Sirens

by Joseph Knox

‘I don’t know her surname.’

  ‘Address?’

  When I told them they looked at each other.

  ‘That’s Zain Carver,’ said Riggs.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, sitting on the gutted sofa.

  ‘And she has been officially reported missing?’

  ‘This morning. By a girl living at that address. She’ll have reported a man missing as well. He went searching for her last night and didn’t come back.’

  ‘What’s his story?’

  ‘Danny Gripe,’ I said. ‘Grip to his friends. Franchise muscle. You’re looking for a fourth or fifth-generation Mustang hatchback. Black with thin red stripes.’

  ‘Licence?’

  ‘She’ll have given that, too.’

  ‘Do you know anything that might lead us to their whereabouts?’

  ‘Catherine was last seen in Rubik’s with Sheldon White.’

  ‘Sheldon White?’ Laskey recognized the name. ‘Rubik’s is Franchise, though.’

  ‘It changed ownership yesterday.’

  Frowns all round.

  ‘Sounds like you had a long night,’ said Laskey. ‘She in trouble?’

  ‘Speak to Parrs,’ I said.

  ‘What are you doing with Zain Carver, mate? Sheldon White? Is that how you got caught with your hand in the till?’

  ‘Yeah. You’ve blown this one wide open. I told you, I know her from an old case. I don’t have to tell you that the Franchise is falling apart and things are changing fast. If you’ve got any sense, you’ll take this to Parrs and tell him it’s connected.’

  Neither of them said anything for a minute.

  ‘Sure,’ said Riggs eventually. ‘That’s what we’ll do.’ He gave me a beaming liar’s smile and they left the room.

  I went to the window and watched them get into their car. Laskey said something that made his partner laugh. I saw his jowls shaking. Once the car pulled away, the street was quiet. The flat was quiet. When I tried to call Superintendent Parrs again, his phone didn’t even ring.

  16

  The next day I read that Zain Carver had been arrested. The newspapers linked him with the death of Isabelle Rossiter. They linked him with Sycamore Way. I tried not to think about who they should have arrested instead. The only silver lining was that it had happened on a weekday, not during one of the parties. Perhaps I’d got through to Parrs after all.

  I needed to speak to the barman. He’d been with Catherine before she went missing and been turned loose by Sheldon White since. I went to his last-known address: an ugly, modern tower block that had been built in the city centre with some fanfare during the property boom. It had promised affordable penthouse-style suites, but the funding fell through and the project was abandoned for a few years. It was finished with tighter budgets, lower expectations and smaller, cheaper rooms.

  I didn’t hold out much hope that he’d be there. He had lived alone, about halfway up the building. I carded a bored-looking security guard for access.

  The room had the stale smell of a cheap, lonely life. It reminded me of my own. It had been cleared out in a hurry, with plenty of clothes and personal effects left behind. I found some crumpled drinks receipts in the pockets of a discarded pair of trousers. He’d recently been drinking in a club called the Wiggle Room.

  As I was leaving, the security guard called over. ‘Find anything this time?’

  ‘This time?’

  ‘One of your lot’s been out already.’ I could see he was bored out of his mind and more than willing to talk.

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Let me see,’ he said, rubbing his chin. ‘Must be at least a week.’ An alarm bell was going off in my head. As far as I knew, the barman had never been reported missing. At least, not to the police. I remembered driving with Zain Carver, though, the night of Sycamore Way. He’d told Grip to put the whole Franchise on the search for Glen Smithson. I wondered if that included his man on the force.

  ‘Was this a uniformed officer or plain clothes?’

  ‘Plain clothes,’ said the man. ‘Plain bloody rude, if you ask me. Was late when he came. Barked at me to open the door. Was in and out in five minutes.’

  ‘Did he give you his name?’

  ‘Not as I can remember.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Like I say, plain. White. Medium height. Normal.’

  Terrific. ‘Do you have CCTV here?’

  ‘We do, but …’ He thought about it. ‘This was the Monday before last. Will have taped over by now. Why do you ask?’

