It Never Goes Away

by Tom Trott

  If Max was the brain that decided the chess moves, Mr X was the hand that moved the pieces. I first saw him because Mrs Swan hired us to identify him. He was harassing her wife. It seemed a long time ago. What did he want with the other Mrs Swan?

  After ten minutes of waiting no one had come or gone from the house, and the only person who passed my car was walking a dog. Both of them gave me a suspicious look. Once they had disappeared from my wing mirror I climbed out of the Primera, zipping up my hoodie. I marched as casually as I could up the road and onto the Swans’ short concrete driveway. The driveway was sloped upwards and next to it a raised concrete balcony jutted out from the French doors. The curtains were closed behind the doors. The driveway was empty. There was space to park a second car in front of the house, but the space was empty too. I peered at the front door.

  The letter box was one of those with a metal flap that lifts up and a bristled slot with another flap on the inside. I lifted the outer flap and pushed my fingers through the bristles to try and grab any post that had been trapped by the second flap, like it often is. There was nothing there, so I pushed on the inside flap but it was stiff, obstructed by something. By this point I was on my knees, my hand as far into the letter box as it would go. With my fingers I could feel a wodge of post, tightly bunched. They must have had a metal cage, the type old people have installed when they can’t bend down anymore, a remnant of the bungalow’s previous owner. I grabbed the only post I could grip, pinching with my index and middle fingers, and with some effort extracted it, grazing my hand in the process.

  It was a charity bag. No name, not even addressed. Hand-delivered. I stuffed it back in. I got up off my knees and looked around, no one was staring at me, no curtains quivered. I really wished I had my lock picking kit.

  I dusted myself off and wandered down the drive, taking a look at the neighbours each side and deciding which looked friendliest. One had a Renault Clio and net curtains: elderly person. Another had a Vauxhall Zafira and no blinds or curtains: family. I decided to go for the old person.

  I had to ring the doorbell three times. Eventually a voice shouted ‘I’m coming! Hold on!’ and a little old lady answered the door. She wore hearing aids and glasses with lenses as thick as paperweights.

  ‘I’m sorry, I was in the little room,’ she apologised. ‘Oh!’ she ejaculated. The sight of me had finally made it through her glasses. ‘Can I help you?’

  I smiled. ‘Justine from next door asked me to feed the cat whilst they’re away, she said you have a key.’

  She looked mortified. ‘Oh, no. No, sorry, dear. Erm...’ She looked concerned, ‘Oh dear, the cat...’ She was beginning to panic.

  ‘It’s ok,’ I reassured her, ‘she must have meant the other side.’

  ‘Yes, yes, she might have given it to Kaleisha. I can’t bend down, you see.’

  I thanked her and wandered to the other neighbours, the family. The door was answered before I even knocked by a medium-to-large Caribbean woman with short slicked-back hair.

  She regarded me doubtfully. ‘What you want?’

  I smiled. ‘Hi. Kaleisha?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Justine asked me to feed the cat whilst they’re away, she said you have a key.’

  She narrowed her eyes. ‘They don’t have no cat. What you want to get in their house for?’

  I smiled, half-laughing, but she wasn’t charmed. I went to speak but she got in first:

  ‘I seen you just now, snooping around. You the man Justine’s scared of.’

  ‘No—’

  ‘I calling the police.’ She slammed the door in my face, rattling her letter box.

  Shit.

  I jogged down her drive. From the pavement I could see in through her French doors, she was just standing there. Then she saw me, raised her eyebrows, and picked up the cordless house phone. She dialled three numbers and put it to her ear. Shit! I frowned at her and ran to the Swans’ front door. There was only one thing I could do now.

  I reached into the letter box again and pulled out the first piece of post I could get hold off. It was the damn charity bag. I threw it on the floor. I reached in and grabbed something else. A menu for a Chinese takeaway. Dammit! I went fishing a third time and this time I felt for a windowed envelope. I pulled one out. It was brown and addressed to Dr Astrid Sørensen. It would do.

