‘I’ve made some posters to put up,’ he says, showing her one from the top of his pile which reads in black capitals:
INCIDENT ON SATURDAY
7TH SEPTEMBER PM
BREAK IN AND POSSIBLE ABDUCTION
WITNESSES OR ANYONE WITH
INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT
J KETTLE VIA THE THE PEGGY MAY
HERITAGE BOAT OR LEAVE A NOTE ON
THE PEGGY MAY HERITAGE BOAT, LITTLE
VENICE MARINA, PADDINGTON
Underneath he has drawn an arrow pointing to the right.
‘I did some with arrows pointing the other way too,’ he says, ‘and I’ve put them down the towpath to Paddington. Do you know what happened?’ he asks. ‘Do you know who took her? Thought you were away or I’d have come up to ask. Been asking everyone.’
‘No. Where is she?’
John Kettle shrugged. ‘Found the barge all smashed up like this Sunday morning. It looked like a bomb had hit, all the chairs and tables knocked over, the doors kicked in. All my plants knocked off the roof.’ He waves his hand at a pile of cracked plastic pots on the bank, soil spilling out of them. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I rang the police from the bridge but they wouldn’t tell me anything. I went to this meeting on Sunday and when I came back – all this tape and everything. So they must have come, to check the scene of the crime. I don’t know what they found, still haven’t seen a copper here. Rang the station again and they put me on hold, for ever. Then said they couldn’t give out information. Bloke I spoke to didn’t even know where Little Venice was.’ He looks down at his boots for a second. ‘So I thought I could make some posters. In case anyone saw anything.’ His throat tightens. ‘She was such a nice woman.’
He checks up the towpath to the right and left and lowers his voice. ‘I know for a fact she was sleeping on board the barge, and she didn’t want anyone to know it. I wasn’t going to dob her in, none of my business. Was never that kind of warden. But I think she might have been under the radar, as it were. In which case the police won’t give a damn. They’re not going to bother themselves searching around for some unknown who wasn’t even on the books. She didn’t have family or anyone over here. As far as the world is concerned, she never existed.’
‘Nobody knows of you or me either, John Kettle,’ says Odeline, in a strangled voice, hitting her stomach with the butt of her fist. ‘Nobody knows that we exist.’
He stares at her for a moment, and her face begins to crumple. So he risks it.
‘Vera told me. Last week – you found your dad. That’s where you were off to on Saturday. Wasn’t that worth the effort of looking?’
Odeline looks at him. ‘I’m not sure,’ she says, quiet again.
‘Listen, lass.’ Her eyes flash in irritation. He tries again: ‘Listen, Odeline. Would you sit down?’
He pulls two chairs over from the other side of the police tape, places them opposite one another and sits on one.
‘Please?’
Odeline drags hers a little further away before sitting on it. John Kettle rubs his face in his hands, leans forward and takes his cap off. He fingers the anchor insignia at the back.
‘When I was a young man in the navy I lost a friend because I wouldn’t go and look for him. I’ve been thinking about it just these last few days, actually, since going to my meetings.’
‘What meetings?’ asks Odeline, itching to walk off. ‘What does this have to do with Vera?’
‘Please hear me out. Please . . . The meetings, they’re at the church. One through the estates, off the towpath there. Looks like Alcatraz. We talk about different things, give each other support.’ He looked up from his cap. ‘It’s good actually. It’s been good. Keeps me out the pub.’ He tries a laugh but it comes out thin.
‘Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this time back in Portsmouth, when we were working the submarines, and been thinking that, really, that was when things began to go bad. Sort of lost my way a bit after that.’ His voice thickens. ‘I told them the story at the meeting on Sunday. They were ever so nice about it.’ He sniffs and Odeline grimaces – she does not want John Kettle to start crying on her. Disgusting.