  ‘There’s a bug in the software at dispatch,’ I lied. ‘It’s been assigning multiple people to the same jobs. Sounds like this other bloke’s one step ahead of me, so it’d be good to get one of us reassigned. Not waste the manpower.’ I hoped a Daily Mail scare story would bring him on board.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘He might have left a number to get him on …’

  The man searched through the assorted papers at his desk and found what he was looking for: a Post-it note with a mobile number scrawled across it. I copied the number into my phone, thanked the man and left. Out on the street, I saved the number into my mobile as: Franchise Man. I found a phone box and dialled.

  It rang out.

  After putting it off for as long as possible, I made the drive north, out to the Burnside. It was dark when I got there, but I had no trouble finding the warehouse. Nothing inside had changed, but when I was halfway around I heard a banging sound coming from the entrance. I walked back out to see one of the Siders who’d confronted myself and Carver repeatedly hitting the roof of my car with a brick. He didn’t seem to notice me, just dispassionately carried on making dents in the bodywork. He looked like he was working on an assembly line. I got in, started up and drove away while he was still doing it. That only left one stone unturned.

  17

  The Greenlaw house was a remote, dilapidated terrace on an abandoned street in old Salford. Ten years before, Joanna Greenlaw had walked out the door and disappeared. The house had stood empty ever since.

  Dull sheet metal covered what would have been windows. The small patch of wasteland outside was unrecognizable as a garden. Under the weight of pollution and rain, the weeds had turned black, and rusting beer cans mingled with the grass like they were growing right out of the ground.

  Rain had been coming down all day and the bricks, boards and weeds were all soaked through. I thought there was graffiti on the metallic sheets at first, but when I got closer I saw they were just spray-painted warnings to deter trespassers.

  I had brought a crowbar to force the door with, but saw that someone had beaten me to it. The heavy lock that had held it shut had been dismantled and replaced with a makeshift wire latch. I looked down the row of houses. The others, as far as the eye could see, all had intact locks. I prised the wire apart and pushed the door open. It stopped unnaturally, mid-arc. The carpet beneath it was swollen with damp.

  I shone a torch down a dark, simple hallway. There was a staircase and two doorways leading off to separate rooms. The wallpaper was peeling, and the ceiling was alive with fungi and rot. I pulled the door to behind me and went inside.

  Greenlaw hadn’t spent much time at the house, but it was difficult to separate her image from the ruin. She had been twenty-six when she went missing, a little older than Cath. I knew I was looking for a feeling more than anything tangible and, even though the place had been empty for a decade, I found it.

  Distilled fear.

  I shone the torch straight ahead, into what was left of a kitchen. There were windows, but they’d been boarded up too. The furniture had been removed, there was a gap where an oven would have been once, and space for a fridge. There was a closed door on the left, leading to what I thought was a pantry. I held my breath and quietly crossed the room. The door opened to empty shelves.

  I left the kitchen and turned into the other ground-floor room. It was a small lounge, again with the windows boarded up. I could only see what was li
t up by the torch, and it gave me the feeling that, to the left and right of the beam, there were people watching me. That they stepped smoothly out of the torch’s path when I moved it.

  It took me a moment to remember where I had seen the room before.

  The Evening News piece.

  POLICE APPEAL FOR INFORMATION

  ON GREENLAW DISAPPEARANCE.

  I could hear myself breathing. The paper had printed a picture of Greenlaw, standing by a fireplace, in this room. I wondered who’d taken it. If it had been Superintendent Parrs. His story about working closely with Greenlaw didn’t explain his obsession, his drive to force a reaction out of Zain Carver. I wondered if there had been something between them.

  I went back into the hall, up the stairs. I expected them to creak under my weight, but they were so damp that they just flexed. The windows upstairs were covered with the same sheet metal as on the ground floor and there was no light aside from my torch. There was a filthy, broken-down bathroom at the top of the stairs. Along the landing there were two doorways leading into bedrooms not much bigger than prison cells.

