Lost jo-2

by Michael Robotham

  “I'm not . . . I'm not wearing a wire.”

  “DON'T LIE TO ME. Dump it out the window.”

  “No.”

  “SHE'S DEAD. YOU HAD YOUR CHANCE.”

  “I'll do whatever you say. Anything. Please. I'm doing it . . .”

  Rachel is shaking. I take the phone from her hands and terminate the call.

  “OK, he didn't know you had a wire. He bluffed you. You should have called his bluff.”

  Rachel nods and takes a deep breath.

  We go through the rehearsal again. I want her to be polite and forceful without being confrontational. Disagree but don't challenge. Delay.

  “Tell them you're scared. You're new to this. You're nervous. They want control so let them think you're vulnerable.”

  For the next two hours we practice, going through the various scenarios. Realistically, I can only instill a handful of ideas. Over and over I repeat the same question. “What are you going to ask?”

  “To see Mickey.”

  “When are you going to hand over the ransom?”

  “When I have Mickey.”

  “That's right. When you're holding her by the hand.”

  I look into her eyes, hoping to see the same resolve that I witnessed at the first press conference after Mickey had gone missing when Rachel refused to break down or cry. I saw the same determination on the courthouse steps after the verdict when she read from a prepared statement.

  “You don't have to go through with this,” I remind her. Rachel doesn't blink or even breathe. Her fingers flutter against the buckles of the satchel.

  On the edge of consciousness I hear a phone ringing. Joe leans across his desk and diverts the call. He looks at me expectantly, his left arm jerking like a broken fire hose.

  “You remembered something.”

  I feel my stomach heave and settle again. “Not enough.”

  His arm has stopped shaking. His face assumes a pale blankness except for the brightness in his eyes. Life is one big mystery to him, an ever-shifting puzzle. Most people don't stop to think. Joe can't stop himself from thinking.

  21

  Ali has had her phone turned off all evening. Finally she calls me.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Working. I'm coming home now.”

  “Not on my account.”

  “I've been working.”

  Twenty minutes later she comes through the door, looking different. They say you can tell when a woman has had sex. Maybe I never did it well enough.

  Ali has something for me. The Police National Computer confirmed that Gerry Brandt shared a prison cell with Tony Murphy four years ago. Brandt was released on parole two months before Mickey disappeared.

  “And how's this for another coincidence,” she says. “Tony Murphy got paroled six months ago—just in time to be involved in all this.”

  “How is ‘New Boy' Dave?”

  With just a hint of a smile: “He's a very happy bunny.”

  Although tired, she sits and goes through her notes. Gerry Brandt disappeared off radar screens the same month that Mickey went missing. Since then there have been no tax returns, social security payments, traffic fines, police cautions or overdue library books . . . He popped up again three months ago when he applied for welfare.

  “So tell me, my clever young thing, does Mr. Brandt have a current location?”

  “As a matter of fact he does,” she says, holding up her hand. Between her fingers is a small piece of folded paper—an address in South London.

  Bermondsey is one of those areas that has been raped twice—once by the Luftwaffe and then by architects in the seventies who put up Stalinesque tower blocks and concrete council estates. It's like seeing a set of healthy teeth riddled with fillings.

  We pull up outside a big old white place, veiled in foliage. Beneath a pelmet of ivy, I see a small balcony supported by ornate brackets and above that a steep slate roof as dark and wet as a washed blackboard.

  I look at my watch. It's just gone seven in the morning.

  “Rise and shine, Princess.”

  A girl of about nineteen with tousled hair peers from the partially opened door. She's wearing a rugby sweater and a pair of cotton briefs. A tattoo peeps from beneath the waistband.

  She looks at Ali's badge and unlocks the chain. Then we follow her down the hallway to the living room. Ali admonishes me silently for checking out the swaying arse.

  Two more girls are asleep on the floor wrapped in each other's arms. Someone else of indeterminate sex is cocooned in a bedspread on the sofa. The air stinks of hash and stale cigarette smoke.

  “Heavy night?”

