by Tony Parsons
‘Think of the lies that bastard Brad Wood told,’ Whitestone said. ‘The risks he took. Just to get through the working week.’
She shook her head with a sense of wonder that was edged with real anger. I knew she had a fifteen-year-old son she was bringing up alone and for the first time I wondered what had happened to her husband.
‘Hey, Billy,’ Wren said. ‘How would you like to trace, interview and eliminate a hundred escort girls? Might spice up your social life.’
Billy Greene was the only one not laughing. He looked as though he hadn’t slept for a week. On his screen the faces of blank-faced men scrolled by, banal and endless. Always the two shots, profile and mug, the eyes dead, the images in black and white, the name and numbers at the bottom of the screen.
The large club of convicted paedophiles that is called ‘known offenders’.
‘There’s another kid missing,’ Billy said, and it killed our laughter stone dead. ‘This morning. Another boy. Another four-year-old. Just like Bradley. Taken from his bed in the night.’ Billy consulted his notes. ‘Off Electric Avenue. Down there in Brixton.’
Whitestone cursed. She looked at me and I nodded. Another abduction of another four-year-old boy in the middle of the night was close enough to our case for me to drive across the river to check it out.
‘Anybody dead?’ Whitestone said.
‘Nobody dead,’ Billy said, and seemed to flinch as it hit him that he had no idea if the child was still alive.
Then we all looked up at the massive flat-screen TV on the whitewall as it suddenly cut to show the front gates of The Garden.
A little girl of around three was being held by the hand by her mother as she placed a small bouquet with the rest of the floral tributes. They were piled up against the security gates, a great tidal wave of flowers that made it feel as though Bradley Wood was already being mourned.
‘Turn that thing off,’ Whitestone said, and then to me: ‘What can we bust her for? The lady pimp?’
I shrugged.
‘Causing or inciting prostitution for gain. Controlling prostitution for gain …’ I hesitated. ‘She would be looking at six months inside. We’d be looking at a pile of paperwork and not a lot to show for it. Wouldn’t you prefer to keep her in play? She could be a lot more use to us as an informant than than doing six months under the Sexual Offences Act.’
Whitestone thought about it. And perhaps she also gave a passing thought to the man she had once been married to.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Let’s bust the bitch.’
But Sampaguita was gone.
The room above the duck restaurant on Gerrard Street was empty now. The only sign that Ginger Gonzalez and her Social Introduction Agency had ever been here were the cables for a broadband connection snaking out of the wall and the rectangles of dust where her desk had stood. A glass that contained the remains of a scented candle sat in the corner. Whitestone picked it up and sniffed it as an old Chinese gentleman entered the room lugging a vacuum cleaner.
‘The lady who was here,’ I said to him. ‘Ng-goy bawng bawng mawng?’ My Cantonese was rusty and it had never been that sharp to begin with. ‘Can you help us, sir?’
‘Gone, gone,’ the old man said. ‘All gone, gone.’
Two much younger Chinese men staggered into the room with a massage table. The old man barked at them in Cantonese and they stood it up against the wall. Gane appeared in the doorway as the old man turned on his vacuum cleaner.
‘Ma’am, you want me to keep this room clear?’ Gane shouted above the racket.
Whitestone shook her head impatiently. She joined me at the window. The red lanterns of the Chinese New Year bobbed in the late morning gloom.
‘Any ideas, Max?’
I thought of the Coburg Bar at the Connaught. The American Bar at the Savoy. The Rivoli Bar at the Ritz. The Fumoir at Claridges. The Promenade Bar at the Dorchester.
‘She could be anywhere,’ I said.
Electric Avenue, Brixton. Wren and I walked between market stalls piled high with Caribbean fruit and vegetables. Guava berry, sugar apple, milk fruit. Yams, plantains, papaya. Mangoes, paw-paw, nutmegs. And plenty of things we had never seen before – red bananas, giant cherries and strangely shaped peppers.
