by Joseph Knox
He glanced at the girl, passed out on my arm, and winked. ‘Course I can, mate.’
I took my jacket off and draped it over her shoulders. I was still holding her upright when I turned to face the Carver house. The night seemed endless. The nearest street light had burned out, but even in near pitch-black I could see that we were being watched.
Two lit cigarettes glowed in the darkness at the end of Carver’s path. I’d wanted to send Isabelle up there on her own, so as not to antagonize him, but once we got closer I wasn’t so sure. One of the cigarettes was thrown down and stamped underfoot, rendering its owner invisible.
I heard a car engine come to life behind me and turned to see the cab moving slowly away. It pulled up a little further along the road. In the glow of its sidelights I could see the outline of a girl, sitting slumped on a wall. She looked up and laughed at something the driver said through the window, then she stood and leaned closer to him. After a few more exchanged words, she walked round the cab and got in on the passenger side. The car started up again, turned the corner and took the light with it.
Fuck him.
When I looked back at the house I saw that the remaining cigarette had been stamped out too, and I couldn’t see the person who’d been smoking it. Isabelle was still draped around me. I went up the path fast and banged hard on the door.
The house was quiet that night, in contrast to my first few times there. The only sound was the wind, rocking the trees that lined the path. I felt the adrenaline lapsing in my bloodstream, humanizing me. I felt the pain in my collarbone where the barman had connected, and the light weight of Isabelle on my arm. I leaned against the door and lost time. The sound of the bolt made me stand upright.
The door opened and Sarah Jane stared out at us. Her red hair was wet, and spilt out wildly over her shoulders, making her skin look paler than usual. She must have been showering before bed. I realized I’d been hoping for Catherine. Sarah Jane looked at Isabelle, still passed out, then at me, like I was all the bastards in the world combined.
‘What happened?’
‘If she’s lucky she won’t remember.’
‘She’s never been lucky yet. Better bring her in.’
She stood aside and I carried Isabelle through, shouldering the door closed behind me. The echo that went through the house was like a memory of life from the party. Stripped of revellers, the place was pretty civilized. There were oil paintings, ornaments, stained-white wooden hall-chairs.
‘Through here,’ said Sarah Jane reluctantly. She turned the lock on the nearest door and we walked into a well-ordered, dimly lit study. The room had been off limits every time I’d been before. I set Isabelle down on a leather sofa. She stirred but didn’t wake up.
‘Have you got any water?’ I said.
Sarah Jane didn’t move for a second, then turned on her heel and left the room. Something about her seemed different. She came back carrying water and painkillers.
‘Leave the pills. I’m not sure what else she’s taken.’
Sarah Jane looked dubiously at my beer-soaked clothes.
‘She was like this when I found her.’
I’d worked out what was different about her now. She wore no make-up and looked disarming for it. Without the backdrop of dark eyeliner to blend in with, her lashes seemed delicate and long. They made a better frame for her green eyes, more affecting and intimate, and she knew it.
I held Isabelle’s head and helped her drink a glass of water for the second time in a few weeks. Then I took the money from her purse and nodded at Sarah Jane. We left the room, closing the door quietly behind us.
‘Where was she? When you found her, I mean.’
‘That bar, Rubik’s. Near the Locks.’
‘Good of you to carry her things …’
‘Especially when they’re so heavy,’ I said, passing over the cash. She held eye contact as she felt through it, then took a breath.
‘Why’d you bring it back?’
‘Doesn’t belong to me.’
‘What about her?’
‘She doesn’t belong to me, either.’
‘More’s the pity.’
‘She’s not welcome here?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘As good as.’
‘We just have a knack for attracting strays …’
I felt like she was talking about me more than Isabelle. ‘Well anyway, I’ll get out of your hair.’
She glanced at the cash in her hand then at me. ‘We haven’t been properly introduced …’
‘Aidan,’ I said, holding out a hand. She gave it the smallest shake possible. Her skin was cold. I wondered if she’d been smoking a cigarette outside a minute before and, if so, who with.
‘I’m Sarah Jane.’ She said her name like it was a job she hated.
‘Does Zain need to know about this, Sarah?’
‘What do you think?’
‘That you could get her in trouble.’
‘She’s used to that by now.’ I waited. ‘Teenage girl. Tearing round at all hours with strange men.’
‘Strange men?’
‘You’re not the first, Aidan. Anyway, you’ve been trying to get in here for weeks. Might help if I tell Zain you saved his collection?’
‘Don’t go to any trouble on my account.’
‘I wouldn’t do anything on your account, Detective.’ I looked at her. ‘Don’t worry. I’m the only one who knows.’ Besides Zain and Grip. Zain had told me that Sarah Jane didn’t know about me. He’d either told her in the meantime, or she’d worked it out for herself.
‘Did you send me a message from Isabelle’s phone?’ She smiled, but it was to keep me at a distance rather than draw me closer. ‘How’d you get my number?’
‘I think you should go.’
‘I think you’re right.’ We heard Isabelle moving in the next room. ‘Shouldn’t she be at home? Her real home, I mean.’
