SuperJack

by Adam Baron

  Chapter Three

  I spent the rest of the day searching for two runaways. This is what I do. Ever since leaving the police force, more than seven years ago now, I’ve been a private investigator specializing in locating children who have made the break from their home environment long before it was usual for them to do so. I do other work as well, but it’s the kids who take up most of my time, their parents paying me to find and keep tabs on them, to let them know if they’re okay. I don’t often tell the people who employ me where the kids they’re looking for are, though. Kids don’t usually choose a life of hostels, begging, cold, rain, violence, drug abuse and prostitution over a warm and loving home environment, and I realized pretty early on that if I led parents to their offspring, I could never be sure what I was sending the kids back to. So it is usually mothers who employ me, telling me not to say anything to any fathers there maybe. I send pictures, and I try to speak to the child in question, to try to get an idea of how they are.

  The kids I was looking for today were both fifteen-year-old girls from a Cornish residential home, who’d disappeared on an arranged school visit to London two months ago. The director of the home wanted news of them and as there was no funding available for services such as mine she was paying me out of her own salary. But I didn’t find them. I’d been given a tip that they might be trawling for business at King’s Cross Station, and while I did find two girls doing this, who vaguely fitted their description, it wasn’t them. The ones I eventually spotted, skinny, pale, freezing in cheap thin fleeces, pulling on damp roll-ups, approaching lone men off the train, were from Leeds not Cornwall and they weren’t fifteen. They were quite a lot younger than that. I watched them both for a while, until they’d each scored a punter and gone off towards the car park across the Pancras Road. I took their pictures anyway and left them there.

  By the time I’d finished and walked out onto the forecourt of the station it was about seven. The buoyancy that had sprung me out of bed that morning was a forgotten dream. The night was dark, the streets pretty quiet but for the occasional drunk and the odd human pharmacy, guys trying to look natural propping up bus stands and phone boxes, as if there were nothing at all unusual in simply hanging out on the street at the beginning of a deep, bitter February night. I moved past them, getting a look of dim recognition turning to back-burner hate from one guy, his thick puffa making him look like a six-foot robin. It was far colder than the city usually ever gets and I pulled my gloves on as I blanked his look and walked quickly up King’s Cross Road to now very trendy Exmouth Market, Clerkenwell, where I live in a former photographic studio that I’d acquired seven or eight years ago. A studio which would now cost me about ten times more than I could afford – if I had to pay for it.

  Just not being in King’s Cross felt good. I know it’s an up-and-coming area and all that but it still goes on, everything that ever happened there still happens. You just have to be cursed with the ability to see it. Hookers don’t dress like hookers, especially not in the winter. Street style and heroin chic have become so mainstream that the guys passing crack pellets mouth to mouth to ancient eighteen-year-olds appear no different than kids on weekend leave from Eton being picked up by their girlfriends. In contrast to a day of that, Rosebery Avenue, just a step away, was a long and winding oasis.

  My flat is on a side street the other side of the market to the Avenue but I didn’t go there. I had a chicken in the fridge but I couldn’t face handling cold, raw meat for some reason, so once I’d made it up from the Cross I stepped into Fred’s, a bar on the corner of the market that I use a lot, where I found a table. I’d actually bought the chicken to cook for Shulpa, but when I’d called her earlier she’d cancelled, and as much as it was a relief not to have to cook it was also a relief to be on my own. That may sound uncharitable, and it wasn’t that I didn’t like Shulpa, but I was in a definite mood to relax and Nicky was right – Shulpa was not exactly relaxing. Feisty, yes. Vivacious, yes. Beautiful, attractive, exciting, yes. But relaxing, forget it. We’d been going out for three or four very hectic months and not seeing her for an evening, having a bite to eat and a quiet drink, felt like opening a deckchair in the eye of a tornado.

  Fred’s was filling up and I was lucky to get a table. I let out a long, slow breath, didn’t bother with the menu and ordered. I thought about the girls I’d seen, the children really, walking away to the car park through the crowd of tourists and commuters and people trying to make it home. They were like ghosts we live among but choose not to see. I blinked my eyes a few times and then I couldn’t see them either. After fifteen minutes of staring into space, letting a glass of red spread a welcome wave of heaviness through my bones that made the rest of the day seep out, a bean burger with chilli salsa and salad was brought to me by my good friend Alberto, a lugubrious Italian in his mid-thirties still struggling to make his name in the art world.

  I thanked Alberto for the food and asked him how he was and he told me terrible. He was thinking of chucking it all in, going back to Genoa to work in his father’s paint factory. I tried not to smile (though it felt good to want to) having heard variations on this theme many times before, and I told him to stick at it. I’d rolled out this line several times before too, but I was actually being sincere. I hoped Alberto would get noticed because the time I went to a private view he was putting on I liked his work a lot. There was also the fact that he was, while a nice guy, a truly terrible waiter. I’d much rather meet him for a coffee than wait for him to bring me one.

