Alias

by Cari Hunter

We go through the kitchen to reach the stairs, and I glance around at the countertops, the crammed spice rack and the crock pots Jo favoured for her many varieties of casserole. Nothing seems to have been disturbed, but I feel like an insect approaching the edge of a spider’s web.

  “They’ll have been here already, won’t they?” I say, tiptoeing up the stairs as if someone might be lying in wait at the top.

  “Most probably. If they took Jolanta’s key from her, they could’ve let themselves in at any time.”

  I stop on the landing, debating which of the three closed doors to try first. Trusting an instinct I can’t quantify, I push the second door on the right and walk into Jo’s bedroom.

  “If that’s the case, why haven’t they trashed the place?” I ask. The room is lived in but tidy, the bed made and the dressing table adorned with trinkets and cheap jewellery.

  “I suppose they knew Jolanta wasn’t coming back here,” she says. “So it wouldn’t matter if they rearranged things as they searched, whereas there was every chance that you’d notice if things were wrong in your alias’s flat.”

  The implications of that take a minute to sink in, and they give me the creeps. “Does that mean they’re not convinced by my amnesia?”

  She’s quick to reassure me. “Not necessarily. It’s more likely they deemed it an unacceptable risk and that staging a burglary was the safer option.”

  “Hitting both properties in the same manner might’ve raised a few eyebrows as well,” I say.

  “Also true. If they had any doubts about your amnesia, I think we’d know about it by now.” She goes to the bedside table and slides out its top drawer. “Okay, then. Any clues as to what we might be looking for?”

  “Only vague ones,” I say. “Notes, diary entries, calendar entries, receipts, bus tickets dated after December twelfth. According to my files, that’s when they changed her shift pattern. I don’t think I saw her much after that.”

  “Until she came to you for help?” Pryce pulls out a handful of papers—letters, receipts, bills—and starts to go through them.

  “Yes, possibly.” I rattle a drawer that’s warped shut. “I don’t remember. I hoped coming here might prod me in the right direction, but it’s the usual shit; I get the day she bought her bloody sofa and none of the stuff that might help us.”

  Pryce settles into a more comfortable position, resting against the wardrobe and stretching her legs out on the carpet. “What happened the day she bought her sofa?”

  “Nothing.” I shake the drawer loose, upending most of its contents onto the floor. “Nothing,” I repeat, more quietly, looking at the remnants of Jo’s life scattered around me. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  I shrug and pick up a chequebook. It’s almost full, with a stub for her rental deposit and another for a water bill. I carry on flicking through it, keeping the story at arm’s length. “It wouldn’t fit through the door, and we knew we couldn’t take out the window, so we ended up with it turned every which way, and I lost half the skin from my fingers. I learned how to say ‘fuck’ in Polish, and when we’d finally done, we went to the Barbakan to celebrate.”

  “The theatre?”

  “No, Bar-bakan. It’s a Polish deli in Chorlton. It’s always heaving but well worth queuing for. We pooled our resources, came up with a few quid, and treated ourselves to poppy bread and this sausage…wiej something or other, it’s shaped like a horseshoe. We had a picnic on the sofa and drank a shitload of cheap vodka.” I rest the book on my lap and smile at her, grateful that she pushed me and that I’m getting more of the details back. It was one of the best days I spent with Jo.

  “Sounds like a good time was had by all.”

  “Yeah, but I wouldn’t recommend the hangover. No amount of aspirin in the world—” I huff, the rest of the thought beaten out by a weird, restless feeling. I paw through the items left in the drawer and then haul out the one beneath it.

  “Alis?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know.” I’m almost snarling at her. “It was silver…”

  She edges closer, obviously intrigued but wary of disrupting whatever’s going on in my head. “What was?”

  “This thing!” I make a shape with my hand, a deep U, and we recognise it at the same time.

  “A horseshoe,” she murmurs. “A pendant? Or maybe a charm?”

  “Pendant, on a necklace,” I say. “For luck, with a little heart.”

  “From you? Did you buy it?”