  “Not me, I don't drink,” she says.

  “We're looking for Gerry Brandt.”

  “He's upstairs.”

  She sits on a dining chair and rests her bare foot on the table to pick at a scab on her knee.

  “Well maybe you'd like to go and tell him that we'd like a word,” Ali replies.

  The girl ponders this and then slides her foot off the table. She makes the stairs seem very steep. The dining room is plastered with cheap flyers for pub bands and there is a padded bench in the corner beneath a bar and weights. Through the door in the kitchen I see last night's takeout curry spilling out of the trash can.

  The girl has returned. “Grub says he'll be a minute.”

  She goes into the bathroom and without bothering to fully close the door, sits on the toilet and urinates. After finishing, she brushes her teeth, watching me in the mirror. Another toilet flushes upstairs followed by the sound of a window opening. A few seconds later a figure drops past the kitchen window and lands in the yard.

  I get a glimpse of his face and see pure unadulterated fear in his eyes.

  By the time I reach the back door he has vaulted the fence and is sprinting up the rear lane. He is barefoot, wearing a cotton undershirt and faded track pants.

  I do a stomach roll over the fence and land heavily on cobblestones. He's thirty yards in front of me, heading for a gate. I figure Ali has gone out the front, trying to cut him off.

  The bastard leaps the gate almost without breaking his stride. My approach is to demolish it because it's slippery underfoot and I can't stop in time. He turns left, dodges an overflowing Dumpster and crosses the road, leaping a hedge as he cuts the corner into an adjoining road.

  Give me twenty years and two good legs and I still couldn't catch this guy. I'm dropping farther behind, coughing up phlegm and seeing dots dance in front of my eyes.

  A British Gas crew is digging a trench down one side of the street. The red clay is piled up next to the open pit. I make the jump easily enough, but I haven't looked for traffic. The silence of the electric motor is what deceives me. The milk truck has pulled out of a parking space and is only traveling a few miles per hour, but I'm in full flight and still in midair. I clip the front corner nearside mudguard and it feels like the entire New Zealand rugby team has driven me into the tarmac.

  Rolling half a dozen times, I collide with the gutter and know my thigh is corked. What is it about my legs? People are just picking on me now!

  Gerry is at the end of the road. He turns his head to look over his shoulder and at that moment is upended. Ali has driven her shoulder into his stomach, wrapped her arms around his waist and used his momentum to lift him up and throw him down. She drops her knees into his back and I can almost feel the air leaving his lungs.

  She is sitting on him, trying to drag his arms behind his back to handcuff them. As she reaches to her belt for the cuffs, Gerry snaps his head back slamming into her chin. She almost loses her balance but she keeps her knees locked to his sides, trying to hold him down.

  I'm on my feet, loping toward them. My leg is numb and next to useless.

  Ahead of me Gerry has dragged himself up on all fours. Ali has her thighs locked around his waist and is riding him like a kid playing horsey with her father. She wraps her forearm around his neck, trying to compress his windpipe. Gerry
is on his haunches, trying to stand. Now he's up. He's six one and more than two hundred pounds.

  I can see what's going to happen. I can hear myself screaming at Ali to let go, but she's clinging tight. There is a low brick wall fronting the yard. It's only a foot high, with a straight edge.

  He lines Ali up, holding her legs now. Then he looks directly at me. A strange noise, an animal sound comes from inside him. Then he falls backward. Every bit of their combined weight comes to bear across Ali's spine and the edge of the wall. She bends and she breaks.

  No sound reaches me. I hear my own voice calling her name. The gas board workers are transfixed, standing in their cement-colored overalls as if suddenly turned to stone. I focus on one of them, yelling at him until his eyes shift from Ali and lock onto mine.

  “Get an ambulance. Now!”

  The pain in my leg is forgotten. Ali's body is draped over the wall. She hasn't moved. Fragments of light leap from the chrome on the parked cars and the tears in her eyes.

  Kneeling beside her, she stares upward and I can see myself reflected in her corneas.

  “I can't feel my legs,” she whispers.