  There was nothing at all to make me think that it was going to be anything other than an ordinary night. King’s Cross gradually got pushed more than just a mile away as Alberto chatted for a while and a half the way he does, until some other customers finally got his attention and I got on with my burger, wishing too late that I’d ordered chips with it. Between bites I glanced around the modern, half-filled bar, taking in the blond-wood chairs, the questionable paintings, the faces of some of the people I sort of recognized, trying to decide if a girl sitting at a table opposite, occasionally glancing my way, was attractive or not. I spent ten minutes doing this, wondering what it was about her that interested me so much, before I realized that while she didn’t look anything like Shulpa, there was something in her manner that put me in mind of her. I found myself wishing that, actually, Shulpa hadn’t cancelled. I had a very sudden and very violent need for her, a need for her to blot everything else out. Again Shulpa appeared like a jack-in-a-box from nowhere, but this time it wasn’t in my mind but my whole body. Fuck the deckchair, I wanted the tornado.

  The effect was instant and embarrassing. I saw the smile I was gradually getting used to and the way it changed as Shulpa pursed her lips together, her eyes shining with mock wickedness. I’d joked with Nicky about his sister before but the way I felt about her wasn’t funny. I couldn’t figure it. Only days before I’d met her I’d finished a relationship that I’d thought and hoped would be my last, but Shulpa somehow had reached right into me. It had started out as a physical thing but had now got to the point where I needed to think where it was going. More confusingly, sometimes I seemed to wake up from her, to wonder what I was doing in the same room as my friend’s sister, let alone in the same relationship.

  Whatever, the rest of the evening seemed empty without Shulpa in it. I turned back to my bean burger. I’d finish it and then call her. If her friend had left I’d drive over to her place. If she hadn’t I’d drive over there anyway. Nicky’s chum could wait till the morning.

  I could see a very beautiful end to a cold and frustrating day. But as I was finishing the burger off, a little more rapidly than my mother would have approved, I noticed a man, coming into the bar, casting his eyes over the restaurant.

  I did a double take Fred Flintstone would have been proud of, almost missing my mouth. He was wearing an expensive fleece and black jeans, a Stone Island coat over one arm. He had a brown, A4 envelope in his hand. I’d never met him before, and on another day I
might not have recognized him, but as it happened I knew instantly who he was, and was very surprised to see him there. I noticed a guy to my right clocking him too.

  The bar was really filling up now. Fred’s attracts a mix of suited-up journalists from the Guardian or Emap, young designers from the Face and Arena, all equally in uniform – theirs supplied by the Carhartt company – and other youngish, professional types. I waited a second, thinking that it might just have been coincidence. But Draper was hurriedly looking around the place, and it wasn’t for a table. He was trying to spot someone. It had to be me. For a second I saw Shulpa again and I thought about ducking out of sight. But I didn’t. After shaking off the surprise like a dog on a riverbank, I stood up. He turned my way. He saw me standing there, took a moment to see that I fitted the description he must have had of me, and nodded. I nodded too and sat back down. Then I waited as he struggled through the knot of chairs and tables, past the girl I’d been swapping glances with.

  As he made his way towards me, a little out of breath, Jack Draper nodded to a couple of people. He was a tall man with a big face and a look of total confidence that I didn’t find very attractive but which, I knew, put me in the minority. He had that look I’d seen a couple of times: I know I’m famous. A man who could afford to be humble. I told myself that it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, it must be weird walking into a room full of strangers who all know who you are. Draper was in his early thirties, a good six two and muscular with it. He had a big, square, open face with deep-set, hard brown eyes, so dark they were almost black, which made me think he had some Welsh in him. His jaw looked like a set of goalposts. Draper had a full head of thick black hair with a cowlick the girls probably died for. The whole lot was brushed forward and cut to look ragged by someone probably called Lionel, a style that didn’t really seem to belong to him, that looked a little too young. The girls no doubt loved it, though, and it wasn’t just them; Draper was head to head with Ginola, pushing another brand of shampoo for men. He’d have had a mullet, I said to myself as he ran his fingers back through it, ten years ago he’d have had a mullet.

  Before long Draper was standing with two large hands on the back of the chair opposite me, looking down.

  ‘Billy?’ he said to me. He had a fairly deep voice, pretty neutral with a hint of Midlands in it. It felt strange to be looking up at this man I’d seen on the television, in the papers. Something about him just looked so, well, famous.

  ‘Billy Rucker?’

  I nodded. ‘And you’re Jack?’ I said. ‘Jack Draper.’ I was going to say ‘the footballer’. Instead I said, ‘Nicky’s friend?’

  Draper nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘that’s right. Hi.’

  ‘Hi.’

  Draper hovered above me, looking like he didn’t quite know what he was doing there. And wishing he wasn’t.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, after a second or two. ‘I was just talking to Nick. Down at his bar. I…I need to speak to someone and he recommended you. He said you’d be able to help me. I left messages on both your machines but he said I might catch you here. I gather you’re going down there anyway, but I’m pretty busy later. You don’t mind me finding you like this?’

  ‘Not at all.’ I shrugged. I did mind. I wanted to go to bed – preferably to Shulpa’s, though my own would have been welcome too. But I was a little curious. Nicky had said Jack might not even come later on, but here he was hunting me out three hours early.

  ‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘You want a drink?’

  ‘Just a Coke.’

  Draper sat, hanging his coat over the back of his chair. He kept the brown envelope in front of him, folding his arms over it. I moved my plate aside and finished the last mouthful of wine in my glass. Alberto was walking by so I gave a tug on his apron and ordered the Coke, asking him to bring me an espresso too. He nodded but kept walking, before sitting at a table of three girls, each one of whom he kissed three times at least.

  I turned back to Draper and smiled. He was looking right at me, an impatient, held look that was a little unsettling. He was being urgent and blasé at the same time, like a fourteen-year-old on a date. Draper’s brow was heavy and concentrated, as though he were squinting into the sun, making him look older than his years. I wondered if that was the effect that being a striker had on you. You could tell by the way he carried himself that he was fit, but he also had the drawn, somehow unhealthy looking pallor of a natural athlete. The red razor rash smeared across his throat looked out of place.

  ‘I can make an appointment if you like.’

  ‘No, no.’ I shook my head, wishing that I’d said sure, how about tomorrow? I smiled again. ‘No, I don’t mind. What is it? What can I do for you? It’s good to meet you at last, by the way. Nicky often talks about you, says you two were the most lethal strike force Leicester has ever seen.’

  Draper smiled at the memory, but without really smiling. All the while he gave off something. Shulpa would have said he had a radiance, that he knew how to channel his energy. To me it was as if he were asking a question by just sitting there, without saying anything. He made me want to check to see if I had any spots of food on my face.

  ‘Says he always scored more goals than you, though.’

  ‘I think he did.’ Jack nodded. He let the thought in, but not far. ‘He wasn’t bad, Nick. Not strong enough, though. Too lanky.’ He turned quickly to the bar before turning back to me.

  ‘We all right here?’ he said suddenly.

  ‘Unless you have the trout.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Nothing. Yes, we’re fine here.’ There was a pause for a second. Draper’s right leg was moving up and down, very slightly but very quickly, and I don’t know if he was aware of it. I could feel his directness again. There was also an awkwardness between us. An immediate but unmistakable sense of being out of sync, as strong as when you meet a girl and there’s an instant rapport, it just happens straight away. I wondered if it was all coming from me. I tried to ignore it.

  ‘Well then, what is it?’ I said again. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘It’s these,’ Draper said quickly, and he pushed the envelope that rested in front of him across the table towards me.

  Draper sat back again, very still, and turned his head to the left as I put my hand in the envelope and slid its contents out onto the table in front of me. It seemed a bit strange to be looking at them, with no preamble, no introduction, nothing. It was almost as if Nicky had okayed me, so Draper didn’t need to know any more, didn’t want to go any further than the matter in hand. Usually, I get asked all sorts of questions.

  Draper continued to ignore the pictures I was looking at, taking the chance to turn his phone off before sitting with his arms folded waiting, his face side on to me, his leg still going. He kept sneaking glances at his watch. I took my time looking through the material I’d found, nodding to myself now and then, and then I asked him what had been going on. Beyond him, I noticed the girl again. She was definitely attractive, with eyes that glanced my way like pretty toes dipped into an unknown pool.

  Draper turned towards me and leaned on his elbows. ‘You know I play for Orient, right?’

  I’d actually thought it was Palace but I didn’t have time to say so.

  ‘Well, it’s been going well for me. Finally.’ He raised his eyes and crossed his fingers as though the heavens had been particularly unkind to him, but he was just pulling God round. ‘I’ve been free of injury for about fourteen months and I’m going more than a goal a game now. People say it’s only second division but it doesn’t matter where you are when you’re scoring. People take notice of you, start taking you seriously. It doesn’t matter where you are if the ball goes in.’

  I nodded. Being a striker was like being a boxer. In spite of anything any fight coach or football manager said to the contrary there was a very easy way of telling whether you were any good or not. If you put the other man down or the ball in the net you were good, simple.

  ‘Yo
u know I started off at Leeds?’

  ‘I do,’ I said. I nodded and did my best natural laugh. The man was a friend of a friend even if he did have an unfeasibly large face and hair you could see your own in. He deserved my attention, at least. ‘Nicky always goes on about having to miss the trial. Because of his dad. His big chance, he says…’

  ‘Well, I started at Leeds when I was eighteen, though I didn’t often get in the side. But that was okay, I was young and I was learning. Then I did get in and I could feel it, you know, I began to feel I belonged. That I more than belonged. I’d come on for the last ten and I got a couple of goals. I started twice. But the manager left. Dave Harvey. They binned him even though the team were beginning to do okay.’

  I nodded. I was pretty sure I didn’t need to go through Draper’s CV, but if he wanted to tell me his life story that was fine.

  ‘The new one was a twat. He put me on the back burner again. He wanted to keep me, he said, when I was finally granted an audience, but the two Dutchmen he brought with him meant I’d hardly get a look-in. He just wanted me for cover and to give his two Perrier-drinking stars a kick up the arse. He was a patronizing cunt as well, he thought English footballers were a bag of shite. And where the hell’s he now? Two clubs have given him the boot and I drank a glass of champagne each time.