Alias

by Cari Hunter

  “Which bloke? Did she know his name?”

  “No. She’d overheard a heated phone call, but she couldn’t understand a word, apart from the odd expletive. Jolanta ended it in tears, but she dismissed it as a lover’s tiff when Shannon asked.”

  “Krzys,” I say. “If he bought her that necklace, I bet it was him on the phone. When was the argument? Could Shannon remember?”

  “She checked her diary and guesstimated the Tuesday before the Friday of the crash.”

  I do the sums in my head. “The newspaper in his flat was dated the day after that, and it would tally with when the neighbour last saw him.”

  “She breaks his heart, and he does a moonlight flit?”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Taken at face value, it seems the most likely explanation for his disappearance: he made a kneejerk decision, packed his essentials, and went off for a while to clear his head. If his wage had seen a similar bump to mine, it might have covered the four months of rent he’d paid, and if he really has dropped off the grid, he probably won’t have heard about Jo’s death.

  “What’s bugging you?” Pryce asks.

  “I’m not sure.” I’ve wrapped everything up so neatly that all it’s lacking is a red bow on top, and yet…I pass her the sketch of the warehouses. “I think this is one of your itches that I can’t scratch.”

  She splutters a laugh at the mangling of her phrase, and I blush to the roots of my hair.

  “You know what I mean,” I say.

  “Fortunately, I do,” she says, but the sketch has caught her interest and she doesn’t prolong my embarrassment. “‘DH Hamer.’ The one and the same?”

  “Yes. Slightly different company name, same styling.” I show her the image on my phone and then flick to a stock media photograph of the Ardwick warehouse. Seeing them juxtaposed spooks me all over again, and I get up and walk across the room, hashing things out in a staggered monologue. “We were there. Me and Jo. One night, I don’t know when. I can’t—She fell, hurt her hands. Is that why Copthorne was so familiar? Not the houses, but the warehouses?”

  “It could be.” She’s playing with the street view, willing it to show more. “Any thoughts on why you might have gone there?”

  I haven’t had the chance to get my head around this, but I try now, stopping and starting a couple of times until I’ve established a coherent narrative.

  “What if Jo saw something while she was working at Copthorne? Something dodgy involving that site. Drop-offs, suspicious activity in a supposedly abandoned warehouse? I was her best mate. She might’ve confided in me and insisted on coming along for moral support when I went to investigate. I wouldn’t have been able to say, ‘actually, I’m an undercover detective, and I’d prefer to go on my own.’”

  Pryce mulls that over, the sketch in one hand, my phone in the other. “And whatever you found there sent you to Wales?”

  “It’s one possibility.”

  Her nose twitches. She’s not convinced. “Bit of a coincidence,” she says.

  “I know.” My shoulders drop. “I hope I didn’t hide the memory stick in the warehouse. We’d never bloody find it.”

  “Either way, we need to go for a little look-see.”

  I nod, the hairs rising on the nape of my neck. “Tonight?” I say, my voice sounding distant, hollow.

  She sets down my phone. “Would you be okay with that?”

  I feel as if I’m about to reignite a chain reaction I’d only just managed to stop. I don’t want to go, but more to the point, I absolutely don’t want to take her with me.

  “It’s fine,” I say. I haven’t got the energy to argue, and I can’t bear to see that suspicious look in her eyes again. Once is enough for today.

  I collect our cups and take them into the kitchen. Rain is hitting the window as squally gusts push dark clouds across the horizon. The storm has brought about an early dusk, the sort of evening that makes you want to hunker down in front of a fire with a good book.

  “Less chance of anyone seeing us in this,” she says from somewhere behind me.

  “True.” I’m gripping the sink so hard that my palm is starting to hurt. I’d give almost anything to close the blinds and lock us in safely for the night, but she’s the only one with a key.

  Chapter Eighteen

  In my dream I’m driving blind. There’s no road, no lights, and I can’t lift my foot from the accelerator. I want to scream but I can’t. I can’t do anything except drive and wait for the impact. I brace when I feel a nudge on my shoulder, my whole body tensing in anticipation, but instead of the smash of glass and the multiple impacts of the car rolling, I wake to Pryce, who’s kneeling by the sofa, shaking my arm.

