by Tom Trott
He ordered a cider and swivelled my way.
‘Do you know what I did this morning?’ he asked with a smile.
What was his name? It was the young guy from Daye’s office, a DC. It would come to me.
‘I jumped the pier, kitesurfing.’
‘You’d better not speak to me,’ I grunted, ‘I’m a criminal; you heard.’ I was in a bad mood.
‘Get over yourself, dude. Look around,’ he did it for me, ‘half the people in here are criminals. All have been in court today, and here they are sharing a pub with policemen, lawyers, and even the occasional judge. They all just want a drink.’
I gave him my best attempt at a death stare. He met it with a smile that would melt anyone’s heart. Luckily, I don’t have one.
‘Have you really been hired to find that little girl?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I have.’
‘Why?’
‘You know, if people keep asking me that I’m going to start feeling insulted.’
‘I’m sorry.’
I sniggered slightly. ‘You probably are, as well.’
He still had the smile on his face, yet it wasn’t painted on. He was one of those people with a small personal summer inside them, the warmth of which was felt whenever they spoke.
‘Why do you want to start a conversation with me?’ I asked.
‘You look like you could do with a friend.’
I didn’t know what to say to that.
More pints later and the pub had emptied of the after work lawyers and coppers, and the disembowelled witnesses and defendants; all that was left were the career drunks. Them, and me, and the man on my elbow.
‘Daye didn’t tell me you were an orphan.’
‘That’s a lovely non sequitur.’
‘He’s not the type to discuss other people’s business. Unless it’s pertinent to a case.’
‘How did you find out then?’
‘Your police file.’
What followed would be silence to anyone listening, but to me it was the static charge that precedes a lightning strike. I could feel it building. Here it comes…
‘What happened to your parents?’
‘Nothing,’ I replied by rote, ‘I never had any.’
For the first time, he didn’t smile. Nor did he push it any further, giving a few respectful moments silence before he changed the subject. My follicles went back to resting.
‘What did you think of the boss?’ he asked.
‘Interesting guy, if he’s not careful someone might end up liking him.’
‘I like him.’
‘Then I guess he’s too late.’
‘He’s a brilliant detective.’
‘And quite the conversationalist, I bet you have great long chats into the middle of the night.’
The top half of his face frowned, but the bottom half hadn’t got the memo and smiled again. ‘He’s a thinker. Sometimes I feel that he could solve any case without leaving his office. He just sits and thinks, sometimes for hours, and then… boom, the answer comes out of him.’
‘Not like you then.’
‘I just do the paperwork.’
I smiled in disbelief. You couldn’t insult this guy. ‘The Signing Detective. Keeping the streets safe one form at a time.’
‘Something like that.’ He smiled again, he seemed to think I was laughing with him. ‘He likes you.’
‘How could you tell?’
‘He didn’t throw you out on your ear.’
‘That would be your advice, would it?’
‘I’m too soft to throw you out. But I certainly wouldn’t help you.’
Maybe there was some grit in this man after all. His smile had changed a bit now, it was less innocent, more knowing.
‘I thought you were my friend,’ I told him.
The smile did a little shimmy, like sunlight on waves. ‘He works hard because he cares,’ he explained, ‘you’re doing it for money.’
‘Does he not get paid?’
‘Maybe I’m too idealistic.’
‘Maybe he’s a better judge of character,’ I retorted.
‘I’m sure he is.’
I was starting to like him now. But I still hated him.
‘I have no problem with you,’ he told me, ‘you understand.’
‘No? You’re the first.’
‘You were doing what you had to do to survive. I think he knows that. But for me, there has to be more to life than survival.’
‘Some of us don’t have a choice.’
‘Everyone has a choice,’ he almost snapped. ‘The way I see it, you only have one real responsibility, and that’s to make the world a better place for you being in it. That could be anything, it doesn’t have to mean making poverty history, it could be art, it could just mean bringing some joy to people’s lives.’
