Lost jo-2

by Michael Robotham

  “Yes.”

  Joe is thinking out loud now, unaware of his twitches and trembles. I follow him down the corridor to the stairs. He pauses, puzzled by something.

  “The gas leak was part of both plans,” he announces.

  “Both plans?”

  “One for outside and one for inside . . .”

  I don't understand. Joe motions for me to follow him and waits for me to climb two flights of stairs. We reach a heavy fire door and emerge onto a barren rectangle of bitumen, the rooftop of the hospital. A gust of wind slaps me in the face and Joe grabs my shirtfront to steady me. A big-bellied gray sky hangs overhead.

  Circular ducts and metal air-conditioning plants punctuate the bitumen. A low brick wall with white capping stones marks the outside edge of the building. A wire security fence is attached, curling inward before being topped with barbed wire.

  Joe slowly walks the perimeter, occasionally glancing at surrounding buildings as though adjusting his internal compass. When he reaches the northeast corner of the building, he leans close to the fence. “You see that park down there—the one with the fountain?” I follow his gaze. “That's the evacuation meeting point. Everyone was supposed to meet there when they emptied the hospital. You were supposed to be with them. There is no way they could have known you were going to be left inside.”

  We are both on the same page now. “Perhaps he was supposed to hide in my room and kill me when I came back.”

  “Or they were going to kill you outside.”

  Joe drops onto his haunches, studying the thin layer of soot on the capping stones. It's the same black film that settles on everything in London until the next shower. Three penny-size circles smudge the surface. Joe swings his eyes to the ground where two larger smudges appear beneath the wall.

  Someone knelt here and rested a tripod on the wall—a lone sniper with a finger on the trigger and his eyelashes brushing the lens, studying the park below. The hair on my forearms is standing on end.

  Fifteen minutes later the rooftop has been sealed off and a SOCO team is at work, searching for clues. Campbell is smarting about being shown up by a clinical psychologist.

  Joe takes me downstairs to the canteen—one of those sterile food halls with tiles on the floor and stainless steel counters. Cedric, the guy in charge, is a Jamaican with impossibly tight curls and a laugh that sounds like someone cracking nuts with a brick.

  He brings us coffee and pulls a half bottle of Scotch from the pocket of his apron. He pours me a slug. Joe doesn't seem to notice. He's too busy trying to fill in the missing pieces.

  “Snipers have very little emotional investment in their victims. It's like playing a computer game.”

  “So he could be young?”

  “And isolated.”

  True to form, the Professor is more interested in why than who; he wants an explanation while I want a face for my empty picture frame, someone to catch and punish.

  “Aleksei Kuznet visited me last night. I think I know why I was in the river. I was following a ransom.”

  Joe doesn't bat an eyelid.

  “He wouldn't tell me the details, but there must have been proof of life. I must have believed Mickey was still alive.”

  “Or wished it.”

  I know what he's saying. He doesn't think I'm being rational.

  “OK, let's ask ourselves some questions,” he says. “If Mickey is alive, where has she been for the past three years?”

  “I don't know.”

  “And why would anyone wait three years to post a ransom demand?”

  “Maybe they didn't kidnap her for ransom, not at first.”

  “OK. If not for ransom, why?”

  I'm struggling now. I don't know. “Maybe they wanted to punish Aleksei.”

  It doesn't sound convincing.

  “It sounds like a hoax to me. Someone close to the family or to the original investigation knew enough to convince desperate people that Mickey might still be alive.”

  “And the shootings?”

  “They had a falling out or someone got greedy.”

  It sounds so much more rational than my theory.

  Joe takes out his notebook and starts drawing lines on the page as if playing hangman.

  “You grew up in Lancashire, didn't you?”

  “What's that got to do with anything?”

  “I'm just asking a question. Your stepfather was an RAF pilot in the war.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I remember you telling me.”

  “Bullshit!”

  A ball of anger forms in my throat. “You're just itching to get inside my head, aren't you? The Human Condition—isn't that what you call it? You got to watch out for that bastard.”

  “Why do you keep dreaming about missing children?”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Maybe you feel guilty.”

  I don't answer.

  “Maybe you blocked it out.”

  “I don't block things out.”

  “Did you ever meet your real father?”

  “You're going to have trouble asking questions with your jaw wired shut.”

  “A lot of people don't know their fathers. You must wonder what he's like; whether you look like him or sound like him.”

  “You're wrong. I don't care.”

  “If you don't care, why won't you talk about it? You were probably a war baby—born just afterward. A lot of fathers didn't come home. Others were stationed overseas. Children get lost . . .”

  I hate that word “lost.” My father didn't go missing. He isn't lying in some small part of France that will forever be England. I don't even know his name.

  Joe is still waiting. He's sitting there, twirling his pen, waiting for Godot. I don't want to be psychoanalyzed or have my past explored. I don't want to talk about my childhood.

  I was fourteen years old the first time my mother sat down and told me about where I came from. She was drunk, of course, curled up on the end of my bed, wanting me to massage her feet. She told me the story of Germile Purrum, a Gypsy girl, with a “Z” tattooed on her left arm and a black triangle sewn into her rags.