‘Trouble there, too. Some girls just generate it.’
‘How sympathetic of you.’
‘She wouldn’t be here if I weren’t sympathetic. Now,’ she
said, walking past me to the door, ‘you said something about leaving?’
‘It’s probably warmer outside anyway. Thought I saw a familiar face on my way in.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yeah, a Burnsider.’
‘What?’ She stepped away from the door.
‘Who do you think’s out there, Sarah? Sheldon White?’ I wanted to see how she reacted to the name.
‘Who’s that?’ she said. It wasn’t convincing. I opened the door and stepped out into the darkness. When I turned around, she’d edged away from me, back into the house.
‘He’s the man who made Zain’s last girlfriend disappear. I’d keep an eye out for him, if I were you.’ I could hear the wind in the trees again, an ambulance somewhere off in the distance.
‘Take her with you,’ Sarah Jane called after me.
‘You just said—’
‘She stays in a room round the corner.’ She bent to a small table, scribbling an address on to a pad. ‘And she’s much too young for you, Detective. I’d keep an eye out for that, if I were you.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, accepting the slip of paper. Even in a hurry, Sarah Jane’s handwriting was angular, thin and neat. It suited her. I went back into the study for Isabelle. She’d moved and, although her eyes were closed, I wondered if she’d been listening to us.
We got to the bottom of the garden path and I stopped. Looked back at the house. There was a soft glow coming from a window upstairs, probably from the screen of a mobile phone. In spite of what I’d said, I hoped that Carver had seen me deliver his money home.
5
Isabelle was staying in an unmissable, brutalist, concrete box of a building. Before the crash it had been intended as an office block, but they changed tack halfway through and it became flats. Jagged red spray-paint above the door said:
FERMEZ LA FUCKING BOUCHE.
Her flat was a sad little shithole. I flipped on the light: a bare, bright bulb in the centre of the ceiling. It was too powerful for the room and left hellish neon sunspots in my eyes, even when I blinked or turned away. The place was a studio apartment, one medium-sized lounge with a sofa bed and bathroom.
I laid Isabelle down on the sofa and cast around a while, trying to justify my being there. There were clothes on hangers around the lounge’s periphery, bright summer dresses that seemed unworn. There was a defeated-looking desk and a curtained window. In the bathroom there were a couple of toiletries and a towel that said SMILE in bright yellow letters. It looked sarcastic.
That was it.
I found some vodka, mixed it with tap water and sat down in a corner, where I had a clear view of both Isabelle and the door. The flat was neater than it had any right to be. There was almost nothing to suggest that someone lived there, let alone a seventeen-year-old girl going off the rails for a month. Something echoed through my mind and I realized what the room reminded me of.
Her father’s penthouse.
They were different in every way, aside from a studied anonymity. This lack of definition, of any personality at all, made the two rooms nearly unique in my experience. I’d spent a few years crawling through the homes of victims, innocent people with nothing to hide. They were usually cluttered with an accumulation of objects defining their life experience. This didn’t remind me of that. It felt like the home of someone who’d done something wrong.
I realized then that so did David Rossiter’s.
The vodka had woken me, and I stood to take a closer look around. The only object of any interest was the Ikea desk rammed up against the wall furthest from the door. It had been poorly fixed together in the first place and unloved ever since.
Isabelle was still sleeping.
I didn’t find a diary or a notebook, but I did find some pictures. Several bunches of glossy black-and-white photographs, made with a high-spec home printer. They seemed to show the Isabelle Rossiter of another dimension, as though some crucial fork in the road had occurred, sending one on to happiness and damning the other.
I glanced over my shoulder.
The girl in the photographs, given over to friends and fits of laughter, linking arms with boys, seemed a world away from the anorexic slip on the sofa. There was some joy in the pictures that I was glad to see she’d had once.
I wondered where it had gone.
The bottom drawer jingled when I pulled it out. It was filled with broken glass, the remains of a mirror. When I began sifting through the shards, expecting traces of powder, maybe a straw, I was surprised to find crusted blood. Looking through the pieces I realized that more than one shattered mirror had been hidden in here. There were parts from three or four differently shaped pieces of glass.
Isabelle had taken one last look at her pictures, the person she was, and turned away. She hadn’t left her life behind by accident. For the first time it dawned on me that she might not be running from rich kid problems.
I thought of the phone again, and crossed the room towards Isabelle, holding my breath. With my eyes on her, I took it from her bag and walked slowly away. I stepped into the bathroom, drew the door shut and dialled into her voicemail.
One new message. Received today.
There was a pause, a breath and then a voice.
That unmistakable Oxbridge accent.
‘Isabelle, I wish you’d pick up the phone. I know I’m the last person you want to hear from, but we need to speak. The police have been here, asking about you. Your whereabouts. They mentioned a Zain Carver. Said he was involved in drugs. Isabelle, I can protect you, but please call me.’ There was a pause. ‘You know I love you.’
David Rossiter. Lying to his daughter about her situation, trying to manipulate her into going home. I was surprised to hear his voice. He’d implied that he had no means of contacting her. I hung up and opened the door.