  “No, not from me.” I open the third drawer, to find the handful of underwear that Jo didn’t pack. A pile of socks has been shoved to the back, and I spot a small black gift box caught in their midst. There’s an address printed on the underside: “Abdella’s, 618 Hyde Road, Gorton.” Too curious to keep her distance, Pryce peers over my shoulder as I open the box. The necklace inside is simple, inexpensive silver, bearing a solid horseshoe pendant. A slip of paper reads “Forever yours, K.”

  “That’s Krzys’s handwriting,” I say. “I saw her wearing it, but she wouldn’t tell me where she got it from.”

  “Were they a couple?”

  “Looks that way. Maybe it was early days and they wanted to keep it a secret.”

  “Well, that’s worked in our favour in terms of you and Jo supposedly being an item.”

  “Yeah.” I scratch along my sutures. It’s becoming a habit when I’m stressed or when things are twisting my knickers into a knot. At this rate I’m surprised there’s any thread left to hold my scalp together. “Do you think those men in the car knew?”

  She rocks back on her heels. “It’s possible. It might explain why Krzys seems to have done a runner as well.”

  The pendant twirls on its chain as I hold it in the sunshine. It’s fixed the right way up, cupped to stop the luck falling out. Perhaps everything would have been different if Jo had remembered to wear it.

  “Is it stealing if I keep it?” I ask. “Just for a while?”

  “It’s probably safer with you.” She smiles, watching the horseshoe catch the light. “Just for a while.”

  * * *

  Calling Jo’s spare room a “bedroom” might fall foul of the Trade Descriptions Act. Pryce claims the desk wedged into its corner, and I head for a bookshelf full of dog-eared paperbacks.

  “Someone’s been in here,” I say, immediately spotting the lazy error. “Jo was a stickler for categorising by author or genre, and these have been tossed back willy-nilly.”

  She doesn’t look up from where she’s arranging a series of typed letters on the carpet. “I know our timeline is sketchy at best, but they can’t have found what they were after, or they wouldn’t have tried to break into your flat the other night.”

  “Stands to reason. I probably discharged myself from the hospital earlier than they were expecting and caught them on the hop.” I swap a Clive Barker for a Stephen King, offended on Jo’s behalf by the disarray on the shelf. “I bet they searched here as soon as the initial fuss about the accident died down. I doubt this street has many Neighbourhood Watch members, so they could’ve come at any time.”

  “And if they struck gold here, there would’ve been no need to up the ante and search your flat.” She sets down her final letter and reaches for her phone, frowning as she taps keys, consults the paperwork, and taps again. “Jolanta paid more than two thousand pounds to a specialist clinic in Warsaw in January. How on earth did she afford that?”

  “What?” I scramble over and snatch up one of the letters. “That can’t be right. There’s no way in hell she had that kind of money.”

  The bill in my hand is itemised, the total of seven hundred and forty-three pounds helpfully converted from Polish zloty. A scribbled note marks it as paid in full on 6th January.

  “That can’t be right,” I say again, but my spirited denial has ebbed to a whimper. Where the fuck did she get the money from? I pick up another bill, paid on 25th January, the total just shy of four hundred pounds. Do I have a similar
windfall stashed someplace I haven’t yet discovered? Is this why we ran?

  The uncertainty must be written all over my face, because Pryce extricates the bill from my fingers and lays it on top of the others.

  “You might not be involved,” she says.

  I don’t react to the insinuation. I don’t have the energy. But although I might be naive, I don’t believe that Jo was a happily signed-up member of the Hamer criminal empire, either.

  “Maybe she was coerced into doing something, or she got in over her head,” I say, clutching at straws. Maybe I did as well. At this stage, anything seems possible.

  “These invoices are all for chemo and radiotherapy,” Pryce says. “Desperation can do terrible things to a person.”

  I nod, but I’m unstable enough to be rocked sideways by a blast of vertigo and tinnitus. What was my excuse? Where’s my impoverished, ailing relative in dire need of finances?

  “Fuck.” I shut my eyes against the tilting room. I hear footsteps, then water running. Seconds later, she lays a cool cloth on the back of my neck, keeping it in place with her palm. “Please don’t tell me we’ll figure it out,” I say. “Don’t tell me it’ll be okay.”