  “Just stay where you are. Help is coming.”

  “I guess I fucked up pretty good.”

  “That was some tackle. Where did you learn to tackle like that?”

  “Four brothers.”

  “What ever happened to Home Economics?”

  She takes a ragged breath. God knows what's broken. I want to reach inside her body and hold her together.

  “I wouldn't ask you normally, Sir, but can you brush the hair out of my eyes?”

  I push the hair across her forehead and tuck it behind her ears.

  “Maybe I'll take tomorrow off,” she says. “I could catch the Eurostar and go shopping in Paris.”

  “Maybe I'll come with you.”

  “You hate shopping and you hate Paris.”

  “I know, but it's good to get away sometimes.”

  “What about Mickey?”

  “We'll have found her by then.”

  There are no soft blankets to tuck under her chin or canteens of water she can sip. She isn't crying anymore. Her eyes are as serene as a deer's. I can hear the ambulance siren.

  Gerry Brandt has long gone. He has left behind a trampled flower bed and a torn scrap of his undershirt trapped in Ali's fingers.

  22

  I hate hospitals. They're full of horrible diseases that end with “ia” and “oma.” I know what I'm talking about. My first wife died in one of them, eaten away by cancer. Sometimes I wonder if the hospital didn't make her sicker than the disease.

  It took two years for her to die but it seemed longer. Laura celebrated every day as a bonus but I couldn't do the same. It was like a slow torture, the endless, repetitive round of doctors' appointments, scans, drugs, bad news and cheerful smiles to hide the truth.

  Claire and Michael were only thirteen but they handled it well enough. It was me who went off the rails. I disappeared and spent eighteen months driving aid trucks into Bosnia Herzegovina during the war. I should have been at home looking after my children instead of sending postcards. Maybe that's why they've never forgiven me.

  They won't let me see Ali. The doctors and nurses move past me as if I'm a plastic chair in the waiting room. The triage nurse, Amanda, is plump and composed. When she speaks the words tumble out like paratroopers.

  “You'll have to wait for the spinal surgeon. He won't be long. There are hot drinks and snacks in the machines. Sorry, I can't provide change.”

  “We've been waiting for six hours.”

  “Won't be long now,” she says, counting rolls of bandages in a box.

  Ali's family is listening to the conversation. Her father leans forward until his head rests on his folded arms. A gentle respectful man, he's like a torpedoed ship sinking beneath the waves.

  Her mother is holding a paper cup of water, occasionally dipping her finger into the liquid and painting it across her eyelids. Three of her brothers are also in the waiting room and watch me with cold stares.

  The stench of my own body odor rises from my shirt. It's the same BO smell that fills airline cabins when businessmen take off their jackets. Turning away from the nurse, I walk slowly back to my seat. As I pass Ali's father, I pause and wait for him to look up.

  “I'm sorry this happened.”

  Out of politeness he shakes my hand.

  “You were with her, Detective Inspector?”

  “Yes.”

  He nods and looks past me. “What is a woman doing catching miscreants and criminals? That is men's work.”

  “She is a very fine police officer.”

  He doesn't reply. “My daughter was a very good athlete as a teenager. A sprinter. I once asked her why she wanted to run so fast. She said she was trying to catch up with the future—to see what sort of woman she was going to become.” He smiles.

  “You should be proud of her,” I say.

  He nods and shakes his head at the same time.

  Moving past him, I slip into the toilet and douse my face with cold water. Taking off my shirt, I rub water under my arms, feeling it leak down to the belt of my trousers. Shutting the cubicle door, I lower the toilet lid and sit down.

  This is my fault. I should have gone upstairs to find Gerry Brandt. I should have caught him before he escaped over the back fence. I can still see the look on his face as he held Ali's legs and fell backward, breaking her body against the wall. He knew what he was doing. Now I'm going to find him. I'm going to bring him in. And maybe, if I'm lucky, he might resist arrest.

  The next moment my body jerks awake. I have fallen asleep in a toilet cubicle with my head against the wall. The knots in my neck feel like fists as I drag myself upward.