We turned into Coldharbour Lane and followed the blue lights of our cars to a block of grey, sullen flats called Southwyck House, known locally as the Barrier Block. A few kids who should surely have been at school sat around on their bicycles waiting for something to happen.
Something else disturbed me about the scene, but it was just out of reach.
The Barrier Block looked like a high-security prison, with tiny windows cut into the high flat slabs of wall. We showed our warrant cards to the young uniformed officer at the taped perimeter and signed in.
‘What you got?’ Wren said.
‘Michael McCarthy, male, black, four years old,’ the young PC said. ‘His mother woke up this morning and the boy was gone. They’re up on the second floor.’
We went up two flights of stairs to a tiny flat where a woman was crying hysterically in a back room. I caught a glimpse of her through a half-open door. An overweight young black woman who was not quite twenty years old sat on a child’s bed. A female uniformed officer was kneeling before her, holding her hand.
‘My baby … my baby … my baby …’
A detective came out to meet us and we shook hands. He looked as though he had been a copper in Brixton for too long.
‘West End Central?’ he smiled. ‘What you doing down here?’
‘Bradley Wood,’ I said. ‘You’ve got another four-year-old boy missing, right?’
‘Please … please … please …’
The woman choked with shock and grief. The detective lowered his voice. ‘It’s a different sort of four-year-old boy. This family are known to social services. The mother has convictions for substance abuse. The little boy – Michael – has already been taken into care twice.’
‘Father?’ I said.
His smile grew wider.
‘Father? You’re a long way from West End Central, friend. A few miles, one river and several hundred light years. What’s a father? Look – if you want to stick around – that’s fine. We’re about to put the kettle on. But between you and me, you’re wasting your time down here.’
I nodded and suddenly realised what was wrong with this picture. There were no journalists at the Barrier Block. Not one.
There was no recognition in the wider world that Michael McCarthy was gone from his home.
I thought of Nils and Charlotte Gatling refusing to let the world forget their nephew and I wondered who was going to care that much about Michael McCarthy.
‘We got it,’ the detective told us, stifling a yawn.
11
Saturday morning. We parked across the street from Anne’s house and I turned to look at Scout in the back seat, her fingers scratching in the fur behind Stan’s ears, her face pale with thought.
‘You’re going to have such a good time,’ I said, so jolly that I sickened myself. And then, in my own voice, ‘Your mother loves you, Scout. She never stopped loving you. You know that, don’t you?’
Scout nodded once and we got out of the car. Apart from Stan. The dog kingdom held no charms for my ex-wife. Stan would have to wait in the car.
‘Stay, Stan,’ Scout told him. ‘Good boy.’
As we got out of the car, Stan was already whimpering for Scout, knowing something was up because of her backpack and this strange destination at London’s green and leafy end.
The entire family came to the door. The new man. Oliver. I was going to have to start thinking of him as Oliver. He wasn’t really the new man any more. Oliver was the man. And their little boy, hanging back shyly. And Anne – very heavy, about eight months along now. She held her arms wide.
‘Scout! So grown up!’
Scout bumped awkwardly against her mother’s pregnant belly.
I always expected waves
of grief to drag me down when I saw Anne in her new life. But the handover was smooth, brief and I felt nothing much at all as Scout was led inside, smiling tightly at all the fuss, unused to being treated like a visiting head of state.
The door gently closed on me – Anne smiling, not unfriendly, just distant – and I knew that the grief was still out there, and that I would mourn for my dead marriage for a long time, but not here, and not today. The grief of bereavement would ambush me when I was least expecting it. I went back to the car and put Stan in the passenger seat. He smacked his lips with anxiety.
‘It’s OK, Stan,’ I told him. ‘This is what normal looks like.’
Midnight came and went and I was still sleepless.
I prowled through the loft, our home feeling the size of a planet without Scout in it, and stood at the window watching the lights of Smithfield blazing far below. Their night was just beginning in the meat market and it made it easier to admit to myself that sleep would be impossible tonight.
