by Tom Trott
The centre was still packed with idiots, and the tarty shops were selling themselves, all smiles and willing staff. The sun was beating down on the cobbles by one o’clock and I was glad to get into the shadows of the Lanes. A different man had taken Lenny’s spot in the last months, it was prime real estate after all, and despite looking homeless he was selling those wind-up toys that do a backflip, and for the first time ever I saw someone buy one.
Brighton in the summer is great for businesses. So many people crammed into tiny streets, all needing somewhere to eat and drink and get out of the heat. Great for all businesses except mine. In the last few months I had attracted enough clients to keep Thalia employed, pay the rent on the office and flat, eat food, and even buy the occasional thing. But my customers are Brightonians, or people looking for Brightonians, and in the summer everyone is a tourist. The residents are on holiday, the students have gone home, and I’m left sitting in my office on a Sunday afternoon with nothing to do and no money to do it with.
I was enjoying the Joy Tothova case. Not in a sick way. Since the winter I had surveilled some husbands, some wives, found a missing dog, acted as a chaperone to a man who owed money to loan sharks, and in one especially boring case, helped an old lady discover who had keyed her car. It was her son. So to investigate an abduction, to feel useful, made it more enjoyable than it should’ve been.
I leafed through the file Thalia was compiling. It wasn’t much more than a few notes, but at least she was keen:
Between 10:00—11:00am Wednesday 13/7/16, the Tothovas (Graham, Maria, and Joy), parked on Stanmer Park Rd, and walked up to the Fiveways. About this time they noticed a blue Ford Transit-style van loitering on Hythe Road. It was double-parked, with engine running.
“Later the three of them were shopping in Fiveways Fruits, then Mrs Tothova crossed the road alone to shop in Barfields Butchers. When Mr Tothova found himself alone in the greengrocers, he assumed that his daughter had gone to the butchers with her mother. Around five minutes later, Maria returned, and discovered that Joy was missing. They searched the nearby shops, and phoned 999 at 11:21.
Biographical research revealed that Graham Tothova was born in Derby, one of three boys and a girl. His parents, Paul and Lynn, were both still alive. His father owned, and still ran, a limousine dealership, and Graham was the only one of the boys not to join the family business. His sister was married, lived in Burton upon Trent, and didn’t appear to work.
It sounded like a coma-inducingly boring upbringing, and no doubt there was some family politics involved in working at Paul’s Limo’s (the extra apostrophe giving it real class) that he had been keen to escape. His parents didn’t even have enough imagination to give him a middle name. The interesting surname came from his Slovakian great-grandfather.
Maria Elizabeth Tothova, on the other hand, had been born Maria Elizabeth Redburn in Dubai. Her father, Stephen Redburn, was a British businessman who sold oil refining machinery to dubious regimes, and her mother, Emilia De St Croix, was a Maltese diplomat.
Her particular presence made a bit more sense to me now: her father had given her the height that comes with money, and her mother had given her the sweet smell of class. No wonder men like Ben McCready went gaga over her. And here she was, in Brighton, married to Graham the son of a car salesman. That must hurt ambitious men like McCready more than anything.
Both her parents were deceased, both from lung cancer, and she only had one brother. Thalia noted he lived in South Africa, but what he did there Google didn’t say.
It was just the three of them in Brighton: Maria, Graham, and Joy. I had no idea why their daughter had been abducted. I couldn’t see any connection with their charity. With their church. With them having moved from Fiveways to Hove. With their families. With their friends. With councillor Ben McCready. Nothing. I couldn’t see how they had pissed anyone off. Quite the opposite. It was like the girl had fallen down a manhole.
Whatever the motive, I wasn’t going to find it by sitting here staring at the bookshelf. I looked down to the cobbles. To the masses. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon, I should be out eating lunch somewhere. Fish & chips on the beach? Maybe not the beach, too many idiots. So maybe somewhere nice, here in the Lanes.
