Lost

by Michael Robotham

  “She pays, she comes,” I say, as I pass him and walk into the bright sunshine.

  For a fleeting moment I think Sarah might run, but instead she turns and holds out her hand for her groceries.

  “Not so fast.”

  She shrugs off her overcoat revealing khaki jeans and a T-shirt.

  “It's a bit of a giveaway.” I motion to the coat.

  “Thanks for the advice.” Her voice is full of fake toughness.

  “You want a cold drink?”

  She balks. She's waiting for a lecture on the evils of shoplifting.

  I hold up the shopping bag. “You want this stuff, you have a cold drink.”

  We go to a juice bar on the corner and take a table outside. Sarah orders a banana smoothie before eyeing up the muffins. I get hungry watching her eat.

  “You saw me a few weeks ago.”

  She nods.

  “What did we talk about?”

  She gives me an odd look.

  “I had an accident. I've forgotten a few things. I was hoping you could help me remember them.”

  Sarah glances at my leg. “You mean like amnesia?”

  “Something like that.”

  She takes another mouthful of muffin.

  “Why did I come and see you?”

  “You wanted to know if I ever cut Mickey's hair or counted the coins in her money box.”

  “Did I say why?”

  “No.”

  “What else did we talk about?”

  “I dunno. Stuff, I guess.”

  Sarah glances down at her shoes, stubbing the toe against the legs of the chair. The sun is pitched high and sharp, like the last hurrah before winter.

  “Do you ever think about Mickey?” I ask.

  “Sometimes.”

  “So do I. I guess you have lots of new friends now.”

  “Yeah, some, but Mickey was different. She was like an . . . a . . . a . . . appendix.”

  “You mean appendage.”

  “Yeah—like a heart.”

  “That's not really an appendage.”

  “OK, like an arm, real important.” She drains her smoothie.

  “You ever see Mrs. Carlyle?”

  Sarah runs her fingers around the rim of her glass, collecting froth. “She still lives in the same place. My mum says it'd give her the creeps living where someone got killed but I reckon Mrs. Carlyle stays for a reason.”

  “Why's that?”

  “She's waiting for Mickey. I'm not saying that Mickey is gonna come home, you know. I just figure Mrs. Carlyle wants to know where she is. That's why she goes to prison every month and visits him.”

  “Visits who?”

  “Mr. Wavell.”

  “She visits him!”

  “Every month. My mum says there's something sick about that. Gives her the creeps.”

  Sarah reaches across the table and turns my wrist so she can read the time. “I'm in heaps of trouble. Can I have my stuff now?”

  I hand her the plastic shopping bag and a ten-quid note. “If I catch you shoplifting again, I'll make you mop supermarket floors for a month.”

  She rolls her eyes and is gone, pedalling furiously on her bicycle, carrying her coat, the bag of groceries and my frozen chicken korma.

  The idea of Rachel Carlyle visiting Howard Wavell in prison sends chills through me. A grooming pedophile and a grieving parent—it's wrong, it's sick, but I know what she's doing. Rachel wants to find Mickey. She wants to bring her home.

  I remember something she said to me a long while ago. Her fingers were tumbling over and over in her lap as she described a little routine she had with Mickey. “Even to the post office,” they would say to each other, as they said goodbye and hugged.

  “Sometimes people don't come back,” said Rachel. “That's why you should always make your goodbyes count.”

  She was trying to hold on to every detail of Mickey—the clothes she wore, the games she played, the songs she sang; the way she frowned when she talked about something serious or a hiccupping laugh that made milk spurt out of her nose at the dinner table. She wanted to remember the thousands of tiny details and trivia that give light and shade to every life—even one as short as Mickey's.

  Ali meets me at the juice bar and I tell her what Sarah said.

  “You're going to go and see Howard, aren't you, Sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could he have sent the ransom demand?”

  “Not without help.”