  One was empty.

  In the second I saw a sleeping bag. There were melted-down candles, some paperbacks and food scraps. I kept my eyes on the door every second I was in there.

  When I walked down the stairs, back to the front door, I turned and shone the torch around madly, trying to catch out some imagined watcher. I walked outside, down the path and back to my car quickly. I felt like I wasn’t alone.

  18

  Parrs was a wall. Isabelle was dead. Catherine and Grip had disappeared. Even Zain Carver was under arrest. The world was suddenly smaller. Emptier. The days reclined and stretched out endlessly in front of me. I tried to wean myself off the speed, but it didn’t work. I quickly went back to one pill a day. I thought that would help me stay off them in the long run. And if one was helping, it only made sense to take two, three, four. After that I lost track again and the days became a blur. My mind raced, made connections that weren’t really there.

  ‘Think about it,’ the barman had said. Joanna Greenlaw. The Franchise. An MP’s daughter involved with them. The spiked drugs that killed her. The spiked drugs that were stolen from Carver and made it to Sycamore Way. Sheldon White’s bid for Rubik’s. Cath’s disappearance. Grip’s disappearance. Black and white paint somewhere at the edge of it all. ‘They all separate things or one fucking big one?’

  I started to sink down into another possible life. It was 6 p.m. The point of no return. Whenever I stayed in Rubik’s later than that, I was always the last to leave. The bar was an open secret, and it was easy to get hold of uppers for the mornings and downers for the nights. Sometimes I confused my uppers and my downers, but then sometimes I confused my days and my nights. Everything bled into everything else. I hoped Catherine might walk in again one day, and everything would come back around.

  She never did, though.

  I was sitting in my usual seat. Clear view of the window, clear view of the bar. Mel, the Australian barmaid, was starting her shift. She walked in with a small bouquet of flowers, and I arrived at the bar at the same time she did. She filled a pint glass with tap water and put the flowers in them.

  ‘Y’shouldn’t have, darling,’ said a man sitting at the bar. He was a regular. The same man who had tried to proposition Isabelle the night before she died. He came here every day. I knew that now because so did I. I’d even heard him talking about Isabelle Rossiter and Sycamore Way. He’d shaken his head with the best of them and said something about the country going to pot.

  He nodded at the flowers. ‘For me?’

  The barmaid smiled. ‘’Fraid not. Just need something to cheer up my room.’

  ‘Pretty girl like you,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t be buying yer own flowers. Or cheering up yer own room.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind.’ She acknowledged me with wide eyes. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Jameson’s and soda,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

  The man gave me a look. ‘What d’you think, son?’

  ‘I don’t know, I try not to.’

  ‘This girl’s buying her own flowers. Was just sayin’, she wants a man in her life.’ I paid for my drink and went back to my seat. ‘Miserable sod,’ he said.

  I was halfway through my drink when the barmaid came over, collecting glasses. She smiled. She’d never asked me about Catherine or referred to the morning I came here looking for her. It must have been clear by now that I had nowhere else to be.

  As she went round the room I saw the man at the bar, watching her. When she disappeared round a corner, he leaned over the bar and took her flowers. He couldn’t quite reach and broke some of them as he did it. Then he smoothed them down, shook the water off the stems and held them low so she wouldn’t see them on her way back.

  She came back with a full crate of empties and lifted them on to the bar. The man watched as she unloaded the glasses into the dishwasher. Between that and a few customers, it was a few minutes before she noticed her vase had been upended. She looked around, confused, then turned to the people sitting nearby.

  The man produced her flowers.

  Presented them to her like a lover.

  When she didn’t take them, he shook the flowers in her face. She reached her hand out, but he didn’t let go. Just looked at her, smiling. After a couple of seconds, he relinquished them and she turned away. She filled another pint glass, put the ruined flowers into it. She stayed like that for a moment, her back to the customers.