I went to Scout’s bedroom. Stan was curled up in the centre of her pillow. His huge round eyes glittered in the darkness.
‘I’m going out for a while,’ I told him.
He lifted his head with interest.
Where we off to then?
‘Just me,’ I said.
I went to my room and started getting changed. Shirt. Tie. Stan was in the doorway, watching me suspiciously.
‘No dogs where I’m going,’ I said. ‘Sorry. They don’t let dogs in, OK?’
He cocked his sleepy head to one side, as if he found that impossible to believe.
Saturday night in the West End. I thought of the Coburg Bar at the Connaught. The American Bar at the Savoy. The Rivoli Bar at the Ritz. The Fumoir at Claridges. The Promenade Bar at the Dorchester. All the strangers meeting in bars tonight. Eye contact. Drinks. Deals struck. I thought perhaps I would start with the Connaught, as that was where Ginger Gonzalez had met Brad Wood.
Stan watched me expectantly with huge bright eyes. I knew I would not be able to close the door on that face.
‘If you come with me you’ve got to stay in the car, OK?’
Stan stretched and yawned as he watched me putting on my wedding suit.
Ginger wasn’t at the Connaught on Carlos Place and she wasn’t at the Ritz on Piccadilly. But I found her at a small corner table of the American Bar of the Savoy. The man she was with was around fifty, sleek and prosperous and slightly more drunk than he should have been. He was tracing an index finger on her wrist as if about to tell her fortune. I picked up a stool from a neighbouring table and sat down with them. The man stared at me.
‘And who the bloody hell are you?’ he said.
I ignored him and looked at Ginger.
‘I thought you were picking up the children, darling?’
The man abruptly stood up. When he was gone, she smiled at me.
‘I like it when you call me darling,’ she said. ‘It makes me think that you’re less likely to arrest me.’
‘I wouldn’t count on it. You left Chinatown in a hurry.’
‘It seemed like the smart move. You don’t like me.’
The waiter approached our table and I shook my head.
‘I don’t like what you do. You can dress it up how you like – call yourself a businesswoman, make like you’re some entrepreneur – but it’s still the same old game to me. And I’ve seen too many poor little cows come to this country thinking they were going to be nannies or dancers or waitresses only to find themselves having sex on some stinking mattress with twenty men a night.’
Her mouth tightened. ‘Not my girls.’
‘I’ve seen too many of them on drugs, too many with their front teeth knocked out and too many with no idea whatever happened to their passport – or their lives.’
‘That’s not what I do.’
‘But I don’t chase pimps. That’s somebody else’s job. I hunt killers. That’s my job. And it’s my boss who wants to bring you in.’
Ginger sipped her drink. Mineral water with ice and a slice of lemon. She was working.
‘Anything I can do to stop that happening?’ she said.
‘Help me,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘I told you all I know about Brad Wood.’
‘I want to know about the rest of them,’ I said. ‘The others. You said that they’re not all good guys.’
‘No. They’re not.’
‘I can’t believe that it’s as straightforward and wholesome as you make it out to be. Consenting adults, stimulating conversation and consensual sex where nobody gets hurt. No tattoos? No tears? There’s more. There has to be.’
‘What are you asking me?’
‘You must get special requests.’
She looked around the bar.
‘It happens.’
‘What do they want? What do they want you to set up? What are their fantasies?’
‘You can’t imagine what they want.’
‘But I bet I can. Some want cruelty of one kind or another. Some want a bigger party than one-on-one. Some want all the stuff they’ve seen online. Some want underage. And some of the bastards want children.’
She was rattled for the first time.
‘I don’t do any of that stuff,’ she said.
I pushed my card across the table.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘If I thought you did, we would be sitting in an interview room.’
She took my card.
‘I see there’s another little boy gone missing,’ she said.
‘That’s right.’
The waiter came back.
‘If you’re not going to order anything, sir, then we need the table.’
Rather than start throwing my weight about, I ordered a beer I didn’t want. Ginger studied my card. When my beer came I sipped it slowly.
