The Disappeared

by Ali Harper

  ‘He thinks we’re dealers.’

  ‘Who cares what he thinks? He’s a bloke.’

  Jo’s never been what you’d call a man’s woman and you can’t really blame her. When she was twelve, her dad ran off with her Girl Guide leader. He’s just had twins with his latest girlfriend, Stacey, who’s only three years older than Jo. Jo says he’s trying to be the Paul Weller of gastroenterology.

  But lately she’s got worse. Five months ago, she caught her last boyfriend – Andy, the copper – in bed with the station typist, and since then she’s declared herself a political lesbian. Whether a political lesbian is the same as an actual lesbian, I’ve yet to discover, but Jo ranks men only a point or two higher than amoeba on the evolutionary scale.

  I watched her trying to prise open the plastic cover on the inside of the driver’s door with a screwdriver. ‘What you doing?’

  ‘Trying to find somewhere to stash this. Case we get pulled.’

  My discomfort grew. I wasn’t in a hurry to have anyone else suspect us of drug dealing, and particularly not the police. We drove back to the office in silence, the sky turning a dusky pink.

  The offices felt safe, familiar. As soon as we’d carried all the bags inside, I locked the door and flicked the lights on. I made us a cup of tea while Jo quickly devised an inventory form on our second-hand PC. We sat in the front office, and Jo printed off a copy as I opened the first bin liner. Pants, or someone from the squat, had tied big knots in the top of each one, and it took me a few moments to prise it undone, the black plastic straining against my stubby fingernails.

  ‘Right, one thing at a time,’ said Jo. ‘Remember, this could be evidence.’

  I paused. ‘Should we wear gloves?’

  ‘Shit, yes,’ said Jo, and I could tell she was pissed off she hadn’t thought of it. ‘I’ll run to Bobats.’

  Bobats is the local hardware store. It’s open more or less twenty-four hours a day, and it sells everything from firelighters to lock cutters. I wasn’t sure it would sell gloves though; but sure enough less than five minutes later Jo was back with a box of disposable ones. We grinned at each other as we both pulled on a pair.

  ‘Remind you of anything?’

  I shook thoughts of plastic speculums and wooden spatulas from my mind. ‘Probably should have thought before we handled a tin of heroin,’ I said.

  Jo held the tip of her pen against the paper she’d attached to a plastic clipboard. ‘OK, what’ve we got?’

  ‘First up. A black jumper. Men’s.’ I looked at the label. ‘Marks & Spencer. Anarchy in the UK.’ I grinned. Jo didn’t respond. ‘Size: Large.’

  Jo scribbled down the information.

  ‘Yeuch.’ I pulled out a pair of blue-grey underpants, glad of my latex. ‘Undies.’

  That was all the first bag contained – clothes, and not all of them washed. The second one was a bit more interesting – a handful of textbooks, a biography of Bowie. A couple of ring-binder files with notes and hand-outs from the university sports psychology department and what looked like an advert dated May 2013 cut from the pages of the Manchester Evening News. ‘“Three Unforgettable Years. You will always be in my heart. Ciao. Roberto Mancini.”’ I turned it over. It had traces of Blu-Tack in the four corners. ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Philistine,’ said Jo. ‘Manager at Man City, till he got sacked. Used to play for Italy.’

  I put the advert to one side and carried on searching. At the bottom of the second bag I found a wallet containing an array of plastic cards – one for the National Union of Students complete with his photograph. I put that up on the desk as the photo was newer than the one we had. Also in the wallet were a couple of credit cards, past their expiry dates, and one that confirmed him as an organ donor. I tried not to see that as a sign. There were a couple of cardboard cards tucked in a pocket behind the leather – a library card and an out-of-date membership card for Alderley Edge Cricket Club. I guessed the wallet hadn’t been used for years. There was no money.

  Jo continued checking the pockets in the heap of clothing in front of us. I’m not known for my colourful wardrobe, but it seemed Jack didn’t wear anything but black. She held up another pair of trousers, and a pair of underpants fell out of the leg. I shuddered. They say clothes maketh the man. If that’s the case, the man we were dealing with was shapeless, full of holes and had a bit of an issue with personal hygiene.