But he takes a breath and levels himself. ‘He was my best pal, this chap, we were always at each other’s side. We were a double act. I was the straight guy, he was the – he was the clown. Submarining. You don’t see daylight for eight, nine weeks at a time. You need to be kept amused. Well, I believe our whole section loved Frank for doing that. The officers let him get away with stuff because they knew he was good for morale. Most of his pranks were harmless: little skits, gentle leg-pulling of the blokes in charge, acting out scenes from the movies with a la-di-da voice for the women’s parts. Yellow hair, pointy nose, cheekbones like yours – he could do Garbo, Mansfield, Veronica Lake, all the Hollywood girls. He was funny. Very funny. I was a joker too, but not a performer like Frankie. Bantered all day, but when it came to entertaining the others it was always his show. We weren’t allowed music on board so he’d spend most his shift singing, making up rhymes about people. If they took it badly, songs got worse. When we had a few days’ leave every couple of months he’d lead the drinkers ashore and end up singing his songs on the bar. He had a good one for me.’ And John Kettle begins to sing quietly, rolling his head from side to side:
Submariner Kettle
Has a stomach of metal –
‘How is this relevant?’
‘Sorry. I’ll explain,’ says John Kettle. He puts his cap on his knee and lays both hands face up on his lap, opening and closing his stubby, lined fingers, staring down at his soil-rimmed nails. ‘I’ve just been thinking over these things, you see. He was a good friend to me. I didn’t have any family around and he’d take me up to his folks for Christmas. Old folks, he had. Their only son, born late in life. Bloody worshipped him. I let them down too. I never got in touch with them afterwards.’ He runs a hand over his face. ‘Oh damn it damn it. You hear nowadays that people are born that way. But that’s not how we used to think of it. Anyway I didn’t twig until one night on shore when he, well, had a go at me. Made a pass. In a bar with everyone around. So I hit him about. Dragged him up a wall and knocked that fine nose halfway across his cheek. Had to. You can imagine the names I called him. I was bloody raging. Couldn’t have them thinking we were a pair of faggots.’
Odeline sprang up.
‘I don’t have to stay here and listen to your bigoted language, John Kettle.’
‘Please,’ he said, standing up to face her and rattling his words out. ‘Frank. He disappeared – that night. He walked backwards out of the bar, and I can still see him, with a cut eye and his nose bashed in by me, lip already swelling, that tidy blond head, such a mess. Chorus of chanting from the boys. He looked from face to face, all the boys that had been his audience and laughed at his jokes. Some of them still laughing at him now, making gestures, jamming bottles in their mouths. Others mad angry, wanting to pull him apart. He was scared. I knew he was scared. But I shouted after him to go down the docks where he belonged. Where the queers went. I wanted the boys to know I wasn’t like him.’
‘What has this to do with –’
‘He didn’t come back.’ John Kettle sinks back into the chair and starts fiddling with his hat again. ‘He didn’t turn up the whole three days we were on shore. One or two of the boys told me to telephone his folks, see if he’d gone up home. Officers asked me if I knew where he’d got to. I let them know he wasn’t anything to do with me. Not any more. Told them Frank’s doings were none of my business.’
He takes a breath.
‘Morning we left, that’s when they found him. Face down under the pier by the docks. He’d done his wrists first.’
The shock of this makes Odeline blink. The man floats face down in her imagination, tilting in the black water under the pier. Wet blond hair, body beginning to bloat. John Kettle has put this image there and she feels tethered now by his telling her this awful story. She wants to wriggle out of it,
to rewind and be free of it.
He twists his cap and his voice strains into a whine.
‘He was my pal.’
‘I am not the same as you, John Kettle.’
‘I know, I know. But it’s the single worst thing of my life, I wish more than anything that I’d at least gone looking. And we’re the only ones who might be able to find her, right. Police aren’t interested. Vera deserves our help, Odeline. She helped me. She came to get me from the hospital. And it seemed like she was a good pal to you too.’
John Kettle looks up at Odeline. She is standing upright with her hands linked. She looks around to the barge cafe. There is a long pause.
‘All right. Where do we start?’
‘There was some bloke sniffing around on Saturday morning when you were away. Foreign gent, asking her questions. She seemed rattled.’
‘What did he look like?’ says Odeline.
‘Just foreign, and dodgy-looking. Slick hair, dusky. Tight trousers. Cowboy boots.’
‘Leather jacket?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s her boss. Zjelko,’ says Odeline. ‘He’s a gangster. That’s the man who took her.’