  “It’s quarter to one,” she says. “If we’re going, we should go.”

  “I’m awake. I’m up.” I allow myself a minute before I move. The old pre-brain-injury me could fall asleep in the middle of a debate, enjoy a restorative cat nap, and continue arguing my point on the other side as if I’d never been interrupted, but these days my grey matter isn’t so spry. I sit and wait for wheels to turn and cogs to crank, slowly recalling a laborious afternoon spent pondering the meaning of my coloured codes, and a mutual decision to go to the Copthorne industrial site in the wee hours, when the business at the houses is more likely to have concluded.

  Dressed in a black hoodie, black jeans, and boots, Pryce looks every inch the breaker and enterer, and she’s packing torches into a rucksack as I weave toward the bathroom.

  “Where the hell did you get those?” I ask.

  She fastens the rucksack and throws me a matching hoodie. “I nipped out to Asda. These were BOGOF in the Cat Burglar aisle.”

  I snort, unfolding the sweater across my chest to check its size. It’s a perfect fit.

  “Thank you kindly,” I say.

  “You’re welcome.” She flashes me a broad smile, full of the nervous excitement most police officers experience prior to a raid: that tension of not knowing whether you’ll come out the other side with a van full of apprehended scrotes or with your head kicked in.

  It’s stopped raining while I’ve been asleep, but thick clouds are covering the sky, leaving only the street lamps and kebab shops to light the city. Taxis send water cascading onto the pavements as they zip by, and the only pedestrians we see are shuffling along, heads down, on the hunt for sheltered doorways. Pryce keeps up with the flow of traffic, not flouting the speed limit as blatantly as most, but not driving so fastidiously that a passing patrol unit might suspect she was drunk and pull her over. She parks around the corner from Copthorne Road and passes me a torch before shouldering the rucksack. We raise our hoods in unison, and I rearrange my sleeve until it covers my cast.

  Too hyper for small talk, we set off at a nod, crossing onto Copthorne and keeping to the shadows as we watch the houses for any signs of life. All the lights in the terrace are off, and there are no cars parked outside. The small industrial estate is similarly deserted. It’s unlit, and the access road has long since fallen into disrepair, with potholes spread the width of it in places, and grass sprouting from cracks in its tarmac. I crouch and train my torch on the uneven surface, making sure to block its light from the houses behind me.

  “This might scupper my ‘suspicious activity’ theory,” I say. I’d expected to be paralysed by anxiety or unspeakable terrors, but Pryce’s presence makes it easier for me to remain detached and think like a detective.

  Her knees crack as she joins me, her torch beam crossing and then aligning itself with mine. “I agree, it’s too overgrown to have been used with any regularity,” she says, immediately on the same wavelength. “But that’s not to say no one’s been here.” She shifts her torch a little to the left, picking out a flatter area of vegetation. It’s springing back to life, but I can see where tyres have churned it up. It’s a wide tread, probably from an SUV or a van.

  “Jo and I walked. We didn’t drive,” I murmur. I can feel the fear from that night beginning to settle over me like
a sodden blanket, and I push to my feet, determined to shake it off before it overwhelms me. I look to Pryce, who seems to sense my need for moral support and comes to stand by my side. “Do the tracks stop here or carry on? I can’t tell.”

  We walk a few yards, trying to map the path of the vehicle, but the winter weather, the puddles, and the irregularities of the road make it impossible to be sure.

  “Shall we start with the obvious one?” she says, and I realise we’ve meandered onto the parking spaces for the Hamer warehouse. I freeze as if caught on a tripwire, but nothing happens; no alarms sound, and no dogs or security guards come rushing out.

  Keeping our hoods low over our faces, we check for CCTV. Once we’re confident no one is monitoring the site remotely, we scout around for an easy point of access. Our quest takes us away from the grille-covered, padlocked front door toward the rear of the building, where nettles and brambles rake our legs, and the boards across the ground floor windows show distinct signs of having been tampered with. I stop at one that I can force up and to the side, creating a gap big enough for us to shimmy through, if we think thin.