  What day is it—Tuesday, no, Wednesday morning? It must be morning but it's dark. I don't even look at my watch.

  My head starts to clear as I make it outside to the waiting room. My hair is matted on my forehead and my nose is crusted and dry.

  The consultant is talking to Ali's family. Sick with fear I cross the room, zigzagging through rows of plastic chairs. Gloom seems to grow under the harsh strip lighting.

  I hesitate for a moment, unsure whether to intrude, but the need to know is too great. As I reach the cluster of people, nobody looks up. The consultant is still talking.

  “She has fractured two vertebrae and dislocated them, squeezing her spine like toothpaste in a tube. Until the bruising goes down we won't know for certain the extent of the paralysis or whether it's permanent. I have another patient, a jockey, who has similar injuries. He was thrown off a horse and landed on the running rail. He's doing very well and should walk again.”

  Sweat chills on my skin and the long empty corridors drop away in every direction.

  “She's zonked out on painkillers but you can see her,” he says, scratching his unshaved chin. “Try not to upset her.” At that same moment his beeper sounds and concusses in my ears. He looks at Ali's parents apologetically and leaves in a clatter of shoes along the corridor.

  I wait my turn outside Ali's room. I can't look at her parents' faces as they leave. Her mother has been crying and her brothers want someone to blame. There's nowhere to hide.

  A wave of nausea ebbs inside me as I push open the door, taking several steps into the semidarkness. Ali is lying flat on her back, staring upward. A skeletal steel frame holds her neck and head in place, preventing her from turning.

  I don't get too close, hoping to spare her my stench and ugliness. It's too late. She sees me in the mirror above her head and says, “Morning.”

  “Morning.”

  I glance about the room and take a chair. Gold bars of light leak through the curtains, falling across her bed.

  “How are you feeling?” I ask.

  “Right now I'm flying with Lucy and her diamonds. I don't feel a thing.” She takes a breath, which is half a groan, and manages a smile. Tear trails have dried on either side of her e
yes. “They say I need an operation on my spine. I'm going to get them to add a few inches. I've always wanted to be six feet tall.”

  She wants me to laugh but I can't manage more than a smile. Ali has gone quiet. Her eyes are closed. Silently, I stand to leave, but her hand reaches out and grabs my wrist.

  “What did the doctor tell you?”

  “They won't know for a few days.”

  Choking on the words: “Will I be able to walk?”

  “They think so.”

  Her eyes squeeze shut and tears form in the delta of wrinkles.

  “You'll be fine,” I say, trying to sound convincing. “You'll be back at work in no time—all six feet of you.”

  Ali wants me to stay. I watch her sleeping until a nurse shoos me outside. It's almost midday. A dozen calls are waiting in my message bank—most of them from Campbell Smith.

  Calling the operating room, I try to get the latest on Gerry Brandt, who is still missing. Nobody will talk to me. Finally I get through to the Senior Investigating Officer, who takes pity on me. There were three hundred Ecstasy tablets beneath the floorboards in Gerry Brandt's bedroom, as well as traces of speed in the S-bend of the upstairs toilet. Is that why he ran?

  I arrive at the Harrow Road Police Station just before 2:00 p.m. and pass through a crowded front office where two motorists with bloodstained shirts are yelling about a traffic accident.

  Campbell shuts the office door behind me. He looks every inch a chief-constable-in-waiting, with his arms behind him and a face stiffer than shirt cardboard.

  “Jesus Christ, Ruiz! Two fractured vertebrae, broken ribs and a ruptured spleen—she could finish in a wheelchair. And where were you? Being run over by a fucking milk truck . . .”

  I can hear them laughing down the hall. The worst of the jokes haven't started yet but that's only because Ali is so sick.

  Campbell opens his top drawer and produces a sheet of typed paper. “I warned you. I told you to stay out of this.”

  He hands me a resignation letter. Mine. I am to retire immediately on health grounds.

  “Sign this.”

  “What are you doing to find Gerry Brandt?”