TWENTY-NINE
Odeline and John Kettle are marching along the Harrow Road. Odeline walks briskly ahead and in a straight line. Others on the pavement step out of her way or look up surprised as they are knocked. Her shoulders are pushed down and her neck is angled forward. Her gaze is fixed in the direction of travel. John Kettle is in her wake, keeping up, sweating under his cap. He was trying to roll a cigarette as they walked but has given up and is stuffing the bag of tobacco back into his pocket. They are going to the biggest establishment in Mr Zjelko’s portfolio, the place that Vera once told her was his headquarters: the Portobello Queen on Elkstone Road.
Odeline is dressed for action. She has rolled the sleeves of her shirt to above her elbows and pushed kitchen roll into the toes of her brogues, in case she needs to run. She has also shortened her braces so the trousers won’t flap and trip her up. She is wearing her moneybelt under the shirt and has zipped into it the screwdriver from her mother’s toolkit (for ‘security’), as well as her notebook and pen (for any details that may be useful if the rescue operation turns out to be more prolonged than this one mission). Zjelko may be keeping Vera locked up in any one of his establishments across West London; it could take more than one afternoon to extract the details of her whereabouts.
The outside of the bar is purple, with a gold crown set above the glass doors. When they get to the entrance, Odeline raps sharply on the glass. John Kettle puts his grizzled, bearded face to it. ‘They’re open,’ he says, and swings the door back. Inside there is a football game on a pull-down projector screen and a pair of men at a table in the corner. The bar stools are covered in spotted white fur like ermine, and there is a giant crown chandelier hanging from the ceiling. The barman is leaning forward on the bar looking up at the screen. ‘Where is she?’ shouts Odeline, advancing towards him. He jerks upright.
‘Excuse us, mate,’ says John Kettle, appearing at Odeline’s shoulder and trying a friendlier approach, ‘We’re looking for a lady called Vera. We think Mr Zjelko knows where she is.’
‘Well, I don’t know where Mr Zjelko is,’ says the barman, in a thick, Vera-ish accent. Check the office upstairs.’ He points to a door at the other end of the bar.
Odeline and John Kettle climb the wooden stairs to the next floor, their feet in a synchronised march, creaking the steps. There is a men’s toilet symbol on a swing door ahead of them and a small empty bar to the right. On the left is another door, slightly ajar, showing a large man with a crew cut sitting at a desk. He is squinting as he deals out playing cards. Smoke curls up from a cigarette hanging at the corner of his mouth.
‘That’s not the bloke,’ whispers John Kettle.
‘I know,’ says Odeline and thrusts the door back, revealing another equally large, polo-shirted man on the other side of the desk. This one has a short square haircut too, with blond tips. They both look up, incurious.
‘Where is he keeping her?’ demands Odeline, whipping her head around the back of the door and seeing only a filing cabinet and a mini fridge.
‘You have business with Mr Zjelko?’ says the man behind the desk in a thick accent. He chucks his head at Odeline and looks across the desk, whistles. The other man laughs.
‘That’s right,’ says John Kettle, trying to fill the rest of the doorway, with his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his jeans. ‘Your friend downstairs sent us up. We’re looking for Vera.’
‘We are leading an investigation into the abduction of a woman on Saturday night from the barge cafe,’ corrects Odeline.
‘Zjelko’s barge?’ asks the smoking man.
‘Yes,’ says Odeline.
‘Shit, man,’ he says to the blond, who makes a worried face. ‘The police know?’
‘They have cordoned off the crime scene,’ says Odeline.
‘Ring him,’ says the smoker, lobbing a mobile phone across to the blond, who whips his hands away, letting the phone clatter off the table.
‘I don’t wanna tell him!’
The smoker exhales and looks back to the doorway. ‘Maybe better you speak to him yourself. You can wait in the bar. He will be back, maybe thirty minutes.’
‘We don’t have time to waste. Where is he?’
‘I said you wait here.’
‘Where is he?’
The smoker bites on his cigarette. ‘You better call Zjelko,’ he says across the desk. ‘Tell him we have trouble.’
‘Let her go find him,’ says the blond.
