He gave me one of his cards, and rejected my suggestion that we move on to a club. Mojo’s, an old favourite of mine, was on Hope Street, a hop, skip and piss against the wall away.
‘I’m shagged,’ he said. ‘I’m off home. How long are you in the ’pool for?’
‘Another day or two. Depends what I dig up.’
‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow then. Give us a call round lunchtime.’
Mojo’s was the kind of place you only find out about through a mate. You could wander up Hope Street during the day and not realise that one of its terraced houses concealed a three-floor club with bars, dance floors and the kind of interior decoration that made Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen look as outré as a Mr Byrite cardigan.
I found a table and sat down with a pint. It was a bit early for Mojo’s, but then I knew how packed this place could get once the pubs reached chucking-out time. Which was not to say that the club was filled only with lonely echoes when I got there. There was a good crowd in, and the music was loud, some drum ’n’ bass track that made your lungs vibrate. I people-watched for a bit, enjoying the currents that pulled the girls and boys this way and that. The way they moved to the music, even though they weren’t dancing: the little tics and twitches of those who were trying to impress, the opening and closing of posture depending on who was nearby, the eye contact. Everyone was fluent in body language in here, it seemed. Apart from one or two mutes who continued disrupting the whole, beautiful rhythm.
Like this guy, sitting next to a woman who was saying no to him every which way but verbally. Everything about him was a bit of snot in your ice cream, from his too-shiny bouffant hair to his no-need-to-iron shirt and knitted tank top, his white trousers and slip-on shoes. He was walking a coin across his knuckles, a large one, that looked like one of those commemorative jobs they’d handed out at school for the Silver Jubilee. Some people, I understand, think that looks cool. Nothing that obviously took years of hardcore practice, at the expense of a normal, healthy existence, is cool. And this guy clearly must have spent aeons in front of his mirror, walking that coin, knowing that to perfect it was to unlock the door to an embarrassment of female riches.
Wrong, minge-wipe.
A middle-aged woman was on the prowl, trying to crash drinks from the students sucking their alcopops at the bar. Some mother high on a night out with her mates, maybe tickled by a compliment or two from some pissed lads earlier on, thinking she could cut it with the foxes in here. She had good legs, I’ll give her that, but they were only good for a hippo. Her boobs were situated where they ought to be but her black bra, visible through the sheer white top she was wearing, wore a sign that said Hardcore Scaffolding Ltd. The less said about her arse the better, but she made two stools groan when she spread it across them.
I was groaning, too. She’d picked my table.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘fuck me ragged with a cricket bat.’
‘Sorry,’ I said, trying not to linger too long on her Maybelline mask.
‘I’m waiting for someone.’
‘If it isn’t Joel Sorrell.’
Christ. Please, God. Please, God, if I never have another drink and promise to apply for a place in a monastery, please tell me that I’ve never porked this Certificate 18 non-special effect.
‘You don’t remember me, do you?’
The people who ask that question get it slightly wrong every time. They should try inserting a ‘want to’ in between the ‘don’t’ and the ‘remember’. I studied her eyes, for as long as they stayed in one place, and gritted my teeth. I was in a club that I liked and the last time I’d been here, so had she, but she and I had been fifteen years younger, and then free of an amount of excess fat that could have gone to create a third person.
‘Hello, Annie,’ I said.
‘Are you married?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I lied.
‘Liar,’ she said. ‘Where’s your ring? Or maybe you’re on the pull tonight? Naughty boy.’
‘Annie, if there was ever a time when I was not on the pull, it’s tonight. I’m so much not pulling that I’m actually pushing. I’m pushing so hard.’
‘You always were a weirdo,’ she said. ‘Nice arse, though, as I remember.’
‘Yes, well that was yesterday. And today is today and we’ve all moved on, haven’t we?’
She asked me if I was going to be a gentleman and buy her a drink, and I said no. ‘Then I’ll buy you one,’ she said.