  “I won’t.” She tightens her hand, and water trickles down my spine. “It might not be.”

  I turn my head carefully and look at her, and she doesn’t try to shift away, to re-establish a comfortable, more professional gap between us. There’s sympathy rather than condemnation in her expression, and she gives me a pained non-smile as she catches a droplet of water with the cloth.

  “Do you want a lift home?”

  “No, I want to get this finished.” If I leave now, I’ll never have the balls to come back here.

  “All right.” She dries my neck as best she can and takes the cloth to the bathroom, returning with a glass of water. “Need any painkillers?”

  My ear sorts itself out as I gulp the water, and the floor stops rolling. “I’m fine,” I say, picking up a book to prove my point. “Let’s keep going.”

  We resume our positions, and I spend a further hour leafing through Jo’s library to check there’s nothing hidden in its pages. Pryce is still busy with the desk as I replace the last book, so I go to the kitchen and work my way through the cupboards. I make rapid progress at first, finding nothing of note among the pans or cutlery, but I stall when I get to the first food cupboard. It’s full of half-used packets, each clipped shut to preserve the contents: traditional staples of noodles, rice, and pasta, and the pulses Jo would add to bulk out a stew. She loved to cook, and even on her tiny budget she tried to prepare her meals from scratch, favouring cheaper cuts of meat and mince, and making do with natural yoghurt when a recipe called for cream.

  My bum grows numb from the tiles as I try to remember the name of the dumplings she’d stuff with all sorts of fillings and fry in oil. My phone and Google come to my rescue, directing me to the BBC recipe page for pierogi and reminding me of a lively discussion about the wisdom of having a Pancake Day but no Pierogi Day.

  “Every day should be Pierogi Day!” she’d declared, and then filled in her calendar to reflect her new law.

  “For fuck’s sake!” I yell, kicking myself for not thinking of the calendar sooner. I scan the walls, sure that it hung in here somewhere. There’s no sign of one in any of the obvious spaces, but closer inspection of the plaster by the fridge reveals a small hole suitable for a hook. I’m barging up the stairs two at a time when Pryce appears on the landing.

  “Find something?” she asks, leaning over the banister.

  “No, not as such.” I stop on the middle step. “But her calendar’s been nicked, and they took the bloody hook as well, the crafty little shits.”

  “Yeah?” She opens her hand, flicking a piece of card in her fingers like a magician working up to the big reveal. “Well, they missed this.”

  She passes the card through the wooden rails and switches on the landing light. I recognise Jo’s handwriting, the concise print and careful lettering. “28 Newbury Road, M19 2AP,” she’s written on the first line, followed by two mobile numbers and a single date and time: “December 14, 9:30 p.m.”

  “That’s two days after we were swapped around at Hamer’s,” I say. “And none of the shifts started at that time.”

  “I put it through Route Planner. The address is about ten minutes from here.”

  “Yeah, it’s Gorton. Did you try the numbers?”

  “No, it’d be safer doing that from a payphone.”

  “True.” I check my watch. “By the time we’re done here, it’ll be dark. Did you have plans for the evening, or do you fancy a stakeout?”

  She sighs. “I had my heart set on wearing something glamorous and painting the town red, but a stakeout sounds like fun as well.”

  “I’ll shout you supper afterward,” I promise.

  “Deal,” she says before I can renege, and I literally bite my tongue, pinching the edge between my incisors. If she notices, she hides it well, and she disappears into the spare bedroom. I watch her go, the card creasing in my fist, and wonder what the hell we’re both playing at.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The phone box stinks of stale urine and damp fag ends. Careful not to touch the receiver to her face, Pryce dials the two mobiles on Jo’s card, and we listen to identical “this number has been disconnected” messages, ending the endeavour fifty pence poorer and in dire need of a wash.

  “If the phones were linked to something illegal, they were probably burners,” I say, raising my voice as shop shutters clatter down and a bus rumbles past on the A6.