  A couple of them were waiting and when one called her she turned to serve him with a tight smile. Even the man at the bar noticed the change and tried to imply an apology with his posture. The next time he bought a drink, the barmaid served him with a marked minimum of conversation, and he made a show of tipping her.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. He downed his pint in one or two swallows, then pushed away from the bar and went to the toilet. He only came back into the main room to get his jacket and leave.

  A few minutes later he was walking away from the Locks, in the opposite direction of the city. He weaved slightly on his feet but otherwise seemed stable. Within sight of the tramline, he paused. I thought he might turn round, but I carried on walking towards him. He looked about, squinting into an alleyway on his right. Then he walked down it, already unzipping his fly.

  When I turned into the alley, he was about halfway along it, ten feet or so away. It was dark but I could see him leaning on a wall, pissing in the opposite direction. He didn’t hear me walking towards him, and I don’t think he saw me, either. When I knocked him down, his piss went haywire in the air, all over his trousers. Then I kicked him as hard as I could, again and again and again and again, until my legs, feet and ankles ached.

  I went back to Rubik’s, drank gin and tonics until I couldn’t speak. The last thing I remember is the lime rind floating up through my glass, like a glowing green lunatic grin.

  19

  I woke up, against all odds, face down in a bed. My head felt like a Russian doll. Like I had six skulls, each smaller than the last, placed one inside the other. When I moved or thought too deeply, they rattled together, and it was a long time before I could roll over and open my eyes.

  When I did I started. There were two men standing over the bed. Laskey and Riggs. The room was dark but what light there was still seemed to pass straight through Laskey’s translucent skin. Riggs was plainly hungover. I didn’t want to know how I looked to them. They both smiled and Laskey threw a shirt at me.

  ‘Rise and shine, handsome.’

  My voice was gone. ‘You can’t just walk in here.’

  ‘Door was wide open, mate.’ It was believable. I didn’t remember getting home. ‘We’ll just wait in the living room, eh?’ They went through. Slowly, I got up, got dressed and followed them. They were walking round the flat, examining anything that was out in the open, picking at the gutted sofa. They turned to me and smiled, but neither spoke.

  ‘Cath,’ I said. The
y heard the shake in my voice. More fear than hangover. ‘You’ve found something …’

  ‘There’s nothing to find,’ said Laskey. ‘We should do you for wasting police time.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You last saw her in Rubik’s,’ he said. ‘That right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘In the company of one Sheldon White?’

  ‘Yeah …’

  ‘Well, she left with him, of her own free will.’

  ‘What?’

  He stifled a yawn. ‘She was seen.’

  ‘By who? What does Parrs say?’

  Riggs cut in. ‘We’re what he says.’

  ‘You were wound-up enough to risk jail-time, though,’ said the thin man. ‘Why?’

  ‘She’s connected with Zain Carver.’

  ‘Tell us about him.’

  ‘I don’t know much.’

  ‘Not what we hear.’

  ‘Catherine,’ I said. ‘Please, tell me.’

  ‘What makes you think we’re here about her?’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Where were you on Friday afternoon?’ They were standing either side of me. Laskey moved so the light from the window would shine into my eyes.

  ‘What day is it?’

  They both laughed and Riggs shook his head. ‘What fucking day is it?’

  ‘We should all get ourselves suspended,’ said Laskey. He looked at me. ‘It’s Sunday, mate. November twenty-ninth. Where were you on Friday afternoon?’

  ‘Rubik’s. Yesterday, too.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Laskey to his partner. ‘Can’t be him, then.’

  ‘Y’win some, y’lose some,’ said Riggs. ‘Sorry to have wasted your time.’ They both turned and started walking towards the door.

  ‘S’pose someone could confirm that?’ said Laskey, over his shoulder.

  ‘Bar staff. Half a dozen drunks …’

  ‘Thing is,’ he said, turning around, ‘one of those drunks was having a quiet pint in Rubik’s on Friday.’

  ‘So?’

  Riggs went on: ‘So he left after six and some bastard kicked his head in.’