‘Well, I’m not a comedian. I’m not a poet. I don’t have enough money to join a pottery class. And they don’t let people like me become politicians. No one wants me to change the world. Surviving is the only option I’ve got. Surviving or dying. This world has never given me a thing, so I don’t owe it.’
‘It’s given you life.’
‘You’re right, maybe it does owe me.’
He didn’t smile again. For the first time he wore a genuine frown, but it was clearly an uncomfortable fit. He had to break it in like new shoes.
‘We’re just overgrown monkeys,’ I continued, ‘and I take great comfort in the knowledge that in a hundred years no one will ever know that I existed. Nothing I could do will ever matter.’
He sighed. ‘If this is all there is. If this is all we’ll ever experience,’ he gestured around the pub, ‘if this is our universe right here; then surely everything we do matters. Right down to this conversation; to this moment, right here.’
‘We’ll have to agree to disagree.’
He went silent for a moment, my negativity broke over him.
‘I understand you need money,’ he started quietly, ‘who doesn’t? Especially when you’re our age. I was lucky to get my job, most of my school friends work in supermarkets, or bars, or call centres. I mean, so did I. Then I lucked out, like some of my teacher friends, into something 20k plus. 20k is something I could only dream of, you know. Like a house!’ He smiled again. Then out of nowhere, ‘Have you ever tried to find your parents?’
I looked along my beer at him, he was genuine, it seemed important to him somehow.
‘There’s no one to find,’ I replied.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be.’
‘How did they die?’
That’s not what I said.
He left it alone again, but I could tell he was itching to pick it back up. He went at it sideways instead:
‘My dad made me who I am.’
‘He’s a copper?’
‘No, nothing like that.’
‘You said it.’ He was starting to piss me off again.
‘He’s a good man, but he never did anything with it.’
‘He raised you, didn’t he?’
‘I wanted to do something worthwhile.’
‘But you changed your mind and became a policeman instead.’
‘What did you want to be when you were young?’
‘Left alone.’
‘You got your wish then.’
‘Not yet.’
He gave another minute silence in memory of a conversation topic recently deceased.
‘Do you know why the boss helped you?’
‘He’s wants to get fired.’
‘He has to know, he’s one of those people.’
‘My condolences.’
‘If there’s a mystery, all he wants is the answer.’
‘That’s all?’
‘He’s not bothered if you make it to prison, he doesn’t hold any animosity towards people, he just has to know why.’
‘And you said he cares.’
‘He does care, I think. In his own way. You wouldn’t k
now it to look at him, but he always does the right thing. And how could he keep doing the right thing if he doesn’t care?’
A sober thought danced across his face for a second.
‘Take this one case. Not too long ago, actually. We caught a burglary in a fleapit. Seventies brick building, near the centre. Landlord found the body, called up. The boss even volunteered to take the case.’
He took a sip of his cider. I waited for the rest.
‘When we get there the place is a total dive. This is ten o’clock on a Tuesday and the place is dark as hell. Stripped out, completely empty, just a mattress on the floor. The landlord doesn’t know how long it’s been like that, he only checked because the door had been kicked in. He says the tenant is a young girl, twenty something, Eastern European, Slavic name. Everything points to one thing. So we thank him and take the key and send him on his way. The lights weren’t working, of course, so the boss pops out to get this little torch that he keeps in the car. I was alone.’
He was looking past me now, out the window, as though across the street a television was playing the film he was describing.
‘There’s something about the human eye or the brain that can tell a human form from all the shadows in the room. On the mattress. It was my first. It’s amazing how the anticipation builds in you. The adrenaline.’
He sated his thirsty mouth.