  I ran down the road to the Primera, started it up, and turned it around so as not to drive past Kaleisha’s house. I zipped back to the end of the road and indicated right onto the main road out of Ovingdean. There was already a police car coming this way. I turned left, away from the car and toward the village. I watched in my mirror as the panda car failed to turn down Wanderdown Road and followed me instead. I was about to put my foot down when it took the next turning, leaving my mirror. It must have been a coincidence.

  I was now deep into the old village. I took a right down a narrow road, but this took me even further in, until brown fields opened up in front of me, and the gate to the old church poked out between trees. The end, and indeed the beginning, of the village, where all roads stop. I was stationary now, engine burbling.

  I checked my watch. It was the afternoon. Plenty of police would have my photo taped to their dashboard by now. Everyone would want to be the person to catch me. I couldn’t afford for any of them to spot me through the windscreen as I zipped past or stopped at a junction. Even if I got away they would have the Primera, my only off-book vehicle, and then they could track my every move with ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition). I didn’t know for sure that they didn’t have the Primera’s number plate already, in which case just driving past a police car could trigger an alert.

  I racked my brain. There were only three ways out of Ovingdean: Falmer Road north into Woodingdean, Falmer Road south into Rottingdean, or Greenway south to the Blind Veterans centre and the coast road. Greenway south was the simplest way out, but that was the route any panda cars coming from town or the station would use. That made Falmer Road south the best option, it wasn’t the fastest route out but it was also the slowest route in and police would avoid it.

  I turned the car around and went back the way I came, up the narrow road out of the old village, back to Ovingdean Road. Just as I put my foot down a panda car poked its nose out of Wanderdown Road and I quickly took the turn beforehand, to my right, grazing the pavement in the process. I passed the only shop in Ovingdean, frantically checking my mirrors, but nothing was following me. With a pang of terror I realised this was the road the first car had turned down. I squinted ahead, but there was nothing in sight. Calm down, that was probably the same car. But what if she’s given them a description? What was there to describe, a white man in his thirties? I tried to think if the tax was up to date on the Primera, if not I had another reason to avoid the ANPR. I needed a way out of Ovingdean.

  What about Greenway north? It was only a farm track, but it was worth a try. I turned back down toward the church, and approached the farm next to it. I crawled forward, checking around me until I passed the sign that said “no vehicles beyond this point”. After two hundred metres I was bumping along between fields, out of sight of the village, then the track forked and I had a choice of turning left and driving through the East Brighton Golf Club or turning right and up the hill toward Warren Road. I took that option. After a bumpy mile I reached the top of the hill and emerged into the Sheepcote Valley car park, used exclusively by people walking their dogs. This seemed as good a place as any to lie low.

  I pulled into a parking bay, turned off the engine, and breathed a sigh of relief. There were three other cars, all estates, all empty. Cars zipped back and forth behind me on Warren Road, all of them in a hurry, none of them police.

  I produced the now crumpled letter from my pocket and turned it over in my hands. It was a windowed brown envelope addressed to Dr Astrid Sørensen on Wanderdown Road, the return address was to the University of Sussex. I ripped it open. It was nothing too interesting, just a
response to a query on back pay. At least that told me one thing.

  The headed paper had a generic contact number for the university. I grabbed one of the three remaining burner phones, dialled, and worked my way through the automated menu until I got to a human. I asked them to put me through to Dr Sørensen.

  It rang three times before an older male voice answered impatiently:

  ‘Dr Sørensen’s office.’

  ‘Hello? Is Astrid there?’ I asked.

  There was a hesitation. ‘Erm... no, she is not.’ I began to detect a French accent. ‘Sorry, who is calling?’

  ‘I’m a private investigator, I’m trying to reach Dr Astrid Sørensen, this is her office?’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’

  ‘Who am I speaking to?’ I asked.

  ‘I am Dr Lonsdale. I am her supervisor.’ He sounded unsure of the fact, but maybe he was just nervous; it’s more difficult to detect tone in the voice of someone speaking a second language.