She got me a pint of lager, and while she was at the bar I almost made a break for it, but I wasn’t going to let her spoil my night and, anyway, I’d have to wait outside in the cold for Geenan to get home. I thanked her when she came back and then spent some time studying the knots and wormholes in the wooden table. When I looked up again, she was crying.
I felt like all men do when a woman starts to cry: guilty, shitty and confused.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, although I wasn’t sure what I was apologising for. It seemed to work, though, and she sobered up a little.
‘It’s okay,’ she said, dabbing at the panda-esque horror that her eyes had become. ‘I’m just tired and drunk. I was only being friendly.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s me. I’m no good any more at recognising friendly.’
‘You sound like a bitter old man,’ she said.
‘Bang on the money,’ I said, and dumped a few big mouthfuls of lager down my neck.
‘Do you remember–’
I touched her arm. ‘Please, could we not play that game?’
‘It’s all I’ve got,’ she said.
‘I remember everything. So no point carrying on.’
‘You still live in the area?’
I shook my head. ‘I ran away years ago. Went down south.’
‘Why?’
I smiled, or tried to. All I could feel was a cold worm trying to move around where my mouth ought to be. ‘I could tell you but it would mean nothing to you.’
She didn’t say anything. For the first time that night, I wished she would.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I moved away because I felt I was getting dragged down. I felt smothered and I didn’t want that.’
The club was getting busier and I glanced at my watch. The pubs were closing and hundreds of people had now realised they were wearing their beer-heads and needed to fill them. Images from my past in the north-west were queuing up like surly youths outside a chip shop, fired, feisty and ready to visit actual bodily harm on me if I so much as dared look at them.
‘I went to hairdressing college when I left school,’ she said. ‘And then, after I dropped out there, I got a job in a baker’s. Hair today, scone tomorrow, that’s what my husband always says.’
I could believe it. I bet he said it every day.
‘I met my husband the day after me and you… you know.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I had a hangover – as you know. And I was out in the garden getting the washing in. He was next-door, cleaning windows. We got chatting.’
She lifted her glass, which was empty, then returned it to the table. I didn’t offer. I had now changed my mind and decided I was getting out the moment she turned her back. ‘Did you ever get married?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Kids?’
‘Annie.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m just being friendly.’
‘So you keep saying. I wouldn’t bother about that. I had my friendly gland removed in a special operation.’
‘When we, you know… weren’t you seeing someone? Teacher wasn’t she?’
I got up too quickly and knocked our glasses to the floor. I think I turned her chair over too, while she was in it. I can’t be sure. Because I was moving fast then, barging through the students and their trendy oblong spectacles, their tiny rubber handbags and two-storey platform trainers. The bouncers were thinking about pinching me, but whether they thought to let it go because I was leaving anyway or because there was something in my eyes that gave th
em cause to back off, I couldn’t say. Either way, they were wise to.
I got out on to Hope Street and sucked in the cold air hard until my lungs caught fire and I started getting a headache. The wind dragged its icy nails up and down my spine. I tugged my jacket close and jammed my hands in the pockets, stalked over to Geenan’s house. There was a light on in the front window.
I knocked on the door. He still wasn’t answering. I knelt on the doorstep and pushed open the flap on the letterbox.
‘Jimmy,’ I called out. I thought I heard a television. ‘Jimmy? It’s me. It’s Joel Sorrell. I talked to you today. I didn’t mean to upset you, but I need your help. I know it’s eating you up. But my girl is gone too. My little girl is gone, too, Jimmy. I’m in the same dirty bathwater as you. I know–’
The door opened and he was standing above me, his face twisted up as if he’d just eaten a forkful of shepherd’s pie only to find that it was shepherd’s shit. ‘You don’t know a fucking thing,’ he said.
He went back into the house, leaving me to get to my feet and follow him.