‘When the boss came back we could see even the bulbs had been taken. I looked about two feet above the body as he shone the light on it. It wasn’t a twenty-something woman, it was a thirty-something man. And he was quite peaceful, not a mark on him. It wasn’t scary at all. Overdose, the coroner said, heart attack basically. We searched the place, not that there was anything but his clothes and his gear. He didn’t have any money, didn’t even have any change. Although the landlord probably took whatever there was when he found the body. Overdue rent. Basically, it turned out he was a small time crook, fancied himself a pimp, but she wouldn’t have it so he threw her out and used her place to shoot up. He had been selling her stuff right out the front of the building.’
He finished and sipped his cider again. He seemed to think he had said something.
‘I’m sure there was a point in there somewhere,’ I told him.
‘Sorry,’ he sighed, ‘anyway, everything in the place is beat-up and broken, nothing new; I’m sure you know the kind of place. But then, lying there in the middle of the room is a brand new kitchen knife. A long thin one. Absolutely brand new, forensics say the blade has never been used. Not a print on it either.’ He lent back and raised his eyebrows as though I was supposed to understand.
‘I see. Thanks, that was definitely worth my time.’
‘He still talks about it today. It’s been ninety days. I’ve counted them. That damn knife. He just has to know what it was doing there.’
‘Fascinating.’
‘Well, maybe you had to be there.’
I sighed. ‘What was it you were showing off about when you came in? Kitesurfing?’
‘Yeah, I jumped the pier today.’
‘Is that difficult?’
‘Impossible. Unless you have the right conditions. I think I’m the first to do it. It was just some silly idea I had. You see, the winds that are required, I had to wait for a storm before I could do it.’
Now I started to like him again. He was at the very least something, and so many people are just nothing.
‘It just goes to show…’ he declared cryptically. What it showed he let me figure out for myself.
When I got back to the caravan I was soaked through, and the dinner left on the step was as cold as a corpse. Overcooked salmon, new potatoes, and broccoli. Not my ideal dinner: I prefer something with flavour. But I stuck it in the submarine’s nuclear reactor, and devoured it desperately.
I had never had a bank account, but even I knew that to access one you needed a card. Or a book like they had in the olden days. He had to have some way of getting to the money. Back then almost no one used internet banking, so there had to be something physical to find. Even if it was a cheque book, even if it was a cheque stub, it was proof.
I laid in the short little bed under the thin little blanket, listening to the rain battering the tinfoil walls; and I concocted my plans of how I was going to find my proof.
Now, back then I didn’t have as firm a grip on the line between what’s illegal and what’s wrong. Maybe I still don’t. Maybe back then I didn’t even know that line existed. Not like I do now, even if I trip over it occasionally.
I reconnected with Jake, a fellow thug from Big Dave’s crew. He was a few years younger than me but because of his size people always thought he was older. He used to get served in pubs at fifteen by leaning his tattooed arm on the bar, the arm that had been tattooed at fourteen. It was a Christian cross with a banner draped across it that read “Chubbs”, his nickname. Except the cheap job looked more like “Ohubbs” where the ends of the C were joined up by folds in the banner. When we wanted to piss him off we called him Ohubbs. But that unleashed the Hulk and we soon stopped.
This is all to say that I paid him to mug Mr Jilani. And I know, I’m thinking right now what you are. But I wasn’t thinking it then. Luckily, it went off without a hitch and the wallet arrived on the plastic step the next day. It was cheap, unbranded, brown leather. Probably bought from a market stall somewhere.
I took out each item and laid them on the little fold-out table in the middle of the caravan, designed to play mind-numbing games of Canasta on when the campsite becomes a bog.
First was his Pakistani driving license, which gave me his vital details. I used a burnt match to scribble them onto the surface of the table.
The next obvious things were his bank cards. One debit, two credit. The debit one matched the account the police already had, and I knew both the credit cards had been checked: they were only ever paid off from the same account.
In the last slot was a Nectar card that had the same washed out and overused look as the escorts on West Street, and in a little hidden slot was a loyalty card from his barbers. He had earned a free hair cut or eyebrow threading. I kept for myself.