I felt like spoiling myself on a day like this, so to hell with it, I was going to blow a week’s food money: late lunch at English’s. If it’s good enough for Peter James, then it’s got to be good enough for me.
7
DNA
halfway through my fruits de mer it started raining. And after an Aperol Spritz, and some pudding, and coffee, it was still raining. I paid up and stood in the door, looking out across East Street. It was a monsoon out there, tourists scurrying under the nearest shelter, until so many had gathered under the restaurant’s awning that they blocked my view.
I held a newspaper over my head as I jogged back through the Lanes, round puddles and through waterfalls, until I made it inside. Upstairs I threw off my jacket, dumping it over the back of a chair. Then just as I had taken my shoes off someone banged on the street door. I wandered out onto the landing, but before I could shout down it opened and three men and a woman stomped up to the landing.
‘Joe Grabarz?’ a man in a dry white shirt asked.
I stood there in my wet socks. ‘Can I help you?’
‘We’re here to search your office.’
He tried to get past me but I took a step back and blocked the doorway.
‘You’re not searching anywhere.’
He raised his well-groomed eyebrows. ‘You haven’t got anything to hide, have you?’
‘Your wife’s not here, ok? She left an hour ago.’
‘Very funny.’
‘Thank you.’
I drank him in for a second: the stiff, starched collar; the ironed-flat clothes and the ironed-flat sense of humour. The other two men were just the same and the woman only differed anatomically.
‘Step aside!’ she shouted from behind them.
She, along with the rest of them, looked far too well turned out to be behaving like this. It was pretend toughness. The type that has never seen the real thing. They weren’t going to push me out of the way or hold me down, they’d run and find an adult.
‘Do you know what I have in my pocket?’ I asked her.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Brass knuckles.’ I was lying, they were in my jacket on the back of the chair. ‘Do you know what they’ll do to your face?’
She took a step back. ‘He said you wouldn’t hurt a woman.’
‘Who said?’
Before she could answer, one of the silent types pushed the first guy out the way and ran to get past me. I grabbed him and threw him back into the bannisters with a bit too much force.
They ran to help him; he was wedged half through, his head hanging out over the stairs. His body had snapped the balustrade and bent two bannisters out of shape. It took all of them to get him free.
‘You’re a bully,’ the woman hissed as they carried him back down the stairs. Seconds later the door slammed.
I was back in the outer office checking my jacket. My brass knuckles weren’t there after all, I must have left them in my desk, maybe.
The street door opened again downstairs.
‘Another satisfied customer!?’ someone called up. It was a man’s voice, foreign, I didn’t recognise it.
‘Hello?’ I called.
Footsteps wandered up the creaky stairs, across the landing, and in the open door.
‘Mr Grabarz?’
Planted there was a short, almost bald, jowly man in a mac. He sounded German.
‘Yes.’
‘Hermann Vogeli.’ Swiss, I remembered. He extended a hand, ‘Nice to meet you.’
I shook it. ‘You too.’
We stood in silence for a moment, my heart rate slowly returning to normal. He didn’t say anything. Didn’t even move. I was calm again now. I needed to learn to stay that way. I made an oath right there and then
: I will stay calm.
‘Come into my office.’
I put my shoes on the radiator. It wasn’t on, but that’s what I did when they were wet.
‘What was that about?’ he asked.
‘Joy Tothova, who else?’
‘Who?’
I sighed. ‘Never mind.’
We wandered into my little office and he sat in the little chair opposite my little desk. I had left the windows open so I quickly checked on them, but it was ok, the overhang of the roof protected me from flooding, and despite the rain it was still as hot as hell.
‘We were expecting you the other night.’
‘Yes, I’m very sorry. I missed my ferry.’
Ferry? How far had he come? ‘You didn’t tell my assistant very much.’
‘It’s a private matter, I always prefer to speak to people personally. Don’t you?’
I just shrugged, I wasn’t really listening. ‘Would you like a drink or anything? Tea, coffee?’
