?’
They had put him in a single-cuff Jil Sander shirt, vaguely purple, a black dandy jacket by Acne, some Ralph Lauren stretch chinos, also black, and a pair of black brogues. They had hung fake-gold bling from his wrists and neck, and had gelled his hair into shapes undreamed of even by Mr Whippy. And they had wrapped around his face a pair of nearly genuine Ray Bans, acquired – no one knew how – by Felix.
‘It’s what they call dress code,’ Garvie said.
Abdul made high-pitched clucking noises of disapproval. ‘Is foolishness.’
‘Is Imperium’s. Same sort of thing, really. Can you drop me off by the bowling alley next door?’
‘Oui, bien sûr. We go quick quick so you lose all you money.’
They drove down Bulwarks Lane into Pollard Way and onto the Town Road out of Five Mile towards the city centre. The night was lit up with the yellow fizz of streetlamps and the white glare of shop windows and the pulsing red points of the cars’ rear lights.
‘I trust the police are leaving you alone, Abdul.’
At once the little man began to gesticulate anxiously. No, they weren’t. They’d questioned him a second time. Did he know Chloe Dow? Had he ever given her a ride in his cab?
‘They ask you yet about a black Porsche?’
‘Oui, they ask.’ Abdul looked at him in the rear-view mirror. ‘You know black Porsche?’
‘Yeah, course. Do you?’
Abdul nodded confidently. ‘Oui oui. I see black Porsche.’
Garvie frowned. ‘Really? Where?’
‘Here, there. Big man drive. Big big like this.’ He puffed out his cheeks.
‘There must be dozens of black Porsches in the city, Abdul.’
Abdul shrugged. ‘Big big man,’ he repeated. ‘I see him here, see him there. I tell police. They write down their little book. Nothing happen. I know.’ He tapped the side of his head significantly.
‘Who is he, this big man?’
Abdul shrugged again. ‘He big play ... big play ...’ He sought for the right word and failed to find it.
‘Playboy?’
‘Oui, Garvie man! C’est ça. Big play boy.’ He rubbed his fingers together. ‘He big big money.’
‘Well, that figures. He drives a Porsche.’
They came at last to The Wicker. Once full of warehouses and workshops, the road had been reclaimed from old industry for entertainment, and now it was a strip of bars and drinking clubs, fast-food outlets, bowling alleys, lap-dancing bars, comedy clubs, cinemas and casinos. Everywhere was the coloured wash of lights, the muffled thump of music and the faint, harsh odour of fried food, booze and aftershave. At nine thirty it was just beginning to get busy.
Abdul let him out at the bowling alley and tutted at him.
‘I know, Abdul. Is foolishness.’
The man nodded. ‘Lucky for you I know not tell your mother.’
The night was mild and damp. A group of men came past wearing fancy dress, and Garvie stood in front of the bowling alley looking across at Imperium Restaurant and Casino at the end of the block, a low sleek building of stone and smoked glass fronted with fake Roman columns and a row of miniature potted orange trees, all trimmed into perfect spheres. Soft blue light illuminated it all. The chunky doormen were ostentatiously dressed in dinn
er jackets and black bow ties. A brilliantly lit giant hoarding above them showed a young woman dressed almost entirely in tassels, clapping her hands next to a slogan that read ALL YOU GOT TO DO TO WIN IS PLAY! Garvie turned away, crossed the forecourt of the bowling alley and slipped down the side of the brick wall separating the properties until he was lost in the shadows. A few moments later he was in Imperium’s rear car park, an irregular patch of broken concrete in no way compatible with the elegant front.
A two-minute search turned up nothing like a Porsche, black or otherwise. He strolled away into the shadows on the far side of the car park, where he lit up and lounged thoughtfully against a less-than-sparkling Renault Clio, waiting. In a little while a couple of cars pulled in, and as the people made their way round to the front, Garvie joined them, and together they went past the doormen – who gave Felix’s older brother’s membership card no more than a cursory glance – and into the casino.
The carpets were plush, the fittings posh. Garvie went down a hallway lined with slot machines to a sunken circular lobby done out like a miniature amphitheatre, where a woman dressed in a short white toga standing behind a fishtank in the form of a Roman urn gave him the eye. Smiling affably, he went on through the cocktail bar, past the restaurant, into the gaming rooms, taking it all in. It was ancient Rome, Hollywood style, a stage set of excessive effects made semi-tasteful by low lighting. The Imperium theme was everywhere: classical statues in ivy-hung alcoves, patches of mosaic on the floor, frescoes, vaguely erotic, on the walls and the soft sound of lyre music piping from hidden speakers. The Imperium logo, a gold wreath on a gold urn, blazed from the purple baize surfaces of the gaming tables and stood in small gold sculptures above the roulette wheels. It even featured in the plastic name tags pinned to the togas of the waitresses who circulated with trays of drinks: Agrippina, Sabina, Flavia, Livia and other famous women of ancient Rome.
It was crowded. From every corner of the place came the standard low-grade hubbub of people enjoying losing money, a soft chatter and occasional laughter titivated by the rattle of roulette balls, cards slapped on tables and the chunter of coins out of one-armed bandits.
Garvie stood in the bar looking around. About four hundred cut-glass bottles of liquor gave back a soft, comforting gleam. Had Chloe come here? She’d talked about Imperium, but then she’d talked about all the clubs and bars in the city. He thought again of that streak in her character, the love of risks. It was a good place to take a risk, to stake it all, to hope for a lucky break. To win. That was her style.