  I know what she's thinking, although she won't say anything. She agrees with Campbell. Every likely explanation has the word “hoax” attached, including the one where Howard uses a ransom demand to win his appeal.

  On the drive to Wormwood Scrubs we cross under the Westway into Scrubs Lane. Teenage girls are playing hockey on the playing fields, while teenage boys sit and watch, captivated by the blue pleated skirts that swirl and dip against muddy knees and moss-smooth thighs.

  Wormwood Scrubs Prison looks like a film set for a 1950s musical, where the filth and grime have been scrubbed off for the cameras. The twin towers are four stories high and in the center is a huge arched door impregnated with iron bolts.

  I try to picture Rachel Carlyle arriving here to visit Howard. In my mind I see a black cab pull up in the forecourt and Rachel sliding out, never letting her knees separate. She walks carefully over the cobblestones, wary of turning her ankle. Glamour hasn't been bred into her, despite her family's money.

  The visitors center is located to the right of the main gate in a set of temporary buildings. Wives and girlfriends have already started to gather, some with children who fidget and fight.

  Once inside they are searched and asked for proof of identity. Their belongings are stored in lockers and gifts are vetted in advance. Anyone wearing clothes that too closely match the prison uniform is asked to change.

  Ali gazes up at the Victorian façade and shivers.

  “You ever been inside?”

  “Once or twice,” she replies. “They should tear the place down.”

  “It's called a deterrent.”

  “Works on me.”

  Leaving her for a moment, I open the trunk and retrieve the diamonds. I can fit two packages in the inside pockets of my overcoat and two more in the outer pockets. I put the coat on the seat beside her.

  “I want you to stay with the car and look after the diamonds.”

  She nods. “You want to wear the vest?”

  “I think I'm safe enough in prison.”

  Crossing the road, I show my badge at the visitors center. Ten minutes later I climb two flights of stairs and emerge into a large room with a long continuous table divided down the middle by a partition. Visitors stay on one side and prisoners on the other. Knees can't touch or lips meet. Physical contact is restricted to holding hands or lifting young children over the divide.

  Heavy boots echo in the corridors as the cons are brought in. Each visitor hands over a docket and has to wait until the prisoner is in place before being admitted.

  I watch a young prisoner greet his wife or girlfriend. He kisses her hand and doesn't want to let it go. They both lean forward as though trying to breathe the same air. His hand reaches under the table.

  Suddenly, the screws seize her chair and wrench it backward. Falling to the floor, she shields her swollen belly. She's pregnant, for Christ's sake. He only wants to feel his baby, but there's no sign of empathy from the screws.

  “DI Ruiz, you can't stay away.”

  The Governor appears beside me. Barrel-chested and balding, he's in his late forties. Finishing a sandwich, he dabs at his lips with a paper napkin, missing egg yoke on his chin.

  “So what brings you back?”

  “It must be the ambience.”

  He laughs roughly and glances through the Perspex screen at the reunions.

  “How long since I was here last?”

  “Don't you remember?”

  “Old age, I'm getting forgetful.”

 
“About four weeks ago; you were interested in that woman who comes to see Howard Wavell.”

  “Mrs. Carlyle.”

  “Yeah. She's not here today. She comes every month and tries to bring the same gifts: kiddie catalogs. That sick fuck better not get an appeal!”

  I try to picture Howard sitting opposite Rachel. Did she reach across the partition and take his hand? I even feel a pang of jealousy and imagine his eyes traveling down the V-neck of her blouse. We live in a sick sick world.

  “I need to talk to him.”

  “He's in segregation.”

  “Why?”

  The Governor picks at his fingernails. “Like I told you before, nobody expected him to live this long. He killed Aleksei Kuznet's little girl! That's a death sentence whichever way you look at it.”

  “But you've managed to protect him.”