In with his cash, seventy quid, was a wodge of receipts. I peeled them apart from each other one by one. A fast food voucher on the back of a bus ticket, a city-saver. He’d been into town on the twenty-eighth of October, whenever that was. It didn’t matter. A note with his sort code on. I checked, it wasn’t shown on his debit card. A million petrol receipts, all for a full tank and all with Nectar points. He was a taxi driver, after all. There was a lottery ticket, a pair of unopened plasters, a receipt for paying in some cash, same account again. That’s what he needed the sort code for. Then some shopping receipts: the odd sandwich, the odd can of energy drink; and some parcel receipts, heavy ones. He eBay-ed from the mosque computer, selling rubbish for pittance.
None of it meant much to me. There was certainly no proof of a second bank account. But the lottery ticket interested me. One of the few things I knew about Muslims was that they couldn’t gamble. By which I mean, Allah forbids it. I don’t mean Muslims can’t gamble in the way that white men can’t jump.
A man with enough money to be blackmailed shouldn’t be playing the lottery. A man cautious enough to hide a second bank account from his wife should also not be playing the lottery. Maybe you don’t agree with me? Maybe you think everyone likes a flutter now and then. Let me put it this way then, smart arse: a devout Muslim, a “very traditional” one, would have to be pretty desperate to disobey God’s command. At his lowest ebb.
The police had searched his house. They had done a thorough job. The man didn’t have an office, so there was nowhere else he could hide anything.
It was four more hours before I realised I was being a fucking idiot. Of course the man had an office. If you don’t know how taxi driving works, here’s a brief explanation: you drive people places. Only joking. What I really mean is, you either own your car and pay the taxi company a cut
; or you drive someone else’s car, and pay both of them a cut. In this case, Jilani owned his car. It was his office.
This time I reconnected with Ryan. A lanky little shit who made a noise like a magpie every time he thought he’d said something clever. He was a real dickhead. He used to call his penis his ‘python’. I mean, that says it all, doesn’t it? But, much to my annoyance Ryan was an excellent car thief. He wanted to charge me two-hundred for the job. I managed to talk him down to one-fifty. But it still meant I had to beg the mothers for extra money, and there was no way I was going to tell them it was to steal a car.
In fact, just saying, ‘you don’t want to know what it’s for,’ was enough to convince them. Debra sent the message down the grapevine and the money came back. I wondered who was paying.
Normally Big Dave had a garage where he kept hot cars until they were resprayed and had their number plates swapped, but a taxi was a little too hot for him. It did stick out rather. And this was a private job, Ryan was not to tell Big Dave, or anyone in his crew. I was trying to go straight and the last thing I needed them thinking was that I was trying to go solo. That would be a great way to lose my good looks.
Ryan had parked the car in an out of the way part of the Sheepcote Valley Caravan Club site just next to the Whitehawk FC ground. I parked my moped half a mile back, at the Wilson Avenue entrance to the park. Mopeds are noisy, and people notice them in quiet little caravan sites. Especially at eleven at night.
I zipped up my thin little jacket and started my trek. I could hear the sounds of the road behind me, the soft rumble of rubber on tarmac, Wilson Avenue is busy. But from ahead I could hear nothing but the gentle hooting of what couldn’t possibly be an owl.
I passed no one. Just some empty tennis courts on the left, with limp nets swaying in the breeze. Then a single-storey brick park keeper’s house, or something. The lights were off. I wasn’t sure what it really was, or is; those odd buildings never seem to be used by anyone but squatters and junkies. My people. Occasionally I would pass an abandoned caravan. Yellowed net curtains and blocked windows. What was inside, I didn’t want to know. Above me, solitary wisps of cloud sailed silently across the ocean of sky, heading south. I wished I could sit on one and gaze down at the gentle nightlights of the city, drifting over the sea, to the continent, over the alps and beyond. But instead I was here, amongst the dark trees, surrounded by rough stony paths that lead in every direction off into the fields, to the hills, and over into the ghostly pockmarked landscape of the East Brighton golf course.