  “Pryce?” I hiss in momentary panic, as I turn from the window and lose her in the darkness.

  “I’m right here,” she says, from no more than a couple of feet away, and I smile, too relieved to feel daft.

  Holding the board with one hand, I direct my torch inward with the other, illuminating what was once a small office. It’s been used as a squat at some point; there are filthy blankets strewn across an upended desk, and foil wraps and needles glittering on the carpet tiles.

  “Watch your step.” I highlight the detritus as she gingerly climbs through. She puts a hand to her nose, and I hear her taking shallow breaths until she acclimatises to the smell. It’s the first thing that hits me when I follow her: a cocktail of urine and faeces so potent it’s going to claw inside my olfactory system and set up residence there for the next few hours.

  “Nobody home?” I ask as she pokes at the blankets with a broken chair leg.

  “Not for a while. There’s all sorts of muck settled on these.”

  We quickly examine what’s left of the fixtures and fittings, impelled by an unspoken desire to move on. The bottom drawer of a filing cabinet has made a handy fire pit, and the upper two drawers are empty. The only paperwork we find is a receipt for a Pot Noodle and a bottle of Frosty Jack cider, unlikely to have been purchased by an employee. Three neighbouring offices tell a similar story, and while it’s obvious no one has utilised the space for anything other than shooting up, shitting, and sleeping, I can feel myself getting impatient for a different, less tangible reason.

  “This isn’t right,” I say as we reconvene on a gangway overlooking the main factory space. Rusted conveyor belts stand at intervals, ready to feed orders from the storage area to the checkers and the packers. It’s a scaled-down version of the Ardwick factory, and that’s its only familiar aspect. I’ve never set foot in this building before.

  “I’m sure we didn’t come in here,” I tell her. “Nothing’s sticking.” I rap my torch on the safety bar in front of us and try again to find the right words, but I can’t. I’m too frustrated, too full of unspent adrenaline to be articulate. “It’s not right,” I say. “He’s not here.”

  I push off the barrier, ready to walk away, but she grabs my arm, her fingers digging in hard enough to hurt.

  “What did you just say?” She doesn’t ask it so much as demand, her tone and her grip around my biceps harsh enough to shock a response out of me.

  “It’s not right,” I repeat slowly, and frown when she shakes her head.

  “No, the rest of it.” She sounds as if she wants to rattle the details loose. “Who’s not here?”

  “I don’t—” I stop and replay the statement in my head. Both parts of it. Fuck. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” I whisper, but the answer is right there, only just out of reach. All it’ll take is the smallest push and I’ll have it.

  She releases my arm, and I stagger back, colliding with a metal post and sending a pigeon flapping for the rafters in a tumult of feathers and dust. I want to grab her hand and run, to pin this thing down, because we’re so close to finding it.

  “We need to get back outside,” I say.

  We exit the same way we came in, retracing our route through the weeds and onto the road. It’s raining again, plump droplets bouncing off the tarmac and filling in the potholes. Too hemmed in by my hood, I shove it down, ignoring Pryce’s bark of warning as I close my eyes and attempt to summon up something, anything that might prove useful. Within seconds, I’m soaked but still clueless, and I feel her yank my hood up and none too gently bustle me toward the opposite warehouse.

  “Is it this one?” She clutches my chin in cold fingers and holds me in place as I look at the building. “We don’t have long, Alis. Think.”

  “No. Farther back,” I say, galvanized by the command. “We couldn’t see the street.”

  “Okay. Good.” She drops her hand and tugs one side of my hood, repositioning the material so it’s not blinding me. “Come on, then.”

  We walk together, close but not touching, our footsteps synched and then slightly off beat. Every roll of loose stone beneath my boots makes my breath shorter and my chest tighter, but there’s no startling revelation en route, just the ambient sense of déjà vu that’s taken to following me around like a personal miasma.