  He laughs wryly. “You could say that. He was only here four days before someone ran a razor blade across his throat. He spent the next month in the hospital wing. Nobody's touched him since then so I figure Aleksei must want him alive. Howard doesn't care.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like I told you before, he keeps refusing to take his insulin. Twice in the last six months he's lapsed into a diabetic coma. If he can't be bothered why should Her Majesty, eh? I'd let the bastard die.”

  The Governor senses I don't agree with him. He sneers. “Contrary to popular opinion, Inspector, I'm not here to play nursemaid to prisoners. I don't hold their hands and say, ‘You poor things, you had a lousy childhood or a crap lawyer or a hanging judge.' A dog on a leash could do what I do.”

  (With a lot more compassion no doubt.)

  “I still need to see him.”

  “He wasn't listed for visitors today.”

  “But you can bring him up.”

  The Governor grunts softly to a senior guard, who picks up a phone, setting the chain of command into motion. Somewhere deep in the intestines of this place someone will fetch Howard. I can picture him lying on a narrow cot, smelling the sourness of the air. The future is a scary business when you're a pedophile in prison. It's not next summer's holiday or a long weekend in the Lake District. The future stretches from when you wake up until you go to sleep again. Sixteen hours can seem like a lifetime.

  Visiting time has almost ended. Howard pushes against the tide, walking as though his legs are shackled. He gazes around the room, looking for his visitor, perhaps expecting Rachel.

  More than forty years on I can still recognize him as the fat kid from school, who changed behind a towel and chain-smoked on an asthma puffer. He was almost a semi-tragic figure but not quite so tragic as Rory McIntyre, a sleepwalker who did a high dive off the third-floor balcony in the early hours of Foundation Day. They say that sleepwalkers wake up in midair but Rory didn't make a sound. Nor did he make a splash. He always was a good diver.

  Howard takes a seat and doesn't seem surprised by the sound of my voice. Instead he stops, arches his neck and swivels his head like an old tortoise. I step in front of him. He blinks at me slowly.

  “Hello, Howard, I want to talk to you about Rachel Carlyle.”

  He smiles little by little but doesn't answer. A scar runs from one side of his throat to the other, just beneath his chins.

  “She comes to see you. Why?”

  “You should ask her.”

  “What do you talk about?”

  He glances at the screws. “I don't have to tell you anything. My appeal application is next Thursday.”

  “You're not getting out of here, Howard. Nobody wants to set you free.”

  Again he smiles. Certain people don't seem to match their voices. Howard is like that. It is pitched too high, as though laced with helium, and his pale face seems disconnected from his body like a white balloon moving gently in a breeze.

  “We can't all be perfect, Mr. Ruiz. We make mistakes and we deal with the consequences. The difference between you and me is that I have my God. He will judge me and get me out of here. Do you ever wonder who is judging you?”

  He seems confident. Why? Maybe he knows about the ransom demand. Any suggestion Mickey might still be alive would automatically grant him a retrial.

  “Why does Mrs. Carlyle come here?”

  He raises his hands in mock surrender and lowers them again. “She wants to know what I did with Mickey. She's worried I might die before telling anyone.”

  “You're messing up your insulin injections.”

  “Do you know what it's like to go into a diabetic coma? First my breathing becomes labored. My mouth and tongue are parched. My blood pressure falls and my pulse accelerates. I get blurred vision, then pain in my eyes. Finally, I slip into unconsciousness. If they don't reach me quickly enough, my kidneys will fail completely and my brain will be permanently damaged. Soon after that I will die.”

  He seems to revel in these details, as if looking forward to it.

  “Did you tell her what happened to Mickey?”

  “I told her the truth.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I told her that I'm not an innocent man but I am innocent of this crime. I have sinned but not committed this sin. I believe in the sanctity of human life. I believe all children are gifts from God, born pure and innocent. They only act with hate and violence because we teach them hate and violence. They are the only ones who can truly judge me.”

  “And how are the children going to judge you?”

  He goes silent.