  “We looked like bowling balls with sticky-out ears and frightened eyes,” she said, nursing a drink between her breasts.

  The prettiest and the strongest Gypsy girls were sent to the homes of the officers in the SS. The next group were used in camp brothels, gang-raped to break them in and often sterilized because the Roma were considered unclean.

  My mother was fifteen when she arrived at Ravensbrück, the largest concentration camp for women in the Reich. She was put to work in the camp brothel, working twelve hours a day.

  She didn't go into details but I know she remembered every one of them.

  “I think I'm pregnant,” she slurred.

  “That's not possible, Daj.”

  “I haven't had my monthly days.”

  “Have you been to see the doctor?”

  She looked at me crossly. “Esther tried to make me bleed.”

  “Who is Esther?”

  “A Jewish angel . . . but you clung to my insides. You didn't want to leave. You wanted so much to live.”

  Daj was talking about me. I knew this part of the story.

  She was three months pregnant when the war ended. She spent another two months looking for her family, but they were all gone—her twin brothers, her mother, her father, aunts, uncles, cousins . . .

  At a displaced persons camp near Frankfurt, a young British immigration officer called Vincent Smith told her she should emigrate. The United States and England were taking refugees if they had identity papers and skills. Germile had neither.

  Because nobody would take a Gypsy she lied on the application form and said she was Jewish. So many had perished it was easy to get identity papers in someone else's name. Germile Purrum became Sofia Eisner, aged nineteen instead of sixteen, a seamstress from Frankfurt—a new person for a new life.

  I was born in a rain-swept En
glish town in a county hospital that still had blackout curtains on the windows. She didn't let me die. She didn't say, “Who needs another white-haired German bastard with cold blue eyes?” And even when I rejected her milk, puking it down her open blouse (another sign, perhaps, that I was more of him than her), she forgave me.

  I don't know what she saw when she looked in my eyes: the enemy, perhaps, or the soldiers who raped her. I looked as though I owned the world, she said. As though everything in creation would be recast or rearranged to suit me.

  I don't know who I am now. I am either a miracle of survival or an abomination. I'm part German, part Gypsy, part English, one-third evil, one-third victim and the other third angry. My mother used to say I was a gentleman. No other language has such a word to describe a man. It's a paradox. You can't claim to be such a thing but you hope others see you that way.

  I look up at Joe and blink away the past. I've been talking all this time.

  His voice is softer than mine. “You're not responsible for your father's sins.”

  Yeah, right! I'm angry now. Why did he start me out on this? I don't want any of his airy-fairy, touchy-feely, Pollyanna-pass-the-tissues psychological crap.

  We sit in silence. I'm through with talking. My nightmares march in jackboots and are best left alone.

  Joe stands suddenly and begins to pack his briefcase. I don't want him to go now.

  “Aren't we going to talk about the ransom?”

  “You're tired. I'll come and see you tomorrow.”

  “But I remembered some of the details.”

  “That's good.”

  “Isn't there something you can tell me; something I should be doing?”

  He looks at me quizzically. “You want some advice?”

  “Yes.”

  “Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.”

  Then he's gone.

  7

  When Mickey disappeared I didn't sleep for the first forty-eight hours. If a missing child isn't found within the first two days the chances of her being found alive diminishes by forty percent. Within two weeks it is down to less than ten percent.

  I hate statistics. I read somewhere that the average person uses 5.9 sheets of toilet tissue when they wipe their arse. It proves nothing and helps no one.

  Here are some more figures. There were six hundred volunteers scouring the streets and eighty officers going door to door. The sense of urgency bordered on violence. I wanted to kick open doors, shake trees and chase every child from the parks and pavements.

  We checked alibis, stopped motorists, interviewed tradesmen and tracked down visitors to Dolphin Mansions in the previous month. Every resident was interviewed. I knew which of them beat his spouse, slept with prostitutes, lied about sickies, owed money to bookies and cultivated marijuana in a box under her bed.

  There had been sixty-five unconfirmed sightings of Mickey and four confessions (including someone claiming to have sacrificed her to the pagan god of the forest). We had also been offered the services of twelve psychics, two palm readers and a guy calling himself the Wizard of Little Milton.

  The closest we came to a confirmed sighting was by an elderly couple at Leicester Square tube station on Wednesday evening. Mrs. Esmerelda Bird wasn't wearing her glasses and her husband, Brian, didn't get close enough to see the girl clearly. There were twelve CCTV cameras at the station but the angles were wrong and the footage such poor quality it resolved nothing and risked derailing the entire investigation if we made it public.

  Already the search had become a media event. TV vans blocked Randolph Avenue, beaming pictures to boxes within boxes, so that people who had never met Mickey could look up from their breakfast cereal and fleetingly adopt her.

  Purple ribbons were tied to the railings outside Dolphin Mansions. Some were threaded with flowers and photographs of Mickey. There were pictures of her displayed on building sites, lampposts and shop windows.

  The sex offenders' register threw up 359 names for Greater London. Two dozen of them either lived in or had some link to the area. Every name was cross-checked, every detail compared and contrasted, looking for those ley lines of human connection that thread the world together.