12
I woke up wearing my clothes. ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Jimmy,’ I said, which was also the last thing I remember saying from the previous night, before I reached that point of drunkenness that ensures you remember nothing else. He’d just opened a second bottle of Jameson’s. I’d had one more drink, the whiskey tasting like water, and must have passed out. He then either put me in a taxi or I recovered sufficiently to do it myself. Crucially, though, I remembered pretty much everything that was said up until that point.
I’d slept too late for breakfast, but I wasn’t up to it anyway. I had a wash and scooped up my keys and wallet, then went downstairs. Outside was wetter than a Conservative back bench. I ran through the rain to the rental car and started her up, flicking on the headlights and the wipers as I nosed out of the car park. The intense fragrance of the interior, something rose-based, was so cloying that I almost threw up. I wound down the window a little and chewed on the damp air. By the time I hit the A562 going east, I felt a little better, but every time I thought about Annie, or the way she’d tried to jemmy a way into me, I felt my gorge rising.
I was in a fury for allowing Annie to infect me with the past, after I’d left the north-west to get away from all that hurt. That I’d acquired a great pile of new hurt – deeper, nastier, insidious hurt – down in London had no bearing on the matter. It was a different hurt, a hurt I thought I could cope with more successfully because I was older and wiser and more cynical. And I must have been doing something right, because I wasn’t running away any more. Maybe that was what separates adults from children: the direction you take and the speed at which you take it when the monsters come looking for you. But Annie wasn’t to blame, especially not after what Jimmy told me.
More fool me for thinking I could dodge my demons.
I followed the Speke Road out of Liverpool, stopping off at a drive-thru McDonald’s for a large McCoke and a few McNurofen cadged from the McGirl at the service hatch. I was about to leave, when Mike gave me a call. He’d spent a few hours in the archives and had found a reference to the murder I’d asked him about.
‘August 2005,’ he revealed. ‘Woman by the name of Georgina Millen. She was twenty-nine years old when she was killed.’
She’d been opened up with the kind of frenzy a thirteen-year-old boy affords a copy of Playboy. The MO didn’t resemble anything that Merseyside’s CID had seen before. The prints they took at the scene came up with zero matches when they were fed through the computer. Despite the public’s near-rabid demand for an arrest to be made, and one of the largest man-hunts in the north-west’s history, nobody was nailed for it. Now I could remember the panic that had flowered in the subsequent weeks. Everyone seemed tensed for a follow-up death, as if someone with such anger in them, such a propensity for murder as violent as this, could not surely have spent himself on a single victim. All over the area, schoolgirls vanished from the streets, confined to their bedrooms, and ferried to and from school by fathers who regarded each other with suspicion in the car parks. But then someone else was killed in a different way, in a different place. The tabloids foamed about other things, attention shifted, interest dropped off. As it always does.
Mike gave me the name of the murder site, and a couple more bits and pieces including the name of the school that the girl had attended. I thanked him, promising him a pint and a Chinese next time I was round his way. Before I rang off, I asked him to hang fire on any follow-up stories about the possible connection between this death and the one in London. He gnashed at that for a while, but eventually caved in. ‘Just till I’ve had a bit of breathing space on it,’ I confirmed. ‘A week, perhaps. Certainly no more than two.’
‘I’ll be all over it then, Joel,’ he said. ‘So don’t go asking me for any more time.’
Which meant I had a week, ten days tops, to finger the bastard. Otherwise, what with the heat the papers would bring to the situation, he’d go to ground. And Mawker would throw me in a cell and have my balls rubbed nonstop with a cheese grater.