  ‘I need to speak to Dr Sørensen, urgently,’ I impressed on him, ‘do you know where I can find her?’

  ‘Mais non, I wish I did.’

  I realised now why he sounded odd, he was concerned and curious about who was calling for his colleague.

  ‘Has something happened to Dr Sørensen?’ I asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  I decided to build some trust: ‘I was hired by Dr Sørensen’s wife, Justine, in relation to a matter I can’t discuss without her permission. I’m sure she would want you to tell me whatever it is you’re worried about.’

  He still sounded sceptical, but he spoke. ‘I don’t suppose it is any breach of privacy to say that Dr Sørensen has not been at work for the last three days.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We do not know. We have not been able to get hold of her. I even drove to her house, but there was no one there. We are all very worried.’

  ‘Has she ever done this before?’

  ‘No, no, she always emails if she is ill, or sometimes Justine will call.’

  ‘Could she be on holiday? Could she have forgotten to tell you?’

  He sighed. ‘We can only hope. I have called and texted her...’ he trailed off.

  We spoke a little bit more, then I said thank you and hung up before he could ask my name. I used the phone to Google “Dr Astrid Sørensen” and the first result was a record of a paper published in The Journal of Stratigraphy and Sedimentology Studies. I remembered what every schoolboy is taught; there are three types of rock: igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary.

  I stared out over the valley, seeing it in strata. The racecourse, the Whitehawk Hill transmitter tower, the trees below, the houses below them, the cranes over the hospital, the sea that rose above them all, to the wind turbines silently spinning on the horizon.

  I was playing with the burner phone. I’d destroyed the first one the second I hung up on Thalia as I knew they would be keeping an eye on any calls coming into her phone from unknown numbers. They would then use the metadata to locate the mobile mast that the phone had connected to, locking down my location to an area of a few hundred square metres. They could then track that phone’s location without me even making a call, watching it connect to the nearest masts as it travelled. This time it seemed safe to assume they were not monitoring calls to Dr Astrid Sørensen’s office. I decided it was safe to stay at this location and make another call, at least right now. I’d get moving the second I finished.

  The line rang twice before it was answered.

  ‘Tessafrak Natural Resources, how may I help you?’

  I recognised the dry voice. I tried to disguise mine. ‘Put me through to Hillerman, please,’ I commanded.

  ‘Whom should I say is calling?’

  ‘Dr Sørensen, he’ll know what it’s about.’

  ‘One moment, I’ll just see if he’s available.’

  There was ten seconds of hold music before his anxious whisper broke in:

  ‘You’re not supposed to call me!’

  I didn’t speak, I just smirked on my end.

  There was silence from him too, somehow I could hear the terror creep into it.

  ‘Dr Sørensen?’ he asked, almost hopefully.

  I hung up. Ten seconds later he rang back. I started the engine, picked up the ringing phone, opened my door, and placed it on the gravel behind the front wheel, ready to reverse out.

  23

  Into the Lioness’s Den

  Unlike Rottingdean or Ovingdean, Saltdean has no old village, in fact nothing of Saltdean existed until 1924, when plots of clifftop land were sold for development and it soon became just another satellite suburb. Today it is split down the middle along Longridge Avenue, everything to its west is part of Brighton & Hove, everything to its east is East Sussex, denying it any collective identity. If the place was wiped off the map only two buildings would be missed, both (just) within the Brighton part: the lido and the Ocean hotel. “Sisters” to each other, they were both designed by R. W. H. Jones, both built in 1938, both in what is generally termed “Art Deco” style, but is more accurately Streamlined Moderne. Barely having time to flourish before the Second World War and the requisition of the hotel and lido by the Auxiliary Fire Service, they both soon went to rot. After the war the Ocean became a Butlin’s, but an attempt to buy the lido too was quashed by residents. It went derelict, and has been temperamentally restored and reopened only in recent years. The Ocean continued as a hotel until it became untenable, and in 2007 the process was started to convert it into that rare thing in Brighton: luxury flats, completed in 2011. It’s strange how they can’t build council houses, but they always manage luxury flats. In their defence, they did a good job. Except for the addition of a modern extra storey, the outside is largely restored to its former glory, now rebranded the Grand Ocean. Inside they’ve sensitively replicated the white, black, and gold colour scheme of the 1930s, and repaired the spiral staircase that runs up the centre of the building. It really is a joy to explore, even when breaking into someone’s flat.