  She sidesteps an Asian bloke dragging a bucket of Day-Glo artificial flowers back into his pound shop. “It’s easy enough to get rid of a cheap pay-as-you-go, but it’ll be interesting to see whether they’ve done anything with that address.”

  “Depends what it was being used for and whether they were aware Jo had made a note of it.”

  “True.” She stops short outside a Tesco Metro. “It’s been a long time since we had breakfast, hasn’t it?”

  “Aye.” I’m starving but haven’t wanted to mention food. Whenever we meet, I seem to be stuffing my face with something. I’d blame the painkillers, if I were actually taking them.

  After stashing our shopping bags in the footwell of the Disco, Pryce follows my directions through the side streets to Gorton. Twenty-eight Newbury Road sits in the middle of a typical residential terrace, with little to distinguish it from its neighbours. Its tiny front garden is litter-strewn and thick with weeds, and one of the panels on its front door has been kicked in and replaced with plywood. The curtains are drawn, but someone is home; there’s a light on in the living room, and a black cat washing itself on the windowsill that pauses mid-lick to watch us drive past.

  “Looks like a normal house,” I say as Pryce makes a U-turn and parks behind the Volvo outside thirty-four. Although the street is sparsely lit, I clamber into the back seat, making sure I’m well out of sight.

  “Do you recognise it?” she asks.

  I squint through the tinted rear windows, focusing and unfocusing my eyes as I cajole my brain into taking an interest.

  “No,” I say. “I don’t think I’ve ever been here.”

  “If it helps any, I don’t think you have, either.”

  “Huh?”

  “You used the map all the way,” she says. “You didn’t need it for parts of the drive to Jolanta’s.”

  It’s a smart observation, but I’m not convinced. “That could be down to us avoiding the main roads.”

  “Could be. It’s just…” She shifts until she’s side-on against the seat, her nose crinkling as she tries to elaborate. “You’re just different when you’re on familiar ground, even if you’re only picking up on little things.”

  I think I know what she’s getting at, but I’m not sure I can put it into words. “It’s like a head rush,” I venture. “Like this big surge of hope that I’ll be normal again, and it lasts for a few seconds or m
inutes before I get shit-scared of what that’ll mean.”

  She nods, a slow inclination of her head, her cheek brushing the leather. “You’re scared your normal might be worse than what you have now.”

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “Yes, I would.” She answers quickly, as if at some point she’s taken the time to imagine herself in my shoes.

  “Cross that bridge when we get to it, eh?” I say, grateful for her honesty but keen to keep our stakeout out of the doldrums.

  She smiles, as relieved as I am to let the topic go, and reaches for the bags stuffed in the footwell. “Is it too early for tea if we skipped dinner? My mam was a strict six o’clocker.”

  “Half six at our house.” I grab the bags, happy in the role of rebel. “Sod the rules, I’m hungry.”

  We split sandwiches and salads, balancing lettuce on the carton lids and chasing cherry tomatoes as they make repeated bids for freedom.

  “Do you have any other family?” I ask around a mouthful of chicken and stuffing.

  “Two sisters. Deryn’s the eldest. She found God and…well, safe to say we don’t speak much any more. Mali’s a couple of years younger than me. She’s married, with two girls of her own, and she teaches primary in Bangor.”

  Despite the sparse detail, fondness has softened her voice, and I know without asking that she’s close to her little sister and nieces. She doesn’t reach for her phone and show me the photos she undoubtedly has on there—it’s not that sort of conversation—but she seems contented as she nibbles on a carrot stick. I wonder what type of aunt she is: the type who doesn’t want mucky hands plastered on her upholstery, or the type who’s happy to face-paint on the kitchen floor. Less than a week ago, I’d have thought my money safe on Type A. Not that I have any room to talk.

  “I can’t remember the names of mine,” I say, lowering my sandwich, crumbs flying from it as my hand twitches. “My nephews and nieces, I mean. One of them’s called Oliver, but the other two—I don’t even know if they’re lads or girls.”

  I haven’t bothered to find out, either. I didn’t ask Martin about them when he phoned, and I’ve been too preoccupied to find the photos Priti mentioned.