  Unfortunately, this took time and the tyranny of the clock was absolute. It ticked away with a mechanical heart. A minute doesn't become any longer just because a child is missing. It only feels that way.

  After two days I went home for just long enough to shower and change my clothes. I found Daj snoring at the kitchen table with her head between her arms and a Siamese cat curled up on her lap. A glass of vodka was wedged between her fingers. Her first drink every day was always a revelation, she said, the juice of angels copulating in flight. Gin was too English and whiskey too Scottish. Port made her teeth and gums go crimson. And when she vomited it looked like black currants shat out by sparrows.

  Daj had become more like a Gypsy as she grew older (and drunker), reverting to type; wrapping herself in layers of the past like the layers of her petticoats. She drank to forget and to deaden the pain. She drank because her demons were thirsty.

  I had to prise her fingers from the glass before I carried her to bed. The Siamese slid off her lap and settled like liquid filling a puddle. As I pulled the bedclothes over her, she opened her eyes.

  “You'll find her won't you, Yanko?” she slurred. “You'll find that little girl. I know what it's like to lose someone.”

  “I'll do the best I can.”

  “I can see all the lost children.”

  “I can't bring them back, Daj.”

  “Close your eyes and you'll see her.”

  “Shush now. Go to sleep.”

  “They never die,” she whispered, accepting my kiss on her cheek. A month later she went into the retirement home. She has never forgiven me for abandoning her, but that's the least of my sins.

  The hospital room is dark. The corridors are dark. The world outside is dark except for the streetlights, shining on parked cars that are covered in icy white fur.

  Ali is asleep in a chair beside my bed. Her face is ashen with weariness and her body held stiffly. The only light is from the TV flickering in the corner.

  Her eyes open.

  “You should have gone home.”

  She shrugs. “They have cable here.”

  I glance at the TV. They're showing an old black-and-white film—Kind Hearts and Coronets with Alec Guinness. The overacting is more obvious with the sound turned down.

  “I'm not obsessed, you know.”

  “What do you mean, Sir?”

  “I'm not trying to bring Mickey Carlyle back from the dead.”

  Ali brushes hair from her eyes. “Why do you think she's alive?”

  “I can't explain.”

  She nods.

  “You were sure about Howard once.”

  “Never completely.” I wish I could explain but I know I'll sound paranoid. Sometimes I think there is only one person in the world who I know didn't kidnap Mickey—and that's me. We conducted more than 8,000 interviews and took 1,200 statements. It was one of the largest, most expensive abduction investigations in British policing history but still we couldn't find her.

  Even now, periodically, I come across posters of Mickey stuck on lampposts and building sites. Nobody else seems to note her features or stare at her wistfully but I can't help it. Sometimes, in the dark hours, I even have conversations with her, which is strange because I never really talked to Claire, my own daughter, when she was Mickey's age. I had more in common with my son because we could talk about sports. What did I know about ballet and Barbie dolls?

  I know more about Mickey than I did about Claire. I know she liked glitter nail polish, strawberry-flavored lip gloss and MTV. She had a treasure box with polished pebbles, painted clay beads and a hair clip that she told everyone was decorated with diamonds instead of chips of glass.

  She loved to sing and dance and her favorite driving song was “Row, row, row your boat gently down the str
eam and if you see a crocodile don't forget to scream.” I used to sing the same song to Claire at bedtime and chase her giggling around the room until she dived under the covers.

  Maybe this is guilt I'm feeling. It's something I know a lot about. I have lived with it, been married to it and watched it float beneath an ice-covered pond. Guilt I'm an expert at. There are other missing children in my life.

  “Are you OK?” asks Ali, reaching over to rest her hand on the bed next to me.

  “Just thinking.”

  She puts an extra pillow behind my back and then turns away, bending over the sink and splashing water on her face. My eyes are now graded to the darkness.

  “Are you happy?”

  She casts her face back to me, surprised by the question.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you like working for the DPG? Is it what you wanted to do?”

  “I wanted to be a detective. Now I chauffeur people around.”

  “But you're going to sit your sergeant's exam.”

  “They'll never put me in charge of an investigation.”

  “Did you always want to be a police officer?”

  She shakes her head. “I wanted to be an athlete. I was going to be the first British-born Sikh sprinter to compete at the Olympics.”

  “What happened?”

  “I couldn't run fast enough.” She laughs and stretches her arms above her head until her joints crack. Then she looks at me sideways along her cheek. “You're going to keep investigating this, aren't you, despite what the Chief Super says?”

  “Yes.”

  A streak of lightning breaks through the gloom outside the window. The flash is too far away for me to hear the thunder.

  Ali clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth. She's trying to make a decision. “I'm owed a few weeks long-service leave. Maybe I could help, Sir.”

  “No. Don't jeopardize your career.”

  “What career?”

  “Seriously, you don't owe me any favors.”

  She glances at the TV. The gray square of light reflects in her eyes.

  “You probably think this sounds pretty wet, Sir, but I've always looked up to you. It's not easy being a woman in the Met but you never treated me any differently. You gave me a chance.”