  It wasn’t until the third bag that we discovered there was a whole lot more to Jack Wilkins.

  Chapter Four

  Jo had taken off her gloves and given up writing everything down. Mainly, I think, because she couldn’t keep coming up with alternative ways to write, ‘shapeless black jumper’ or, ‘pair of black canvas trousers with ripped hole in the knee’. As I watched the mountain of jumble grow higher, I did wonder what Jack was doing for clothes. It was March, but still bitterly cold – hardly time to be dispensing with jumpers. Had he decided on a whole new wardrobe direction or had he gone somewhere that clothes didn’t matter?

  Which, of course, begged the question, where don’t clothes matter? I sparked up a fag and mulled it over. Two answers came to mind: a nudist beach in the South of France and the bottom of a lake. For some reason I couldn’t get the second one out of my head. I glanced at the clock. Four hours we’d been on the case, and I’d been quietly confident we’d have something for Mrs Wilkins by now. If not her son himself, at least news of his current address. Instead, all I could tell her was that he was mixed up in the supply of Class As and was probably naked.

  Jo stood and crossed the room to retrieve the third bin liner. She left behind her a space on the floor, the brown carpet tiles resembling an island in a sea of black clothing. I watched her wrestle the knot for a few seconds, before giving up and ripping a hole in the side of the bag. A volcano of balled-up pairs of socks erupted. Jo frowned.

  ‘How many?’

  The contrast of the neatly paired socks, different colours – blue, grey, tan – next to the heap of the rest of Jack’s clothes struck me. ‘They’re all brand new,’ I said, picking up the pair that had rolled closest to me. They had that unwrinkled freshness of having never been worn or washed. ‘Why would you have a million pairs of brand new socks?’

  Jo freed two socks from their conjoined ball. She held them up, like Christmas stockings, then cocked her head to one side, her eyebrows knotting. I thought I heard something, a scrunching sound. Jo let one sock drop to the floor, and I watched her wrinkle up the other, like she was about to put it on. She turned it inside out, and as she did a wad of tightly folded paper popped out. Jo’s blue eyes shone. She’s got the most amazing eyes has Jo and the make-up she wears accentuates them, so that sometimes I catch people transfixed as they’re talking to her. She grinned at me as she smoothed out the bundle, and I realized what it was we were looking at.

  ‘Wowzer.’

  I did the same to the pair I was holding. An identical wad of cash fell out. I picked it up and smoothed out the clutch of twenty-pound notes. I counted them out, as Jo snapped on another pair of gloves. When I’d finished I stared at her.

  ‘Ten. Ten twenty-pound notes. Ten times twenty? That’s two hundred quid.’

  Jo nodded, indicating she had what I had. We both checked our second socks. Same result.

  Jo grabbed a third pair. I didn’t, I was too busy trying to do the maths. I assessed the piles of socks. At least fifty pairs. Two hundred quid in each sock, two socks in each pair. That’s like what? My brain refused to do the sums, so I reached for my phone off the edge of the desk, as Jo popped out another wedge of cash.

  ‘Twenty grand.’ I sat back on the floor, propped up against the wall. ‘Give or take …’

  Neither of us spoke for a moment. I felt a shiver, like someone had breathed down the back of my neck. I ran to the window and tugged the string that pulled the vertical blinds closed, making sure every centimetre of the dark glass was covered.

  ‘Get me some envelopes,’ said Jo. ‘We
need to get this straight.’

  Jo un-balled sock after sock and counted out piles of cash, every so often stopping to tuck a wedge of notes into a brown envelope and write something on the front.

  I sat back and tried to work out what was going on in Jack’s life. If he owed his dealers, why didn’t he just hand over the cash? Why leave it at his house, wrapped in pairs of black, brown and blue socks? Why leave his clothes behind? Had he been planning on coming back?

  ‘Sixty,’ said Jo, when she’d sealed the last pile of cash into an envelope.

  ‘Sixty grand?’ I felt light-headed.

  ‘Sixty pairs of socks. Twenty-four grand.’

  I crossed my legs and reminded myself to breathe from my belly and let the weight sink into the floor through my sitting bones.

  ‘Well. Our first case has been good for business, even if we haven’t solved anything,’ said Jo.