She smiled at me.
‘You don’t have anyone to get back to, do you?’ she said.
‘Not quite true,’ I said. ‘My dog’s in the car.’
‘I’m not sure a dog counts,’ she said.
‘He counts to me.’
‘What happened? You break up with your girlfriend?’
I hesitated. Did I really want to share my secrets with a woman who ran a Social Introduction Agency?
‘Wife,’ I said.
‘Anything else I can help you with?’ she said, playing with me now.
‘You think I need a younger version of my wife?’
‘I think you look lonely, Detective.’
‘Everybody’s lonely,’ I said, standing up to go.
Her face became serious. ‘You know, there’s something far worse than the stuff they see online,’ she said.
‘And what’s that?’ I said.
‘The stuff they see in their head,’ she said.
Sunday morning at Fred’s.
With my hands inside big eighteen-ounce Lonsdale gloves, I threw hooks to the heavy bag. Bam-bam-bam, on and on, the lactic acid building in my arms and making them feel heavy and aching. I was determined to exhaust myself so that I would sleep better tonight.
‘Punch from your shoulders, not your feet,’ Fred was telling the young man in the ring with him. When the buzzer went for the end of my three minutes I stood and watched them. Other people were pausing in their workouts to watch.
The kid was that good.
Fred was taking him on the pads. Calling the shots.
‘Double jab. Double jab. Come on, Rocky! Double jab – right cross – left hook. Good. Don’t worry about power. Worry about speed. Punch from your feet! Get your whole body behind it! And now our seven-punch combination.’ The punches rattled out in a perfect blur. ‘Good, Rocky,’ said Fred, his pirate’s face splitting into a wide grin.
The young man was lean and very fast, with the kind of fitness level that only comes when you are very young and very serious. And you have to be good to call yourself Rocky. I watched his jab pop out and slap hard against the pads, the stinging sound of leather hitting
leather. There was something Mediterranean about the way he looked, dark-haired and sallow-skinned, Italian or Spanish maybe, and if he wasn’t a professional boxer already then he was thinking about it.
Fred set down the pads. He put in his mouthguard and pulled on his headguard and fourteen-ounce gloves. Then they sparred for a few rounds, Fred fighting on the back foot, flicking his jab out, staying away from the kid’s big right hand. What shocked me was that only Fred wore a headguard. After three three-minute rounds they climbed out of the ring.
‘You don’t spar in a headguard?’ I asked the kid.
He grinned. ‘Never use them,’ he said. ‘Makes me too willing to get hit.’
‘These travellers like to fight,’ Fred laughed. ‘It’s in their blood.’
So Rocky was a gypsy.
‘You a pro?’ I said.
‘Thinking about it. Might be getting married soon.’ He couldn’t have been more than eighteen. ‘Working on the black stuff right now. You know. Laying driveways.’
I nodded. ‘Good luck with it all.’
‘Thanks, man.’
We touched gloves.
I was back banging the heavy bag when the news on the TV cut to The Garden. Nils and Charlotte Gatling were looking at the flowers that were piled up at the security gates. He had his hands behind his back with all the self-consciousness of visiting royalty. She stood nervously twisted her right hand over her left wrist, as if the gesture gave her comfort, as if she was holding hands with herself. Together brother and sister read the messages, exchanged a few words, watched from a respectful distance by what felt like the entire nation. I waited to see if there was anything about Michael McCarthy of Brixton.
But they cut to the sport’s desk, as if the other boy had already been forgotten.
After training at Fred’s I went home and got clean and caffeinated. Then I drove up to Hampstead Heath, Stan over-excited in the passenger seat, panting with anticipation, knowing exactly where we were going.
The ground was rock hard and glittering with ice, and under the blood-red sky we ran past ponds where fishermen slept in their tents and we walked down lanes where foxes watched us with mild contempt and we crashed through thickets of bare winter trees into unexpected meadows that we would never find again.