Another twenty minutes and the A562 became Fiddlers Ferry Road. I followed it through its regeneration into Widnes Road and turned off at the Penketh roundabout, on to Stocks Lane. I turned right on to Meeting Lane and drove down to the end, bearing down on the waves of déja vu that were threatening to make me lose control and pile the car into one of the neatly clipped front lawns. I must have weeded and mowed a fair few of the gardens along here in my time, back when I was casting about for something to do. I did all kinds of odd-jobs: gardening, furniture removal, digging up potatoes, picking raspberries. About a year before I joined the police, I got the taxi-driving job, and also a few stints as a security guard through a friend whose father was the regional inspector for a nationwide security firm. Of all the jobs in all the world, that one stunk like a skunk with halitosis living on a sewage farm. I used to spend sixteen-hour shifts, 8 a.m. till midnight, sitting in a Portakabin on building sites, chasing off kids who wanted to play in the sand. I couldn’t bunk off the patrols and read or get a suntan because there were checkpoints at various areas around the site that I needed to punch in at certain times throughout the day, just to prove I’d been doing the job properly. Now, instead of chasing off those kids who wanted to play in the sand, I was trying to find them.
I parked the car on the road outside the primary school and walked through the playground to the main entrance. There were kids all over the place, pretty much what might be expected, I suppose, although this was a new strain of kid – an überkid. I was accosted by a couple of them who asked, in basso voices, if they could look after my car. I told them no, and that it didn’t matter if they did anything to it because it was a rented car and was thus insured against damage.
‘How about if we do something to you instead? Are you insured against damage?’ This from a boy who couldn’t have been any older than ten with, I swear, a furring of pseudo-moustache on his top lip. He must have topped five foot six.
‘Which failed experiment produced you?’ I asked him, feeling cheap at having a pop at a child but, well, he started it.
‘Come again?’ Bumfluff said.
‘Are you one of the teachers here?’
Some of the other kids laughed. Bumfluff didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. He was turning red, his hands balled into fists the size of Puerto Rican mangoes. I was impressed, but I moved on before he did something to get himself expelled.
Inside the entrance hall was a small, presently unmanned, reception desk. The walls were filled with collages of winter scenes, lots of glitter and tinfoil and clear plastic glued on to black backing paper with Uhu. Another board contained words describing winter. To the usual ones someone had chalked – without any of the staff noticing, it would seem – the words Miss Hicks’s tits. From the assembly hall came the sound of someone playing the piano astonishingly badly.
A cough, one of those questioning
hacks used by people who can’t be arsed to try out their manners, made me turn around. A woman who looked as if she was put on the earth to wear shawls scurried into the entrance hall. She was thinner than the plot of a TV movie and bore the ingrained expression of all teachers who wish to instil terror into their charges: a kind of hawkishness that comes with true dedication and practice. It wasn’t something you could wash off easily. She couldn’t be all bad, though: she had cat scratches on her hands.
‘Yes?’ she said, in precisely the voice I expected. Borderline shrill.
‘My name’s Joel Sorrell,’ I said, then added, in a voice filled with urbane ennui, ‘Can you help me?’
My dad had given me this little trick when I was young. He said, whenever you’re talking to a woman, before you say anything, ask her if she can help you. And say it in a little-boy-lost voice. I’ve always followed his advice. It never works.
‘What do you want?’ she asked, her tone brittle.
‘I need some information,’ I said, ditching the little-boy-lost and trying the wolfish admirer of older women ploy. I gave her a smile. ‘Got cats?’ I asked, nodding at her hands and revealing my own scars.
‘Gardening,’ she said. A disappointment, but it was an in of sorts. ‘Are you from the police?’
‘No, I’m representing a client who has a missing relative. Possibly abducted from this school.’
‘We have nobody missing from this school. We have excellent security measures here.’
‘Which is why I was allowed to get in without anybody checking who I was.’
This seemed to bring her up short. Any chance of her being my ally was now as likely as Osama Bin Laden appearing in a Wigan panto.
‘I can assure you,’ she said again, ‘that our security here is excellent.’
I didn’t really care. I said, ‘Two pupils from this school were murdered. Did you know that?’
‘That’s complete non–’
‘No, it’s true. Two girls. One called Kara Geenan and another, Georgina Millen. Both killed in the same year, 2009.’
Dust and Desire Page 15