  ‘We can’t keep it.’

  ‘You think we should give it to his mum?’ From the tone of her voice, I gathered Jo didn’t think much to this idea.

  ‘I’m thinking his dealers are bound to come looking for it sooner or later. His note.’ I pulled it from my pocket. ‘It says, “when they come looking for me”. They must know where he lives.’

  Jo reached up to help herself to a handful of rubber bands from the desk tidy and bundled the envelopes together.

  ‘Why would he post smack but not mention the cash?’ I asked out loud. Another thought hit me. We’d just removed heroin with a street value of God knows what and twenty-four grand in cash. ‘Shit. They’re going to go to his house and—’

  ‘We left them our business card,’ Jo finished the sentence for me. She straightened up from her position and stretched out her back. ‘Might not be a bad thing. They can come round here; we can give them the money; they tell us where Jack is. Everyone’s a winner.’

  ‘Mmm.’ I wasn’t convinced. ‘If it’s that easy, why didn’t Jack give them the money?’

  ‘He got greedy?’

  ‘If he got greedy, why’d he leave it behind?’

  ‘Maybe he got scared.’

  ‘If he got scared, why’d he run without his clothes?’

  ‘I dunno.’ Jo was obviously bored playing twenty questions, which was a shame because I had a whole stack more. She got onto her knees, used the desk to pull herself to standing. ‘I’ll lock this in the safe for now.’

  She went through to the back room with twenty-four neatly labelled envelopes, a thousand pounds in each.

  ‘Don’t forget this.’ I lobbed the tin of heroin at her, and she caught it one-handed. While she was gone, I stuffed Jack’s clothes back into what was left of the bin bags. There were two more bags still to open.

  ‘The safe’s full,’ said Jo, coming back into the room. ‘Find anything else?’

  ‘More clothes. Some copies of the Socialist Worker, an old bus pass. Not much to show for a life, is it?’

  ‘He’s not doing bad. Twenty-four grand in savings.’

  ‘Hardly think they’re savings.’

  ‘But still—’

  ‘What’s not here?’ I asked. ‘If these are all his worldly goods?’

  ‘No computer, no iPad, no phone,’ said Jo, sitting on the edge of the desk.

  ‘Good point. Pants said he’d nicked Brownie’s PlayStation. So he’s taken electrical goods.’

  ‘To sell.’

  ‘Doesn’t make sense. Why nick a PlayStation and leave behind twenty-four grand?’

  ‘No toothbrush. No toiletries.’

  ‘We should ask Pants about that. Maybe they’re in the bathroom. It would be useful to know if he took his toothbrush.’ I scrawled a note on the pad on the desk.

  Jo yawned. ‘What now?’

  It wasn’t like we had much to go on. ‘Let’s try The Warehouse. They might know something there. And we might bump into Brownie.’

  It struck me that I should have taken a notebook to the squat. My memory’s not great at the best of times. I felt like a schoolgirl with an appointment to see the headmaster. How was I going to explain this to Mrs Wilkins?

  When I first had the idea for this business, I’d had visions of the kind of experiences Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell preside over on Long Lost Family – the ecstasy on people’s faces as I reunited them with lost loves. Not that I’m in it for the gratitude, but I want to make a difference. I know what it’s like to live with the ghosts of the disappeared.

  But I had this quiet but persistent voice inside me, saying that that kind of arm flinging, oh-my-god-I-can’t-believe-it’s-you, tears, laughter, hugging experience wasn’t going to be happening. In fact, the monologue inside my head continued, I should keep my nose out. Dealers, large sums of money, smack. It was obvious nothing good was going to come of this.

  But it’s like I’ve got this kind of death wish when it comes to family. I’m driven by something I can’t explain, something about belonging and the self-awareness, the understanding that comes with it. I need it to work out.

  I need to find the family that works. Because Christ knows, mine didn’t.

  Chapter Five

  We took the bus into town. Perhaps not the obvious mode of transport for professional investigators, but it’s a habit that’s hard to break. Besides, the number 93 rattles down Woodhouse Lane at a rate of about one every minute, ferrying students into town and college. And there’s never anywhere to park in Leeds.