‘No, thank you.’ He slipped a cigarette and a lighter out of his jacket, ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
‘I’m afraid I do.’
He froze mid movement, ‘Really? I would not have thought so.’
‘I don’t personally. But I can’t say the same for my next visitor.’
‘Of course.’ He put it back in his pocket, placed both hands on his knees, and looked out at the rain. It was falling parallel to the windows, a silent curtain.
‘What a horrible day,’ he mused, ‘hot and wet. My uncle used to have a house near Dufourspitze that I would visit in the summer. It never rained when I was there. It was so high that we were above the weather. We would stand on the roof and look down at all the clouds that were laid out around us like a carpet.’
He was in his fifties at least, but he could have been older, everything about him was second hand and poorly treated. His face looked like cold meat left out in the rain, and hung off his skull in the way that it would if he had put it through the wash too many times. He dressed like the most boring form of businessmen, the type that sleep in airport hotels, where everything is as grey as the air on the runway. Except he had come by ferry. He had probably spent last night in a Dieppe Formula 1 with distant view of the punishing surf. He worked in a business park in a cold trans-European city where no language was common and experiencing it was a sedative. He was a photocopied photocopy of a beige man. One that had yellowed in the sun like Sellotape.
‘My uncle,’ he continued, ‘was a pioneer in what they now call ultramarathons. Because he lived at such high altitude his body processed oxygen far more efficiently than “der niedrige Leute”, “the low people”, as he used to call them.’
I smiled politely and made small talk. ‘Your English is very good, I always wished I’d learnt a language.’
‘My job takes me all over Europe.’
‘What is your job?’
He gave a coy smile and raised his fingers very slightly off his knees. ‘We’ll get to that.’
I was too tired now to make a thing of it, the heavy meal and the drinks were hugging me to sleep.
He scanned across my bookshelf: various editions of Kelly’s Directory of Brighton & Hove, The Encyclopaedia of Brighton, The Pevsner Architectural Guide to the city, other things like that.
‘I see history is a hobby of yours.’
‘It’s my job,’ I told him.
He smiled. ‘History defines us all, doesn’t it?’
‘If you let it.’
He frowned, then changed the subject again: ‘Have you ever been to Switzerland?’
‘No.’
‘You must go. Dufourspitze is beautiful in the spring.’
‘I’ll add it to my bucket list.’
He went to open his mouth again but I cut him off:
‘What was it you wanted to see me about?’
He tried not to smile and his fingers drummed on his kneecaps. ‘Would you indulge me a little storytelling?’
I sighed. ‘Why not.’ I wanted a drink, but that might be impolite.
‘My story begins in Spain, in Rojales, near Torrevieja. Have you ever been there?’
‘I’ll add that to the list too.’
‘Well, Rojales is a poor town. And for the Spanish to think it poor, you know it has to be poor. It wasn’t all their fault, the economy was hit hard. But for whatever reason you want to give, there are no jobs. And now most of the young people have left, half of them came here to find a job. Living in that town there is a woman, María Dolores Suárez, only she’s not living anymore. A famous tragedy in Rojales, she was only forty-one. And when someone dies and they have something to pass on, they have to find a next of kin. Only when it comes to María’s death, they cannot find any next of kin. Everyone knows she has no children. No brother, no sisters. But she’s got something to pass on. That’s when they hire me.’ A thumb left his knee just long enough to point toward his chest.
My feet were sweaty, I fanned out the ends of my socks with my toes.
‘I went to Rojales. I asked every old bat living there, and I found out that María had what you call a half-sister. Older, the same mother, but family. So then I had to find her, Nadia del Toro, and I found her not too far away. In El Chaparral. If you need to know what El Chaparral is like: the people there dream of living in Rojales one day. So I found her, but when I found her, I found her in the graveyard. She had been dead for more than thirty years. But María has something to pass on, and I had been hired to find the person who gets it.’