Isabelle was standing, barefoot, by the sofa. Tousled punk-rock hair and blotched eyeliner. Her heels hadn’t been particularly high but without them she seemed much smaller. This loss of height, combined with her bare feet, made her look frighteningly young.
Her eyes went to the phone in my hand. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I was just—’
‘Going through my things?’
I put the phone down on the floor. ‘I brought you home, Izzy. I was just looking for something to pass the time.’ I saw then that her fist was clenched around her room keys, holding the longest one out like a knife.
‘Pass it elsewhere, please.’
‘Of course.’ I edged round the outside of the room towards the door. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, once I’d got it open.
‘I know you’re working for him.’
I turned but didn’t answer. Her scarf had fallen open and I could see the scar across her throat. She’d tried to kill herself once. She’d tried to run away from home after that. She’d tried drugs and a relationship with an older man. And all of it was there in her scarf, hanging open at the neck. It was there in her shrinking voice, the awful room, her cold blue feet with the chipped nail polish. She was seventeen years old and she was trying not to cry.
‘Izzy …’
‘Just go.’
‘Can we talk about this?’ I said. ‘Tomorrow?’ She shifted on her feet and looked at me for a long time, until I became conscious of daylight seeping through the nylon curtains.
‘If you don’t talk to him first.’
‘He’ll never know I was here.’
‘I’ve never had a secret from him in my life.’ I saw all the breath go out of her, like the first moment before a panic attack. She went on in a small voice: ‘He pays my boyfriends to tell him what they’ve done with me. He gets them drunk and records them. Sometimes he plays me the tapes.’ She took a breath. ‘He knows everything.’
‘He’ll never know I was here,’ I said. I wanted her to feel safe, so I walked out and closed the door behind me.
‘You can come back,’ she said quietly.
I wasn’t sure whether she meant that moment or the next day, so I stood outside with my hand on the door, listening. I heard her land back down on the sofa, breathing deeply. For a minute she had it under control, but began to breathe faster. She started to laugh and then she started to cry. When I left it sounded like she was laughing and crying at the same time. I wondered if it was the drugs, whatever she was on, or waking up to find a strange man in her room. I didn’t want to believe what she’d said about being monitored. She’d sounded paranoid, delusional.
I took a night bus, exhausted, back to my own rented room and lay down on the bed. I couldn’t sleep but I had his card in my hand for a couple of hours before I called. He answered the phone on the second ring.
‘Waits.’
‘We need to talk.’
‘I’ll send a car,’ said Rossiter. Sitting there, waiting for the knock, I couldn’t help thinking of the graffiti I’d seen earlier in the bar.
Forget the night ahead.
6
I’d arrived home with family on my mind. Absent parents, secrets and lies. I felt inside my pocket for the letter that Sutty had passed on to me. I laid it flat on the table but still couldn’t open it. Isabelle Rossiter and I had more in common than I’d realized. I hadn’t trusted anyone when I left my family.
The Oaks was a large Victorian complex. Closed down, boarded up and burned out now. The grown-ups were nameless, faceless to me, and I had trouble telling them apart. I was eight years old when we arrived, and my sister was five. I was scared to death. I remember my hot cheeks whenever Annie looked to me for an answer about what was happening, and I
couldn’t tell her because I didn’t know.
The male dormitory was filled with boys like me. Around my age, and all new arrivals. Now I see that the personality types – quiet, sullen, outrageous and violent – were all just different expressions of fear. I suppose mine was somewhere in the middle.
I watched everything and gave away as little as possible about myself.
We hadn’t been allowed to take our things with us, and I thought of the facts of my life as a kind of currency. Not valuable, but the last thing I had left to hide on my person. Only to be used in case of emergencies. It’s a bad habit I’ve never quite broken.
Annie and I slept in separate rooms but spent most of the days together. I usually just kept her in my sight. Watched her at play but pretended not to. I was scared of her asking when we were going home. Asking where our mother was. I was scared of her telling me more about her dreams.
We hadn’t been there long when they first tried to place us with a family. It was never explained or expressed to us in that way. The thought of a child knowing that they’re auditioning for new parents is too hateful for the carers to conscience. We were simply told that we’d be meeting some nice people, that we had to be good.
In truth, most kids understand what’s happening and, even at that age, you could see who’d be picked first. They try to keep siblings together but, be realistic, who has a home or heart big enough?
I remember walking down the corridor towards the director’s office. I was nervous and snappy with my sister. She couldn’t keep her clothes straight, didn’t know how important it was. When we reached the office we were taken through by one of the nameless, faceless women. The room smelled of polish, and every surface gleamed varnish-brown. There was an intimidating bookcase on one wall and a desk at the other. In between there was a window, looking out on to the grounds, and a chesterfield beside it. Sitting on the sofa were a young couple. They looked like they were on their way to church.
They stood when we walked in.
The lady smiled so much at Annie that I thought she must know her. Her smile faltered when she saw me. We answered some simple questions. What our names and ages were. What food we liked and what games we enjoyed.