The smoker turns the block of his head back to Odeline. ‘Okay, he’s at the supermarket.’
‘Thanks, pal,’ says John Kettle, and Odeline shoots him a look.
‘We will go there directly,’ she says.
The supermarket is the biggest Odeline has ever seen. It is the size of an airport, she imagines. In Arundel convenience stores there were two aisles and a freezer section. They enter this place through electric doors where people are rattling their trolleys out to the car park, piled high with plastic bags. Beyond the checkouts there is a sign which says ‘AISLE 48 CLEANING PRODUCTS’. Forty-eight! Odeline positions John Kettle in front of the electric doors to prevent Zjelko’s escape and walks into the huge hangar of bright lights and endless rows of blaring packaging. She summons to her mind an image of the man she saw outside Vera’s boat on the morning she got the letter. The shiny hair. The velvety foreign voice – ‘Ciao, Vera.’
Repellent man.
She gets to a gap halfway down aisle 48 and heads left towards the centre of the supermarket, whipping her head right and left to look down each aisle. In aisle 7 she sees him: the black hair lacquered back to a nest of curls at the nape of the neck, the shadowed jaw, the leather jacket with the Ferrari motif, the leg-hugging jeans. Cowboy boots. He is reading the back of a juice carton. She approaches and, just a step behind him, smells coconut. She takes a breath and speaks in a cold, clinical whisper to the oiled curls sitting on the leather collar.
‘The game is up.’
He does not flinch as she expects him to, but turns around slowly and looks at her brogues, up the length of her trousers, over the wing-collar shirt billowing out from the red braces, up the length of her neck to her chin, over her frozen face and into her eyes. Up close, she sees he has close-set eyes, and thick short hairs around his jaw. The top of his mouth is a line – no lip – and the bottom is a thick, pale pink pad, as if he is wearing some kind of gloss. The lips of his eyelids are thick pink as well, and his crooked nose has a dropped septum, so Odeline can see this same pink on the insides of his nose – it is as if the orifices of his face have been freshly cut. He is still holding the juice carton and has a metal basket looped over the elbow of his leather jacket. At the top of it is a bag of organic granola.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ The line of his top lip curls to show a gold eye tooth. His eyes are
wandering back down her figure.
Odeline delivers her next line faster than she would like, looking at the point of black hair at the top of his forehead, which is at her eye level.
‘Don’t test my patience, Zjelko. Tell me where she is.’
‘Eh?’ He shows the gold tooth again. ‘You looking for a job or something? I only have cleaning for ones like you.’
Odeline tries her ultimate line, the one she has planned to save for extreme circumstances. She can’t believe she is using it this soon.
‘I know what kind of business you run, Mr Zjelko.’
‘Oh!’ He rolls his head back in understanding, showing a bald scar under the stubbled chin. ‘Nice voice. So you funny girl?’ He takes a step forward and unscrews the cap at the top of the carton, making a click. The coconut smell is stronger now. Odeline moves back and puts a hand to the shape of the screwdriver beneath her shirt. She whips her head to the left and the right. There’s only one shopper nearby, a fat girl with a fatter toddler sitting at the top of the trolley, and they’re about to turn the corner. Soon this half of the aisle will be empty.
‘And what business do you have, funny girl, annoying me now with your stupid voices when I am trying to shop?’ He puts the juice carton on to his bottom lip and takes a swig, using a little finger to wipe the orange liquid from the corners of his mouth. She sees wiry black hairs on the backs of his fingers and very pink nails.
‘I am a friend of Vera’s. I am leading the investigation into her disappearance,’ says Odeline, hearing her voice tremble. ‘It’s time to come clean.’ She tries tensing her jaw.
He takes another swig. ‘Whatta fuck about some Vera?’
‘We have come to take her back. I have a team of people guarding the exits.’
Swig. And then, for an instant, Zjelko freezes – a flash of recognition in his pink-rimmed eyes.
‘Vera, from my barge? Vera Novak?’
Odeline is briefly taken aback, this is the first time she has heard her friend’s surname. But she doesn’t let it throw her – she perseveres.
Chaplin & Company Page 26