I could feel this story stretching into infinity. It had got darker in the room now, grey clouds growing over the sky like mould.
I took out the brandy bottle from the third drawer down and poured myself a short drink out of boredom more than anything else.
‘Do you mind?’ I interrupted him.
‘Of course not.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want anything?’
‘Nein, danke schoen.’ He continued: ‘Right next to the graveyard where Nadia was buried is the town’s only nursing home. Run by the church. Sitting in a chair staring at a dead tree I found the oldest woman you’ve ever seen. She was as wrinkled as a prune, couldn’t see a thing, her eyes were like pearls. These old people know every story in the town, and they know every story in the graveyard because they know they will be moving there soon. It was her who told me Nadia’s story. Nadia had been a young person once, and she came to England looking for a job like all the others. She came here, to Brighton. She stayed in Brighton for three years before she came back home. But when she came back home she kept herself away from people. No one was allowed to see her. People got worried, but they didn’t get worried enough, and one day she took too many sleeping pills. She was a nurse, she knew the dosage.’
I took a sip of my drink, I didn’t really want it.
‘In the investigation a friend turns up. Carmen. Now, Carmen is a gypsy, and not well liked in El Chaparral; you know what gypsies are like. No one seems to think she was particularly good friends with Nadia, but then no one in the town cared enough to stop her killing herself, so I will ignore that. Carmen gets on the stand and she says Nadia had a child.’
I could see where this was going now. Another bloodhound job for Grabarz, the best nose in Brighton. In a minute he’d pull out a hat or a glove so I could get the scent.
‘She was raped. In Brighton. Nadia, she says, was raped by a Pole. She left the baby in the hospital. This is why she killed herself, Carmen says.’ He coughed suddenly, spluttering. ‘Could I have some water?’
I got up to pour him a glass from the sink in the cupboard. I passed him the water and he took a small sip and then hovered the glass over my desk.
‘Coaster?’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
He put the glass down.
‘So, I checked the records here. They are all online. Nadia was here for three years. Accounting for the nine months, still I had twenty-seven months to look through. I looked for orphans n
amed Del Toro but there weren’t any. So I searched for orphaned children with Polish surnames instead, and guess what, there was only one:’ Holy shit! ‘Joseph Grabarz.’
I felt like time should freeze at that moment. That the rain and the footsteps and the spiders in the corner should all look up and shout WHAT THE FUCK!? That I should be granted a few millennia to process and contemplate and finally come around to some decision about considering possibly thinking about an idea of what I might want to do next. But it didn’t, time kept charging forward like a freight train to the stomach.
He leant back in his chair. I was already leant back in mine. The wind drifted in through the open windows. Hurried footsteps were sloshing up and down the alley. The rain pattered on the glass and splashed on the cobbles down below. The rain was endless. Much like the silence that was sitting in between us like a morning fog. I felt cold for the first time in weeks.
Stay calm. I tossed back the rest of my drink. I wanted it now. The brandy lit a welcome fire in my chest.
‘Let me see if I understand this correctly,’ I started steadily, ‘you think, because of some uncorroborated story that some blind old Spanish lady told you, that I might be some other, now deceased, Spanish lady’s half-nephew? Is that correct?’ I thought I had made it sound sufficiently ridiculous.
‘Yes. It is for me to determine the inheritor of her estate. And I say that you are the inheritor of her estate.’
‘Let me guess, I just have to pay you a small fee to release that inheritance?’
‘Nothing like that.’
I poured myself another drink. My phone vibrated on the desk. A text. I ignored it.
‘So, if you’re correct, how much would I inherit?’
A little smile danced across his increasingly smug face. ‘You misunderstand me, Mr Grabarz. Maybe it’s my English—’
‘I doubt it.’
‘—but, you see, the men who hired me lent a considerable amount of money to Miss Suárez, and they would like that investment back.’
I tried to keep my face stony. ‘Excuse me?’
‘I am afraid to say that you have inherited only debts.’