  It was early enough that The Warehouse hadn’t opened for the night. The big black doors were closed and there wasn’t a doorbell, so we hung around outside till we saw a young blonde woman turn the corner and push through the side door. We jogged to catch up with her before the door banged shut. Jo asked her if we could speak to the manager, and she said to come in.

  Once inside, she told us to wait by the main door. No one goes to The Warehouse for the décor, but even so I was taken aback at the state of it, empty of its clientele and with the lights on. Bare, damp walls, the floor littered with cigarette burns, the seating areas stained and ripped.

  I watched the woman who’d let us in cross to the bar and speak to a bloke with a straggly beard. She returned and told us Bill wasn’t in yet, but wouldn’t be long. She invited us to wait, asked if we wanted a beer. Jo nodded at the same moment I held up a hand to say no. I sighed, but on the inside.

  At first, me giving up drinking had been a bit of an issue to our friendship, but Jo’s adapted now. We’d both known if something didn’t give, well, if something didn’t give, something would have given. Probably me. That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt watching Jo swig from a bottle of Tiger beer that had beads of condensation on the glass.

  Jo sat while I opted to stand, rehearsing my lines for Jack’s mother: It’s not gone quite as well as we hoped, Mrs Wilkins, but …

  A tall, gangly man made his way across the dance floor towards us. He must have been six foot seven, a long, lean streak of piss. ‘You’re looking for me,’ he said, and it didn’t sound like a question.

  ‘You the boss?’ asked Jo.

  ‘Bill,’ he said. I held out my hand but he either didn’t see or he ignored it.

  ‘Nothing going at the moment, but if you come back next week, I might have something.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  Jo stood up. She has this trick of making herself look taller than she actually is, but they still looked like a comedy duo as they faced each other. She wasn’t much above his waist.

  ‘We’re not looking for a job.’ She made the word ‘job’ sound like something you might scrape off the sole of your boots.

  We followed him as he made his way towards the bar. He turned his head and spoke to us as he walked. ‘What then?’

  The dance floor stuck to my boots as we crossed the room. The seating areas looked manky under the harsh lights, and the heat of the bulbs was making me sweat. God knows what the temperature would get like when the place filled.

  Bill ducked beneath the bar and lifted a crate of beers onto
the black melamine. He pulled half a dozen bottles out by their necks and stacked them on the shelves behind him.

  ‘We’re looking for Jack,’ I said. ‘Jack Wilkins.’

  He froze for a brief second, so brief I wondered whether I’d imagined it and then resumed his shelf-stacking. ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s a friend. We’re worried about him.’

  ‘You and the rest of the world.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘What?’ Jo was on tiptoe at the bar, straining to hear him.

  He turned round, wiped his hands down his trousers. ‘He was on the rota, last week, three shifts. Didn’t turn up for any of them.’

  ‘Has he rung in sick?’ I asked.

  ‘Still don’t see why this is your business.’

  Jo leaned over the bar, and I saw Bill’s eyes drop to her cleavage. When he got back to her face, he flinched as Jo glowered at him.

  ‘We’re looking for a friend who appears to have disappeared. No need to be defensive.’

  Bill’s gaze flicked to the outskirts of the room, and I knew he was looking for the door staff. No sign of them, which was fortunate, as Jo’d had an altercation with one, heavily tattooed, the last time we were here. The list of places we haven’t been escorted out of is getting shorter; although since I stopped drinking I’ve adopted the role of minder. As soon as Jo shows signs of wear and tear I steer us back up the hill. It’s not that she goes out looking for trouble, but she can’t keep her mouth shut when she’s had a few – insists on intervening in any situation, particularly if there’s a political or feminist perspective that needs raising. She’s obliged to rescue women from unwanted male attention, or to point out issues of gender inequality that may have been overlooked by pissed-up blokes who are out hunting, looking to get their rocks off.

  Bill turned his attention back to Jo. ‘Don’t come in here—’

  ‘We’re private investigators,’ I said. ‘We’ve been hired by his family. No one’s seen him or heard from him and they’re worried. About to call the police.’ I shrugged my shoulders in what I hoped was a disarming manner. ‘We’re trying to find him before that happens.’