  It was an easy lock to pick, even with the tools I’d had to improvise from stationary and bits of car. Within thirty seconds I was inside, fingering the impersonal touches that I would expect from someone ex-military; someone who can fit their life in a kitbag. William Morris said “have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” Using this metric I determined she found nothing beautiful. From the crockery to the furniture to the floors to the toiletries, everything was practical. Practicality hidden inside a beautiful shell, how appropriate.

  If I was going to be waiting I decided I would enjoy myself, slightly, so I checked her fridge and found an interesting Cabernet Sauvignon barrel-aged beer. I sat down in a comfortable chair, in the dark, and if I still smoked, I would have. Instead I stared over the lights of Saltdean, with its wishbone shaped roads and the rolling farmland beyond. Nothing much stirred. Some people came and went from the building, sometimes footsteps would climb and descend the spiral stairs, sometimes they would shuffle down the corridor, or creak overhead. I opened a window. Salt drifted on the air. The windows faced away from the sea, but once the traffic died and the wind changed direction, it was possible to hear the crashing of waves below the cliffs, barely a quarter of a mile away.

  I had been waiting two hours and had got through three of the beers before I heard footsteps, then a key in the lock, then the door opened and there appeared the silhouette of Detective Chief Inspector Price.

  She flicked on the light. Nothing changed in her cool, pale face when she saw me, or in her sapphire, almost violet, eyes. She dropped her briefcase on the floor and slipped into the chair opposite me, pushing blonde curls behind her ears, then sitting with her hands in her pockets like a sulking teenager. There was a slight twitch at the corner of her thin, pink mouth. She frowned at the empty bottles by my chair leg.

  ‘You’re incredibly stupid,’ she said.

  I nodded. I could feel the beer, I had
had one too many. ‘What else is new?’

  She didn’t smile. She was giving me a look that could split a man’s head open.

  ‘I remember I was surprised to learn you lived here,’ I said apropos of nothing.

  She just raised her eyebrows, her fingers were tapping restlessly in her pockets.

  ‘This is a beautiful building,’ I explained, ‘you pay a premium for that. I wouldn’t think you cared about such things.’

  ‘It has an onsite gym.’

  ‘Ah...’ I nodded, then took a deep breath, trying to clear my head a bit.

  ‘You know this just makes things worse for you, right?’

  I smiled wanly. ‘When you’re facing two murder charges, what’s a little domestic burglary between friends?’

  ‘About six months,’ she replied. ‘And we’re not friends.’

  ‘Maybe not, but I think we respect each other.’

  She shook her head. ‘No we don’t.’

  ‘Well,’ I replied, ‘I respect you.’

  Her eyebrows shot up in disbelief. ‘Is this how you show respect?’

  ‘I’m trying to show respect by coming here and talking to you. Laying things out, so you know how they stand.’

  If her eyebrows could climb even higher they’d be part of her fringe.

  ‘Do you think I did it?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think. I just follow evidence.’

  ‘Fine, I can work with that. Let me give you some.’

  I told her in the clearest way I could about Dr Sørensen and about Justine Swan, how she hired me to identify Mr X, how Mr X was arranging a deal with Tessafrak, how that deal related to Ben McCready, how Ben McCready had hired Clarence, how Clarence had contacted me using the money as a coded message, and finally about Max.

  ‘Your conspiracy theory again!’ she scoffed. ‘You hide it well, but you’ve always been a nut.’

  ‘I’m only telling you what happened, you can make your own judgements on it.’