  She slows as we approach the third warehouse, her eyebrow rising in silent inquiry, but I lead her past, my pace increasing to a near jog, my torch beam zigzagging ahead of us.

  “This one,” I gasp, winded, my ribs reminding me they took a battering in the crash. “It’s this one.”

  “Are you sure?” she asks, not half as out of puff as I am.

  “Yes.” I’m as sure about this as I’ve been about anything in the last two weeks, and the roil of nervous nausea in my belly adds extra credence. I creep forward, crossing four parking spaces, their dividing lines broken but still visible. I avoid the thin strips like a superstitious idiot dodging cracks in the pavement, a distraction that keeps me moving until my light catches the DH HAMER sign hanging askew by the main entrance.

  “Jesus. Fuck.” I bend low, propping my hands on my knees. I’m panting, but there’s not enough air coming in, and I hear her telling me to breathe through my nose or hold my breath or some shit that I’m not capable of doing because there are sparks dancing in my eyes and I think I’m going to faint.

  “It’s okay,” she’s saying. “You’re okay. You stay here. I can go in on my own.”

  And that sorts me out faster than a backhand across the face and a dose of smelling salts.

  “I’m coming with you,” I tell her in my best brooking-no-argument tone, and I see the flicker of a smile, as if that was her intention all along.

  Without further discussion, we slog around the building’s perimeter, keeping our eyes peeled for a weak spot. It comes in the form of a shattered window, its glass freshly strewn on its sill. A cursory toe through the weeds finds a lone brick, clean on its uppermost side, and the obvious tool for the vandalism.

  Pryce gives a stiff nod to acknowledge the discovery and uses her torch to knock a couple of stubborn shards from the window frame. She boosts me through the gap, and then, unhindered by a plaster cast or a sore chest, she scrambles up and over with ease. We pause to get our bearings, which doesn’t take long. The building comprises a single large, open space intersected by rows of heavy-duty shelving. Unlike the first warehouse, no one has co-opted it as a den, but there’s still a smell, an insidious drift of decay carried on a through-draught that blends methane and ammonia with an underlying and unmistakeable sweetness. Deirdre Asante was right: once you’ve smelled it, you never forget it.

  “Christ,” Pryce whispers. “Where’s that coming from?”

  I walk away from her, following not the smell but the ghost of a route I’ve already taken, Jo sobbing and sobbing, her hand clasped in mine. Ei
ght rows in, and along to the farthest recess. There’s no light, and I’m feeling my way, inching forward with my soles scuffing the floor. I don’t switch my torch on. I know what it’s going to show me, and I don’t want to see it. The smell gets so strong that it’s almost as if I’m chewing on it, and the toe of my boot suddenly hits something that flops and gives beneath the slight pressure. There’s a release of liquid that drips into the dirt, and I gag, heaving and then vomiting onto a shelf.

  I’m sitting on the floor by the time Pryce finds the right aisle. She comes to me first, giving the body a wide, cautious berth and taking a bottle of water from her rucksack.

  “Sip it,” she tells me, putting a packet of Polo Mints into my free hand. She uses the remainder of the bottle to sluice the shelf clean and dons a pair of nitrile gloves.

  “It’s Krzys,” I say. “Last time it was only a few hours since, and we could see who it was. Not like now. You can’t tell now.” My voice catches and quavers. “They’ve just left him to rot like an animal.”

  Despite the garbled syntax, she seems to get the gist. She bends low, focusing her light on the blackened hole in the centre of his forehead. The abnormal, flattened angle of his skull suggests the back of it is missing.

  “They did it in front of Jo,” I say, fighting to get it all out now, because I’ll only be able to describe it once, and it might be gone the next time I blink. “Executed him and forced her to watch. I think—” I look at the body, at the tongue lolling from its mouth, as swollen and livid as a slab of liver. The skin on his cheek undulates as maggots wriggle beneath its surface. I gag again and suck my mint until I’ve swallowed the nausea away.

  “You think what?” she asks quietly.

  I shake my head, tears filling my eyes. I’m not thinking. I can’t.

  “He tried to stop her from coming here, working here,” I say. “He threatened to go to the police.”