  Sweat rings beneath his arms have spread out and merged, plastering his shirt to his skin so that I can see every freckle and mole. There's something else on his back, beneath the fabric. Something has discolored the material, turning it yellow.

  Howard has to look over his right shoulder to see me. He grimaces slightly. At that same moment, I force him forward across the table. Deaf to his squeals that are muffled against my forearm, I lift his shirt. His flesh is like pulped melon. Angry wounds crisscross his back, weeping blood and yellow crystalline scum.

  Prison guards are running toward us. One of them puts a handkerchief over his mouth.

  “Get a doctor,” I yell. “Move!”

  Commands are shouted and phone calls are made. Howard is screaming and thrashing like he's on fire. Suddenly, he lies still, with his arms stretched across the table.

  “Who did this to you?”

  He doesn't answer.

  “Talk to me. Who did this?”

  He mumbles something. I can't quite hear him. Leaning closer, I pick up the words, “Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not . . . never yield to temptation . . .”

  There is something tucked inside the sleeve of his shirt. He doesn't stop me pulling it free. It's the wooden handle of a skipping rope, threaded with a twelve-inch strand of fencing wire. Self-flagellation, self-mutilation, fasting and flogging—can someone please explain them to me?

  Howard shrugs my hand away and gets to his feet. He won't wait for a doctor and he doesn't want to talk any more. He shuffles toward the door, with his flapping shoes, yellow skin and shallow breathing. At the last possible moment he turns and I'm expecting one of those pleading, kicked-dog looks.

  Instead I get something different. This man whom I helped lock away for murder; who flays himself with fencing wire, who every day is spat upon, jeered, threatened and abused . . . this man looks sorry for me.

  Eighty-five steps and ninety-four hours—that's how long Mickey had been missing when I served a search warrant on number 9 Dolphin Mansions.

  “Surprise. Surprise,” I said as Howard opened the door. His large eyes bulged slightly and his mouth opened but no sound came out. He was wearing a pajama top, long shorts with an elasticized waist and dark brown loafers that accentuated the whiteness of his shins.

  I started like I always did—telling Howard how much I knew about him. He was single, never married. He grew up in Warrington, the youngest of seven children in a big loud Protestant family. Both his parents were dead
. He had twenty-eight nieces and nephews and was godfather to eleven of them. In 1962 he was hospitalized after a traffic accident. A year later he suffered a nervous breakdown and became a voluntary outpatient at a clinic in north London. He had worked as a storeman, a laborer, a painter and decorator, a van driver and now a gardener. He went to church three times a week, sang in the choir, read biographies, was allergic to strawberries and took photographs in his spare time.

  I wanted Howard to feel like he was fifteen and I had just caught him jerking off in the showers at Cottesloe Park. And no matter what excuses he offered, I'd know he was lying. Fear and uncertainty—the most powerful weapons in the known world.

  “You left something out,” he mumbled.

  “What's that?”

  “I'm a diabetic. Insulin shots, the whole business.”

  “My uncle had that.”

  “Don't tell me—he gave up chocolate bars and started jogging and his diabetes went away. I hear that all the time. That and, ‘Christ, I would just die if I had to stick a needle in myself every day.' Or this is a good one, ‘You get that from being fat don't you?'”

  People were trooping past us, wearing overalls and gloves. Some carried metal boxes with photographic equipment and lights. Duckboards had been laid like stepping-stones down the hall.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked softly.

  “Evidence. That's what detectives do. It's what we use to support a case. It turns hypothesis into theories and theories into cases.”

  “I'm a case.”

  “A work in progress.”

  That was the truth of it. I couldn't say what I was looking for until I found it—clothing, fingerprints, binding material, videos, photographs, a seven-year-old girl with a lisp . . . any of the above.

  “I want a lawyer.”

  “Good. You can use my phone. Afterward we'll go outside and hold a joint press conference on the front steps.”

  “You can't take me out there.” The television cameras were lined up along the pavement like metal Triffids, waiting to lash out at anyone who left the building.